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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 continues his Singularity University executive program coverage over at Wired: 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: Nanotechnology devices: Molecular machines shift into gear. 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: Last week I posted a story of strange behavior in the simulation of molecular machines. EurekAlert reports work by the University of Liverpool and Chinese Academy of Sciences: An interesting question was posed to my “Do the math” post of last week: What does this have to do with nanotechnology? A little history helps, as usual. Eniac plugboard: Hardware or software? Nominations are now open for the Foresight Institute Prizes for 2009, due June 30. If you connect a 12-volt battery to a 4-ohm lamp, 3 amps of current will flow through the circuit by Ohm’s Law, V=IR. Power = VI = 36 watts will be dissipated by the lamp. If you add a 2-ohm resistor in series with the lamp, the resistances add to 6 ohms, the current [...] Scientists have succeeded in coordinating the movements of the biped’s legs so that it can walk in one direction along a DNA track without the need of intervention at each step. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania used basic engineering principles derived from studying natural proteins to design from scratch a simple and small protein that performed the function of carrying oxygen that is performed by natural globin proteins. A piece in The Christian Science Monitor compares Nadrian Seeman, founder of the field of structural DNA nanotechnology and winner of the 1995 Foresight Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, with Henry Ford—implying that his recent accomplishment with his collaborators in creating a two-armed DNA nanorobot could point to a role for DNA nanorobots in future nanotech [...] A major advance in molecular machine fabrication allows the construction of rotaxane molecular shuttles in which organic and inorganic components are mechanically linked in the same molecular structure. The relevance of the ribosome to nanotech may be greatly increased by the announcement that synthetic ribosomes have been created and used to synthesize a complex protein named firefly luciferase. Two independently controlled nanomechanical devices can be positioned on a two-dimensional DNA grid so that they can cooperate to capture between them one of four DNA building blocks, determined by which of two possible states each device is set to. A response to my “Parricide” essay has been seen on IEEE’s Tech Talk blog. Dexter Johnson gives a fair summary of the positions taken to date, and says As the argument seems to go, Drexler popularized the term nanotechnology in his book Engines of Creation, and so when the general public heard that thousands of scientists [...] Plasmonic nanoswitches based upon molecular machines may eventually lead to nanotech plasmonic circuits. A new nanocar that runs cool — at room temperature — has been demonstrated by the research group of Stephan Link, colleague of James Tour at Rice. Tour won Foresight’s Feynman Prize last year for his earlier nanocar work. Christian Joachim (who shared the Foresight Nanotech Institute Feynman Prize in the Experimental category in 1997 and won in the Theoretical category in 2005) is heading a group of researchers working to bring about atomic-scale computing. ScienceDaily led us to this European Commission ICT Results feature “Computing in a molecule“, which describes their on-going efforts: Over [...] |
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