Foresight Institute Feynman Prize winner Dr. Ralph Merkle, perhaps better known to Nanodot readers for his nanotech work, has just won the IEEE’s Hamming Medal along with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie: Thirty-five years ago, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle developed an easy method for sending secure messages over insecure channels. With the… Continue reading Merkle wins Hamming Medal with Diffie, Hellman
“Science advances, funeral by funeral.” (often attributed to Timothy Ferris) The blogosphere has been abuzz over the past week or so with the release of data — emails and program source and documentation — from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the premier climatology research institutions in the world.… Continue reading Climategate, or, how science works
Nanotechnology Enables Real Atomic Precision is the title of a piece by Susan Smith in Desktop Engineering, which includes comments by longtime Foresight Senior Associates Steve Vetter and Tihamer Toth-Fejel: While nanotechology might mean different things to different people, the term was originally coined to describe the building of things from the bottom up with… Continue reading Atomic precision as the goal of nanotechnology
Here’s a talk happening next Tuesday at UCLA: NanoSystems Seminar Series Title: High-speed AFM meets the Holographic Assembler Mervyn Miles Physics Bristol University Abstract: High-speed AFM is important for following processes occurring on short time scales inaccessible to conventional AFM. We are working on two versions: one is capable of extremely high imaging rates and… Continue reading High-speed AFM meets the Holographic Assembler
Josh Hall, on his way to catch a plane, sends us this news from Technology Review’s Katherine Bourzac: A California company is using silicon ink patterned on top of silicon wafers to boost the efficiency of solar cells. The Sunnyvale, CA, firm Innovalight says that the inkjet process is a cheaper route to more-efficient solar power.… Continue reading Solar cells with nanocrystal ink reach 18 percent efficiency
One of the constraints laid down by DARPA at the recent Physical Intelligence proposers workshop was that the model of intelligence that was to be proposed had to have a physical implementation. It seemed odd to some of the attendees that this should be a hard constraint, since many models of intelligence have a perfectly… Continue reading A cautionary note
About a month ago, the web was all agog over the announcement of DARPA’s Physical Intelligence program — Wired wrote: The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing… Continue reading Physical Intelligence
EurekAlert reports work by the University of Liverpool and Chinese Academy of Sciences: New rotors could help develop nanoscale generators In collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, scientists have investigated the rotation of molecules on a fixed surface to understand how they may help in the development of future rotor-based machinery at… Continue reading UK/China team aim at molecular rotors to generate current
Nominations are now open for the Foresight Institute Prizes for 2009, due June 30. Our best-known prizes of course are the two annual Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology, one for Experiment and one for Theory: Description Instructions Also open are nominations for the Foresight Prize in Communications: Description Instructions And the Student Prize: Description… Continue reading Feynman Prize nominations now open, also Communications, Student Prizes
Two papers in a recent issue of Science suggest that graphene is rapidly moving from being “just” a nanotech wonder material to becoming relevant to atomically precise nanotechnologies.
