A one-molecule robot capable of following a trail of chemical breadcrumbs will be presented at TEDxCaltech-Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years.
A list of the “Top 50 Blogs by Scientific Researchers” includes Nanodot among blogs focusing on open source and open access, academia, projects funded by organizations, and news produced by writers who research science.
Robin Hanson comments on David Brin’s response to a New Scientist editorial. As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has been that aliens are peaceful zero-population-growth no-nuke greens, since we all know that any other sort quickly destroy themselves. This seems to me an instructive… Continue reading Alien Invasion
Two nanoparticles connected by a polymer will tend to be drawn together at finite temperatures (though not at absolute zero) because as the polymer chain explores the states available to it, there are many more tangled and balled up ones than stretched-out straight ones — even though there is no overt force pulling the chain… Continue reading Is gravity an entropic spring?
There’s a really nice article at Wired about Kevin Dunbar’s research how science is really done and how often scientists get data they didn’t expect. Dunbar knew that scientists often don’t think the way the textbooks say they are supposed to. He suspected that all those philosophers of science — from Aristotle to Karl Popper… Continue reading Learning from science
From the TR Physics Arxiv blog: The quantum vacuum has fascinated physicists ever since Hendrik Casimir and Dirk Polder suggested in 1948 that it would exert a force on a pair of narrowly separated conducting plates. Their idea was eventually confirmed when the force was measured in 1997. Just how to exploit this force is… Continue reading Quantum propulsion?
H+ magazine is available online: my article, Singularity: nanotech or AI, is on page 82. enjoy!
The Royal society has a new website making freely available a selection of classic papers from the history of science. (h/t Luboš Motl’s The Reference Frame): I am just looking at an Isaac Newton’s letter about light and colors sent to the editor of Cambridge University Press 😉 in February 1671/72. It describes some Newton’s… Continue reading Royal Society classic science papers
(or a little physics about climate change. Or at least a few clarifications about some of the points being raised.) In the wake of Climategate, a wide variety of mistakes and misapprehensions are being circulated on the Internet (as if that weren’t happening before). For example, in this article from the Telegraph: Phil Jones, the… Continue reading Eine Kleine Nachtphysik
Just for fun: (h/t Roger Pielke, Jr.) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VRBWLpYCPY) (h/t Megan McArdle)
