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Josh Hall, on his way to catch a plane, sends us this news from Technology Review’s Katherine Bourzac: The word “planet” means wanderer. The ancients, with their lives lived largely outdoors and without artificial lighting, were much more intimately acquainted with the heavens than are we moderns, unless we specialize in astronomy. They noticed that although there was a fixed pattern of stars for the most part, some of them wandered [...] MIT scientists have demonstrated the usefulness of biological frameworks for combining distinct functional elements to make a device. The application is hydrophobic sand, which retains moisture near the roots of desert plants by virtue of a proprietary nanostructured coating on the grains of sand. From the February 2009 issue of the “science is culture” publication Seed magazine, not yet online: The following is an edited and revised version of the talk I gave at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference that was held in conjunction with Convergence 08 (and which I reprised for Convergence). I’m posting it here because it seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thing Foresight was founded for: to [...] Chinese scientists have developed a nanotech solution to harvest energy from multiple electrons—something alternative approaches to artificial photosynthesis have not yet managed to do. Foresight advisor Glenn Reynolds opines about nanotech in the NY Post for Earth Day: Phil McKenna at NewScientist.com news service describes a nanotechnology advance that turns radiation directly into electricity, leading us to wonder if it thus simultaneously provides a use for nuclear waste. This nanotech application appears to be in the early stages of development, so aside from questions of just how efficient and how expensive it [...] We’ve written here before about the plan to put iron nanoparticles in the ocean as a way to increase growth of plankton, thereby absorbing carbon dioxide. Previously this was to be done by a company called Planktos; now a new company called Climos is making similar plans. There was controversy about Planktos, and [...] |
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