The Royal society has a new website making freely available a selection of classic papers from the history of science. (h/t Luboš Motl’s The Reference Frame): I am just looking at an Isaac Newton’s letter about light and colors sent to the editor of Cambridge University Press in February 1671/72. It describes some Newton’s basic [...]

(or a little physics about climate change. Or at least a few clarifications about some of the points being raised.) In the wake of Climategate, a wide variety of mistakes and misapprehensions are being circulated on the Internet (as if that weren’t happening before). For example, in this article from the Telegraph: Phil Jones, the [...]

Raw data are important in validating scientific work. Even so simple an operation as smoothing by time-averaging can have counter-intuitive effects, such as Simpson’s Paradox: For a simple and homey example, here are the batting averages of Derek Jeter and David Justice in 1995, 1996, and 1997: in 1995, Jeter had 12 hits in 48 [...]

Just for fun: (h/t Roger Pielke, Jr.)   (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VRBWLpYCPY) (h/t Megan McArdle)  

“Science advances, funeral by funeral.” (often attributed to Timothy Ferris) The blogosphere has been abuzz over the past week or so with the release of data — emails and program source and documentation — from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the premier climatology research institutions in the world. [...]

From the protein crystallography beamline at Berkeley Labs Advanced Light Source: an action shapshot the Rho transcription factor from E. coli. The orange spiral in the middle is a strand of RNA, and Rho is everything else.   (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPQ0OnlfkkA) (h/t Technology Review blog)

Peptides control crystal growth with switches, throttles and brakes. From Physorg.com.     (PhysOrg.com) — By producing some of the highest resolution images of peptides attaching to mineral surfaces, scientists have a deeper understanding how biomolecules manipulate the growth crystals. The research, which appears in the Nov. 23 online edition of the journal Proceedings of [...]

This year is the 20th anniversary of the original Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology. The neat, clear vision of nanotechnology we had in 1989 rested on two key aspects that would make it a transformative, rather than merely an evolutionary, technology: The ability to construct and observe at the atomic scale, and the construction of machines [...]

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 [...]

Over at Nanoclast, Dexter Johnson writes: It seems when nanotech is applied to photovoltaics it can either boost their efficiency to new heights or it can cheapen their manufacturing process. But it never seems to provide a solution to both of these. It’s always a tradeoff: increased efficiency but difficult manufacturing processes or a cheaper [...]

Gallery – A joyride through the nanoscale – Image 1 – New Scientist. This New Scientist article has some nice images from Whitesides recent book, sort of a retake on the “Secret House” idea.  

Technology Review: Self-Cleaning, Super-Absorbant Solar Cells. Amorphous-silicon solar cells patterned with nanoscale domes absorb more light–and shed water and dust.  

According to the loose length-scale based definition, nanotechnology has long since conquered the world: feature sizes in microprocessors have been below the 100 nanometer mark for some time, qualifying them, if anyone wanted to, to be called nanoprocessors. The latest reports and plans are mentioning 22-nanometer parts just 2 years from now: DailyTech – AMD [...]

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 [...]

Self-assembly of carbon nanotubes into two-dimensional geometries using DNA origami templates. Harnessing DNA origami to arrange CNTs.

Nanotechnology researchers find reliable, mess-free way to grow graphene. from nanowerk   “You can imagine trying to peel a piece of shrink wrap off a dish to put it on a new dish — it’s going to be messy,” said lead researcher Jiwoong Park, Cornell assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology. Inspired by previous [...]

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 [...]

From the Albany (OR) Democrat Herald: Phone robots: Let’s all rebel By Hasso Hering, Columnist | Posted: Saturday, November 7, 2009 11:45 pm What this country needs – even more than a shorter baseball season so the World Series doesn’t go into November – is a popular uprising against the tyranny of telephone robots. This [...]

There was some objection to my post Is Robo Habilis a gateway to Intelligence? to the effect that it might take a lot of extra time to build the robots, and that would lengthen the time necessary to develop AI. That might certainly be true of the garage experimenter, but in the world at large, [...]

I’m at the AAAI Fall Symposium session on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, and there was a really interesting talk by Walter Schneider of Pitt about progress in mapping the nerve bundles that are the “information superhighways” between the various parts of the brain.  You’ll find his slides from last year’s talk on his home page, and [...]