Month: July 2002

from the not-yet-a-tri-corder dept.
Gina Miller writes "The Chicago Sun Times Nanotech leading to diagnoses by handheld reports that Northwestern University's Institute for Nanotechnology in collaboration with Nanosphere Inc. are in the midst of developing a hand held device based on nanoparticles, that could give instant diagnosis via bodily fluids. The device is based on nanoparticles that exibit color which along with genetic markers of DNA could together turn diagnosis into color coding detection. The chip that will go on the inside of the handheld, is being developed by Nanosphere Inc. The article also discusses another company, NanoInk and how their work with dip-pen nanolithography could pertain to the color coding aspect by allowing the chip to sample specific sequences in the DNA that the gold particles have color-coded."

The New York Times has an extensive article ("Even for the Last .400 Hitter, Cryonics Is the Longest Shot", by M. Janofsky, 9 July 2002) on the controversy sparked by the cryonic suspension of baseball great Ted Williams at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation facility in Arizona:

Sent here by his son, Williams, the Boston Red Sox slugger who died last week at 83, has become the 50th — and by far the most famous — "patient" at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which preserves bodies in the hope that breakthroughs in medical science will someday make it possible to resuscitate them.

The article notes: "All of this has elevated the profile of Alcor and its president and chief executive, Dr. Jerry B. Lemler. Since the weekend, when reporters indicated that Williams's body was being sent here, the phones have rung incessantly and the Alcor Web site, www.alcor.org, has been clogged with visitors, said Dr. Lemler, a lifelong Yankees fan from New Rochelle, N.Y."

"This has raised public awareness about cryonics and about Alcor," Dr. Lemler said. "We're under scrutiny like never before, and we welcome it. We were anxious for so many years to be able to state our philosophies, our goals, our convictions, as well as our prices and our disclaimers."

Gina Miller writes "AsiaBizTech reports: Singapore Backs Nanotechnology Business . Singapore's government is looking to move forward with nanotechnology promotion that would impliment disk storage and biological fields by cooperating with overseas bodies such as Japan. Although their budget is smaller than the U.S. and Japan, today it stands at S$65 million, larger than all previous nanotech budgets. In January of 2002, the National University of Singapore Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Initiative (NUSNNI) was established. Since that time Singapore has set up the Institute of Bioengineering, began began joint research with a U.S. venture, SurroMed Inc., in nanobiology and expected to announce further venture projects."

Gina Miller writes "The Gainesville Sun.com has an article: UF team thinking small for treatments . The Sun medical staff writer, reports that the University of Florida are developing "nanopharmaceuticals" and believe these drug-binding molecules to have great potential for drug transport to even the tiniest capillaries in the human body. The work is currently focused on drug overdose situations, in which these molecules could easily bind to the invader drug to reduce toxic effects. Dr. Donn Dennis, professor of anesthesiology and medical director of the research project states "Let's say you have a specific type of cancer cell in the bloodstream and want to get a chemotherapeutic agent to attack it. This technology has the potential to deliver that drug only to the inside of the cells that are cancerous. You would avoid all the side effects of the cancer drugs, which can make every organ in the body sick." Dennis says about nanotechnology "It has major implications not only in medicine, but in food production, energy production, and other fundamental problems that we face as the world's population continues to increase.""

JohnFaith writes "High Lift Systems will be sponsoring a conference in Seattle on implementing a carbon tether space elevator: http://www.confcon.com/sp_elev_02/sp_elev_02.html. There's also a story in the Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/13 4489679_spaceelevator08m.html. This type of application has been mentioned in various nanotech books, so it will be interesting to see if the conference will mention molecular machines as a way to build these structures."

2012Rocky writes "From United Press International: Merged science promises golden age (UPI, July 08, 2002).

If several of today's leading scientific disciplines can overcome barriers to working cooperatively, within a couple of decades their efforts could produce concepts currently confined to science fiction, such as direct brain-to-brain communication, a National Science Foundation report released Monday predicts.

This article points out that the convergence of nano-, bio-, information technology and cognitive science could usher in a golden age for humanity. The 387 page pre-pub report goes in to much greater detail.
See the full report [a pre-publication on-line version]: Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance"

Gina Miller writes "Tim Harper has written a feature in the July 2002 issue of Business 2.0, Small Wonders, covering the advent of nanotechnology. He writes "What's the real story? Simply this: What is happening in nanotech is indeed revolutionary, but it's happening on a level far removed from products and markets. It's happening on the level of a fundamental understanding of how the universe operates at the scale of atoms and molecules, where Mother Nature does some of her most clever work. Some of the world's top scientists, in disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and physics that are traditionally seen as separate, are focusing on the field. With this will come an explosion of discovery, encouraged by government funding — $2 billion worldwide this year — unseen since the Apollo space program." The article describes current nanotech products and those that will arrive in the coming years."

Gina Miller writes "Guardian Unlimited Observer has a commentary, We should look forward to the future (30 June 2002) by Charles Leadbeater. The author discusses the fears of future technologies, how it is provoked by certain publications, and how with previous advances there was also fear of those things that now seem mundane. In summary he says: "Science may bring new genetic risks but also new energy sources, cures for disease, ways of growing food, opportunities for communication, cultural expression and democratic debate. The future will be messy and complex, disappointing and surprising, but we should not fear it so much that we seek, Canute-like, to keep it forever at bay." "

waynerad writes "Some physicists are proposing using a quantum computer to simulate quantum systems, which are intractable to simulate on a classical computer. This would be huge big breakthrough for figuring out the chemistry involved in assembling large devices atom-by-atom, it seems to me. If, of course, these quantum computers can actually be built. The preprint is here.

'Simulating reality is hard task. The combined computer power of the planet still couldn't run a full simulation of simple quantum systems. However, quantum computers could efficiently simulate other quantum systems. This, in fact, was the original motivation for Richard Feynman to propose such a device as a quantum computer in the 1980s. A quantum device that runs a perfect virtual reality simulation is just a form of a quantum computer but specific things must be taken into account in the design, different from a quantum computer to factor large numbers or run other applications. The authors propose some designs for quantum simulators and point out that such a tool would be invaluable in studying new material designs, especially for new superconductors and magnets. '"

Mr_Farlops writes "In something of a reprise of earlier work involving silica nanotubes, scientists at UC Davis have developed a switchable polycarbonate membrane etched with tiny, evenly-sized pores. The pores, only 10 nanometers across, are lined with a thin layer of gold and then with another layer of oily molecules called thiols. The thiols spontaneously assemble into a switchable membrane that can be opened or closed according to the acidity of the solution on one side or the other of the membrane. The researchers envision the use of these membranes in microscopic "labs-on-a-chip," inexpensive sorting of catalysts and enzymes or in the controlled release of tiny quantities of drugs."