First Nano-Step Toward Nanobot Construction

Scientists are reporting that they have taken the first small step toward building a device capable of manipulating individual molecules of various materials. The ultimate dream of nanotechnology is to produce minuscule robotic devices capable of being programmed and capable of manipulating matter at the molecular level. These little nanobots, as they have been dubbed, will be able to produce materials and objects of unimagined properties. Eventually they may even be programmed to produce more nanobots, thus becoming self-replicating.

The potential is unimaginable. The current effort to produce a palatable meat-replacement without using animals would be child’s play for the nanobots. Reconstructing a faulty heart-valve or even rejuvenating human tissue, should be possible. Materials stronger than steel yet lighter than Styrofoam could be produced. Of course there is also the danger of military use or malicious programming causing the complete extermination of the human race — a problem that will need to be addressed as the technology develops — but the overall potential is almost limitless.

We are a very long ways from being able to produce such devices, but the first tiny steps toward this goal are described in the cited report. There are tools for nano-construction already, but none suitable for manipulating the variety of materials in the ways that are needed to work them together into a nanobot. This report describes how scientists are working on a tool that could help build the tool that could be used to build a nanobot.

Most Studies Are Just Plain Wrong

After years of watching reports of studies flip-flop from one view to the complete opposite, it comes as no great surprise to learn that there is a bias for wrong results to prevail. Just like bad news dominates news reporting, because it gets attention, so too, bad science prevails, for various reasons.

A 2005 report by  John P A Ioannidis called Why Most Published Research Findings are False explains — with lots of math — why this is so, so I will not repeat it here. I just suggest you read that if you are interested. Of course, that study is a Published Research Finding — so maybe it is false? At least I wish it were false.

Dinosaurs Bugged to Death

A new theory suggests that it wasn’t the meteor or asteroid hitting the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs, though that may well have played a role. Paleontologists keep finding evidence for dinosaur fossils thousands of years after that event, so at least some must have survived.

To what, then, do we owe the ultimate extinction of all dinosaurs? The new theory says it was bugs, er, I mean insects. Both insects and flowering plants flourished after the climate-changing asteroid hit, probably filling in the environmental niches left under-utilized by plants and animals that were wiped out. Insects acted as pollinators for the flowering plants, which then had an evolutionary advantage because they could adapt more rapidly than plants that didn’t reproduce sexually. So the growth in insect and flowering plant diversity and ubiquity went hand in hand.

That was bad for dinosaurs. They had evolved to eat the earlier types of plants, or other dinosaurs who relied on eating those types of plants. Those darn flowers probably didn’t taste good to a dinosaur palate. Their favorite foods were more widely dispersed, making it harder for the dinosaurs to thrive.

Also, the evolutionary paths of insects included many that were blood-suckers, like ticks and fleas and mosquitoes. These insects served as ideal vectors for the spread of diseases, exposing dinosaurs to another stressing, and often fatal, environmental pressure.

The new theory doesn’t mention it, but I think you can add in one of the dominant contenders for dino-extinction from the pre-asteroid theories (remember, way back in the 1960s and 1970s, when nobody had heard of the asteroid theory?)  Mammals also flourished in the changed environment, mostly as little rat-like creatures. Today’s little rat-like (and big human-like) mammals love eggs, and there is no reason to think those sharing the world with the last dinosaurs were any different. Their egg-eating habit was probably another nail in the dinosaur coffin.

Less food, more disease, and fewer offspring — sheesh, it’s no wonder they went extinct.