pierandrei’s thinkfluid

In a 1959 lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” physicist Richard Feynman wondered, “What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?”. New frontier in material research is at the nano-scale. Manipulating a wide variety of materials at this ultrasmall molecular level promises to deliver highly efficient solar cells, hydrogen storage that ushers in the long-awaited hydrogen-energy economy, human life-span extension, pervasive computing so that every device will become a smart device in one way or another or we can have possibly even a way to transform Mars into an Earth-like second home. But research is exploiting also promising shortcut—using viruses, bacteria, and yeasts to build electronic, magnetic, and optical structures. Dr. Angela Belcher and her group at MIT are developing an organic-inorganic hybrid method of growing batteries. By forcing viruses to interact with materials like metals, Dr. Belcher is exploring new materials that are self assembling with a high degree of control based on the chosen DNA sequence. Seen on http://futurefeeder.com