Daily
Mail: Researchers at Tufts University in Massachusetts have
built the world’s smallest electric
motor—consisting of a single molecule just a nanometer in
size, or 1/60 000 the diameter of a human hair. Using a
scanning tunneling microscope, Charles Sykes and coworkers
rotated a single butyl methyl sulfide molecule by nudging it
with an electric field. Although molecular motors powered by
other means, such as chemical reactions or light, have been
built, they cannot achieve the precision of the Tufts team's
electric motor: Even the smallest amount of chemicals or the
narrowest beam of light will affect clusters of molecules. The
team’s
electric
motor, as detailed in
Nature Nanotechnology, could lead to advances in
medicine, to deliver tiny amounts of drugs to very specific
locations, and in nanosensors.
