At first glance, nothing appears unusual about the coin displayed by scientists at the Steirscheiss Institute in Michigan. The edges are rough, the image of Jefferson a little faded, but it appears to be an ordinary nickel.
What makes this nickel remarkable is that it was cloned.
"Cloning inorganic material presents a different set of challenges than cloning a sheep or a dinosaur," says director Sandra Mayton. "The things we're trying to clone don't naturally make copies of themselves. We have to work around that by using the object's quantum signature as a kind of template, where one would normally use DNA."
"You can think of the replicator as a kind of Xerox machine," says researcher Kevin Falks. "The zero-point energy of the original is like toner, and the copy paper is actually a superheated, magnetically contained orb of plasma."
Does this breakthrough mean we'll soon be drinking Earl Grey tea produced by Star Trek-style replicators? Not likely, says Falks. "It takes an enormous amount of energy to produce just a little mass," he says. "The energy required to clone a five gram nickel is enough to power two-hundred average households for over a year."
While the energy cost of this technology renders it impractical for now, we may soon be able to use it to clone organs, silverware, pets, money, medicine, and compact discs. Sound like fantasy? It's Factual Science!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Currently underway at MIT, two separate privately funded research projects are competing to reduce the energy inputs necessary for inorganic cloning. The Computational and Systems Biology Department and the Engineering Systems Division are using a Hybrid approach to cloning.
ReplyDeleteThe Hybrid approach uses the Toner/Plasma Orb methodology combined with mature DNA techniques. By using a segment of genes, which closely resemble the objects quantum signature, the object when superheated will “learn” or more accurately will imprint with the missing instructions on self-replication. In theory, this will decrease the energy consumption in the scoping and deployment phases, by requiring a weaker electromagnetic field to contain the filaments, beams, and double layers in the ionized gas as replication takes place. Several series of test sets have been conducted successfully.
A repeatable and verifiable reduction in energy has been achieved using the material aluminum. The first area of research is focusing on hybridizing aluminum screens (for example a tea strainer or a small sink drain) and celery stalk DNA, due to its vascular structure.
Who can say it better than Subra Suresh, Dean of our School of Engineering. “Engineers make things – and they make things better”. http://engineering.mit.edu/
I think that GE funds one of the projects so obviously they are not as broke as Fox News reports.