Eric Drexler has posted the slides from his keynote talk at the Berkeley Nanotech Forum. These are a fairly painless way to get an overview of the Productive Nanosystems Roadmap.
Just a week ago I was at NIST to hear a talk by Paul Rothemund, winner of the 2006 Feynman Prize with Erik Winfree for the invention of DNA Origami. In just 3 years this has taken off in a big way. This story at Nanowerk News reports the latest: Danish researchers have made a… Continue reading Nano-boxes from DNA origami
In Arthur C. Clarke’s classic SF novel Against the Fall of Night, there is a description of the “moving ways”, the powered sidewalks on which people rode around the city, as being made of a material that would have baffled an engineer of our own times because it was solid in one direction and liquid… Continue reading Anisotropic semi-Dirac electrons in atomically-precise trilayers
This article over at Ars Technica has a nice overview of some recent work showing that when water is forced through a nanotube of appropriate size, the polar nature of the water molecule lines them up so as to create a voltage along the tube. They show that such a tube can be used as… Continue reading Nanopumps
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov continues the discussion about nanofactories. He says a number of reasonable things, but then mischaracterizes, or at least greatly oversimplifies, Foresight’s position on nanofactories and self-replicating machines in general: The general implied position of the Foresight Institute appears to be, “we’ll figure these things out as we go, MNT… Continue reading Replicating nanofactories redux
Earlier this week I was at the premiere of Transcendent Man, a biographical overview of Ray Kurzweil’s views on the coming Singularity. Kurzweil’s main argument is that the power of the exponential in technology is major, systemic, and underappreciated. The specific item of interest in this post is Kurzweil’s claim, repeated in the movie, that… Continue reading A Moore's Law for energy?
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov has a post about self-replication in which he seems to find it remarkable that Foresight, among others, can view a world containing mechanical replicators with aplomb: What is remarkable are those that seem to argue, like Ray Kurzweil, the Foresight Institute, and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, that humanity… Continue reading Self-replicating nanofactories?
Two recent publications provide more evidence of the growing capability of DNA scaffolds to support complex and interactive functions.
As I pointed out in Nanotechnology Without Engines, nanotechnology’s promise of being a revolutionary rather than evolutionary technology was based on two key ideas: Nanotechnology, the revolutionary technology, was always about the power of self-replication and never only about the very small. This was clearly the case both in Drexler’s conception and in Feynman’s: …… Continue reading The other half of nanotech
A new modular method of constructing DNA nanotubes provides control of the geometry of the nanotube cross-section and may enable real-time modulation of the stiffness and porosity of the nanotube.
