Huge Fields of Self-Assembled Molecular Ridges May Help Sensor Design

A droplet of liquid and a few seconds are all that researchers need to produce neatly spaced ridges of molecules that cover a huge area--at least by the standards of nanotechnology. In a feat of so-called self-assembly, a group reports that disk-shaped molecules can stack themselves by the millions into lines of up to a millimeter in length and covering several square millimeters.

The process might help ease the fabrication of sensors such as liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that register the presence of offending chemicals. "You just drop a droplet of the solution on a surface and the molecules arrange themselves," says group member Johannes Elemans, a nano researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. "It takes five seconds to make the surface, which is not really labor intensive," he says.

Nano-tech is the next realm of "amazing stuff." Research into nano-coatings has already yielded progress toward a frictionless surface. Imagine the benefits of such a coating. Everything from toilets that don't use water to cars that need minute quantities of oil and that see fuel economies approaching 200 MPG. In medicine, nano-tech has been used to develop drug coatings that have already reduced the dosage requirements for oral insulin. Remember that the discovery of silicon growing techniques that yielded densities of millions of transistors per square centimeter changed the world. Nano-tech has the capability of having an even more profound effect.