The Nanocar Wins

The inventor of the nanocar, Professor James Tour, has been awarded the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for his nanotechnology breakthrough.

Tour is a professor of chemistry at Rice University and has won the prestigious science award for a little car he created that is only slightly bigger than a strand of DNA. The car, at four nanometers across, has all the necessary makings of a vehicle (engine, suspension, axles, and wheels) and is comprised of only a few hundred atoms.

The prize was first awarded in 1993 and is named for Richard P. Feynman who introduced the concept of nanotechnology in 1959. Tour says that these nanovehicles are important because they will one day deliver payloads and piece together objects such as computer chips or buildings like a self-assembling machine.

Tour and his team of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers took eight years to build this nanocar. The molecular-sized vehicle is powered and directed by light, and is small enough to not need power from any other source. Tour points out that he hasn’t even patented this creation because by the time he would see any profit from it, the patent would expire. It’s not a matter of making a few vehicles to move around atoms and build objects; construction would need something like 10^23 or more nanovehicles working in unison and without conflict to construct a large-scale object.

“For example, nature builds by self-assembly but also by enzymatic assembly, says Tour. Enzymes are nature’s nanomachines. They take molecules and stitch them together in nonperiodic patterns. That’s what you need for complex assembly.”

Nanobots that build skyscrapers are a long way off, but we are now beginning to see the possibilities this technology holds. We are mimicking the process of nature by which molecules are carried into place and over time build complex organisms, but with nanobots we would be building machines and structures from non-organic materials.

Imagine having a personal nanomaker (replicator for you trekkies) in your home where you can purchase an item and it is built for you right in front of your eyes. In the future these little nanobots may be everywhere, building items from the ground up and virtually materializing from thin air. I think it’s time for some nanobot horror films to pop up.