5 ms·
Insanely fast submarine is made of one molecule (2015)
- bovermyer 10y agoWouldn't it be cool to have thousands of things like these swimming around in your circulatory system, repairing damage and fighting illness as they found it?
- tantalor 10y agoYou already do, and they're free.
- Aardwolf 10y agoAnd pretty effective, though it could still be better. Imagine programmable ones. The only danger is malevolent ones :/
- stcredzero 10y agoSomeone, somewhere on the network would melt a person into goo just for the lulz, then justify it because the victim's security was so weak.
- marcosdumay 10y agoWell, your current ones are programmable. Medicine just didn't discover the perfect API, but there are some well known (and very effective) hacks.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoThey already are programmable, in the form of the adaptive immune response. Perhaps we can learn to program our own immune cells via the neuro-immunological axis. That danger is real too, in the form of autoimmune diseases. Although perhaps malevolent is too strong a word.
- m_mueller 10y agodeprogramming would be nice if we want to get rid of these autoimmune diseases.
- duaneb 10y ago> Imagine programmable ones. The only danger is malevolent ones Ahh yes, we would just make perfect versions of our own cells. What could go wrong?
- justinhj 10y agoReminds me of the movie Fantastic Voyage [1966] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060397/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060397/
- nkrisc 10y ago244 atoms still sounds like a rather large molecule (which is cool). Not being a chemist, how does this generally compare to other compounds, synthetic and natural?
- CapitalistCartr 10y agoIts not that rare. Especially modern synthetics. Many organic compounds have 4 figure molecules. Most are repetitive chains, such as natural rubber.
- cperciva 10y ago244 atoms is big for physical chemistry, but tiny for biochemistry. A typical amino acid has about 20 atoms, and the line between "peptide" and "protein" is usually drawn around 50 amino acids, i.e. 1000 atoms.
- yomly 10y agoSo from a brief look at the paper [0], the molecular submarine is just over 1,000g/mol For reference the haemoglobin A protein unit is about 64,000g/mol [1]. Molecules above about 500g/mol struggle to pass through the blood brain barrier [2] So ignoring everything else, this is a molecule that is considerably smaller than a cell but bigger than many pharmaceutical drugs. That's not to say anything more than 500g/mol is useless - metal-based or protein based molecules can rapidly jump up in size/weight but will usually travel through the body via alternative mechanisms to diffusion. [0] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b03764 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b03764 [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539316/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539316/
- mschuster91 10y agoNoob question: how does one assemble such a molecule?
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI wonder if this would have applications for environmental cleanup?