A possible top-down path to atomically precise manufacturing that passes through microscale machinery might be rendered easier because of recent progress in suppressing the Casimir force, which contributes to the 'stiction' problem often encountered with microelectromechanical systems.
Here we present a special report from Dave Conz of ASU on Josh Hall’s talk and subsequent panel discussion at the SME nanotech conference. An excerpt: Technoscientific development is difficult [...]
PhysOrg.com brings news and a video of a new 3D patterning technique from IBM that reaches down to 15 nm resolution which "could go even smaller": IBM Research in Zurich [...]
Accelerating Future » RepRap “Mendel” to be Released Soon!. Nicw round-up with videos of the latest in the Rep-Rap world.
One of the major problems for micromachines, much less nanomachines, is wear. The phenomenon of stiction combines the two worst aspects of surface-to-surface interaction -- a high coefficient of friction [...]
There's a nice article over at the Singularity Hub that's a round-up of currently-available haptics devices. They seem primarily excited over the prospects of haptics in gaming, but there are [...]
Engineering and analysis in the field of SRMs is unusual in many ways. Eric Drexler has posted a paper about differences in evolutionary capacity in mechanical and biological systems that's [...]
The CCC/CRA, a consortium of academic computer science departments (essentially), has a roadmap to future robotics that has some implications for the Feynman Path. Some highlights (from the chapter on [...]
Just Do It It's the 20th anniversary of the first Foresight Conference this year. Over the intervening two decades, one of the most common questions of Foresight members and supporters [...]
Scaling KSRM Design Considerations There hasn't been a lot of work on self-replicating workcells. There's been plenty on robotic workcells that don't replicate, but almost all of this falls into [...]
