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World's Smallest Motor

World's Smallest Motor

Sometimes invention is the mother of necessity. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed the world's smallest motor. Now they're trying to figure out what to do with it.

Using a gold rotor mounted atop a carbon nanotube shaft, the smallest synthetic motor ever made measures just 500 nanometers across--about 300 times smaller than the width of a human hair. It's small enough to be mounted onto a virus, and requires a scanning electron microscope for you to watch it in operation.

"Nature is still ahead of us," says Alex Zettl, the UC-Berkeley physics professor whose team developed the new nanomotor, "but we're catching up." The breakthrough project comes just 15 years after another team of Berkeley scientists claimed credit for building the first microscale motor. At about 100 microns, or a hair's width, it was a relative Gulliver in the Lilliputian world of nanotechnology.

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What are your thoughts on nanotechnology? Will good things come from it?

Motor Smallest Worlds

It is truly amazing how far we have come with technology in the past even 50 years! This wouldn't even have been imagined in a movie or book 50 years ago and now it is a reality. Think about it, the first computer filled a large room and could only do rudimentary calculations. Now we have motors smaller than the width of a human hair.

I am sure there will be some very wonderful things developed that will signicantly aid us as a society because of this.

World's Smallest Motor UFO & Writing Art Education Sciences

I found a great article on "live science" regarding this. It shows that the smallest motor is 200 nanometers wide. It operates by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube. See it here.

Some of the benefits of this technology would be powering a mechanical "doctor" that could maneuver and travel inside someone, sending back pictures and the like to help doctors diagnose you without having to do any type of surgury! Imagine the possibilities. Imagine that they needed a small biopsy of a tissue mass inside your body and could get it without ever having to do any type of surgery at all!

https://www.livescience.com/technology/0504...lest_motor.html