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Gaming the Future: The Book!

Month: June 2000

Tensile Strength of Carbon Nanotubes Measured

from the is-that-a-beanstalk-in-your-pocket? dept.
Alison Chaiken tells us of a story in the newsletter Physical Review Focus (from the American Physical Society) about how a U.S. team has now made the most direct measurements yet of the strength of carbon nanotubes. "The results confirm that nanotubes are among the strongest of all known materials, and the measurement technique is likely to lead to a more detailed characterization of nanotubes in the future. (Min-Feng Yu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 5552.)"

Alison adds, "This is the work that Rod Ruoff and his students presented at the 1999 Fall Foresight Conference. " The abstract is online but viewing the full paper (in Physical Review Letters) requires a subscription or purchase.

Why the future needs Bill Joy

from the we-don't-want-a-Joyless-future dept.
Jonathan Desp writes "Tihamer Toth-Fejel wrote a think piece on Bill Joy's technology concerns, available here where he is saying: Our hubris may make it possible for robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology to drive us and our environment into utter extinction. But if we humbly work hard, dig for truth, and love each other, we might just tame the galaxy and live happily ever after. Most likely, we'll muddle through with only a few major catastrophes….I'm glad that Bill Joy is searching. I hope that many join this search, and I hope that as technologists, we can come up with better intellectual tools to aid in that search."

Nanotech-specific search engine

from the find-all-things-nano dept.
Pat Delany writes "Nanospot.org is a new web search engine just for nanotechnology. We target the contents of over 240 nanotech websites, including academic papers, opinion pieces, research/industrial equipment spec sheets, experiment results, researchers' cv's, general nano overviews, etc., to provide easy access to the best nanotechnology information on the web." ChrisPeterson writes "When you're looking for info on molecular nanotechnology, you may want to use this new nanotech-only search engine. Why? The big engines are weeks or months out of date. This one searches lots of nanotech websites and does it more often than the big engines can. It worked well when I tested it on a common nanotech search term."

DoD Funding Nanotechnology

from the nano's-real-it-has-a-military-acronym dept.
Steven C. Vetter alerts us to the new Defense University Research Initiative on Nanotechnology (DURINT) "to enhance universities' capabilities to perform basic science and engineering research and related education in nanotechnology critical to national defense…The DoD expects the DURINT program will promote nanotechnology research, primarily for defense but also for civilian applications." Areas include Nanoscale Machines and Motors, Nano-System Energetics, and Characterization of Nanoscale Elements, Devices, and Systems. Read More for the official announcement.

Big discussion of Foresight Guidelines on nanotech safety

from the other-dot-talks-nano dept.
Our parent website, Slashdot, has a discussion of the Foresight Guidelines for nanotech safety. There are some useful comments embedded in it. To read the highest-rated comments first, do what you do on this site: use the pull-down menu to change "Oldest First" to "Highest Scores First", then press the "change" button. See also Jeffrey Soreff's and others' comments on the original item here on nanodot.

Coarse-Grained Agoric Computing

from the I-will-gladly-pay-you-Tuesday-for-a-megaflop-today dept.
Yahoo has the story about a distributed computing project that pays you for those otherwise-unused cycles. Australian company ProcessTree Network plans to implement a scheme to pay money toward users' ISP bills in exchange for running a SETI@home-like distributed-computing client. (Windows-only for now…)

Gene Scientists bet on size of Human Genome

from the is-that-what-they-mean-by-a-gene-pool? dept.
A New York Times article (forwarded by Robin Hanson) describes a betting pool among geneticists on the number of genes of the human genome. The mean of the 228 bets so far cast is 62,598 genes, with a high of 200,000 and a low of 27,462. By comparison, 19,099 genes are apparently required to run the C. elegans roundworm and 13,601 genes for the Drosophila fruit fly, the only two animals whose full genomes have so far been decoded.

Courtney Love at Digital Hollywood

from the ain't-gonna-work-on-Sony's-farm-no-more dept.
Rock musician Courtney Love presented a brilliant talk (now available in its entirety on Salon) at the Digital Hollywood conference talking about Napster, intellectual property, the RIAA, and the economics of music. Ms. Love demonstrates clearly that she Gets It — incentive structures, the frictionlessness of digital information, the economic relationship between artist and audience, and the free rider problem. (She even quotes Neal Stephenson.)

Nanotech safety guidelines released

from the thank-you-Neil dept.
Yakira Heyman writes "Foresight has issued the first public release of our guidelines for the safe and responsible development of nanotechnology. Included are specific development principles and initial guidelines for device design." The linked page has the press release, guideline text, and background on the process by which the guidelines were produced. Also available are instructions on how to endorse the guidelines.

To make suggestions for improvement, comment below or you can annotate the text directly.

Nanotech conference abstracts due ASAP

from the hurry-up! dept.
If you plan to present your work at this fall's Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology in Bethesda, MD, you'll need to get your abstract in immediately. The formal deadline is June 16, but if you get it in by Monday, June 19, you'll be okay. After that, there's still a chance, but it decreases over time.

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