Its future storage primarily takes advantage of self-assembling polymer molecules that align themselves into rows.
If the idea of self-assembling carbon molecules isn't out there enough, try to wrap your head (and tongue) around cyanomethanimine.
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It might also herald an age of self-assembling furniture, said experts.
Nanotechnology techniques such as self-assembling promise researchers an intriguing alternative to continuing to refine the most commonly used technique for building transistors on silicon computer chips, namely, optical lithography.
Hal Rosen, a manager of research at Hitachi, says he's impressed by the researchers' ability to shrink so much storage into such a small space, but skeptical that a self-assembling method could create larger-scale disks.
Belcher's colleague Paula Hammond, an expert in making highly ordered, self-assembling polymers and other materials, created a pattern of tiny posts, onto which the researchers deposited several layers of polymers that act as the battery's electrolyte.
Getting to that stage might mean combining self-assembly methods with lithography, or doing away with the head that reads the data-packed disk and instead creating a self-assembling solid-state system on the model of Flash memory storage used today.
The fix, according to a team at MIT, is self-assembling (and therefore self-repairing) solar cells made up of a synthetic molecular soup containing phospholipids that, when mixed with a solution, attach themselves to a series of carbon nanotubes for alignment.
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To make the metamaterial, the team worked with cobalt nanoparticles -- which have self assembling qualities -- suspended in kerosene.
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Moreover, he aims to promote a self-sustaining bicycle economy with regional operations assembling the bikes and area mechanics trained to repair them.
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