From Nanowerk News: Rowland fellow Fischer devises spiral swimmer nanomachine Harvard researchers have created a new type of microscopic swimmer: a magnetized spiral that corkscrews through liquids and is able to deliver chemicals and push loads larger than itself. Though other researchers have created similar devices in the past, Peer Fischer, a junior fellow at… Continue reading Swimming nanomachines
There was a gratifyingly large response to last Friday’s post Acolytes of neo-Malthusian Apocalypticism. Several of the commenters seemed to think I was trying to refute the LtG model, but that would require a whole book instead of one blog post. I consider LtG to have been demolished in detail by people with a lot… Continue reading More on Limits to Growth
When I was in college 35 years ago, there was a major fad of neo-Malthusian doom-mongering, led by the “Limits to Growth” book and movement. A retreat was organized from the college, and some concerned, environmentally conscious professors and students, myself included, went off for a concentrated seminar in which we educated each other about… Continue reading Acolytes of neo-Malthusian Apocalypticism
Foresight President Josh Hall will be the guest of Phil Bowermaster of the Speculist on FastFowardRadio Sunday 5/10/09 at 10PM Eastern (7 Pacific). Here is the announcement: Accelerating technological development promises to impact every aspect of our lives — how we work, how we play, how we interact with each other, how we view our… Continue reading Foresight on Fastfowardradio
Another step along the Moore’s Law-like trend line for solar power: Ink-Jet Printing for Cheaper Solar Cells at Technology Review. (see also Nanoscale Inkjet Printing)
In this post I pointed out that in the foreseeable future, nanotech devices are likely to be energy-starved. Chris Peterson asks in a comment whether there would be a problem from the heat dissipation from this energy use. The analysis is worth a post of its own, so here goes: About 100 thousand terawatts of… Continue reading Cool energy
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
