Everybody knows that the world is running out of oil. The predicted year of the peak varies from 2000 to 2100, but it is generally conceded that it won’t last forever. Of course, economists know that when you have a scarce resource, it doesn’t just suddenly run out: the price rises, more expensive sources or [...]

DNA origami structures act as seeds to program the construction of structures up to 100 times larger.

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.

In my Early Retirement post, I wrote If you have a human-level AI based on computer technology, the cost to do what it can do will begin to decline at Moore’s Law rates. Even if an AI costs a million dollars in, say, 2020, it’ll be a thousand in 2030 and one dollar in 2040 [...]

There’s a post at The Futurist entitled Nanotechnology : Bubble, Bust, ….Boom? which echoes an earlier posting here: I believe that nanotechnology underwent a similar bubble, peaking in early 2005, and has been in a bust for the next four years. The Futurist believes nanotech, of the near-term applications-oriented kind, is about ready to pick [...]

Conference to tackle what they claim is “the single most important issue in science & society in this century.”

In an amusing echo to my Smarter or just Faster post on the nature of intelligence, there is a report at Technology Review pointing out a “strong correlation” between the condition of the fatty myelin sheaths of neurons (the insulators to their wires) and IQ. This would make for faster transmission (and presumably less background [...]

20 years ago, in the wake of the cold fusion excitement-turned-debacle, I noticed an interesting fact. The people doing the experiments were divided into two classes: The electrochemists who believed that fusion was happening were doing their experiments in plastic tubs and glassware, whereas the physicists who believed that no fusion was really happening were [...]

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 Convergence: Artificial Intelligence Panel, Peter Norvig, Steve Omohundro, Ben Goertzel, Barney Pell Convergence: Synthetic [...]

In this post I began considering the prognostications in George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years, in light of some of the kinds of changes in technology that might come online during the century. This is obviously hard to do, but imagine trying to predict the geopolitical course of the 20th century without understanding the possibility [...]

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 his [...]

Over at CRN, Chris Phoenix posted a very nice piece about the reception Foresight gave to introduce me as President. He mentions that I am broadening Foresight’s focus to include AI as well as nanotechnology in the picture we see of transformative technologies on the horizon. But he ends with an interesting twist: But I’ll [...]

Last week at AGI-09, I chaired a one-day workshop on the future of AGI. (“AGI” means Artificial General Intelligence, which is essentially what the term “AI” meant before 1980: the attempt to build a system that would be the equivalent of a human in its thinking abilities, displaying a robust ability to think, converse, exhibit [...]

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.

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.

Another promising nanotech approach to harnessing the potential of siRNA molecules is to pack them on the surface of gold nanoparticles.

Using optical near-field effects with a laser to localize heating effects, scientists were able to induce the growth of 1.4-nanometer-diameter ultra-short single-walled carbon nanotubes between the sharp tips of electrodes separated by about 200 nm.

“It is time we do what’s necessary to make NANO the next national priority.”–U.S. Rep. Michael Honda, D-San Jose

Two publications in the current issue of the IOP journal Nanotechnology report techniques that may bring real-time quality control to two different nanotech fabrication methods.