The Foresight Institute has appointed Dr. J. Storrs Hall to the position of President.
Once upon a time, or so the story goes, there was a young man who was hauled up before the court on charges that he had killed his father and mother. He readily confessed to the crime, but nevertheless pled for clemency: after all, he pointed out, he was an orphan. Recently on his blog… Continue reading Parricide
The answers of 151 thinkers and visionaries to the Edge Annual question for 2009 have been posted. The question: “WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?” As phrased by John Brockman, Editor and Publisher, “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” In his answer, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler points to a role… Continue reading Will realization of the seriousness of climate change push the development of molecular nanotechnology?
One of the main reasons that we are confident in the overall predictions of molecular manufacturing is that there are many pathways to it from current technology and using currently understood science. It is thus something of a milestone that we have arrived at a fork in the road about which there is room for… Continue reading Why the DMS debate is a good thing for nanotech
The following is an edited and revised version of the talk I gave at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference that was held in conjunction with Convergence 08 (and which I reprised for Convergence). I’m posting it here because it seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thing Foresight was founded for: to… Continue reading The weather machine
You might think that by now the definitions of terms like “nanotechnology” and “nanosystems” would be firmly established. In fact the process of arriving at an international consensus is more difficult than you might expect. Representing Foresight in the effort to define these and other terms is David R. Forrest, Ph.D., President of the Institute… Continue reading Defining international standards for nanotechnology
On 5 June 2008, Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (IMM) submitted to IEEE Spectrum the following response to the article “Rupturing the Nanotech Rapture” by Richard A.L. Jones (IEEE Spectrum, June 2008 issue). Their brief letter is reproduced below because Spectrum has chosen to publish only one of the… Continue reading Research challenges for the diamondoid mechanosynthesis path to advanced nanotechnology
DARPA and a Texas fund have awarded $9.7M to investigate one nanotech path toward atomically precise manufacturing.
A pioneering UK program aimed at developing a nanofactory has made a £1.53M ($3M) award to Professor Philip Moriarty of the University of Nottingham to support a five-year series of experiments to investigate the possibility of diamond mechanosynthesis, testing the theoretical proposals recently made by Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle. Details are contained in the… Continue reading Diamond mechanosynthesis for atomically precise nanotechnology to be explored experimentally
Sunday, May 18th at 7:00 PM Pacific / 10:00 PM Eastern, FastForward Radio will feature a distinguished panel discussing the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. The panel will discuss the background and history of the roadmap, and explore how it will serve to help realize these horizons. The panelists are: Christine Peterson, Acting President of… Continue reading Panel to discuss productive nanosystems Sunday night
