Imagine a situation where you need a hammer, a wrench, a car model, and an origami crane. Now imagine that all those things can be crafted from the same material. Move over MacGyver, programmable matter is changing the playing field.
New discoveries in nanotechnology give rise to new tools that can be manipulated to serve a number or purposes at any given time.
DARPA has begun work on a material that can shift at the will of the user. Dr. Mitchell R. Zakin, the program manager in charge of this project, said that the soldier of the future will need to be able to adapt to an ever-changing battlefield. To do so, he will need a tool that can adapt with him. He references a, "paint-can like object," in the back of a soldier's vehicle. Within would be the maliable material. By uploading a set of instructions from an on-board computer to said container, the materials inside would reform into the requested device. Once the task is completed, the object can be returned to the bucket and reprogrammed into something different.
A Harvard team working on this project has managed to create the first step towards this device. Dan Smith of Popular Science said that Harvard's prototype is "self-folding origami", which looks like a series of triangles on a small square surface. (See above image)
Also, researchers in MIT have developed tiny motors that can, "Control the assembly of objects underwater or in space." Said Smith.
While DARPA considers a morphing tool, Intel is working on designing a similar product that has the ability to create real-time, malleable holograms. Objects that can be created from digital data and made into a tangible model. A report released by CNN documents a group of business people seated around a car model built from a pool of, what can be assumed is, programmable matter. They pinch, pluck, and peel at the little car and it responds by shifting to their commands.
It can be assumed that the demonstration was a CGI rendering, but the message was clear, they wanted to design a substance that could change in real-time from human interaction.
Though this idea was much farther fetched than the research done by DARPA, Dr. Andrew A. Chen, Vice President and Director of Research at Intel, feels confident that this research will greatly impact our daily lives. Taking items that normally would be a hassle together and making it possible to change them to fit perfectly. He references a pair of sunglasses and a Bluetooth earpiece being able to fit comfortably together as long as they can shift to meet one another.
[I think it bears presenting the URL of one of my sources: http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-06/mightily-morphing-powerful-range-objects]
See this is interesting to me, what do they do to change the shape of the molecules? I really liked how this was written. It's hard for me to completely grasp how they have control over such small molecular changes(did we make a tiny transistor?), but all the same I was able to understand the broad changes - and was able to relate.
ReplyDeleteChris: What is DARPA? Sounds like something on "Lost." You never explain it. This post is interesting, but I really don't get it. Assuming your blog is for sharper pencils than I am, I guess that's OK, but make sure you're not writing over the heads of your readers. Score: 9
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