In a 47-minute interview Christine Peterson discusses the future that science and technology is bringing over the next few decades, and how to get involved to push the future in a positive direction.

A set of rationally engineered transcriptional regulators for yeast will make it easier to build complex molecular machine systems in yeast, some of which may become useful additions to pathway technologies for atomically precise manufacturing and productive nanosystems.

Foldit game players have again out-performed scientists in protein design, this time improving the design of a protein designed from scratch to catalyze Diels-Alder cycloadditions.

Excellent lineup of speakers again this year for the Open Science Summit, Oct. 22-23, and you can get in for only $100 if you register by this Friday:  http://opensciencesummit.com Hope to see you there!  —Christine Peterson, President, Foresight Institute

Proposed projects to use smartphone networks to gather data and inform authorities are opening discussion of how such data should be used.

A biochemical circuit built from 74 small DNA molecules demonstrates an approach that may enable embedded control of molecular devices.

Willow Garage TurtleBot, an open source programmable robot with a 3D vision system, is available to preorder, starting at $500.

MIT scientists have devised much more efficient procedures for modeling protein folding in order to be able to model the folding of the flood of proteins sequences made available by modern genome sequencing methods.

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.

Video footage of conference focused on “Updating the social contract for Science”

An IEEE Spectrum podcast asks the question, Why Are Terrorists Often Engineers? The blurb: With terrorism back in the news, so, too, is a curious footnote: Of the hundreds of individuals involved in political violence, nearly half of those with degrees have been engineers. This finding, first published in 2008, has been substantiated by two [...]

Longtime Foresight supporter John Gilmore writes: “I noticed a story that reminded me of something Foresight wanted to encourage in society.  Wired reports that the CIA uses decision analysis software ‘Analysis of Competing Hypotheses’, and has funded a rewritten version for shared networked analysis by many people.  But the gov’t contractors got into a hassle [...]

The Open Science Summit on July 29-31 in Berkeley is looking better and better. Topics include OpenPCR, DIY biology, open source hardware, brain preservation, synthetic biology, gene patents, open data, open access journals, reputation engines, crowd-funding and microfinance for science, citizen science, biohacking, open source biodefense, cure entrepreneurs, open source drug discovery, patent pools, tech transfer, and [...]

Finishing off the week on a fun note, we see that robotic firm Willow Garage — of special interest to Foresight due to their emphasis on open source — has achieved an important milestone in robotics: namely, the ability for a robot to fetch a beer from the fridge and deliver it. It’s worth seeing [...]

Not able to attend the Open Science Summit on July 29-31 in Berkeley, California? We’ll miss you, but you can watch the conference live at: http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010 Put it on your calendar now!  Or we’ll hope to see you in person, especially for the session where I’m speaking: “Safety and Security Concerns, Open Source Biodefense” at [...]

Those of you with a background in organic chemistry will recognize the venerable name of Beilstein, originally a handbook of organic chemistry which evolved into a database, later combined with Gmelin inorganic data to form the Crossfire database. So the Beilstein brand is a powerful one in chemistry.  Nanowerk brings to our attention that Beilstein [...]

I’ll be speaking at the following event. If you miss the early registration rate, you can get 20% off regular registration with the discount code ‘Foresight’: Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0 July 29-31 International House Berkeley http://opensciencesummit.com Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for [...]

From Ars Technica: Nobel Intent, a thought-provoking article on what the prevalence of computational science portends for reproducibility in science: Victoria Stodden is currently at Yale Law School, and she gave a short talk at the recent Science Online meeting in which she discussed the legal aspects of ensuring that the code behind computational tools [...]

The other day I got a worried call from my mother-in-law.  My wife usually calls her during her commute but that day she neither called or answered her phone. Turns out my wife’s iPhone had crashed — the software had wedged and there was no way to reboot.  The amusing, if you can call it [...]

As I pointed out in Nanotechnology Without Engines, nanotechnology’s promise of being a revolutionary rather than evolutionary technology was based on two key ideas: Nanotechnology, the revolutionary technology, was always about the power of self-replication and never only about the very small. This was clearly the case both in Drexler’s conception and in Feynman’s: … [...]