In t-minus 6 hours the Formula 1 of chemistry, the Nanocar Race, will begin. You can watch the stream here:
youtube.com
expect SUPER-CRASHES as HUNDREDS of nanocars collide when being deposited into the microscope, long sequences of ULTRA PRECISION ACTION with one of the world's greatest microscopes, OUT OF CONTROL racing as drivers BILLIONS of times larger than their cars struggle to both see and drive their cars.
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time for hype! Here are the team's cars!
Neat
Allemagne master race reporting in
I put my money on the Ohio car in dead last.
OP here, there's going to be some SCIENCE IN ACTION here, some of these nanocars have NEVER BEEN TESTED before.
5 dollars on the swiss one. Alpine niggers are great with small stuff.
The Swiss Nano Dragster is a penis
That's all I have to say.
Swiss team's car has been tested, but has the problem it can get attracted to the microscope tip and fly off.
and the German team is a Swas- Oh wait I mean windmill.
Cool
It's gonna start in two hours.
Shit let's post some nanocars. Pic related is France's nanocar. It's HUGE, relatively speaking, with a whopping 300 atoms. How they are able to get decent yields is beyond me.
What's cool about this one is that it has something resembling an engine on it, its wheels are paddlewheels which are supposed to be turnable with STM current. This design is yet to be tested, but they did try a similar design. This new design has a lifted suspension, the axles have a slightly bent conformation.
Next up we have the Swiss team's car, a so called nanodragster. Although if you ask me it sort of look like 'rocket ship'. It's small and simple! Now it doesn't have any wheels it just slightly adheres to the surfaces and can be pushed around with STM current by repelling the nitrogens in the back.
It has been tested and works, doesn't seem very controllable though. The problem is because it is held weakly to the surface it can sometimes jump to the STM tip during current pulses and be lost, a so called scope-out failure.
Technically it does drift though.
Thanks OP for posting this. I really need something to bring back my interest in science after the whole Bill Nye faggotry.
Next up is the Rice-Graz university team. So this team is notable because James Tour's group at Rice invented the nano car and showed they could be steered. Another person in this group invented a nanosubmarine and a motorized nanocar.
Pic related is supposed to be their motorized nanocar. But it may not be the nanocar they race. It's motorized in that it has a light driven feringa nanomotor that rotates when exposed to UV light. In pic related they are using carborane wheels, though they have also used adamantane(fucking diamond!), and fullerene wheels in the past.
So we know the motor works, in solution at least, but they have yet to try it in on a surface. Such a motor probably won't work well, even if they can find a way to pipe in UV to the microscope. Problem is their motor won't work if it is too close to the gold surface because surface plasmons on the gold surface will sap away light energy
now I'm not exactly familiar with the exact dynamics of the motor they are using, but even if it doesn't get quenched out by the gold surface, it might go too FAST and get lost from the microscope!
IE the motor might flap around like crazy too much. Some of these nanomotors, not necessarily this one, can supposedly reach instantaneous temperatures of 1000 K,
A whole spectrum of nanocars
here is TU-Dresden(Germany)'s car. Turns out it's actually a 'windmill'. Like the swiss team it also just hops around, loosely held to the surface with van der waals forces. Unlike the Swiss team the 'windmill' consists of 4 acetylbiphenyl molecules hydrogen bonded to each other.
Shit, the design is so simple that you can buy hundreds of grams of 'windmill' blades from your favorite chemical supplier.
It has been tested and works. It has the advantage of having 4 steering points, which supposedly make it easier to control. Although it's held together with weak as fuck hydrogen bonding, so it could very fall apart during the race
>german one looks like a swastika
lmao
...
Ok so here we have the Japanese team. While Rice 'invented' the nanocar, Yasuhiro Shirai was the man behind it(or at least he got first author on the first nanocar paper I can find).
Their car is interesting, it's supposed to act like a caterpillar and crawl. They have confirmed this mechanism an air-water interface, but have yet to do so on a gold surface like in microscope used for the race. So it may not work. But hey, even if it doesn't it tells us a shit load about the dynamics of these sorts of molecules on metal surfaces. This sort of stuff is useful for making organic solar cells and what not.
Really you have to understand that it's not everyday that researchers get to use a microscope like this, even if they lose the race they still win.
Oh and another cool thing about their car, they purify it by SUBLIMATING it out of solution on to the STM surface. They get it so hot it flies through the air and CRASHES into the surface! Interestingly it is capable of surviving the crash!
Pic related is Ohio's car, which they call the Bobcat Nanowagon.
The wheels are huge, so it sort of looks like a nano monster truck! Now crazy thing about this one is that unlike the other cars, the wheels are seperate molecules and are on axles. So they have nano-bearings! That's some drexlerian shit right there!
If you are in the know, these are Cucurbituril rotaxanes. IE Cucurbituril is a macrocycle that is free to slide and rotate on a molecular rod. It also sort of looks like a pumpkin if you squint at it, which is how it got it's name
OP here was supposed to collaborate with a person in this group until our PI really fucked things up. Fuck you for forgetting to pay people Chad.
IT'S ON MOTHERFUCKERS! And it's in French....
they speak both English and French.
DUDE
Germans lost a blade!
well 30 hours to go for the race! It's a really long distance!
What a waste of effort
>windmill
japanese team had a crash, looked like a computer crash
Hey that icecream cone skit was pretty good
oh wow. Software is crashing like crazy. THANKS MICROSOFT!
had to restart everything because of the crash
race is restarting again due to a software crash
Swiss team and Rice-Graz was doing very well.
Speed measured: 10 km/hr
Swiss team has hit some difficult terrain and has to turn around to avoid it
Bump, it is still going on
Well the streams down, but as of 1 am frenchie time, Graz-Rice was able to drive 450 nm. That's like really far for something this small
Day 2 stream here: youtu.be
bump