Wow! HacDC friend Carl Leonard has done it again! His most recent (and always fantastic) “Robotcast” video podcast is all about the RepRap Build-a-Thon we had at the HacDC space last month. Great video of a bunch of interesting and enthusiastic folks building robots, with a surprise appearance by Adrian Bower. It is kind of a music video for hardcore hackers, and nicely shows off the space and people of HacDC. Thanks and props to Carl for sharing it with us and the world!
One of the key steps in the development of molecular-scale assembly is the creation of similarly-sized assembly tools that have sufficient accuracy and reproducibility to place atoms in exactly where they need to be, following a predefined plan. Researchers in New York and China have been able to create a nanoscale robot that can place molecular components accurately at atomic scale. The real breakthrough appears to be the unique error-correcting mechanisms that they implemented.
The details can be found in this paper in Nature Nanotechnology, and a nice overview is here at the NanoWerk blog.
Had a bunch of really interested folks at the “Hack the Genome, the age of biomolecular cryptography” talk today at Shmoocon. Lots of fantastic ideas and great discussions afterwards with interested hackers. It is great to see how much creative knowledge and energy there is in our community. I was asked to share my slides, so I have put them up on my site over at Radio Free Genome, and you can download the presentation directly from here.
I am headed to Shmoocon, and looking forward to seeing my HacDC collegues there! For those of you who might forget, I am giving my talk, “Hack the Genome, the age of Biomolecular Cryptology” tomorrow at noon in the “Break It” session. Pam was not surprised at the choice of session – I don’t know if I should be pleased or mad! See you there!
“Wow!” “Amazing!” “I want to be involved!” Just some of the comments that I heard during the HacDC RepRap Build-a-Thon yesterday and today. Thanks to the participation of a range of very talented local (and not-so local!) folks, the event was a tremendous success. In particular, thanks to the speakers, Zack “Hoeken” Smith and Adrian Bowyer (virtually, from the UK) as well as the breakout session leaders Adam Koepel and Brian Dolge. Obviously, huge thanks to Nick Farr for organizing the space and activities, as well as to the many HacDC’ers who stayed up into the wee hours working on a Darwin RepRap machine! Keep an eye out for more details on this blog and on the HacDC wiki here. Carl Leonard was also very busy with his video cameras, so I am sure we can expect to see more more about this event on his amazing video blog, Robotcast.