http://www.foresight.org/nanodot examining transformative technology Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:13:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Eric Drexler is apparently at the Renaissance Weekend with the intent to speak to the assembled interesting people about how "advanced nanotechnology can address the climate change problem providing low-cost solar energy and by removing accumluated CO2 from the atmosphere."  In the same spirit, for the rest of us, here's ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3140 Robert A. Freitas Jr., author of the Nanomedicine series of books, has just published a major new theory paper on aspects of medical nanorobot control, providing an early glimpse of future discussions of this topic that are planned to appear in Chapter 12 (Nanorobot Control) of Nanomedicine, Vol. IIB: Systems ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3138 There's a paper on roboethics by Yueh-Hsuan Weng of Taiwan's Conscription Agency in the International Journal of Social Robotics that has gotten a write-up on Physorg (h/t to Accelerating Future). Here's the abstract: Technocrats from many developed countries, especially Japan and South Korea, are preparing for the human-robot co-existence society that they ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3136 There's a post on Technology Review's blog about a paper on arXiv about a theoretical result in magnetic memories. Current-day magnetic memory is already "nanotechnology" under the loose definition, involving 5-nanometer particles of cobalt (having about 50,000 atoms). The authors have shown that a single molecule consisting of a cobalt ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3133 The nominations for Foresight's 2009 Feynman Prize will be closing soon, so if you know someone who has done outstanding work to advance the goal of molecular nanotechnology, please visit the Instructions Page to nominate them. Research areas considered relevant to MNT (e.g., productive nanosystems and molecular machine systems) include but ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3129 One thing I was at some pains during my recent visit to Willow Garage was the likely impact of Moore's Law on the course of robotics development in the next few years. This is of great interest to a futurist because if computation is a bottleneck, it will be ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3127 Over at the Moral Machines blog, there's a pointer to an AP story about the recent DC train crash: Investigators looking into the deadly crash of two Metro transit trains focused Tuesday on why a computerized system failed to halt an oncoming train, and why the train failed to stop even ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3123 After hearing an excellent talk by Willow Garage president Steven Cousins at PARC last Thursday, I wangled a visit to the company Monday and talked to a few more people. Willow Garage is a research robotics company in Silicon Valley which has a unique mission for a start-up. ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3121 Suppose there were a class of technologies called millitech: science and engineering that could be measured in millimeters, from say about a tenth of a millimeter to 100 millimeters -- in any dimension. That includes hairs, paper, pebbles, marbles, anything you can hold in the palm of your hand, ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3096 An article this past weekend on Nanowerk reports on a study about attitudes toward regulation of nanotechnology among nanoscientists and the general public: As reported in the online version of the Journal of Nanoparticle Research today (June 19), Scheufele and Corley found that the public tends to focus on the benefits ... http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3093