The Korea Herald carries a story on a forum in Korea on “Revolutionary Advanced Technology and Future Urbanism”. Researcher Eric Drexler explained the goals of nanotech software firm Nanorex and his views of US/Asia competition in productive nanosystems: Nanorex is still developing products that are expected to be available later this year…The idea is to… Continue reading Asia likely to lead in longer-term nanotechnology manufacturing
Our friends at Nanorex have done it again. You really should click through to see this new nanotech design in action. Click on the design to make it move: This worm drive assembly designed by K. Eric Drexler, Josh Hall, Ninad Sathaye and Mark Sims includes 11 components totalling 25,374 atoms. The animations below have… Continue reading Nanotechnology design-of-the-month reaches 25,000 precisely-placed atoms
We’ll end the week on an upbeat note: It’s good to see the American Associate for the Advancement of Science — AAAS, publisher of the journal Science — covering long-term nanotechnology prospects on their EurekAlert website. An updated essay by Eric Drexler looks at “Revolutionizing the Future of Technology“. Excerpts: Why focus on productive nanosystems… Continue reading Productive nanosystems on AAAS nanotechnology site
High school students in the COSMOS program were treated to an early version of the NanoEngineer-1 modeling software for atomically-precise nanotechnology. Foresight Director of Education Miguel Aznar reported to Nanorex president Mark Sims on the nanotech course results: Success! NanoEngineer-1 greatly enhanced my nanotechnology class. My students were excited to manipulate and simulate the world… Continue reading Nanotechnology software enables students to design molecular machines
The highly prolific Robert Freitas and colleagues have gathered their work on diamond mechanosynthesis onto one website titled the Nanofactory Collaboration. Enjoy! Includes an introduction to the topic, participant list, publications list, and a description of the technical challenges. Most impressive to me is the publications list. How does he do it? Does he not… Continue reading Diamond mechanosynthesis project site launched
John Faith brings our attention to an item at PhysicsWeb on how to overcome friction in nanosized mechanical devices: Friction is a big problem in nanosized devices because they have huge surface-to-volume ratios, which means that their surfaces quickly wear out and seize up. Traditional lubricants are useless in such machines because they become thick… Continue reading Towards frictionless nanomachines
Mark Sims of Nanorex, a Foresight participating member, reports that he has completed the first nanomechanical simulation of the Merkle/Drexler universal joint. He used the nanoENGINEER-1 software on a Dell laptop, taking about 24 hours to complete the simulation of a 3,846-atom structure. Mark explains: “A universal joint is a joint in a rigid rod… Continue reading Nanomechanical simulation of atomically-precise universal joint
This week I’m attending the Institute for the Future’s meeting titled Beyond the Horizon: Science & Technology in Ten, Twenty & Fifty Years. Overall, it’s great and I recommend it. Reminds me of Foresight’s Vision Weekends. Tomorrow I’ll be presenting our Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems project at one of the breakouts. The meeting was… Continue reading IFTF predicts nanotech 50 years out
As described — briefly, as one would expect — in the May 2006 Nanotech Briefs (subscription only), the EU is funding a nanomotor construction kit project. From their press release: “A promising interdisciplinary approach combines research methods of biology, physics, chemistry, computing, system theory and engineering into a “synthetic biology”. The EU has also recognised… Continue reading Europeans to make construction kit of tailored nanomotor components
From PhysOrg.com, coverage of work published in Advanced Materials [abstract]: “A team of chemists from France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US are working together to bridge the gap between nanoscience and nanotechnology. They have now devised a method that could allow them to organize tiny molecular machines on a surface and so build… Continue reading Molecular machine film changes chemical to electrical signal
