Longtime Foresight friend Robert Grudin has a new book Design and Truth, just reviewed by the New York Times.  The review quotes Grudin on designers: “However grand their aspirations, they wait upon the will of people in power,” he writes. “And power, which can ratify the truth of good design, can, conversely, debase design into [...]

PhysOrg.com brings news and a video of a new 3D patterning technique from IBM that reaches down to 15 nm resolution which “could go even smaller”: IBM Research in Zurich has demonstrated a new nanoscale patterning technique that could replace electron beam lithography (EBL). The demonstration carved a 1:5 billion scale three-dimensional model of the [...]

Brian Wang brings to our attention a Daily Mail article: 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 [...]

David Cassel brings our attention to an h+ review of the long-awaited film The Singularity is Near, based on the book by Ray Kurzweil: In documentary style, we have Ray discussing his ideas about the Singularity, with commentators variously supporting or refuting or worrying about his ideas. With Bill McKibben in the role of the [...]

Videos for all talks and slides for some are now available for the Foresight Conference held in January. Here’s the list: http://www.foresight.org/conf2010/ Or if you prefer to watch them in chronological order: http://foresight.org/conf2010/schedule.html There are 17 videos, so in case you’d like some guidance in getting started, consider starting with the top three talks as [...]

Angela Belcher and team at MIT have tweaked a bacterial virus to serve as a scaffolding to: attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins). The viruses became wire-like devices that could very efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules. Belcher says that within [...]

From Singularity Hub, 5 Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter: Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they’re less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork. Case in point: Daishin’s Seki5-axis mill. The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve out a full scale motorcycle helmet [...]

The winner of the 2009 Foresight Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Theory), Robert A. Freitas Jr., has now been granted the first diamond mechanosynthesis patent.  This is not just the first DMS patent but also, I believe, the first mechanosynthesis patent that has ever been issued.  Freitas is the sole inventor on this patent, which was [...]

Longtime Foresight Senior Associate and senior research scientist at Genetic Programming, Inc. has done an interview on memristors over at blog FrogHeart for those of us trying to keep up on this challenging topic.  He concludes: So why are memristors useful? Sticking with our water analogy, I can make the pipe bigger or small depending [...]

Finally, the first step has been made toward the longed-for goal of a robot which can do laundry: http://singularityhub.com/2010/03/31/berkeley-gets-willow-garage-robot-to-fold-towels-simply-stunning-video/ Of course, this also gives us some idea of other formerly human-only tasks that robots are likely to take over in the next decade or two. Thanks to SingularityHub.com for bringing this to our attention.  —Chris [...]

This conference track is being chaired by a real computer scientist with a specialty in AI, so it should be more meaty than some popular discussions of this challenging topic: We invite submissions describing systematic attempts at understanding the likelihood and nature of these projections. In particular, we welcome papers critically analyzing the following issues [...]

Nanowerk reports: Taking the patent land grab to a new level, the government of Greece today, April 1, filed a patent and trademark application for the term nanotechnology with the European Patent Office. The country is thereby seeking the right to prevent third parties from commercially exploiting these and related terms without paying royalties. “Quite [...]

From David Cassel: The military is funding a project to create neural computing using memristors, a sophisticated circuit component which HP Labs describes as a stepping stone to “computers that can make decisions” and “appliances that learn from experience.” http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/synapse-chip In a video, HP researcher R. Stanley Williams explains how his team created the first [...]