Peter Diamandis Talks About Nanotechnology

May 18, 2016 – I regularly share with readers of 21st Century Tech blog, email content I receive from Peter Diamandis, of Ansari XPrize fame, one of the truly innovative thinkers on the planet today. Diamandis is a co-author of Abundance and Bold, two interesting and important books about that describe our future and how entrepreneurs can through solving global challenges become the next billionaire disruptive innovators.

In the following posting Diamandis gets us caught up in the incredible breakthroughs happening in the nanotech world now and in the near future. Enjoy!

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Most historians credit the concept of nanotechnology to physicist Richard Feynman and his 1959 speech, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Feynman imagined a day when machines could be miniaturized and huge amounts of information could be encoded in miniscule spaces, paving the way for disruptive technological developments.

But it was K. Eric Drexler’s 1986 book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, which really put the idea on the map. Drexler posited the idea of self-replicating nanomachines: machines that build other machines. Because these machines werealso programmable, they could be directed to build not only more of themselves, but also more of whatever else you’d like. And because this building would take place on an atomic scale, these nanobots would pull apart any kind of material (soil, water, air, you name it), atom by atom, and construct, well, just about anything. Drexler painted the picture of a world where the entire Library of Congress could fit on a chip the size of a sugar cube and where environmental scrubbers could clear pollutants from the air.

What Does “Nanotechnology” Actually Mean?

Nanotechnology is science, engineering, and technology conducted at a nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers. Essentially, it’s manipulating and controlling materials at an atomic and molecular level. To give you perspective, here’s how to visualize a nanometer:

• The ratio of the Earth to a child’s marble is roughly the ratio of a meter to a nanometer.
• It is a million times smaller than the length of an ant.
• A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.
• A red blood cell is about 7,000-8,000 nanometers in diameter.
• A strand of DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter.

A nanorobot, then, is a machine that can build and manipulate things with precision  at an atomic level. Imagine a robot that can pluck, pick and place atoms like a kid plays with LEGO bricks, able to build anything from basic atomic building blocks… C, N, H, O, P, Fe, Ni, and so on… ​ While some people dismiss the future of nanorobots as science fiction, you should realize that each of us is alive today because of countless nanobots operating within each of our trillions of cells. We give them biological names like a ribosome, but they are essentially machines programmed with a function like “read messenger RNA and create a specific protein.”

That being said, it’s important to distinguish between wet or biological nanotech, using DNA and the machinery of life to create unique structures made of proteins or DNA (as a building material), and the more Drexlerian nanotech which involves building an assembler, or machine that can 3D print with atoms at a nanoscale and effectively create any thermodynamic stable structure. This is an area that fascinates me and given its implications for the future, is something I track closely.

Let’s explore a few of the different types researchers are developing.

Different Types of Nanorobots and Applications

There are many different types of nanobots – here are just a few.

1. Smallest engine ever created: A group of physicists from the University of Mainz in Germany recently built the smallest engine ever created from just a single atom. Like any other engine, it converts heat energy into movement — but it does so on a smaller scale than ever seen before. The atom is trapped in a cone of electromagnetic energy and lasers are used to heat it up and cool it down, which causes the atom to move back and forth in the cone like an engine piston.
2. 3D-motion nanomachines from DNA: Mechanical engineers at Ohio State University have designed and constructed complex nanoscale mechanical parts using DNA origami — proving that the same basic design principles that apply to typical full-size machine parts can now also be applied to DNA — and can produce complex, controllable components for future nanobots.
3. Nanoswimmers: ETH Zurich and Technion researchers have developed an elastic nano-swimmer polypyrrole (Ppy) nanowire about 15 micrometers (millionths of a meter) long and 200 nanometers thick that can move through biological fluid environments at almost 15 micrometers per second. The nanoswimmer could be used to deliver drugs and magnetically controlled to swim through the bloodstream to target cancer cells, for example.
4. Ant-like nanoengine with 100x force per unit weight: University of Cambridge researchers have developed a tiny engine capable of a force per unit-weight nearly 100 times higher than any motor or muscle. The new nano-engines could lead to nanorobots small enough to enter living cells to fight disease, the researchers say. Professor Jeremy Baumberg from the Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research, has named the devices actuating nanotransducers (ANTs). Like real ants, they produce large force for their weight.
5. Sperm-inspired microrobots: A team of researchers at the University of Twente (Netherlands) and German University in Cairo (Egypt) has developed sperm-inspired microrobots, which can be controlled by oscillating weak magnetic fields. They will be used in complex micro-manipulation and targeted therapy tasks.
6. Bacteria-powered robots: Drexel University engineers have developed a method for using electric fields to help microscopic bacteria-powered robots detect obstacles in their environment and navigate around them. Uses for example include delivering medication, manipulating stem cells to direct their growth, or building a micro structure.
7. Nanorockets: Several groups of researchers have recently constructed a high-speed, remote-controlled nanoscale version of a rocket by combining nanoparticles with biological molecules. The researchers hope to develop the rocket so it can be used in any environment; for example, to deliver drugs to a target area of the body.

Key Applications of Nano and Micro-Machines

The application of nano and micro-machines appear to be nearly endless. Here, from my perspective, are the most noticeable ones:

• Cancer Treatment: Identifying and destroying cancer cells more accurately and effectively.
• Drug Delivery Mechanisms: Targeted drug delivery mechanisms for disease control and prevention.
• Medical Imaging: Creating the nanoparticles to gather in certain tissues and then scanning the body with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could help highlight problems such as diabetes.
• New Sensing Devices: With near limitless customized sensing properties, nanorobotics would unlock new sensing capabilities we can integrate into our systems to monitor and measure the world around us.
• Information Storage Devices: A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.
• New Energy Systems: Nanorobotics might play a role in developing more efficient renewable energy system. Or, they could make our current machines more energy efficient such that they’d need less energy to operate at the same or high capacities.
• Super-strong Metamaterials: There is lots of research going into metamaterials. A team out of Caltech has developed a new type of material, made from nanoscale struts crisscrossed like the struts of the Eiffel Tower. It is one of the strongest and lightest substances ever made.
• Smart Windows and Walls: Electrochromic devices, which dynamically change color under applied potential, are widely studied for use in energy-efficient smart windows – these can control the internal temperature of a room, clean themselves, and more.
• Ocean-cleaning microsponges: A carbon nanotube sponge capable of soaking up water contaminants such as fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals more than three times more efficiently than previous efforts has been presented in a study published in IOP Publishing’s journal Nanotechnology.
• Replicators: Also known as a Molecular Assembler, is a proposed device able to guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision.
• Health Sensors: These would monitor our blood chemistry, notify us when something is out of whack, detect spoiled food or inflammation in the body, and more.
• Connecting our Brains to the Internet: Ray Kurzweil believes nanorobots will allow us to connect our biological nervous system to the cloud by 2030.

As you can see, this is really just the beginning… the opportunities are near limitless.

Big Problem, Big Opportunity

Nanotechnology has the potential to solve some of the biggest problems the world faces today. A recent National Science Foundation report notes, “…Nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance].” If this wasn’t exciting enough, the markets for nanotechnology are, as you might imagine, massive. It has been forecast that the global nanotechnology industry will grow to $75.8 billion (USD) by 2020.