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In Popular Mechanics, longtime Foresight friend Prof. Glenn Reynolds looks at the future of nanotech and artificial intelligence, among other things looking at safety issues, including one call that potentially dangerous technologies be relinquished. He takes a counterintuitive stance, which we’ve discussed here at Foresight over the years: Ted Greenwald posted yesterday at Wired about Foresight member Ralph Merkle’s presentation on nanotechnology at the Singularity University’s first Executive Program, which has just convened over at NASA Ames here in Silicon Valley: I’m at the AAAI Fall Symposium session on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, and there was a really interesting talk by Walter Schneider of Pitt about progress in mapping the nerve bundles that are the “information superhighways” between the various parts of the brain. You’ll find his slides from last year’s talk on his home page, and [...] 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: SENS4 is going on in Cambridge, England. 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 and Operations, the third volume [...] A nanotech-based gene-therapy method that dramatically improved the efficiency of conventional cancer therapy in animal models is now undergoing clinical trials. Using a magnetic bead to slowly pull a DNA molecule through a solid-sate nanopore looks promising as the basis for a very fast and efficient nanotech DNA sequencing method. A Newsdesk feature by Kelly Morris titled “Nanotechnology crucial in fighting infectious disease” in the April 2009 issue of Lancet Infectious Diseases surveys some highlights in developing nanotech efforts to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases. Examples include detecting disease through lab-on-a-chip technology featuring cantilevers that move upon binding antigens and nanowires that detect current [...] Conference to tackle what they claim is “the single most important issue in science & society in this century.” By joining an iron oxide nanoparticle bearing a tumor-specific antibody with a gold nanoparticle bearing an anti-cancer drug, scientists created a dumbbell-like nanotech vehicle that delivered the drug into breast cancer cells. Jeriaska has made available videos of presentations from Convergence08, held on November 15-16, 2008 in Mountain View, California, to examine the convergence of NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) technologies. Among those of special interest to Nanodot readers: Mapping a Cone of Uncertainty, Paul Saffo What forces are going to shape the world throughout the 21st century? A recent NYT bestseller, The Next 100 Years, by George Friedman, proposes a number of very interesting theories. Friedman is considered to be something of an intellectual maverick, contradicting the conventional wisdom at many points, and very insightful, since in many cases [...] Nanotech advances are leading toward bone implants that are are smart, multifunctional devices that will be capable of improved integration with surrounding bone tissue, and that will resist inflammation, bacterial growth, and the recurrence of bone cancer. Another promising nanotech approach to harnessing the potential of siRNA molecules is to pack them on the surface of gold nanoparticles. Plant viruses are a new addition to the long list of types of nanoparticles being investigated as next generation nanotech cancer therapies. Nanotech may soon provide a solution for one of the more vexing problems in tissue engineering—how to control the differentiation of pluripotent or multipotent precursor cells into the specific cells needed to fix a specific problem. In new variation of ways to use nanotech to treat cancer, scientists have shown that using a scorpion toxin to target nanoparticles to brain cancer cells depletes the amount on the cancer cell surface of a protein required to make the cells invasive. From the National Cancer Institute’s Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer “Toxin-nanoparticle combo [...] An international team of investigators has demonstrated in mice a nanotech method of orally delivering an anticancer therapy that would normally have to be delivered by injection. Having demonstrated a year ago an effective nanotech method for shutting down specific gene expression in a mouse model of colitis, a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University is preparing to test this method in clinical trials for blood, pancreatic, breast and brain cancers. |
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