Author: Foresight Editor

from the sing-repeatedly-"It-Was-an-RNA-World-After-All" dept.
Foresight chairman EricDrexler points out this story from Chemical & Engineering News: "The best evidence yet that, before there were proteins, there was once a world in which RNA both provided genetic information and catalyzed chemical reactions comes from a trio of papers in the current issue of Science. In a tour de force of X-ray crystallography, chemists at Yale University have located most of the atoms in the gigantic apparatus that cells use to link amino acids together into proteins. The heart of the apparatus where peptide bonds form, they find, is composed entirely of RNA." See also The RNA World book.

from the bits-and-pieces dept.

According to an article in the New York Times (18 August 2000), chemists at the University of California at Los Angeles are reporting a further advance in the effort to produce electronic circuitry on a molecular scale. (Note: access to the Times site is free, but requires registration. To avoid logging in, read instead this version at the San Jose Mercury News.)

In an article published in the 18 August 2000 issue of Science, the U.C.L.A. team, led by James Heath and J.Fraser Stoddart, says it has succeeded in using a molecule to create an electronic switch that can be reconfigured — turned on and off, and on again — like a transistor.

UPDATED: UCLA has also posted a lengthy press release in which the researchers discuss their work in some detail. It's a useful overview of the work, straight from the source.

from the makes-our-heads-hurt dept.
Surely the problems that we at Foresight take on — e.g. heading off abuse of nanotechnology and machine intelligence — are some of the most complex ("wicked") around. Those of us trying to work on these problems — alone or in groups, online or in person — will benefit from this essay on wicked problems and how to come at them for best effect: To solve wicked problems, we need to confront a more complex mass of information than we are used to dealing with, while unleashing creativity and opportunity-driven thinking. It is a more complex and chaotic process…"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them."–Laurence J. Peter Thanks to Scott Johnson, editor of Future Presence email newsletter from Arlington Institute, for the pointer.

from the Nano-Blue dept.
IBM-Almaden researcher Isaac Chuang described his team's experiments that demonstrate what IBM claims is the world's most advanced quantum computer, which is based on a single, specially designed molecule containing five fluorine atoms. Chuang presented the results on 15 August 2000 at Stanford University at the Hot Chips 2000 conference, which is organized by the IEEE Computer Society. An IBM press release described the research; the web version contains a number of useful links to related items.

UPDATED: An article in the 26 August 2000 issue of Science News provides a useful overview of this research, a graphic of the molecule used, and links to references and resources.