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Gaming the Future: The Book!

Month: June 2009

More signs of mainstream interest in nanomachinery

This Physorg story gives the details, hat tip to Sander Olsen… Scientists from A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), led by Professor Christian Joachim, have scored a breakthrough in nanotechnology by becoming the first in the world to invent a molecular gear of the size of 1.2nm whose rotation can be deliberately controlled.… Continue reading More signs of mainstream interest in nanomachinery

A cautionary note, concluded

Last week I posted a story of strange behavior in the simulation of molecular machines. One commenter asked if this was due to something unusual in the starting configuration of the atoms. This was the first thing we investigated, and didn’t seem to be the case. There was a small amount to strain energy in… Continue reading A cautionary note, concluded

A cautionary note

One of the constraints laid down by DARPA at the recent Physical Intelligence proposers workshop was that the model of intelligence that was to be proposed had to have a physical implementation. It seemed odd to some of the attendees that this should be a hard constraint, since many models of intelligence have a perfectly… Continue reading A cautionary note

Physical Intelligence

About a month ago, the web was all agog over the announcement of DARPA’s Physical Intelligence program — Wired wrote: The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing… Continue reading Physical Intelligence

Buckytube-filled aluminum

Brian Wang over at Next Big Future has an article about improving the properties of aluminum as a structural material by filling with buckytubes, the way plastics are made stronger by filling by fiberglass. This isn’t particularly new: what’s new is that Bayer appears to be able to make nanotubes in enough quantity to make… Continue reading Buckytube-filled aluminum

Nanorobots from the NNI?

The Nanomanufacturing Summit, held in Boston recently, was largely what you would have expected — near-term bulk-tech approaches to nanostructured materials, some interesting research aimed at new electronics, and so forth. Notable, however, was a plenary talk by M. C. Roco, who appears to have changed his tune to the extent of predicting nanorobotics and… Continue reading Nanorobots from the NNI?

The Fuel of the Future

What will your car run on in 2020 or 2030? What form of energy storage and transmission will allow intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar, to be a viable input to the economy? There’s a good chance, of course, that cars will still run on gasoline — its demise has been predicted early… Continue reading The Fuel of the Future

Limited, expensive nanofactories

Continuing the discussion of nanofactories from here and here: Michael writes: The common definition of “nanofactory” is a desktop, user-friendly system capable of building macroscale products using positional placement of individual atoms. Dr. Hall appears like he may (?) be using the term to describe “any nanomachine that makes another nanomachine”, but reading the writings… Continue reading Limited, expensive nanofactories

The first nanofactories

Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov is worried about what we might call a hard nano-takeoff: The first nanofactories will be both impressive (in their exponential qualities and complete automation of manufacturing) and unimpressive (their chemical inflexibility, possible cooling requirements, electricity consumption, limited initial design space, etc.) I predict they will be revolutionary enough that… Continue reading The first nanofactories

Nanoconstruction by Pinhole Camera

From Physorg.com: Russian Academy of Sciences have developed a method of nanofabrication using an atom pinhole camera…. The technique could produce individual nanostructures down to 30 nm, a size reduction of 10,000 times compared with the original object. “Our present experimental results show the resolution about 30 nm, but our calculations (the theoretical prediction) tell… Continue reading Nanoconstruction by Pinhole Camera

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