A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) partners 10 EU research organisations to work on the groundbreaking €10 million ATMOL project that lays the foundation for creating and testing a molecular-sized processor chip.

A*STAR’s IMRE and 10 EU research organisations are working together to build what is essentially a single molecule processor chip. As a comparison, a thousand of such molecular chips could fit into one of today’s microchips, the core device that determines computational speed. The ambitious project, termed Atomic Scale and Single Molecule Logic Gate Technologies (ATMOL), will establish a new process for making a complete molecular chip. This means that computing power can be increased significantly but take up only a small fraction of the space that is required by today’s standards.

The fabrication process involves the use of three unique ultra high vacuum (UHV) atomic scale interconnection machines which build the chip atom-by-atom. These machines physically move atoms into place one at a time at cryogenic temperatures. One of these machines is located in A*STAR’s IMRE.

“IMRE holds the only patent in the world for making solid interconnections and packaging of a molecular chip”, says Prof Christian Joachim, who is leading the entire project, explaining the reason A*STAR’s IMRE was chosen as a partner in this groundbreaking project.

“The UHV interconnection machine at IMRE is the only one in the entire project that can study the performance of a single molecule logic gate and surface atom circuit logic gate at the moment”, added Prof Joachim, who is the Head of Molecular Nanoscience and Picotechnology at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and a Visiting Investigator at IMRE. Prof Joachim’s team in IMRE is one of the pioneers in atom technology, having built the world’s first controllable molecular gear.

“The work in this project is extremely important in setting the stage for how computer chips and electronics may be made in the future”, said Prof Andy Hor, Executive Director of IMRE. “The fact that we are the only non-EU research organisation in this project speaks volumes about the level of Singapore’s research and how far we have come in building our R&D capabilities”.

According to Dr. David Guedj, the European Officer following ATMOL for The European Commission, “ATMOL is the flagship project coming out of the recent Call for Proposals on Molecular Scale Devices and Systems”. It was launched by the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET-Proactive) part of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) programme of the European Commission. FET-Proactive supports transformational, long-term collaborative frontier research in Europe, with a view to develop scientific excellence and technological innovation.

As part of the project, annual ATMOL conferences will be held to bring together all project partners for progress updates. The inaugural conference will be hosted by Singapore next year. The project will officially commence on 1 January 2011.

Credit to Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence News.

Those attracted to the idea of Open Science may also want to check out the web site for Open Access Week, just ending. From the web site:

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fourth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.

On a purely personal note, French statesman Georges Clemenceau is reputed to have said something like “War is too important to be left to the generals.” Having watched progress in nanotechnology and artificial general intelligence since 1986, I am inclined to agree with the open science movement that progress in science in general, and nanotechnology and AGI in particular, is too important to be left solely to the professionals and the governments and large corporations that fund them.

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on Monday dedicated the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the world’s first and most powerful X-ray laser, at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. …

The Linac Coherent Light Source is a new type of scientific facility that promises to revolutionize our view of the atomic world as it performs basic scientific research and drives applications in energy and environmental sciences, drug development and materials engineering. It is able to view matter on a scale of individual atoms, and on time scales fast enough to see atomic motion and changes in the chemical bonds between them, effectively making stop-motion movies of the basic processes of matter and life for the first time.

We are told the facility is free to use and people can propose their projects. Could movies of bonds between individual atoms breaking and forming improve our ability to design and implement molecular manufacturing systems?

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

Several times a year, Humanity+, the world’s leading nonprofit for the ethical use of technology, holds conferences about the sciences, technologies and social issues concerning the future. Past Humanity+ conferences have taken place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard University and Irvine, California. Our next conference, Humanity+ @ Caltech, will take place on December 4-5th (Saturday-Sunday) at Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Speakers will include many of the top visionaries and leaders of the transhumanist community, as well as new voices from the worlds of science, art, media and business.

The Humanity+ @ Caltech program will be divided into four main sessions, each one of which will cover a key area of transhumanist thought:

• Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media and Methods (Saturday morning)
• Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan (Saturday afternoon)
• Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement and Substrate-Independent Minds (Sunday morning)
• Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis (Sunday afternoon)

For information about registration: http://humanityplus10.eventbrite.com/

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 much more.

Here’s some advance media coverage:

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/07/07/the-open-science-shift/

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/07/diy-biotechnologists-go-looking-for-a-bigger-garage/59701/

If you can’t attend in person, watch the webcast live at:

http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010

Put it on your calendar now!  Or we’ll hope to see you in person, especially for the session where I’m speaking: “Safety and Security Concerns, Open Source Biodefense” at 5:15 PM on Friday.  –Chris Peterson

Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0

July 29-31 International House Berkeley
http://opensciencesummit.com

Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for a truly free and open 21st century knowledge economy? Join us at the first Open Science Summit, an attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable an new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

In the last ten years, a collection of burgeoning movements has begun the herculean task of overhauling the outmoded institutions and worldviews that make up our global scientific governance system. Proponents of the Access to Knowledge movement (A2K) have united around the principle that data and knowledge are “anti-rivalrous,” the value of information increases as it spreads.

Open Access Journals have demonstrated a new path for publishing that utilizes the power of the internet to instantly distribute ideas instead of imposing artificial scarcity to prop up old business models. “Health 2.0” entrepreneurs are seeking to apply the lessons of e-commerce to empower patients.

However, these different efforts are each working on a piece of a problem without a view of the whole. It is not sufficient or realistic to tweak one component of the innovation system (eg, patent policy) and assume the others stay static. Instead, dynamic, interactive, nonlinear change is unfolding.

The Open Science Summit is the first and only event to consider what happens throughout the entire innovation chain as reform in one area influences the prospects in others. In the best case scenario, a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing shifts toward transparency and collaboration could unleash hitherto untapped reserves of human ingenuity.

Hope to see you there!  —Chris Peterson

A routine traffic-stop in Switzerland has allegedly thwarted eco-terrorists from blowing up the site of the £55million nano-technology HQ of IBM in Europe…

The group describes itself as anarchist and is opposed to all forms of micro-technology as well as nuclear power and weapons…

The IBM facility that the Il Silvestre group was targeting is still under construction.  When finished, it will contain the most state-of-the-art facilities in Europe for nano-and-bio-technological research, with the probability of billions of pounds in profit for IBM.

The article describes the suspects as ‘eco-terrorists’ but I am not sure we should encourage them by using that term.  (Or ‘anarchists” either, for that matter—peaceful anarchists should object to that.)

The more terrorism there is, the more we need Open Source Sensing.  —Chris Peterson

On May 15, 2009, Sony Pictures will release “Angels and Demons,” and bring the world’s largest particle physics laboratory to the silver screen.

Based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, this major motion picture, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, focuses on a plot to destroy the Vatican using a small amount of antimatter. That antimatter is made using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is stolen from the European particle physics laboratory CERN. Parts of the movie were filmed at CERN.

This is ridiculous, of course — CERN makes antimatter at the rate of half a nanogram per year. And they’ve only been doing that for the past few years, and they don’t leave it just sitting around in jars — they use it up. E=mc² tells us that one nanogram of mass (a year’s worth of antimatter and the matter it annihilates) give you 100 kJ energy, less than a teaspoon of gasoline.

The NSF will host a live teleconference/webcase Tuesday, May 19, 2009, 1 p.m. EDT at Science360.gov. In the meantime have a look at the CERN site Q & A.

Over the last 60 years, ever-smaller generations of transistors have driven exponential growth in computing power. Could molecules, each turned into miniscule computer components, trigger even greater growth in computing over the next 60?

Atomic-scale computing, in which computer processes are carried out in a single molecule or using a surface atomic-scale circuit, holds vast promise for the microelectronics industry. It allows computers to continue to increase in processing power through the development of components in the nano- and pico scale. In theory, atomic-scale computing could put computers more powerful than today’s supercomputers in everyone’s pocket.

“Atomic-scale computing researchers today are in much the same position as transistor inventors were before 1947. No one knows where this will lead,” says Christian Joachim of the French National Scientific Research Centre’s (CNRS) Centre for Material Elaboration & Structural Studies (CEMES) in Toulouse, France.

Joachim, the head of the CEMES Nanoscience and Picotechnology Group (GNS), is currently coordinating a team of researchers from 15 academic and industrial research institutes in Europe whose groundbreaking work on developing a molecular replacement for transistors has brought the vision of atomic-scale computing a step closer to reality. Their efforts, a continuation of work that began in the 1990s, are today being funded by the European Union in the Pico-Inside project.…

Nanotechnology is about taking something and shrinking it to its smallest possible scale. It’s a top-down approach,” Joachim says. He and the Pico-Inside team are turning that upside down, starting from the atom, the molecule, and exploring if such a tiny bit of matter can be a logic gate, memory source, or more. “It is a bottom-up or, as we call it, ‘bottom-bottom’ approach because we do not want to reach the material scale,” he explains.

Joachim’s team has focused on taking one individual molecule and building up computer components, with the ultimate goal of hosting a logic gate in a single molecule.

How many atoms to build a computer?

“The question we have asked ourselves is how many atoms does it take to build a computer?” Joachim says. “That is something we cannot answer at present, but we are getting a better idea about it.”

The team has managed to design a simple logic gate with 30 atoms that perform the same task as 14 transistors, while also exploring the architecture, technology and chemistry needed to achieve computing inside a single molecule and to interconnect molecules.

They are focusing on two architectures: one that mimics the classical design of a logic gate but in atomic form, including nodes, loops, meshes etc., and another, more complex, process that relies on changes to the molecule’s conformation to carry out the logic gate inputs and quantum mechanics to perform the computation.

The logic gates are interconnected using scanning-tunnelling microscopes and atomic-force microscopes — devices that can measure and move individual atoms with resolutions down to 1/100 of a nanometre (that is one hundred millionth of a millimetre!). As a side project, partly for fun but partly to stimulate new lines of research, Joachim and his team have used the technique to build tiny nano-machines, such as wheels, gears, motors and nano-vehicles each consisting of a single molecule.

“Put logic gates on it and it could decide where to go,” Joachim notes, pointing to what would be one of the world’s first implementations of atomic-scale robotics.

The importance of the Pico-Inside team’s work has been widely recognised in the scientific community, though Joachim cautions that it is still very much fundamental research. It will be some time before commercial applications emerge from it. However, emerge they all but certainly will.

—Jim

In its present form, the Weather Machine is a work of futurism, not engineering. I have done only back-of-the-envelope calculations, and my assertions about what could be built are based more on instinct and educated guesses than on any major, deep engineering analysis. Even so, as a futurist I am fairly sure that something like the weather machine will be possible within the next few decades.

The Weather Machine, Mark I

Here’s the basic idea for the machine: construct a small aerostat—a hydrogen balloon—at a guess an optimal size is somewhere between a millimeter and a centimeter in diameter. It has a very thin shell of diamond, maybe just a nanometer thick. It’s round, and it has inside it (and possibly extending outside, giving it the shape of the planet Saturn) an equatorial plane that is a mirror. If you squashed it flat, you would have a disc only a few nanometers thick. Although you could build such a balloon out of materials that we build balloons of now, it would not be economical for our purposes. Given that we can build these aerostats so that the total amount of material in one is actually very, very small, we can inflate them with hydrogen in such a way that they will float at an altitude of twenty miles or so—well into the stratosphere and above the weather and the jet streams.

Each aerostat contains a mirror, and also a control unit consisting of a radio receiver, computer, and GPS receiver. It has just barely enough power and fans or other actuators to tilt itself to a preferred orientation. That’s all it does—listens for commands on the radio, and tilts to an angle that is a function of its latitude and longitude. It’s not really a complicated machine.

Now make enough of them to cover the entire globe. For the centimeter size, you’d need about five quintillion of them. This is why nanotechnology makes a big difference. If you tried to cover the earth with something the total thickness of even a current-day party balloon, let’s say about 100 microns, you need on the order of 100 billion tonnes of material, but with the nano-engineered design, just a few nanometers thick, you only need about ten million tonnes. To compare that with the scope of current-day construction, ten million tonnes is roughly the amount of material that is used to make a hundred miles of freeway. This is an amount of material that current-day technology, much less nanotech, can handle straightforwardly.

That’s the weather machine. We have these aerostats which float twenty miles up. They have GPS and controllers and can turn themselves. That’s all there is to it. What could you do with a machine like this? The machine is essentially a programmable greenhouse gas. If you set the mirrors facing the sun, it reflects all the sunlight back. If you set them sideways, it allows the sunlight to come through, and similarly for the longwave radiation coming from the back side of the earth at night.

For comparison, the radiative forcing associated with CO2 as a greenhouse gas, as generally mentioned in the theory of global warming, is on the order of one watt per square meter. The weather machine would allow direct control of a substantial fraction of the total insolation, on the order of a kilowatt per square meter—1000 times as much. It would completely trump any natural or anthropogenic climatic forcing, and allow us to set Earth’s climate to whatever we wanted it to be.

For mere overall climate control, we’d only need to build a few tenths of a percent of a full weather machine, and the controls on the individual aerostats can be very simple. When set to let sunlight through, for example, the mirrors can be several degrees away from edge-on to the sun, and the effect would be a scattering of light (visible perhaps as a slight haziness) but no significant reduction in total insolation.

Kardashev Type I civilization

A Kardashev Type I civilization is one that controls all the energy available on a single planet. A Weather Machine would do that—our total current energy (strictly speaking, power) use, at 15 terawatts, is a completely negligible fraction of the over 100 petawatts the machine would control.

If you read the IPCC numbers on how much global warming is going to cost, the actual estimate is that over the course of the century it is going to be about 3% of the global GDP—a huge sum of money. A Weather Machine could not only prevent that, but probably double the GDP simply by regional climate control. If you could actually control the climate and tailor it, you could make land in lots of places on the earth, such as Northern Canada and Russia, as valuable as California. The economic benefit would be enormous. There is a huge amount of value to being able to control the weather. This is something that people have always wanted to do and therefore, once it becomes possible, they probably will.

The better control we have over our aerostats, the more we can do. Controlling insolation on the scale of tens or hundreds of miles would probably give us the ability to affect daily weather patterns as well as climatic averages. Given really precise control, you could enhance solar power, for example. Build an array of photovoltaics in the desert and and then program about a thousand square kilometers of aerostats above it to focus the sunlight down onto your array. Instead of needing a thousand square kilometers of solar collectors, you need only one. The main reason solar power is expensive is that it’s diffuse, so the capital costs for collecting it are high. But with 1000x concentration it should be quite economical. The concentration is more or less free because you have already built the machine to control the weather. What’s more, you have not changed the energy balance any, because you are shading all the areas that are otherwise under the thousand square kilometers. That gives your concentrated collector, in broad daylight, an energy flux that is approximately the same as a thousand nuclear reactors of a typical size. Of course, you have to cool the collectors fairly vigorously because they are not 100% efficient.

In 2029 the asteroid Apophis is going to come within the orbit of the moon, passing the earth, in what will be something of a butterfly effect incident where it is fairly difficult to predict exactly what is going to happen to it after that close encounter. Apophis will return in 2036 and we can’t say for sure whether it will strike the Earth or not. In 2029, if a highly controllable Weather Machine had been built by then, as the asteroid comes tumbling past we could focus a few petawatts of sunlight on it and give it a kick. This is probably a lot more appropriate in the case of Apophis than many other asteroids because it is going to be so close. A small kick in 2029 will have a huge result in 2036, almost certainly enough to prevent a strike if that should actually be the trajectory it’s on.

The Weather Machine, Mark II

The Mark I Weather Machine is something like nanomechanical rod logic—an gedanken experiment existence proof that a given level of technology will have a given capability. We can go a bit farther and talk about what the capability might be like given closer control of light and matter, bearing in mind this is somewhat more speculative.

Take the same aerostat, but inside put an aerogel composed of electronically switchable optical-frequency antennas—these are beginning to be looked at in the labs now under the name of nantennas. We can now tune the aerostat to be an absorber or transmitter of radiation in any desired frequency, in any desired direction (and if we’re really good, with any desired phase). It’s all solid state, with no need to control the aerostat’s physical attitude. Once we have that, the Weather Machine essentially becomes an enormous directional video screen, or with phase control, hologram.

Astronomers hated Weather Machine Mark I, but they love Mark II because it turns the entire earth into a telescope with an aperture of 8,000 miles. Mark I could zap Apophis as it flew by inside the Moon’s orbit; Mark II could zap asteroids at much greater distances, or power laser-propulsion spacecraft.

Mark II, with the ability to shift frequencies and directions independently, is powered at night. Mark I could cool the Earth by shading the sunlight on the dayside, or warm it by reflecting back the infrared that pours into the night sky. The total power going in and out is roughly the same (although more goes out from the dayside for a variety of reasons). Thus there’s plenty of power available for the nightside to do street-lighting, or show ads in the sky, or whatever you’d like. Remember that because it’s a hologram, it can have a completely different effect for each spot on the surface: my night sky can be a giant telescope, and my neighbor’s can be a giant video game.

Coming soon to a planet near you

I’m fairly certain that a Weather machine will be built sometime this century. It seems straightforwardly within the capabilities of molecular manufacturing, particularly the Mark I form. There are plenty of people worried about things like climate change or asteroid impact that it could prevent or ameliorate. It could have an enormous economic value. All of these indicate that it should be built, but the most pressing and cogent reason that it will be is likely military.

Rremember the solar power plant. What if instead of a power plant beneath this thousand square kilometers of concentrated sunlight, there were an army, fleet, or indeed a city? Another way of specifying the amount of energy that would get pumped into the area is that it would be the equivalent of exploding a one-kiloton bomb every second for as long as you wanted. A Weather Machine would be a very potent weapon, even the Mark I version. Mark II could shoot down the moons of Mars.

Even without direct attacks, whoever can control the weather on Earth is pretty much in charge here. Anyone who objects and starts rattling their sabers gets twenty years of no summer and no growing season. For that reason alone, given the technological capability of doing it, it will be done. I cannot see the US government understanding that this is possible and not doing it. In fact, there are several other governments I cannot see understanding it can be done and not doing it.

If you are a smaller government without enough conventional forces to defend yourself well while your Weather Machine is being built, I would guess that approximately 5% of one is all you would need to have a setting that was a dead man switch: if someone came and blew you up and you quit sending out the control signals, all of the aerostats would default into snowball earth mode. It would be a doomsday device. This is troubling.

Once somebody gets 5% of one built, you’re stuck listening to them. You had better start building your own first, or at least simultaneously. In fact, it seems reasonable to imagine that by later in the century there are going to be several competing clouds of these things around. Hopefully they won’t end up physically competing with each other, but that the people in charge of them will come to some negotiation. That’s going to be all the more reason for someone wanting to be in the game. You have three quintillion balloons up, and I have one quintillion, and this guy over there has two quintillion, which means we get that many votes in the weather control world government.

The ultimate implications of a Weather Machine are mind-boggling. I can’t even come close to seeing all of the implications that it will have, but I’m fairly sure that it’s possible and that it will happen. It’s worth thinking about.