In anticipation of Eric Drexler’s new book, Forbes contributor Bruce Dorminey interviews him about the meaning of nanotechnology and its revolutionary prospects. Selected excerpt: … In what fields would APM cause the most pronounced economic disruption and the collapse of global supply chains to more local chains? The digital revolution had far-reaching effects on information [...]

New protein repellent coating enhances the speed of carbon nanotube-based biosensors, pointing the way to faster, cheaper medical diagnostics.

When can we expect advanced nanomachinery to be commercialized? Will any technologies not be affected in some way by advanced nanotechnology?

In a lecture at Oxford Eric Drexler argued that atomically precise manufacturing will be the next great revolution in the material basis of civilization, and discussed how we can establish reliable knowledge about key aspects of such technologies.

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

H+ Magazine has a report by Ben Goertzel on the Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. … This was the largest AGI conference yet, with more than 200 people attending, and it had a markedly different tone from the prior conferences in the series. A number of participants noted that there was less of an [...]

Will proposals to establish criteria for green nanotechnology foster growth of nanotechnology innovation?

Research and Science Education Subcommittee Chairman Dan Lipinski (IL-03) expressed his strong support for the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s draft Strategic Plan, in particular its focus on ensuring that America’s substantial investment in nanotech research and development is turned into new companies, products, and jobs.

Humanity+ @ Caltech: Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change is being streamed live.

US National Nanotechnology Initiative wants your comments on its strategic plan.

This humorous essay at Cracked.com by David Wong has a lot of truth in it about the change we are now seeing in how the economy functions, as so many goods and services are produced using automation: And if someday we do perfect cold-fusion reactors or nanotech manufacturing and everyone has 100 GB/second Wi-Fi connections downloading [...]

Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change, December 4-5, 2010, Pasadena, CA

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 [...]

It’s a good thing we got Nanodot moved onto a new server recently — we just had a huge spike in readers.  This is due to one recent post, Some Historical Perspective, being picked up and spread around the climate-change blogosphere.  Of the pageviews we have had over the past three months, 10% of them [...]

From The Atlantic: Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who accurately forecast the bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting economic contraction, has become famous for his pessimism—he has been the gloomiest of the doomsayers… “The question is, can the U.S. grow in a non-bubble way?” [Roubini] asked the question rhetorically, so I [...]

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. [...]

Previous: What Singularity? Yesterday I took issue with Alfred Nordmann’s IEEE post in which he claimed that technological progress was slowing down instead of accelerating. I claimed instead that it was being distorted by the needs of the next rungs of the Maslow hierarchy, and that a huge portion of society’s energy was going into [...]

It’s a question of some interest whether the Singularity will consist of just more exponential growth, or whether some superexponential growth mode is likely to happen (or is even possible), such as would be required for a real mathematical singularity. On the side of exponential growth, as I pointed out here, is the fact that [...]

Previous in series: VTOL So, how close are we to flying cars? For specificity, let’s pick a technological bar to hurdle that answers most of the objections to the concept we’ve seen as comments on the previous posts: It should be relatively high-powered compared to current light craft. It should be STOVL for safety and [...]

It is, today, just 40 years since I sat glued to a grainy black-and-white TV set and watched the Apollo astronauts land on, and then step out on, the moon. If you had asked me then, I would have assured you that by the year 2000, much less 2009, I’d have my own spaceship, or [...]