Author: Foresight Editor

Space Daily's Charles Choi has an interview with chemists Hao Yan of Arizona State and Nadrian Seeman of NYU. "Imagine if you have self-assembled arrays from DNA and incorporate robots into them, you can have them all working together, for instance, in a device that could control medical reactions in the body," Yan told Nano World…"You wouldn't have these DNA robots just running around, but rather as components in nanofactories the same way that on a larger scale you (use) robots to make cars," Seeman clarified…"Of course, you still need to figure out how to incorporate these self-assembled arrays and nanorobots together," Yan added. "That's a challenging problem." Indeed.

Adam Keiper, who spoke at Foresight's fall conference, blogs on Nanobot about a press conference co-sponsored by the NanoBusiness Alliance and Congressional Nano Caucus. Worth reading despite a confused mention of Foresight, implying that we are promoting worries about gray goo, when the opposite is the case. Foresight president Scott Mize is participating in the nanopolicy tour described.

"A team of German scientists has succeeded in creating what they call DNA ëvelcroí to bind and then separate nanoparticles…This experiment could lead, one day, to ëself-constructingí materials…Nanoscience is the revolutionary new field that adopts a ëbottom-upí approach, taking atoms as the point of departure from which to ëartificiallyí create molecular nanosystems with very specific properties." It's actually better than Velcro, because it's customizable. –CP. Update: This work appears related to Nadrian Seeman's.

At the 2005 ISSCC HP and Intel are announcing the Montecito (hmmm… wonder where they got that name…) release of the Itanium microprocessor. Using a 90nm process two dual-threaded 64-bit cores and 26.5 MB of cache add up to a total of 1.72 billion transistors and operating at 2 GHz. Heat production is limited to 100W. Articles here & here. Kind of interesting considering that in 2002 they were predicting that a billion transistor multi-core procesor would require the 65nm process and wouldn't be available until 2007.

More ISSCC news…

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Wendy Emanuel writes "Northbrook, Ill. ñ February 1, 2005 ñ Nanosphere, Inc. today announced it plans to expand the application of the recently reported early detection test for Alzheimerís disease to a variety of other applications, including cancer, coronary artery disease and Mad Cow disease. More…

String theorist Michio Kaku suggests molecular nanotechnology as one way to deal with the heat death of the universe: "There is nothing in the rules of science to prevent the regeneration of an advanced civilisation from the molecular level. For a dying civilisation trapped in a freezing universe, this may be the last hope." The size of his proposed devices seems to vary, however. Read more for the full quote.

Roland Piquepaille writes "By mixing a salt compound with an hydrocarbon, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have created molecules able to sense their environment. Then they used these molecules to develop self-assembling nanotubes which look like that 'nanocarpets'. These nanostructures can change colors when their environment is modified and can be trained to kill bacteria, such as E. coli. Now, they plan to develop products that would both detect and destroy biological weapons. Read more for selected excerpts about these nanostructures acting as biosensors."

Keck writes "Foresight's logo has served us well for many years, and I'm sure many long-time members are very attached to it. But I've noticed on orkut that it's one of the duller logos around these days, entirely lacking in color and textural depth, and relatively text-heavy. Perhaps many would like to scoff at such superficial considerations, and it could even be argued that the current logo should remain defiantly retro, as it subtly testifies to Foresight's remarkable age and consistent message. But I'd like to spark a discussion about it.

Can and should the existing logo by reinvigorated by at least adding some color? Should the texty-ness also be lowered? Are there any more radical suggestions for a new logo, perhaps incorporating a bio-medical motif? Or should we just leave well enough alone? What do you think?"