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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Tiny nano-scale machines formed from DNA could be the future of manufacturing things at small scale but great volume: drugs, tiny chip components, and of course more nanomachines. But moving simple, reusable machines like a little arm half a micrometer long is more difficult than at human scale. Wires for signals aren't possible at that scale, and if you want to move it with a second arm, how do you move that arm?

For a while chemical signals have been used; wash a certain solution over a nanobot and it changes its orientation, closes its grasping tip, or what have you. But that's slow and inexact.

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich were looking at ways to improve this situation of controlling machines at the molecular scale. They were working with "nano-cranes," which are essentially a custom 400-nanometer strand of DNA sticking up out of a substrate, with a flexible base (literally — it's made of unpaired bases) that lets it rotate in any direction. It's more like a tiny robotic finger, but let's not split hairs (or base pairs).

What Friedrich Simmel and his team found, [www.tum.de] or rather realized the potential of, was that DNA molecules and therefore these nano-cranes have a negative charge. So theoretically, they should move in response to electric fields. And that's just what they did.

[...] The team's work, which like most great research seems obvious in retrospect, earned them the coveted cover story in Science [sciencemag.org].

Source: TechCrunch [techcrunch.com]

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