A paper on arXiv referenced (and nicely explained) in a Technology Review blog: How altruistic behaviour emerges has puzzled evolutionary biologists for decades. From the point of view of survivial of the fittest, the unselfish concern for the welfare of others seems inexplicable. Surely any organism should always act selfishly if it were truly intent [...]

A recent Newsweek article on Kurzweil seems to have been something of a hack job, judging from this reply: … For example, of the many accurate predictions for the year 2009 that I wrote in my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, written in the late 1990s, only three are listed in the sidebar “Kurzweil’s [...]

The greatly anticipated “AI” project recently unveiled, Wolfram Alpha, appears to have flopped, at least insofar as being an AI. Next up looks to be Siri, an app coming to your iPhone this fall. From the San Jose Mercury: Siri, a San Jose company, announced Wednesday that it would offer an “intelligent agent” for Apple’s [...]

Nanotechnology is, ultimately, a mechanization of the molecular processes of life. One of the most important of those processes is photosynthesis. If we really understood photosynthesis as deeply as we do, say, gear trains, and had the machinery to build whatever molecular machines we designed, we could build trees that produced gasoline from sunlight and [...]

EurekAlert reports work by the University of Liverpool and Chinese Academy of Sciences: New rotors could help develop nanoscale generators In collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, scientists have investigated the rotation of molecules on a fixed surface to understand how they may help in the development of future rotor-based machinery at [...]

What kind of software will AIs run? This is of some interest, because it will tell us how much the current flowering of parallel hardware will actually get us toward human equivalent processing power. Amdahl’s Law holds: If the task of being intelligent is strongly serial, all those processors won’t help much. If it’s parallelizable, [...]

From The Gulf Times via Nanowerk: The proposal for establishing an Arab Council on Nanotechnology (ACON) was presented by Al-Quds University’s Mukhles Sowwan while discussing about ‘Nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing: Towards balanced plans for responsible worldwide use.’ “The mission of ACON should be to raise awareness of the benefits and dangers of molecular nanotechnology, and [...]

from Nanowerk News: Held at a former air force base in Victorville, Calif. in late 2007, the DARPA Urban Challenge offered a $3.5 million purse to competitors who could design the fastest and safest vehicles that could traverse a 60-mile urban course in moving traffic in less than six hours. The contestant vehicles were unmanned [...]

In Beyond AI, my book about the future of artificial intelligence and machine ethics, I made a prediction about how much processing power would be needed for an AI and how long it would take to get it assuming Moore’s Law: You really can’t blame the early AI researchers for their optimism. It must have [...]

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?

Longtime Foresight associates may remember Robert Birge, then of Syracuse, who spoke at the very first Foresight Conference in 1989. He has just won the Connecticut Medal of Science for his work in photoactive biochemicals. Story here (Hartford Courant).

Some interesting developments in memories: This Nanowerk story reports results out of Alex Zettl’s group at Berkeley on a memory cell that consists of an iron nanoparticle which can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. More information on this can be found at Zettl’s site here. This memory, like someother nanotech schemes, relies [...]

Nominations are now open for the Foresight Institute Prizes for 2009, due June 30. Our best-known prizes of course are the two annual Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology, one for Experiment and one for Theory: Description Instructions Also open are nominations for the Foresight Prize in Communications: Description Instructions And the Student Prize: Description [...]

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 is [...]

There is at Technology Review’s arXiv blog an article “How to find bugs in giant software programs.” It’s an overview of a paper on arXiv which is a statistical study of program sizes and bug distributions in the Eclipse dataset of Java programs. TR says, So how are errors distributed among these programs? It would [...]

“Codex Futurius” is a project of Discover Magazine’s Science Not Fiction blog in which they ask science questions raised by science fiction.. Then they ask the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange to reccommend them experts to answer the questions. Their first question came to me, and it was about gray goo … [...]

Two new items that are follow-ons to the Moore’s Law for Energy thread: A story at Technology Review about new electronics that improve the usable power from existing solar panels by 5-25%. The advance is new smarter electronics that allows for an inverter for each panel instead of one big one for the whole system. [...]

From PhysOrg: … Implants and scaffolding for tissue growth require porous, soft materials — which are usually very fragile. Because many biological tissues are regularly subjected to intense mechanical loads, it is also important that the implant material have comparable elasticity in order to avoid inflammation. At the same time, the material must be very [...]

The highly anticipated Wolfram|Alpha site came online over the weekend, and here are some first impressions: They need a little work on the html — this was Firefox, but it looked the same on Konqueror.

University of Ulster Scientists Make a Nanorod Breakthrough Engineers at the University of Ulster are the first researchers to create diamond nanorods with a diameter as thin as 2.1 nm, which is not only smaller than all the currently reported diamond 1D nanostructures (4-300 nm) but also smaller than the theoretical calculated value (2.7-9 nm) [...]