A Look Inside the Tiny, Gorgeous Worlds of Self-Assembling Microarchitectures
All images courtesy of Noorduin, et al. The color images were created using false color techniques.

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A Look Inside the Tiny, Gorgeous Worlds of Self-Assembling Microarchitectures

What tiny bits of silicate and barium carbonate can do given the right conditions.

It's possible to build very elaborate structures without actually building them.

We're used to the opposite: a top-down world. This is the world we're most familiar with, in which complex schematics and requirements are first drafted on paper with incredible precision (they are "complete"), with the building materials, construction methods, and the rest of the whole process being the result of those original on-paper designs. If we need a wire to conduct electricity for a design's power needs, we dig an enormous pit in the Earth from which we remove copper sulfides usually containing less than 1 percent actual copper. Through many steps of heating and refining and concentrating we wind up with a copper material with the desired properties for our wiring. That is top-down.

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It seems irrational, wasteful. But what alternative could there be? For much of the industrial era there really hasn't been one and so things are constructed from the top-down perspective, in which materials are applied to concepts. Technology is progressing, however, thanks in large part to advances within chemistry. Engineers are learning to make things make themselves. Just by mixing up the right components, it's possible to build tiny nanoscale machines and materials. It turns out that order is easy to come by in the universe, so long as we know what things are needed to be in place for that order to manifest.

"By studying natural shapes and processes, researchers have learned that the key ingredient to arriving at complexity is the coupling between different processes. This coupling leads to self-organization and is an essential feature of life," Elias Vlieg wrote in Science magazine. "In biominerals, such as diatom skeletons or abalone shells, the interplay between calcium carbonate or similar minerals with organic molecules can lead to highly functional materials with hierarchical architectures and stunning beauty."

Vlieg was writing in reference to a study describing the creation of a series of functional and uniquely beautiful structures in a "bottom-up" fashion, using different solutions and different pH levels to generate the silicate and barium carbonate structures below.

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You can think of it in terms of computer code. Programmers are taught to write not to this or that language, but to a larger structure, an algorithm or interface. It is the code that must fit the algorithm and not the other way around. From the vast world of computer programming languages, we then build the right design. The design could mostly care less about the language or the implementation.

But if it could be the other way around, we would have something analogous to self-assembling microarchitecture: code that writes itself, that develops its own algorithms. The design would become the materials.

For building actual things, technology is just now at the beginning. Indeed wires (nanowires) will someday soon by formed from materials that are grown rather than removed from the Earth, as molecular electronics take shape in the real-world. Needless to say, their creation will be a much more aesthetically pleasing process (as above) compared to open-pit mines in the desert.

You can see more at Science.