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"DOGS can smell cancer and diabetes," detecting volatile organic molecules associated with the diseases. The illusive quest for an e-nose continues. https://lnkd.in/emBjZwq View in LinkedIn

NANO PROPERTIES DIFFER. "In the past two decades, the concept of “small is different” has been established for a wide variety of phenomena, including electrical, optical, magnetic, and mechanical properties of materials." Or, a snowflake is not a glacier. These radically different properties open up new programmability options in ordinary materials. https://lnkd.in/efupmXS View in LinkedIn

REMEMBER IRIDESCENCE? The radiant natural colors of peacock feathers, beetles, seashells, often employing complex photonic crystal lattices, are ways of asymmetrically separating and gating photons of light to then display reflectivity or constructive or destructive interference characteristic of a diffraction gating. Humans have coincidentally used similar methods to develop transistors and semiconductors, at the heart of our modern electronics. View in LinkedIn

MANIPULATION or programming of physical materials in the engineering and physics world depends largely on how electrons, light, magnetic and other properties can be asymmetrically gated, combined, or otherwise differentiated through specific channels at a nano scale. Understanding these phenomena opens the door to programmability. Biology has been using these techniques for millennia. View in LinkedIn

"PROGRAMMABLE MATTER at its most basic level is designing a material that has components within it with instructions for self-assembly. Basically you’re trying to mimic what nature does, and nature does a superb job of creating all sorts of objects that self-assemble." https://lnkd.in/ewiHcjY View in LinkedIn

CONTROL OF INANIMATE MATTER. "While living cells are often said (a little simplistically) to be dancing to the evolutionarily shaped program coded in their genomes, technologies demand that we bring matter under our own direct control. It’s one thing to design molecules that assemble themselves, quite another to design systems made from components that will reconfigure or disassemble at the push of a button." https://lnkd.in/dDwjZMg View in LinkedIn

CONTROLLABLE MATTER. "So it’s not too huge a leap to envision their use in some future form of configurable matter that might be used to modify, heal, or control living things." There is our raw desire, the distant aspiration. https://lnkd.in/dzmMmjE View in LinkedIn

BLUEPRINT IN NATURE. "These same techniques have also permitted wireless remote control of certain processes in living organisms, such as the triggering of nerve signals and the release of insulin." Our humble efforts to master the programming of living cells is a sharp contrast with those of bacteria. https://lnkd.in/dzmMmjE View in LinkedIn

CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS, or the body clock, in mammals, squids and likely other creatures are also controlled by symbiotic bacteria living within. The hand on the masterswitch is not our own. https://lnkd.in/evWzdkH View in LinkedIn

REPROGRAMMING STEM CELLS has been an area that the human species has made recent advances in, late in comparison to bacteria. https://lnkd.in/ep46MGM View in LinkedIn