A nice article in New Scientist about the search for substances harder than diamond. This is important for nanomechanical engineering because hardness translates into properties useful in machine parts at the nanoscale. A nanocrystalline form of diamond, sometimes called aggregated diamond nanorods, was described in 2003 by Tetsuo Irifune and his colleagues at Ehime University… Continue reading Harder than diamond?
Last week I posted an essay in which I claimed that the Singularity could be said to be halfway here already because we had already set up a huge program that was more or less running the world (and that it was fast becoming a computer program). What are the great concerns of the Singularitarians?… Continue reading ESP redux
Recent advances in nanoplasmonics, h/t arXiv blog: Plasmonic Laser Heralds New Generation of Computing If you’re into buzzwords, nanoplasmonics is one you ought to know about. Nanoplasmonics, we’re told, is the next big thing–the field that will allow us to sense and manipulate the world on the smallest of scales. Plasmons, of course, are waves… Continue reading Nanoplasmonics
SENS4 is going on in Cambridge, England. The purpose of the SENS conference series, like all the SENS initiatives (such as the journal Rejuvenation Research), is to expedite the development of truly effective therapies to postpone and treat human aging by tackling it as an engineering problem: not seeking elusive and probably illusory magic bullets,… Continue reading SENS4
The blogosphere (and science news-cliposphere) is all agog aver the discovery of magnetic monopoles, from Nature to Slashdot. Nanowerk Physicsworld What’s happened is the publication of some papers and preprints about observation and measurement of monopoles in spin ices, particularly in the complex crystal structures of compounds such as Ho2Ti2O7 and Dy2Ti2O7 at cryogenic temperatures.… Continue reading Monopoles
Previous: What Singularity? Yesterday I took issue with Alfred Nordmann’s IEEE post in which he claimed that technological progress was slowing down instead of accelerating. I claimed instead that it was being distorted by the needs of the next rungs of the Maslow hierarchy, and that a huge portion of society’s energy was going into… Continue reading ESP
There’s an interesting piece up at the IEEE robotics blog, by Alfred Nordmann, with the subtitle “The story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple–and wrong.” He argues that far from accelerating, technological progress is slowing down: The trouble begins with the singularitarians’ assumption that technological advances have accelerated. I’d argue that I have seen… Continue reading What Singularity?
Here at Foresight our main focus is on longer-term technologies such as molecular manufacturing, but we keep an eye on what’s arriving along the nearer-term pathways as well. In 2007 I attended a workshop on “Nanotechnology for Chemical and Biological Defense” and the proceedings volume of that meeting, with the same name, is now available.… Continue reading Nanotechnology for chemical and biological defense: the book
IEEE Spectrum: Boston Startup iWalk Lands Funding for Robotic Prosthetics. If you wonder how soon we will have walking robots, remember that the technology underlying the Segway was developed for a stair-climbing wheelchair. From the article: I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Herr speak at an MIT robotics conference last November. At the time,… Continue reading IEEE Spectrum: Boston Startup iWalk Lands Funding for Robotic Prosthetics
If you were an alien from an advanced civilization who had been stranded on Earth, but had all your people’s knowledge on a thumb drive, how would you go about creating nanotech and building up Earth’s technology to the level you could rejoin your galactic civilization? If you actually knew the details, probably one of… Continue reading Proteins
