Reynolds advocates faster nano/AI R&D for safety reasons

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:
But I wonder if that’s such a good [...]

More Merkle at Singularity University

Ted Greenwald continues his Singularity University executive program coverage over at Wired:
These days, though, Merkle is setting his sights much higher. Over the past few years he has put together a theoretical system for building diamond, atom by atom. It involves nine molecular tools and methane/hydrogen feedstock on a diamond substrate. He has analyzed all [...]

Merkle on nanotech at Singularity University

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:
From there he skims through a catalog of progress — familiar example of pushing atoms into IBM logos and such on a 2D [...]

Atomic precision as the goal of nanotechnology

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:
While nanotechology might mean different things to different people, the term was originally coined to describe the building of things from the bottom up with atomic [...]

High-speed AFM meets the Holographic Assembler

Here’s a talk happening next Tuesday at UCLA:
NanoSystems Seminar Series
Title: High-speed AFM meets the Holographic Assembler
Mervyn Miles
Physics
Bristol University
Abstract: High-speed AFM is important for following processes occurring on short time scales inaccessible to conventional AFM. We are working on two versions: one is capable of extremely high imaging rates and can image over relatively large [...]

Dr. Doom has some good news: nanotechnology

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 turned it [...]

Potential leap forward in electron microscopy

Potential leap forward in electron microscopy. from Eurekalert.
Why it matters: A non-invasive electron microscope could shed light on fundamental questions about life and matter, allowing researchers to observe molecules inside a living cell without disturbing them. If successful, such microscopes would surmount what Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor concluded in 1956 was the fundamental limitation of [...]

20 Years of Moving Atoms, One by One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

20 Years of Moving Atoms, One by One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.
It’s the 20th anniversary of the famous Eigler “IBM”.

Solar cells with nanocrystal ink reach 18 percent efficiency

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. Using [...]

Koreans Show Feasibility of Room Temperature Version of IBM Millipede Super High Density Memory

Koreans Show Feasibility of Room Temperature Version of IBM Millipede Super High Density Memory.

Nanoscale Wear

One of the major problems for micromachines, much less nanomachines, is wear. The phenomenon of stiction combines the two worst aspects of surface-to-surface interaction — a high coefficient of friction and a locally-generated high applied force — to cause enormous problems. At the very smallest scale, once we gain complete control over atomic configuration, superlubricity [...]

Nanotechnology for chemical and biological defense: the book

Here at Foresight our main focus is on longer-term technologies such as molecular manufacturing, but we keep an eye on what’s arriving along the nearer-term pathways as well.  In 2007 I attended a workshop on “Nanotechnology for Chemical and Biological Defense” and the proceedings volume of that meeting, with the same name, is now available. [...]

nanophones

cute video from nokia about what a nanotech phone might be like…

Super-dense magnetic memory

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 dimer sitting on top of [...]

Feynman Prize nominations: last chance

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 are not limited to:

artificial molecular [...]

Regulation of millitechnology

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, anything less than 4 inches [...]

Attitudes to nanotech regulation

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 — rather than potential environmental [...]

Smart Cascio article in Atlantic

Jamais Cascio has an article in the current Atlantic about how humans are getting smarter. This is the best article on the subject I’ve seen in the mainstream press, and better than most in the transhumanist corner of the web.
Cascio’s main point is that, as we’ve always done, we build our technology to [...]

A cautionary note

One of the constraints laid down by DARPA at the recent Physical
Intelligence proposers workshop was that the model of intelligence
that was to be proposed had to have a physical implementation. It
seemed odd to some of the attendees that this should be a hard
constraint, since many models of intelligence have a perfectly
reasonable implementation as software.
I [...]

Buckytube-filled aluminum

Brian Wang over at Next Big Future has an article about improving the properties of aluminum as a structural material by filling with buckytubes, the way plastics are made stronger by filling by fiberglass. This isn’t particularly new: what’s new is that Bayer appears to be able to make nanotubes in enough quantity to [...]