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news from around the web from people addicted to tech

Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs

Next to grilled cheese sandwiches and classic Zelda, building blocks were quite possibly the best creation known to childhood. I remember spending countless days sifting through a giant tub filled with assorted blocks trying to find the ideal piece. These days, my RSS stream is filled with news of labs building systems that scale our concept of blocks down into the realm of atoms and molecules.

This week, I was pleased to read that Berkeley Lab’s nanoscience analog of Mt. Olympus was trumpeting news of Ron Zuckerman and Ki Tae Nam’s ability to create ‘molecular paper’. In other words, a molecular version of the giant flat surfaces always required to build castles or moon bases upon.

Zuckerman has been a household name among nanotech and biotech scientists alike for some time. Now his list of admirable accomplishments include design of a programmable surface only two atoms thick. This isn’t the only approach for designing programmable surfaces at the nanoscale, as Caltech researcher Paul Rothemund has demonstrated with his DNA origami technique. Still, Zuckerman and Nam have greatly expanded the toolkit for building 2D and 3D nanoscale platforms by using Zuckerman’s hallmark peptide molecules instead of DNA.

Zuckerman’s method also has the benefit of being able to spontaneously assemble in water.

Potential applications abound for a surface that small, from ultra sensitive sensor platforms, to designer membranes, to potential uses in pharmaceuticals, and potentially more far reaching manufacturing goals that require atomically precise systems. In lay terms, this discovery provides an air traffic control system for molecules.

The Molecular Foundry is proving to be a hot spot for nanotechnology research, and is a great example of strategic science investment by the US Federal Governments Department of Energy. Investment that a highly competitive innovation economy desperately needs.

Its great to see investment pay off. I dare say its more exciting now than it ever was over the prospect of grilled cheese sandwiches.