51 Jim Tour is not my favorite punching bag. That honor belongs squarely to E.J. Corey, inventor of the Woodward-Hoffman rules. Tour’s unbelievably peculiar and public beliefs aside, (I could add comical, but that might be mean) I enjoy reading the work he produces and find some of his shit somewhat fascinating. I’ve been lambasted for supporting the man before (even though I mock him so?) but, like Tour, I preemptively forgive you for being such an ignant douche bag.
Ahem. We all remember the Nanocar, an invention so amazing it has its own Wikipedia article. The problem with said Nanocar is that the propulsion isn’t cool enough. So, in keeping with his kitschy nomenclature, the new Nanoworm, as you can imagine, slinks along like a worm. Unlike previous nanocars powered with Synthetic molecular motors this guy uses an azobenzene derivatives to push it around. James Tour’s latest Org. Lett (DOI:10.1021/ol703027h) details why this is good from the standpoint of being able to use light to propel your nanocar, and it has something to do with the benefit of being able to use fullerene wheels as well as carborane wheels. So, you have to sets of tires. In case, you know, there’s snow on your Au(111) and you don’t want to be slipping all over the place. errr… ’cause fullerenes are the snow tires of the nanoworld.
While I don’t know off the top of my head why you need two different types of wheels for your nanocar, it’s gratifying to know that you can have both (though fullerene technology still sucks, according to the text). So, how does this bad boy work? Well… as you can see the azobenzene does a rotation cis/trans isomerization which pulls one end of the car forward and then pushes the other backwards. At least in theory.
There is no evidence that the car moves forward on any surfaces. It could just shrink and expand, which would be interesting in its own right. Also, as mentioned in the paper, fullerene wheels still suck, which means the best wheels are still carboranes. So, I guess it’s still closed circuit racing for these puppies.
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lol, you beat me to this one. Jim Tour IS my favorite punching bag.
Like I said, you should totally do a post on it too.
IAWTC. This begs for a nanocar accident, yes? Perhaps a collision with a nanopedestrian?
nano-NASCAR sucks.
Even if nano-Stewart beats the pooh out of nano-Busch. I couldn’t care nano-less.
isn’t this closer to a nanoinchworm?
Funded by the Honda Motor Co.
Go figure. Japanese people like to make things smaller.
Like Freud said, sometimes a nanocigar is just a nanocigar
Think bigger – AzoAmerica! A modest derivatization of North America could have it inexorably creeping toward China with every sunrise/sunset abetted by diurnal thermal cycling. Shorter shipping lanes reduce container ship diesel emissions. Less soot and CO2 saves Canukistani polar bears so NASA orbits stuff around Mars instead of Earth, fooling invading space aliens and Saving Our Children!
OTOH, wouldn’t it benefit huwomanity more to have an instant curling hair dye?
Hmmm…someone is going to have to explain the merit of this “research.” What did we learn? That azobenzenes isomerize? That people get funding for silly things like nano-people and nano-cars?
I’ll be excited when they build the first nano-Barbie Dream Car, complete with convertible top.
Small molecular machines may play a role in electronics, especially detectors, nanofluidic devices, organic displays, etc. This is an example of a proposal to perform simple movement controlled by light. I would have personally rejected this article because it does not accomplish what it appears to suggest, which makes it irritatingly misleading. Without that, we are left with the uninteresting coupling chemistry and the slightly useful information about fullerenes not totally absorbing the light needed to do this isomerization.
I mean… the nanocar’s overhyped to the point where people just call it garbage and I don’t necessarily think it’s garbage. I think it’s a start to something very interesting.
They will only play a “roll” in Jim Tour’s stuff. Most real nano-stuff will probably have very few moving parts. Bah-dum-ching!
Disagree. IIRC, Sir Fraser’s group had a nice paper out last year or so that dealt with bistable rotaxanes and memory. Moving parts? yes. Cool applications? yes. (Am I stalking him? maybe.)
Stalk indoors. Otherwise you’ll get frostbite.
Behold. I can make myself look smart and leave you looking like a douche.
While this area is great (e.g. the work of Sir Fraser and Co), this nano-vehicle stuff is just complete nonsense. When you design any machine you obviously have to take into account the environment it will work in. A helicopter works great at 0-200 meters, but take it 3 miles up where the air is thin and it’ll drop like a stone. Or put a car on a frozen lake. The wheels are completely useless and in that environment you’d be much better off with a sail and blades.
Surely one of the stupidest things one can do is to base a machine design on a design that is intended to work in a *completely* different environment?
What benefit can be derived by using spherical molecules as rolling (actually, randomly spinning in each direction) ‘wheels’ at the molecular level when the way that molecules behave is so different to the Newtonian laws that govern mechanics in the macroscopic world? There is no inertia, no momentum and no gravity in the nanoworld, motion is governed by viscosity and surface area, and brownian motion means that all the parts of all molecules are in constant thermal motion anyway. As one person commented at a conference I was at a few weeks ago, presumably the Tour nanovehicles would behave at least as well if they had cubane for wheels instead of buckyballs.
The way the nanocar is portrayed by Tour is very misleading and basically deceitful to Honda and the general public. It gives the impression that something other than pulling simple molecules
along with an STM tip has been achieved when it has not. The same thing has been done with anthracene and many other non-’nanovehicles’. These are very early days in the field of nanomachinery and the prospects are fantastically exciting. The current achievements do not need to be hyped in this science fictional way. This is poor science that causes problems for the whole field.
There is no inertia, no momentum and no gravity in the nanoworld, motion is governed by viscosity and surface area, and brownian motion means that all the parts of all molecules are in constant thermal motion anyway.
I’m quite certain that’s either outright incorrect or just hyperbole. Inertia and momentum exist in systems with any tangible amounts of mass and while brownian motion certainly means all parts of a molecule are in thermal motion that motion is erratic, and since (to my recollection) there is no evidence to state that the “wheels” do not rotate 360 degrees, then there is no reason to suggest that Tour is quite as full of shit as you make him out to be. Besides, I’m quite certain the wheels could be cubane. The wheels of a car could be cubes as well, if a sufficiently strong engine were available to overcome the mass of the car to start spinning them.
I’m sure he meant the limit of inertia and momentum on the nano- scale becomes vanishingly small and is likely outweighed by other more random thermo- factors.
Mitch
Indeed I did, Mitch.
Oh dear. Give a protein molecule a one off push and it will stop within a single bond length. Momentum and inertia are completely neglible for the design on molecular level machines. Suggest you read ‘Life at low Reynolds number’ by Purcell (Am J Phys 1977, 45, 3-11) or ‘Design principles for Brownian molecular machines: how to swim in
molasses and walk in a hurricane’ by Astumian (Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2007, 9, 5067–5083).
Life at low Reynold’s number is a wonderful article. Effects that are important at daily scale many times get overwhelmed by other effects that take over at micro scale.
Just finished Purcell’s Life at a low Reynolds number. Very interesting stuff!
As noted in the the “Life at Low Reynolds Number” article that Sceptical Prof mentioned, the laws of motion become completely reversible at the nanoscale. Therefore, any reciprocal motion (same path of motion on the power stroke and recovery stroke) will lead to no net displacement. One very cool demonstration of this principle, is that you can mix some dye into a solution of glycerol and then simply by reversing your mixing motion, unmix the solution (details about the demo and references can be found at http://physics.brown.edu/physi.....4F1010.htm It’s a very cool demonstration to see).
So, a reversible cis-trans isomerization would not be able to propel the nanocar by itself.
Awesome. If anyone ever does the demo, please post a video!
Here ya go. Laminar Reverse Flow.
Thanks!
I’m always apt to give the fanciful more credence than it’s due, I suppose, and Tour’s work is no exception. Does it matter if they’re fullerenes or carboranes or cubanes or the severed hand of John the Baptist? Possibly.
I don’t understand your distaste for the work given that it’s been tested and generally accepted that C60 moves by rotation and not by gliding (per your anthracene example. Here is a free pdf of an awesome Nature article that discusses the uses and evidence of rolling nanotubes. There are other references to the rolling of C60). I’m not quite sure Tour is trying to mislead anyone into thinking that all four wheels move in concert to propel the car in one direction or another – just that the motion they undergo is a rolling motion and not a gliding one. That much is testable and seems true.
That being said, I did find this paper quite misleading (a figure depicting motion never observed, for instance), but I’m not judging his compendium or work off it. I know, and anyone in the molecular machine community knows, that monodirectional motion of molecular machines is the holy grail of nanothingieeists. He’s not there, obviously, since his wheels clealry spin in random directions, but he’s got a case for showing that rolling is more efficient than sliding. (again, see the nature paper).
A molecular machine is cute – it’s only useful when it is working in concert with quadrillions of others, and by then inertia and gravity begin to cause problems.
Uhm, doesn’t he actually move it with an AFM cantilever?
Ok, never mind, should actually readthe literature.
No, I was right (and wrong). STM, not AFM.
Journal of the American Chemical Society 128, 4854-4864 (2006)
Umm, that’s the HEAD of John the Baptist, Kyle.
Salome might have wanted his hand if he simply hadn’t tipped well for her lap dancing instead of calling her mom a whore.
I don’t understand your point, Kyle, why is rolling better (or worse) than gliding for the components of a nanomachine? All that matters for thermal motion to (randomly) move an object preferentially in one dimension rather than two is for the molecule to have different surface areas in the two directions (e.g. anthracene face down on a surface). No one calls anthracene a nanoscale version of an automobile.
The problem with hyping things in this way is that people believe that scientists have made tiny powered cars that can move things around. See, for example, issue 4 of Nano magazine, you can download it for free here (http://www.nanomagazine.co.uk/.....ssue4.pdf). In the article on ‘nanocars’, whose wording was approved by Tour according to the Editor, it says things like ‘The motorized model is powered by light…. When light strikes the motor it is energized and begins to turn, pushing the car along in a manner similar to a paddlewheel’ and so on.
These molecules have nothing in common with motor vehicles except, like nanoputians, they look like objects that are familiar to us. This sort of article gives the public false expectations and mis-informs them that scientists have done things that they have not done. It can also mislead other scientists into thinking that they don’t have to consider what the environment of the molecular world is actually like to design machines, but that they can simply make chemical cartoons of our everyday world machines and have them work in the same way at the nanoscale. We should have moved on from that way of thinking now.
I’m not saying that it isn’t perfectly OK for people to have very different and varied views on how to design molecular machines and what they might be used for – of course it is! But your imagination has to remain rooted in what the molecular world is like. What is bad science is to base an idea on something that is specifically designed to work through features that simply do not apply to the environment you’re working in.
You’re providing speculative arguments about the thermal stability (or motion) of crap on a gold surface when, in reality, little is actually known about it. It’s hard to say, for instance, if the mobility of rounded objects on surfaces is better or worse than flat objects. If they are marginally better, then that marginal improvement would be amplified (possibly) with each molecule acting in concert. See the Nature paper for why that might be useful. After some discussion with faculty that actually study the dynamics of materials on surfaces (i.e. comparing flat rings to round things on Au(111)) I can tell you that your thermo arguments are fine, but no one (that I know of) is trying to make a thermodynamic argument (and cubane wouldn’t work very well, consequently). The speculation is that rounded objects transverse surfaces more efficiently, though to the extent that an ‘axle’ is needed is unknown. Email me directly for a discussion on how that knowledge came about.
But let’s remind ourselves that these are still unknowns. Has Tour mislead anyone? I don’t know, I’ve never been to his talks, but you can’t say he’s wrong since you have no proof that he IS wrong. I also know how editorial spin can make your research sound a lot more… interesting than it is (and they don’t always listen to you when you request revisions in wording!) You have reasonable arguments but nothing to contradict him. So, you know, it’s sort of like shit or get off the pot. Do the experiments! No one will know if Tour is wrong until someone does them. And no one would have any need to do the experiments if Tour never did the work in the first place. If, in the end you’re right – hooray if not, hooray. Good research has been done and the world is better off for it.
Now, if you’re upset about the very child like way he presents his research (i.e. people and cars) then, fine. But, let’s be clear, it’s his prerogative as to how he sells his research. It does nothing to hurt science any more than colored figures did in the 80’s with Sir Fraser (another interesting story there, I guess.) I’d like to think reviewers aren’t so stupid they would miss that, though this article didn’t seem to get vetted very thoughtfully.
It is not his perogative how he sells his research at all. He is ethically bound, like all scientists, to portray it in a way that does not grossly mislead the public (and his sponsors).
There is nothing wrong at all in doing experiments that you have a hunch might work, even if they seem silly ideas to others. Just publish it as ‘rolling motion of parts of a molecule on a surface’ until you have some indication that your strange ideas might lead to something. There is plenty wrong with promoting something as a ‘nanocar’ when you have not (yet) shown it does anything different to a simple aromatic hydrocarbon. It is wrong because when you do that you know full well that it will give a completely false impression to the public, journalists and other scientists of what you have achieved and it perpetuates the ‘fantastic voyage’ myth of nanotechnology.
If you don’t appreciate that, look at the recent Foresight (the organization co-founded by Drexler) Roadmap on Productive Nanosystems (http://www.foresight.org/roadm....._main.pdf). p 34: ‘Nanocar. One of the most prominent examples of the application of this technology is the Rice University Nanocar (and its evolving product line of wheelbarrows and trucks). What distinguishes this effort is that a Feringa motor, which powers the device, was successfully integrated with other molecular structures to create a molecular machine. The motor rotates and pushes a protruding molecular group against the substrate propelling the molecular car forward along an atomically flat surface under 365 nm wavelength light.’
May I remind you again after you’ve read that, Tour’s nanovehicles do nothing that anthracene doesn’t. It is not a molecular machine and there has been no rational premise put forward as to how it can be made into one, it just LOOKS like a cartoon picture of one. (And when you put a Feringa motor in it it does NOT propel it forward on a surface. A Feringa motor might be able to do that on its own, incidentally, the only bit it doesn’t need is the nanocar part.)
When Sir Fraser talks about ‘molecular elevators’ and the like he is using imagery, he’s not saying molecules are going to use tiny elevators to lift them up forty floors of a nano-tower in Nanoville. When Tour says ‘nanocar’ he is actually promoting macroscopic engineering design principles for the nanoworld. It’s a completely unfair and unjust comparison.
You have to appreciate my position here: I “exist” on the Internet to promote the science of chemistry and champion it in a user friendly way. I call bullshit where I see it, but I can’t – without heaps of evidence – toss (or agree to) an accusation of unethical conduct so publicly. Hopefully you understand me.
It is the Chemblog’s official stance that Jim Tour has done nothing unethical and is undeserving of such criticism. Now, as I’ve said, there is nothing new about this work and there is nothing ground breaking. I find it cute but I’m not taken in by the idea of nanopeople and nanocars as anything other than interesting ways of getting people into science. He may be doing it because he is exceptionally naive (which is an accusation he should be used to by now) or just bat shit crazy and thinks of everything in these childish terms, but I DO NOT THINK he’s doing it on purpose with the intention of misleading people. I don’t think Jim Tour can be accused of being an unethical liar.
I’m gullible though, and possibly stupid. So it’s anyone’s call.
The only unethical thing Tour does is to rally with the Discovery Institute and oppose Darwinism
Agreed. Remember, the NanoPutians were supposed to be an “educational tool”. Tour never sold it as anything else. The responsibility of the funding agency to vet it as a dumb idea is immaterial to the ethical propriety of Tour.
Yes, you’re right, I was too harsh. I started out only wanting to point out why this was the stupidist of nano-crap and I got carried away responding to some of the comments. It’s too easy to take cheap shots in this sort of anonymous forum and not fair. Lesson learnt for me. Please forget/ignore it all.
Nah… I kind of liked your rant. I don’t like the Foresight folks either and I’m tired of the nanohype.
Can the nanoworms be used as nanobait by the nanoputians to nanocatch nanofish nanoto nanoeat?
Nanu Nanu.
Noone knows how to propel something on a surface in a unidirectional way, its unknown, this is research….he has to try out various ideas, weather they appear stupid or not…and he has to be able to publish his work.
Have you not seen Kelly’s molecular ratchest that violate the second law of thermodynamics (J. Org. Chem. 1998, 63, 3655. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 1997, 36, 1866)
but building on this he invented a (useless) molecular motor “Unidirectional rotary motion in a molecular system,” Nature. 1999, 400, 150-152.
This is a new field, others are working in it, obviously the ones with the best ideas will come out on top.
As long as he only claims what he has actually done…the above Nano Magazine suggests that he is claiming much much more however, and teh sales pitch is a little irritating…I dont know why you would no like this research.
People *do* know how to propel something on a surface in a unidirectional way. It’s called myosin.
Technically speaking, his stuff is also bidirectional, since you could go backwards just as easily as forwards.
I suspect you mean “one-dimensional”.
One can make the myosin system “one-dimensional” by, analogy is like comparing the “nanocar” as a “nanomonorail”, if you take the actin and stretch it out using, say, optical tweezers…
Monorail!
Monorail!
Technically speaking, his stuff is also bidirectional, since you could go backwards just as easily as forwards.
- are you talking about Kelly or Tour?
one-dimensional would mean moving either forward or backward along one line. I think the goal is unidirectional – moving, with control, only in one direction.
I dont think his stuff is any-xx-directional, doesnt move unless you push it. could go sideways as well as forward or back.
A synthetic myosin like system would be huge.
I think a better analogy is the “nanopaperweight” just sitting there, unless you push it.
Sure thing pi, but you gotta admit this was rather …silly..anyway the whole nano arena is getting silly..with all that trying to relate to the ‘real’world terminology. I’m still waiting for the first to publish the nano dildo..god knows sex sells..
Too late.
10.1021/ic0352250
whats really funny is that this was the 7th most downloaded article for inorg chem
Maybe there is room for another journal
A chemistry Journal for the sexual deprived
Maybe it would be redundant?
Now how in the hell did i miss that???
thnx for the heads up man..
As a person that takes part in that project(nanocars) I can say to you guys, that this all nanocrap in fact is a total bulshit. I think this all stuff is to advertize and make greate PR to Honda & take some $.