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3D Nano Wineglass Created By NEC 51

Posted by Hemos from the better-then-riedel dept.
Capt. Mondo writes: "Just found this press release on NEC's Web site featuring a wine glass with a diameter of 2,750 nanometers. Normally this sort of thing would make me think it's some silly holiday-themed publicity stunt for nanotech -- like the world's smallest ad placed on a bee for guinnessworldrecords.com -- but the fact that NEC is claiming to have a new process for creating nano-sized objects in 3D (with the "glass" being the result) makes this a bit more interesting. Apparently the new process uses an ion beam with a diameter of 10nm, a gas containing the base material for construction and good ol' CAD. "
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3D Nano Wineglass Created by NEC More

3D Nano Wineglass Created by NEC

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  • New for really, really small alcoholics. Stuff that'll get you wasted and fit in your hands.
    --
  • Everyone run out and invest in NEC, with products like this, how could they fail?!
  • remember those little people from Gulliver's Travel's? You just breathed one in.
  • maybe they were going by volume?
  • Well, a wine glas is symmetrical, while a beer mug is not.

    which is just as well, since we want to be cultivating a proper sense of culture among the microbes, no?

    [ducks, then runs away ...]

  • If this were really news for nerds, you'd be talking about a nano beer mug.

    Yeah, like real nerds drink alcohol... something that damages brain cells... puhleeze...
  • I love it when someone posts something stupid, trying to be serious, and then the moderators mod it as "+5 Funny".

    I mean, c'mon, now THAT's funny!!
  • alas, all my ideas for patents are being stolen from under my nose... we here at ReallyDumbIdeas.com have been working dilligently on a sub-femto sized beer stien. But, noooo, NEC has to go and come out with a nano wineglass. Now we will be completely ignored by the media! Egads! All the effort of super-shrinking our porcelin, and all the work crafting the really freakin' tiny molds! AAAAAAAaarrrrgh!

    Hopefully they haven't stumbled upon our plans to make these devices code-named "faucets"...

  • The SI prefixes (from NIST [nist.gov]) are:

    yocto (10e-24)
    zepto (10e-21)
    atto (10e-18)
    femto (10e-15)
    pico (10e-12)
    nano (10e-09)
    micro (10e-06)
    milli (10e-03)
    [unity] (10e+00)
    kilo (10e+03)
    mega (10e+06)
    giga (10e+09)
    tera (10e+12)
    peta (10e+15)
    exa (10e+18)
    zetta (10e+21)
    yotta (10e+24)

    The length of a typical bond between two atoms is about one Ångstrom -- 10e-10 metre, or a tenth of a nanometer -- so the first few prefixes probably won't come up much in conversation [yet?].

    (for completeness, there are binary versions [nist.gov] of these prefixes too :-)

    And on the subject of nano-things... let's not let the CAD-crazed physicists with their molecular beams and Atomic Force Microscopes push the fascination of supramolecular chemistry off the stage. Have a look at the Stoddart [ucla.edu] and Rebek [scripps.edu] groups' pages. Also see KevinMS' comment!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Does it take a long time to render?? :)

    They should have plenty of RAM, because the model would be huge. This is because they are working with nanostuff. If they want to make something visible (and util) for human beings, they would use many RAM (and CPU time for rendering :).
  • I'm sure that the cylindrical symmetry had something to do with the choice of shape. I do know quite a few college geeks that do drink, and many college non-geeks that don't. And anyway, I don't think it would be possible to drink to excess with such a small glass.
  • The three companies are now developing the technique to introduce it into manufacturing at the earliest opportunity, and plan to increase related research and development efforts.

    This sounds great, but what the hell is it made of? They call it a wine glass, is it fine leaded crystal? The base material in gas form is all they mention. Does that mean that they can use any material that can be vaporized? It seems that in order for this to be of use in manufacturing (manufacturing what?) they would have to be able to use a variety of materials to build with...

  • Still a Long way to go. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    NEC's demonstration of making a wine glass, doesn't fully demonstrate complete freedom to create any 3D object by far. A Teapot would be the more appropriate design.

    The Wineglass, can be built from the Bottom-Up approach, it's symetrical, and a very basic design to do.

    A Teapot (Like the one you've got in 3dsMAX), requires more advanced control of the atoms.

    The real test would be to see if they can make a little car with an axle & cog wheels.

    Like Arnie said in Terminator 2 - It doesn't work that way, It can't form complex moving parts.

    ~Memir
  • I am not sure but I would speculate it would be something like the following:
    1. Ions* are suspended in a gas.
    2. Laser or ion gun is focused at an area of the gas making it cationic*
    3. The difference in charges draws ions to the area in question forming a structure.

    *I might be backwards about the placement of cations and ions, or I could be just plain wrong

    BTW my sigfile is old, new email address is bluenail@sailormon.com, except that there are two o's in moon. will change that sigfile now
  • I think a drop of wine is about 2000 (probably more) times bigger than the glass. Exactly how are we going to drink out of this? Did they think about that before ordering a bottle of bubbly?
  • A dozen 2.7 micron wine glassess to all my familly members. Presented in a cardboard box stamped with that stupid label maker they gave me last christmas.
  • As a demonstration of what they can do with their new technology, the wineglass is perfect. Not only does it demonstrate that they can make something very, very small, but that they can create complex curves in three dimensions that are themselves, very, very small.

    It's all a matter of orientation: to a righteous man, it's a tiny, tiny chalice....


    To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.

  • ..the physics involved in using a focused laser in a medium with gas to produce solid structures?
  • They really should have done a nanoscopic water bong.
  • ok, so the glass has a diameter of 2750 nm, how small actually is this, they say 200,000 times smaller than a wineglass, but how small is this actually? They should've had a picture where the glass was residing beside a reference object, which most people would know the size of, or at least the tip of a ruler to show how small it was... oh well...

  • Re:Wineglass? (Score:4)

    by kaoshin ( 110328 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @04:06PM (#571169)
    Thats not a wineglass. It's a grail. They are showing thier faith.
  • Not to mention that apparently normal wineglasses are > 1/2 meter tall.

    researchers built the glass from carbon with an external diameter of only 2,750 nanometers (nm),approximately 200,000 times smaller than a normal sized glass.

    Now, admittedly I'm doing this on my cell phone's calculator, but:

    2,750 * 200,000 = 5.5 x 10^8 nm (for a standard wineglass)

    5.5 x 10^8 nm / 1 x 10^9 nm/meter = .55 meters

    That's a lot of wine...

    -Cyclopatra

  • how can they call that the world's smallest ad? it's written on the leg of a bee... check this IBM logo [cornell.edu] out, it's much smaller (35 atoms!) and it was done some 10 years ago. and featured in Slashdot [slashdot.org] before.
  • 1 nm is indeed 10^-9 m, so the article is wrong there, but the article also says the glass is 200,000 times smaller than a normal glass, and that it's ~2700 nm. Those are consistent, so probably only the article's definition of nm (and micron) are incorrect.

  • Re:Why a wine glass? (Score:3)

    by Wah ( 30840 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @04:51PM (#571173) Homepage Journal
    the teapot wouldn't render and making a beer-mug that small would have defied all logic.
    --
  • What do they mean with the smallest ad thing? The smallest ad _anywhere_ or the smallest ad on a _bee_ ? The first doesn't hold up for sure. I find the article somewhat inaccurate generally.
  • Ok, what's the point of this whole Nano stuff anyway? I mean, who would WANT a nano wine glass anyway?

    Person 1: "How am I supposed to drink this? I can't even see it!"
    Person 2: "It's 200 proof - you can taste it."
    Person 1: "But what if I drink the glass too?"
    Person 2: "Don't worry, you'd never know it anyway."
    Person 1: "Well that's comforting..."

    Want good Xmas music? Look for Manheim Steamroller!
  • And at todays prices it'd cost ya $10 to fill.
  • hey, I was already cutting them slack by using the *right* definition of a nanometer :P By their figures, the average wineglass is 20 ft. tall!

    -Cyclopatra

  • A nanometer is a metric unit of length equal to one billionth of a meter. A Micron is the thousandth part of one millimeter (the millionth part of a meter).
  • Unfortuntely their numbers have continued to dwindle, once it became public knowledge that they abstain from "gettin' it on on a regular basis." :)
    --

  • obligatory commercial immitation (Score:3)

    by matija ( 27014 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:48PM (#571180) Homepage
    One nanosized wineglass: $120 000
    Micromaniuplators for handling it: $50 000
    A bottle of very fine Wine: $100
    The look on the policeman's face when he reads your blood alcohol level after you tell him you had "10 glasses of wine": priceless

  • Just in case anybody thinks this is nanotechnology, it is not. Its just really small construction. Not that it isnt cool, but nanotechnology is, by its nature, beyond cool. This really has nothing to do with nanotechnology except techniques that build this small could be used to help or bootstrap nanotechnology. In nanotechnology, every atom is deliberatly included. In technology like this, natural structures of atoms are shaped, just like normal construction, but just at a very small scale. I know no nanotechnology claims were made in the article, I'm just venting, but I have a feeling this story will be misrepresented in news outlets as a type of nanotechnology. Although we might as well get used to it, "nanotechnology" will eventually become a household word years before the true promise of nanotechnolgy becomes available with the ability of nano type assembly and replication.
  • Nononono, you've got it ALL wrong... We're not saying "Drinking is good", we're saying "Drink in moderation". After all, who's going to get drunk off a couple 1.875nL glasses of wine?
    Unfortunately, a LOT of geeks I know binge drink...
  • Are we looking at the first steps of realizing a replication system as seen on Star Trek? Granted this article is about creating extremely tiny objects, but judging from the shape of that wine glass, little robots are still a looong ways off.

    What's more interesting is the ability to construct an object by combining its base elements from a gaseous state. I might be wrong, but I have a feeling we will see the ability to create complex organic/inorganic structures from base elements, before 'nanotechnology'. Now all we need is the ability to deconstruct easily storable matter into an alternate state that can then be reconstructed into the desired object.

    When we can do this .. they will be interesting times indeed.
  • Yeah, all real nerds are Protestant, chaste, clean mouthed, white teetotalers that use Linux... puhleeze...

    Uhhh, no I think most nerds are not religious at all, actually. But I've met plenty of nerds, and none of them ever drank.
  • Apparantly you are not familiar with the notion of SARCASM. My original post was sarcastic. Who the hell would be gullible enough to think I, making a comment about a subjectively classified group of people ("nerds"), was being totally serious?

  • What? Sarcasm? I have no idea what that is! I can assure you that I was never used sarcasm in my original reply... and I wasn't at all concerned that you weren't when you replied and insisted.

    User ID's aren't a very good indicator of how long someone has been reading /. -- I've been here for (yikes!) more than two years. If you haven't noticed, there are a lot of people that use the South Park mantra "Drugs are bad, because drugs are bad" -- AND THEY MEAN IT. Fortunately, you aren't that brainwashed.

    --

  • So who's gonna build a car to go with the wine glass, so we can have mini cops with mini roadblocks and mini breathalyzers ready to bust your ass for being over the limit?

    What could you actually build that would be useful with this technology as it stands now? I mean, given its limitations, if you fired up CAD and had carte blanche, what would be your ultimate 3D rendering? A microscopic Tux? A Porche 911? The smallest Vaio in existance?

  • News for Nerds?? (Score:4)

    by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @03:52PM (#571189) Homepage Journal
    If this were really news for nerds, you'd be talking about a nano beer mug.


    --

  • Is anyone else bothered by the fact that, given the opportunity to create anything at all with this wonderous technology, these people chose to do a wineglass? What kind of message is this sending to todays youth? Among college students, the more technically inclined ("geeks", if you will) are probably the only social group who don't binge drink on a regular basis. And here we, the "responsible adults" of the world, are telling them "Drinking is good".

    But drinking is not good. And drinking to excess is even worse. The Bible says drunkenness is a sin (Gal. 5:21), and even those here who aren't Christians will still agree that getting intoxicated can lead to a variety of unhealthy activities.

    For shame, NEC. Next time, try to consider the social consequences of your actions.

    --

  • Give 'em a little slop; it's the right order of magnitude. You've heard of a yard of ale, yes :-)?

  • Depends how you define "nanometer" (Score:4)

    by IntelliTubbie ( 29947 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @03:53PM (#571192)
    The press release says that "one nanometer is one-millionth of a meter." But isn't 1 nm = 10^-9 m = 1 billionth of a meter? It also says that a micron is "one-thousandth of a meter," which I thought was a millimeter.
  • How long before I can make one myself?

    Maybe HP will come out with a NanoJet product in a few years so I can do this.

    It would be so useful to the average consumer.
  • Among college students, the more technically inclined ("geeks", if you will) are probably the only social group who don't binge drink on a regular basis.

    I know you were joking.. but: This is not true.. There are significant Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship groups at many campuses accross the continent, who, generally speaking, abstain from 'binge drinking on a regular basis'.
  • The only problem with this method of manufacture would be speed. While I am sure it does not take long for the laser to create these objects, chemical and biological methods of making nano-sized objects can produce billions of components quickly.

    Though making arbitrary shapes makes nano-technolgy much more realistic. I better hurry up and go back to school to get ahead of the curve!
  • 2,750 nm = 2.75 microns. Transistors on your PIV chip - around 200 nm. So it's about 10x bigger than that - about 1/40 the width of a human hair, given the comparisons I've heard. Kind of hard to put up a reference object that's going to be recognizable.

    -Cyclopatra

  • Well, out of the top of my head:

    1nm (nano) = 10^-9m
    1um (micro) = 10^-6m
    1mm (milli) = 10^-3m
    1m = 10^0m
    1km (kilo) = 10^3m
    1Mm (mega) = 10^6m
    1Gm (giga) = 10^9m

    One nanometer is one billionth of a meter.. that's the definition.
  • You miss the point. It's not a question of "why do we do it?", but rather one of "can we do it?"

    Humanity has always tried making new things for the sake of making new things. It is part of our inherent nature. Almost all of scientific progress is made through trial and error, along with "can we do it?" episodes such as this.

    We went to the Moon so we could say we had gone there. Now we're aiming for Mars. Who cares if it doesn't *immediately* benefit us? Some day it will. When we get to Mars we'll be asking ourselves why we didn't do it sooner.

    Nanotechnology has many, many possible applications, from medicine to disaster clean-ups. Choosing a wine glass was just one way of showing it *is* possible to do that. Of course, it would take billions of these things to intoxicate anyone, but intoxication was never the point.

    It was necessary to start somewhere, so they chose to start there. I applaud them for getting this far!

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