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Robotics

Nanocar Wins Top Science Award 175

Lucas123 writes "A researcher who built a car slightly larger than a strand of DNA won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice Univ. built a car only 4 nanometers in width in order to demonstrate that nanovehicles could be controlled enough to deliver payloads to build larger objects, such as memory chips and, someday, even buildings, like a self-assembling machine. Tour and a team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers constructed a car with chassis, working suspension, wheels and a motor. 'You shine light on it and the motor spins in one direction and pushes the car like a paddle wheel on the surface,' Tour said. The team also built a truck that can carry a payload."

Comment How about recording? (Score 2, Informative) 702

In vim/gvim, I think the most useful thing I have ever used is the recording capability. It works great for editing HTML. If you have 10 lines that look very similar (such as a list of navigation links), start recording, edit the first line making sure that you end your statement with 'j' so that it moves to the next line, then finish recording and you can execute that recording for the next 9 lines.

To start recording, type 'q' and then a number such as '1'. This will record your next keystrokes into memory bank 1. When you're done typing, just hit 'q' to finish recording.

So, if you had

<h1>Foo</h1>
<h1>Foo</h1>
<h1>Foo</h1>
<h1>Foo</h1>

and you wanted

<h1>Foo Bar</h1>
<h1>Foo Bar</h1>
<h1>Foo Bar</h1>
<h1>Foo Bar</h1>

you would hit 'q1' to begin recording in bank 1, '^' to start at the beginning, 'l' (as in ell) 6 times to move six characters to the right, 'a' to insert after the last 'o' of "Foo", ' Bar' to insert the string, 'esc' 'j' to finish and move down one line, 'q' to finish recording, then '3@1' to execute the operation in bank 1 three times.

I can't count the number of times I have used this functionality! Makes coding immensely easier.

Hardware Hacking

X-Rays Emitted From Ordinary Scotch Tape 190

Maximum Prophet writes "When I was in High School, I built an X-Ray machine that (probably) didn't produce any X-Rays. I used an old vacuum tube and high voltage. Little did I know that simple triboluminescence would have enough energy to do useful work." The catch: you'll need to peel your tape in a vacuum, and have the x-ray film at the ready.

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