Chemists make playdough/lego-like hybrid to create tiny building blocks
Playdough and Legos are among the most popular childhood building blocks. But what could you use if you wanted to create something really small – a structure less than the width of a human hair?
It turns out, a team of chemists has found, this can be achieved by creating particles that have both playdough and Lego traits.
These “patchy particles,” described in the latest issue of the journal Nature, are 1/200th the width of a human hair and can form endless architectures from a handful of basic pieces. And unlike their larger counterparts, these particles can self-assemble.
“Imagine that you want to build a castle, but instead of handpicking the bricks and patiently connecting them one by one, you simply shake the box of pieces so that they magically connect to one another in forming a full-featured castle,” says Stefano Sacanna, an assistant professor in New York University Department of Chemistry and one of the creators. “These smart particles represent an important step forward for the realization of self-assembling new materials and micro-machinery.”
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