Nanobots

“We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.” -- Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar

This is why I love serendipity … one lucky find leads to another lucky find, which leads to another …

A tip from Dr. Daniel E. Resasco (ouresasco@gmail.com), D. and H. Bourne Chair and George Lynn Cross Professor, Chemical, Biological, and Materials Engineering, at the University of Oklahoma led to a Google® search on the Advanced Energy Consortium (http://www.beg.utexas.edu/aec/) This led in turn to the following Houston Chronicle article …
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A new way to get inside scoop on oil: Super-tiny robots may be deployed for big strikes of tomorrow
By Tom Fowler, Houston Chronicle (May 17, 2009)
[Excerpts]
Big Oil is thinking small — really, really small — in its quest to squeeze more oil and gas from the ground.

A consortium of companies is funding research at Rice University, the University of Texas and other schools around the country to develop tiny devices 70,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair to gather information about oil and gas reservoirs deep underground.

Jim Tour (http://www.jmtour.com/) a professor at Rice University known for cutting-edge work in the field of nanotechnology — which involves the engineering of atomic-scale devices — said the devices under development would be like secret agents sent behind enemy lines, but without a radio to transmit messages.

“You don’t get the information until the agent actually comes back and you interrogate him,” Tour said.

And instead of just one or two agents, trillions of nanobots would travel below, carried in drilling mud or some other medium. The nanobots would have different molecules attached that react in different ways with oil, water, sulfur or other materials.

When brought back to the surface the nanobots would be analyzed for changes that could tell geologists something about the reservoir they passed through, such as the temperature or pressure, the presence of sulfur or other chemicals.
View the full text of this article at: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl//6428632.html
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