24-hour race won by molecule that traveled 1 micron | Hacker News Reader

24-hour race won by molecule that traveled 1 micron

arstechnica.com

128 pointsordu22 comments

Just like one of the comments in the article says, the final rankings table is actually quite funny: https://www.memo-project.eu/flatCMS/index.php/News#17.

Changing lanes, overpassing, crossing trenches and lost molecules.

I'm tickled by the "Molecule jump onto the [STM] tip" - did they have a Symbiote[1] in the race?

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiote_(comics)

To put this in perspective, a car going highway speeds of 60 mi/h that travels for 24 hours will travel 1,440 miles, or approximately 500,000 times the car's length.

By contrast, this molecule is 3 nm long and traveled 1 micron in 24 hours, or approximately 300 times the molecule's length -- that is, about four orders of magnitude slower than the car given its length.

By this metric, something like a bee is faster than a jet fighter.

A bee: 0.02m, 5 m/s -> 250 self lengths. A fighter: 20m, 500 m/s -> 25 self lengths.

By this metric, X-rays move faster than light.

You might have just revolutionised the world of physics

Compared to a visible light wave, the smaller “”faster”” X-rays have more bandwidth/can carry more information for the same band width—so the distinction seems to make a kind of intuitive sense.

They do, but not as fast as gamma rays. And according to which observer?

I wouldn’t observe gamma rays. They’re bad for your health.

Yes, the bee is faster in a meaningful way — the exact same way we say an ant is incredibly strong, relative to its size.

> By this metric, something like a bee is faster than a jet fighter.

The metric is even worse than that. Think about a bee riding inside a fighter.

> The cars, present at the respective facilities of the eight participating teams, were remotely controlled from the race venue in Toulouse.

> Along with its unique vehicles, what made the race special was the venue, a giant spherical structure called La Boule. Located in the CEMES (Centre d’Élaboration de Matériaux et d’Etudes Structurales) campus, it has a diameter of 25 meters and housed the world’s largest electron microscope at the beginning of the 1960s.

So just to get it right, the "venue" is just the place where the races are coordinated, but otherwise was only chosen for symbolic/historic significance. The actual physical races are taking place in the labs of the participating teams. Is that correct?

So each team has its own "race track", tunneling microscope, etc as well?

"No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"

(can't believe that awesome show is coming back, hope just as good)

It’s had 4 finales and 3 revivals, all of which have brought great new episodes.

I’m confident the same will happen again.

That looks like a giant van der Graaff in the background. Powers the microscope or just the optics?

I am an electron microscopist and I am thoroughly confused by what I am looking at. The article simply labels it as "the worlds largest electron microscope" which is confusing because size is not really a measure of electron microscopy as far as I'm aware. Perhaps voltage or resolution? The contest took place at NIMS which is well known for EM but I've never seen any photos like that one:

https://www.nims.go.jp/eng/research/group/electron-microscop...

Anyways, if that's a TEM my guess is the contraption at the top is more about the source (providing high voltage to the emitter) than the optics. Optics don't require much power, a single electron is not difficult to manipulate at all. What's harder is getting a coherent electron beam at the voltage you need (i.e. 300 kV+).

Oops I intended that as a pun on (the abuse of) the word 'optics' in PR/marketing/media/politics..

It looks like a Cockroft-Walton voltage multiplier. So it's the power source.

It seems like that was where the event was held: https://www.cemes.fr/Nanocar-Race-II-1463?lang=en

Unclear if that's part of the equipment or not.

Those have nothing to do with the microscope.

A STM is basically a very sharp needle flying just above the surface and measuring the tunneling current with a few volts applied at most. It's rather small, most space will be taken up by the vacuum chamber and cryostat.

Other electron microscopes (TEM or SEM) cannot resolve molecules / or would fry them with their high voltage/currents...

The article mentions that the race venue used to house the world's largest (traditional, HV) electron microscopes at one time. I thought it would be cool if these towers were actually for that but it seems likely the place is just a science museum of sorts now. Or maybe they are some sort of fancy (electrostatic) dust collector?

Oh yes you are right!

That's apparently part of the first 1MeV TEM. Should be the high voltage source for the electron gun. The electron optics were most likely magnetic, not electrostatic.

There is a whole movie about it:

https://images.cnrs.fr/en/video/1257

Later MeV TEMs looked very different, and are now replaced by aberration corrected tools...

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