| Title | Drivers Gear Up for World’s First Nanocar Race | |
| Date | Thursday April 20 2017, @07:36AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the you-have-died-of-Dysentery dept. | ||
Six teams from three continents are preparing for a unique race on a polished gold track in the south of France this month. But this is no luxurious supercar event: competitors will be racing single molecules. In 36 hours, they aim to move them a distance of 100 nanometres — about one-thousandth the width of a human hair — on a laboratory track held in a vacuum and chilled to a few degrees above absolute zero.
The contest is being billed as the world's first nanocar race, and the aim is to get people excited about nanotechnology and molecular machines, says co-organizer Christian Joachim, a chemist who works at the Centre for Materials Elaboration and Structural Studies in Toulouse, where the event will take place. He and Gwénaël Rapenne, a chemist at the University of Toulouse-Paul Sabatier, developed the contest after Joachim realized — following an interview with a journalist — that nanocars attracted much more public attention than did his research on fundamental aspects of nanotechnology.
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printed from SoylentNews, Drivers Gear Up for World’s First Nanocar Race on 2024-04-19 19:52:23