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bucky radioantenna blobmaker
you've seen a geodesic dome, you've seen a telescoping radio antenna, just connect ther vertices of the geodesic to telescoping struts to make a thing that can make vastly varied shapes of blobs | |
wouldn't it be fun to see a geodesic take on a new blobby shape, or see a robot that extended psuedopods and clambered around?
well, just take a geodesic sphere and replace the struts with telescoping sections like radio antennas, then in any direction it can bulge out and clamber around or just look
nifty.
How small can it get, perhaps buckminsterfullerene like molecule linked with nested buckytube struts that are lined with electrically responsive liquid crystals could do it to make an EM electrically actuated nanorobot.
Hoberman sphere version available as well.
56 nm gold nanoantennas
https://www.ncbi.nl...rticles/PMC5026460/
[beanangel, Oct 31 2019]
[link]
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At a nanometre scale, how is the selective activation of the struts achieved ? |
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Liquid crystal helices curl and uncurl in response to electricity, the nested tubes have C100-300 diameters giving them room to expand |
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The liquid crystals might have halogen groups or -OH attached to them to make them stickier |
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Yes, but how exactly is the electricity directed to specific structural elements and not to others ? |
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I'm with [8th]*. You could probably engineer some sort of
sliding-filament
mechanism, but getting control of independent elements
will be difficult. |
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If I were going to do this, I'd probably use DNA - either as
the
structural+movement element, or just as the movement
element. Imagine an
extended telescoping rod, with a long piece (as long as the
extended rod) of
single-stranded DNA fixed to each end. If you now add a
short piece of DNA
whose ends are complementary to the two ends of the long
piece, it will tend to
anneal and thereby pull the two ends together, shortening
the rod. Since there
are almost infinitely many possible DNA sequences, you
could achieve
independent control of any number of rods by using
different short DNAs in the
solution. |
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[*In this one very specific matter.] |
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Is there a magnetic type action? How much distance is in that annealing action?. I thought it was randomly bumping till very close. |
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Yes, that would be a problem. You'd probably have to have
some sort of random movement, or temporary compression of
all elements, to allow annealing of the short piece(s). |
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There are some proteins which will bind to a given sequence
of DNA and bend or wrap it, to actively shorten it. But there's
a finite number of such proteins and it would get messy. |
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I thought it might work with gold nanoantennas. [link] shows them at 56 nm |
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If each element had a pair of antennae tuned to two different frequencies, and tightly resonant, then only the element receiving the correct frequency pair would respond. The system would need two narrow band frequency-agile transmitters as a driver. |
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