Hubert, who's a concert pianist and composer in his off hours, is a polymath engineering Ph.D. candidate who prides himself on a dossier brimming with new ideas and novel approaches to old ones. His website is filled with projects and prototypes. Just as important, although considerably less sexy, is the promise of efficient energy delivery from the electrical plant to one's toaster, stereo or home computer. With superconducting wires, this would not be a problem. His invention offers the capability to move piles of a few thousand atoms at a time into patterns and structures at the size scales of individual viruses and proteins.
Nanotechnology needs the tools to make working, three-dimensional nano machines possible.
What you might be able to do in the future is to go into your doctor's office, and they'd take a very small blood sample and put it onto a gene chip, which would read your entire human genome in a matter of minutes. The only way one could feasibly get the resolution high enough so that you could carry out this rather complex operation with many many billions of little strands of DNA is using a machine like this to pattern out the DNA strands onto the gene chip. No special gas is required or cryogenic temperatures. Even vibrational isolation, which prevents the device from shaking too much, is not necessary in many cases. Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.