Inventor James Tour a professor of chemistry at Rice University won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for developing a car that is just four nanometers across and slightly wider than a strand of DNA. Tour’s nanocar car has a pivoting suspension, rotating axles attached to wheels, and even an engine!

The nanocar is able to move by using light or heat. When the surface that the cars are on is heated it excites the molecules that make up the car and as a reaction the nanocar moves forward until ultimately it hit’s an object. The light method works on the principle of Photoactivation.

Tour hopes that within the next 30 years his technology could construct quantum-dot memory which string together metal atoms in patterns that could then store data.

“Until now, engineers have built things by taking larger objects and cutting them down to make smaller ones,” Tour said. “In the future, things will be built not from the top down, but the bottom up -- as in nature.”

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