Just a week ago I was at NIST to hear a talk by Paul Rothemund, winner of the 2006 Feynman Prize with Erik Winfree for the invention of DNA Origami. In just 3 years this has taken off in a big way. This story at Nanowerk News reports the latest: Danish researchers have made a… Continue reading Nano-boxes from DNA origami
In Arthur C. Clarke’s classic SF novel Against the Fall of Night, there is a description of the “moving ways”, the powered sidewalks on which people rode around the city, as being made of a material that would have baffled an engineer of our own times because it was solid in one direction and liquid… Continue reading Anisotropic semi-Dirac electrons in atomically-precise trilayers
This article over at Ars Technica has a nice overview of some recent work showing that when water is forced through a nanotube of appropriate size, the polar nature of the water molecule lines them up so as to create a voltage along the tube. They show that such a tube can be used as… Continue reading Nanopumps
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov continues the discussion about nanofactories. He says a number of reasonable things, but then mischaracterizes, or at least greatly oversimplifies, Foresight’s position on nanofactories and self-replicating machines in general: The general implied position of the Foresight Institute appears to be, “we’ll figure these things out as we go, MNT… Continue reading Replicating nanofactories redux
Earlier this week I was at the premiere of Transcendent Man, a biographical overview of Ray Kurzweil’s views on the coming Singularity. Kurzweil’s main argument is that the power of the exponential in technology is major, systemic, and underappreciated. The specific item of interest in this post is Kurzweil’s claim, repeated in the movie, that… Continue reading A Moore's Law for energy?
