Solar moratorium news, nanowire memory and tiny, tiny computer chips

From KurzweilAI.net — the US government comes to its senses on the solar moratorium, breakthroughs in nanowire memory, and computer chips heading toward smaller than 10 nanometers.

U.S. Lifts Moratorium on New Solar Projects

New York Times, July 3, 2008 Under increasing public pressure over its decision to temporarily halt all new solar development on public land, the Bureau of Land Management said Wednesday that it was lifting the freeze, barely a month after it was put into effect. See also: Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects   Read Original Article>>

 

New Nanowire-Based Memory Could Beef Up Information Storage

PhysOrg.com, July 2, 2008 University of Pennsylvania researchers have created a type of nanowire-based information storage device that is capable of storing three bit values rather than the usual two. This ability could lead to a new generation of high-capacity information storage for electronic devices. The phase changes are achieved by subjecting the nanowires to pulsed electric fields. This process heats the nanowires, altering the core and shell structure from crystalline (ordered) to amorphous (disordered). These two states correspond to two different electrical resistances. The third value corresponds to the case where the core is amorphous while the shell is crystalline (or visa versa), resulting in an intermediate resistance. Creating information storage from nanowires can be done via “bottom-up” approaches, using the natural tendency of tiny structures to self-assemble into larger structures, so they may be able to break free of the limitations faced by traditional “top-down” methods, such as patterning a circuit onto a silicon wafer by depositing a nanowire thin film.   Read Original Article>>

 

Intel’s Gelsinger Sees Clear Path To 10nm Chips

ChannelWeb, June 30, 2008 Intel sees a “clear way” to manufacturing chips under 10 nanometers, according to Pat Gelsinger, VP of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group. The next die shrink milestone will be the 32nm process, set to kick off next year, followed by 14nm a few years after that and then sub-10nm, he said.   Read Original Article>>

Quantum stickiness, Hawking and teh funny

From KurzweilAI.net, micromachine stiction, Stephen Hawking tackles the universe’s inflation and defining humor.

How a quantum effect is gumming up nanomachines

New Scientist news service, June 28, 2008 Researchers are making progress in overcoming static friction, or or “stiction,” which sticks together the parts of micromachines on scales of between 10 and 300 nanometers and limits progress in reducing their size, affecting computer hard drives and other devices with small moving parts. Stiction is due to the Casimir effect, a quantum-mechanics phenomenon that causes surfaces to be attracted. Methods to reduce its effect include use of patterned surfaces, suspending the components in a liquid, and use of metamaterials.   Read Original Article>>

Hawking ‘close’ to explaining universe’s inflation

New Scientist (article preview), June 28, 2008 Starting with current observations of the universe and working back to narrow down the initial set of possibilities and by treating the early cosmos as a quantum object with a multitude of alternative universes that gradually blend into ours, Stephen Hawking and colleagues think they are close to perfecting an answer to explain why the infant universe expanded so rapidly. (Subscription required)   Read Original Article>>

Mechanism and function of humor identified by new evolutionary theory

PhysOrg.com, June 27, 2008 Humor occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, suggests Alastair Clarke in the forthcoming book, Humour. “Now that we understand the mechanism of humour, the possibility of creating an artificial intelligence being that could develop its own sense of humour becomes very real,” he says. “This would, for the first time, create an AI capable of exhibiting one of the defining characteristics that make us human, making it seem significantly less robotic as a result.”   Read Original Article>>

Nanowire circuits and tracking asteroids

From KurzweilAI.net, the House passed a bill to begin tracking potential Earth-strike asteroids, and a new low-cost, high-volume method of integrating nanowires onto silicon has been developed.

House passes bill mandating a plan for asteroid warning and deflection

KurzweilAI.net, June 27, 2008 In recently passed H.R.6063, The U.S. House of Representatives would direct the NASA Administrator to develop plans for a low-cost spacemission to rendezvous with the Apophis asteroid and attach a tracking device (subject to Senate approval). The Apophis is expected to pass at a distance from Earth that is closer than geostationary satellites in 2029. The bill would also require the Director of the White House’s Office of Science and TechnologyPolicy (OSTP) to develop a policy within two years for notifying Federal agencies and relevant emergency response institutions of an impending near-Earth objectthreat. And the OSTP would be required to recommend a Federal agency (or agencies) to be responsible for protecting the Nation from any near-Earth object anticipated to collide with Earth, and for implementing a deflection campaign.

 

Researchers develop new technique for fabricating nanowire circuits

Nanowerk News, June 26, 2008 Scientists at Harvard University and German universities of Jena, Gottingen, and Bremen have developed a reproducible, high-volume, low-cost fabrication methodfor integrating nanowire devices directly onto silicon. The method incorporates spin-on glass technology, used in silicon integrated circuits manufacturing, and photolithography, transferring a circuit pattern onto a substrate with light. These devices can then function as light-emitting diodes, with the color of light determined by the type of semiconductor nanowire used. Because nanowires can be made of materials commonly used in electronics and photonics, they hold great promise for integrating efficient light emitters, and could lead to the development of a completely new class of integrated circuits, such as large arrays of ultra-small nanoscale lasers that could be designed as high-density optical interconnects or used for on-chip chemical sensing.   Read Original Article>>

Quantum images

From KurzweilAI.net:

Physicists Produce Quantum-Entangled Images

PhysOrg.com, June 25, 2008 Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland (UM) have produced “quantum images,” pairs of information-rich visual patterns whose features are entangled (linked by the laws of quantum physics). (NIST) Matching up both quantum images and subtracting their fluctuations, their noise is lower (so their information content potentially higher) than it is from any two classical images. In addition to promising better detection of faint objects and improved amplification and positioning of light beams, the researchers’ technique for producing quantum images may someday be useful for storing patterns of data in quantum computers and transmitting large amounts of highly secure encrypted information.   Read Original Article>>

Broadband, the US and the future

The New America Foundation – a think tank self-described as investing in, “new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of critical challenges facing the United States” – hosted a forum on broadband in the US.

Here’s a quick description from an email I received from the group:

On Monday New America’s Wireless Future Program hosted a policy forum highlighting the critical need for developing an affirmative national broadband strategy to keep the U.S. prosperous in the 21st Century.  We also released a new Issue Brief, by NAF’s Benjamin Lennett, that explains how unlicensed access to TV band ‘white space’ will give a big boost to rural broadband.  

Here’s a link to a PDF of the report’s executive summary.

Update — this post was initially only going to cover the NAF forum, but here’s some interesting broadband news via KurzweilAI.net:

Time reversal allows wireless broadband under the sea

New Scientist news service, June 25, 2008 Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and NATO Undersea Research Center have developed an “acoustic time reversal” technique that boosts underwater wireless broadband speed by up to three times, or extends the range up to 3500 km. The system compensates for reduced signal/noise ratio due to phase-delay artifacts from surface and sea-bottom echoes. A receiver first transmits an acoustic carrier signal. The sender then time-reverses what they receive, and also modulates the signal to carry a message.   Read Original Article>>

The petabyte age

From KurzweilAI.net, Wired’s Chris Anderson has an interesting piece on the “petabyte age,” Google and the business of doing science.

The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn’t Just More — More Is Different

Wired, June 23, 2008 The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world, suggests Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson. Science can advance even without coherent models and unified theories, letting statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.   Read Original Article>>

 

From the original article:

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right

 

A fractal universe?

I love fractals (blogged on the subject here, but sadly to note the passing of Ed Lorenz) and news that the universe may be arranged in a fractal pattern is just too cool. There’s agreement that on smaller scales — galaxies, clusters and superclusters. To now the thinking is beyond superclusters, things tend to homogenize rather than group together.

Maybe not (from the second link):

… a small team of physicists, including Francesco Sylos Labini of the Enrico Fermi Centre in Rome and Luciano Pietronero of the University of Rome argue that the data shows the opposite: the universe continues to look fractal as far out as our telescopes can see.

There are some issues with the idea, but some of the interested parties put more than reputations on the line with a friendly wager:

What’s at stake if the universe is indeed a fractal on the largest scales? Besides a radical rethink of the laws and history of the cosmos, researchers have placed something more down-to-Earth on the line.

More than a decade ago, Sylos Labini and Pietronero wagered a bet with physicist Marc Davis of the University of California, Berkeley, US. The bet, refereed by Turok, held that if the galaxy distribution turned out to be fractal beyond scales of approximately 50 million light years, Davis would owe Sylos Labini and Pietronero a case of California wine.

Should the fractal pattern begin to disintegrate at scales less than 50 million light years, Davis would receive a case of Italian wine – which some would say is a better deal. Turok has yet to declare a winner.

A couple of solar breaktroughs

From KurzweilAI.net — MIT students create a low-cost, low-tech solar dish, and carbon nanotubes may lower the cost and improve the performance of solar cells.

MIT team plays with fire to create cheap energy

Christian Science Monitor, June 18, 2008 A simple new low-cost solar dish developed by MIT students produces steam heat for less than the cost of heat from oil or natural gas, according to the MIT team. The steam heat can be used cost effectively for manufacturing, food pasteurization, and heating buildings.   Read Original Article>>

 

Perfecting a solar cell by adding imperfections

PhysOrg.com, June 16, 2008 New research at Santa Fe Institute, Michigan State University, and Columbia University shows that a film of carbon nanotubes may be able to replace two of the layers normally used in a solar cell, with improved performance at lower cost. Exposing the carbon nanotubes to ozone made the carbon nanotubes better catalysts, with more than a ten-fold improvement, and replaced expensive platinum. And making them longer improved both conductivity and transparency. The carbonnanotube films might also be used in fuel cells and batteries.   Read Original Article>>

Fired for teaching creationism …

… and just a little thing about branding crosses onto students.

An Ohio middle-school teacher, John Freshwater, lost his job for ignoring district warnings and continuing to teach christian beliefs, and for using a high-frequency generator to brand crosses into the arms of his students.

The best quote from the link:

Freshwater’s friend Dave Daubenmire defended him.

“With the exception of the cross-burning episode. … I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district,” he told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published Friday.

Yeah, take away the cross branding and continuing to use the bully pulpit of a middle-school science classroom to teach something better placed in a philosophy, theology, mythology or fiction study group, and I’m sure he’s an asset to the district.

New display tech and low-cost wind power

From KurzweilAI.net.

This display tech really gets beyond an interactive touch screen. I’ll look forward to see what game developers can do with this sort of distance interactivity once this technology becomes cost-effective for the home.

A Display That Tracks Your Movements

Technology Review, June 20, 2008 Samsung and interactive advertisingcompany Reactrix Systems plan to bring 57-inch interactive displays to Hilton hotel lobbies by the end of the year. These displays can “see” people in 3D standing up to 15 feet away from the screen as they wave their hands to play games, navigate menus, use maps –and interact with ads.   Read Original Article>>

A new wind turbine from BroadStar breaks the $1per watt barrier. It looks like there’s real headway being made in both solar- and wind-power efficiencies.

BroadStar Achieves Breakthrough In Low-Cost Energy Production With New Generation Wind Turbine

Energy Daily, June 9, 2008 BroadStar Wind Systems’ new AeroCam wind turbine is the first to break through the $1/watt cost barrier, the company claims. Designed with a low profile on a horizontal axis with multiple blades, it automatically and interactively adjust the pitch or angle of attack of the aerodynamic blades as the turbine rotates, thereby optimizing its performance, like a bird’s wings. It enables distributed power generation in almost any setting, including densely populated urban areas and unconventional sites such as commercial developments and corporate campuses.   Read Original Article>>

H2O on Mars!

It’s the early report, but if all is absolutely confirmed this is very, very exciting news for mankind and the future of space travel.

From the link:

Scientists in charge of the Phoenix Mars lander are more convinced there is ice near the Martian North pole as they review new images from the Red Planet. Eight small pieces of a bright material “have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it,” said a statement from Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s website.

“It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do that.”

If you haven’t been following the Mars Phoenix Lander story you might not have heard it’s using Twitter to tweet information back to Earth. Here’s the tweet after the water discovery:

 ”Are you ready to celebrate?  Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars!  w00t!!!  Best day ever!!” the Mars Phoenix Lander tweeted at about 5:15 pm.

 

 

Microscope on a chip

From KurzweilAI.net — interesting news about a high-power scanning electron microscope.

‘Microscope on a chip’ to give four times the detail

NewScientist news service, June 13, 2008 A new scanning electronmicroscope (SEM) design by physicist Derek Eastham could achieve a resolution around four times better than existing SEMs–as low as 0.01 nanometers (roughly the distance between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron). It also produces a beam with about 100 times less energythan usual in an SEM, lowering the cost and possibly allowing it to study delicate structures normally destroyed by electron microscopes, such as untreated proteins and DNA.   Read Original Article>>

We’re living longer

Woot. The US death rate hit an all-time low in 2006.

From KurzweilAI.net:

U.S. Death Rate Hit Record Low in 2006

Journal Watch, June 12, 2008 The age-adjusted U.S. death rate dropped roughly 3% from 2005 to 2006, reaching an all-time low of 776 deaths per 100,000 individuals, according to a CDC review of national mortality data. Among the other findings: * Deaths due to either influenza or pneumonia saw the biggest decline, a 13% drop. * Mortality from other leading causes — for example, chronic lower respiratory diseases, heart disease, diabetes, and essential hypertension or hypertensive renal disease — also fell significantly. * Parkinson disease, Alzheimer disease, and homicide saw drops in mortality, but these did not reach significance. * Life expectancy at birth reached a record high of 78.1 years, up 0.3 years from 2005.   Read Original Article>>

 

3D sans glasses, nanotube electron turbine and recreating the first cell

From KurzweilAI.net — 3D imagery without the need for special glasses, printing molecules with a nanotech electron turbine, and recreating what is beleived to be the first living cell on Earth.

3-D Viewing without Goofy Glasses

Technology Review, June 12, 2008Philips’ WOWvx displays–which allow viewers to perceive high-quality 3-D images without the need for special glasses–are now beginning to appear in shopping malls, movie-theater lobbies, and theme parks worldwide. Artist rendition of WOWvx 3-D screens (Phillips) The technology uses image-processing software, plus display hardware that includes sheets of tiny lenses atop LCD screens. The lenses project slightly different images to viewers’ left and right eyes, which the brain translates into a perception of depth.   Read Original Article>>

 

‘Electron turbine’ could print designer molecules

New Scientist news service, June 11, 2008Lancaster University scientists have developed a conceptual design for a carbon-nanotube-based motor that spins in a current of electrons (like a wind turbine). (C. Lambert) The device could be made by suspending a carbon nanotube between two nanotubes and running an electric current through it, causing it to spin and function like a pump or printer. By pumping atoms into the motor, it could assemble molecules (become the world’s smallest molecular printer), or shrink computer memory or processors 10 times smaller than existing devices by using an array of motors shuttling atoms between the 1 and 0 ends of the middle tube to store or process information.   Read Original Article>>

 

 

Scientists Close to Reconstructing First Living Cell

ScientificAmerican.com, June 10, 2008Harvard Medical School researchers have built a model of what they believe in the first living cell on Earth (3.5 to 4 billion years ago), containing a strip of genetic material surrounded by a fatty membrane and capable of replicating. (Janet Iwasa)   Read Original Article>>

The internet is changing our brains

Just read Nicholas Carr’s piece in the July/August 2008 print Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The article raises some very interesting points, most importantly bringing into sharper focus the relatively new neuroscience idea that our brain continually changes, improves and otherwise re-wires itself. This is counter the long-held belief that once you reach adulthood, your brain is permanentlyset. Sort of like concrete poured into a mold. Instead the medium a malleable, and the mold is constantly refiguring itself.

The larger concept is the internet, and its unique structure, is affecting the way we access and process information. Certainly true. I’ve included an excerpt from the article about how acquiring a typewriter affected Nietzsche’s writing.

I completely understand this idea. When writing for business or media I use the computer keyboard, but when writing fiction I often will write in longhand. It’s a different experience and it slows my thinking down forcing me to contemplate each word a bit more. Sure I do some fiction at the keyboard, but much of that writing is done with pen set to paper. And my journal of many years is one hundred percent longhand. Something about the pen, or pencil, scratching across the page still appeals to me. Plus I like looking at the large stack of spiral-bound notebooks holding my thoughts dating back twenty-plus years.

From the article:

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

More on libertarian seasteading

I’ve blogged about this subject before, and here’s a take from Cato-at-Liberty by Timothy B. Lee on libertarian seasteading. I think the concept of post-, extra-national libertarian communities is very interesting. My above linked blog post covers Peter Thiels’ investment in the Seasteading Institute. Looks like Tim also thinks this monetary input is a strong factor in this idea’s potential for success.

From the second link:

Over at Ars Technica, I have an in-depth discussion of seasteading, an effort by a group of Silicon Valley libertarians to develop technology for living on the open oceans in a cost-effective manner. They argue that government is an industry with excessive barriers to entry, and they aim to change that by creating a turnkey solution for starting your own community.

History is littered with utopian projects, libertarian and otherwise, that fell far short of their lofty goals. At first glance, the Seasteading Institute looks like just another utopian scheme. But there are at least two reasons to think this one might accomplish more than its predecessors. First, recognizing that it would take many decades to develop a self-sufficient ocean metropolis, Friedman and his partners have chosen to focus largely on short-term engineering challenges. They want to build cheap, durable sea platforms that anyone can purchase. Second, they’ve raised half a million dollars from Peter Thiel, the libertarian entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal and is now a major investor in Facebook. Thiel’s backing will allow them to move beyond the extensive background work they’ve already done and begin the expensive task of actually designing and building their first prototype, which they hope to splash down in San Francisco Bay in the next few years.

Quantum cryptography

Move over one-time pad, there’s a new kid on the cryptographic block — quantum cryptography. This is one amazing application for the weirdness that is quantum mechanics and quantum effects. And one cool way to transmit secret messages.

Today’s KurzweilAI.net newsletter had a link to a Scientific American story on space-based quantum codes used for cryptography.

Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait wrote about this on Monday. He offers a cool short-version explanation of the quantum mechanics involved, and his comment section has even more detail provided by BABlog readers.

Here’s the KurzweilAI  short:

Space Station Could Beam Secret Quantum Codes by 2014

ScientificAmerican.com, June 9, 2008 University of Vienna researchers hope to send an experiment to the International SpaceStation (ISS) by the middle of the next decade that would pave the way for transcontinental transmission of secret messages encoded using quantum entanglement. (European Space Agency In addition to potential use for secure communications, the “Space-QUEST” project would give researchers a chance to test the theory that entanglement should be unlimited in range.   Read Original Article>>

 

Here’s an excerpt from the Scientific American link found above at “Read Original Article”:

Researchers hope to send an experiment to the International Space Station (ISS) by the middle of the next decade that would pave the way for transcontinental transmission of secret messages encoded using the mysterious quantum property of entanglement.

When two particles such as photons are born from the same event, they emerge entangled, meaning they can communicate instantaneously no matter how far apart they are. Transmitting entangled pairs of photons reliably is the backbone of so-called quantum key distribution—procedures for converting those pairs into potentially unbreakable codes. Quantum cryptography, as it is known, could appeal to banks, covert government agencies and the military, and was tested in a 2007 Swiss election

Here’s some of Phil Plait’s commentary at Bad Astronomy:

So some European scientists came up with the idea of using the International Space Station (I know! Using ISS for science! Wow!) to test this out. They can create a small setup with a laser which can create entangled photons. The entangled photons are then sent simultaneously to two different ground stations, widely separated on the surface of the Earth, so that both have a copy of the entangled photons. In addition, two quantum keys are created based on the photons; this is essentially a code based on the state of the photons — like winning a bet is based on which way a coin lands. The two keys are different, and one each is sent to the two ground stations. So both stations have a pair of entangled photons (identical to the other station’s) and a different key.

Each key is actually a long chain of 1s and 0s. The two keys are then compared on the ISS to create what’s called a bitwise XOR — for example, if two coins both land heads then the XOR operation yields a 0, but if they land differently (one heads and one tails) then it yields a 1 — it’s just telling you whether they are the same or different. So for each place in the key, the two numbers are compared, and if they’re the same (both 1s or both 0s) then a 0 is written down. If they are different then a 1 is put there. When this is done, you get a third string of 1s and 0s, representing a comparison of the two keys.

Still with me? Yeah, me neither, but we’re almost done. So now the ISS has this long number string which represents whether the keys are alike or different. It then transmits this to one of the two stations on Earth.

So? What does this mean? This means that now the two ground stations can create a code between them based on their keys, a code that is known only to them and no one else. Furthermore, this code cannot be cracked by anyone, anywhere, because it’s based on entangled photons that cannot be known to anyone else! Because of entanglement, they know what the other station has because they can look at their key and figure it out. But no one else can.

A real holodeck? and nanopaper

From KurzweilAI.net, in more science fiction becoming science fact the Star Trek holodeck becomes a bit more real, and news about super strong nanopaper with multiple applications.

Star Trek HoloDeck 1.0 - HoloVizio 3D Makes Its Debut

Scientific Blogging, June 8, 2008 Researchers with the EU-funded COHERENT project have developed the HoloVizio, a 3-D screen that can present realistic, animated 3-D images simultaneously to an unlimited number of freely moving viewers. Viewers can walk around the screen in a wide field of view, seeing the objects and shadows moving continuously as in the normal perspective. It is even possible to look behind the objects; hidden details appear, while others disappear. Uses include 3-D anatomical models, collaborative automotive design, and oil exploration.   Read Original Article>>

 

 

New Type of Paper Won’t Let You Just Rip It Apart

New York Times, June 10, 2008 Researchers in Sweden and Japan have developed “nanopaper”–a much stronger paper, made from much smaller fibrils of cellulose tens of nanometers wide, with a tensile strength greater than that of cast iron. (American Chemical Society) The paper might have applications in construction or as a reinforcing material.   Read Original Article>>

More Singularity and living 3D nano-microscopy

From KurzweilAI.net. Ray Kurzweil talks about the Singularityon NPR and a new technique allows for nano-level microscopy on living cells.

Will We Recognize The Future?

Science Friday, June 6, 2008What happens when the rate of technological change becomes so fast that the fundamental nature of what it means to be human changes too? On Science Fridayon NPR (June 6, 2009 at 3 PM), host Ira Flatow talks with inventor, technologist and futuristRay Kurzweil about the idea of the Singularity — what happens when technology advances so much that it’s impossible to predict what happens next. Will artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology be able to completely reshape what it means to be human? This is a call-in radio show.   Read Original Article>>

Pretty on the Inside

Technology Review, June 5, 2008University of California, San Francisco and Ludwig Maximilians University researchers are using a new technique called 3-D structured-illumination microscopy to view living cells with 100 nanometers resolution. Cells prepare for division by condensing their DNA into chromosomes (Lothar Schermelleh, Peter Carlton) The new microscope illuminates cells with interference patterns. When a fine cellular structure reflects this light, it changes the pattern slightly. The microscope collects it, then software interprets the changes and creates an image. The inner workings of living cells have previously been impossible to resolve with optical microscopes, which are limited to a resolution of about half the wavelength of visible light, around 200 nanometers. Electron microscopy has the resolution, but can only be used on dead cells.   Read Original Article>>

Sunset on Mars

A NASA photo taken May 19, 2005, by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.

 

(Hat tip: Boing Boing)

Absolute hot

Is there an opposite to absolute zero?

From the link:

Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or about minus 460 F. You can’t get colder than that; it would be like trying to go south from the South Pole. Is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?

Well, the answer, depending on which theoretical physicist you ask, is yes, no, or maybe. Huh? you ask. Yeah, that’s how I felt. And the question doesn’t just mess with the minds of physics dummies like me. Several physicists begged off of trying to answer it, referring me to colleagues. Even ones who did talk about it said things like “It’s a little bit out of my comfort zone” and “I think I’d like to ruminate over it.” After I posed it to one cosmologist, there was dead silence on the other end of the line for long enough that I wondered if we had a dropped call.

 

Gold nanoparticles safely penetrate cells

From KurzweilAI.net:

Nanoparticles of a Different Stripe

Technology Review, May 30, 2008 Gold nanoparticles coated with alternating stripes of hydrophobic and hydrophilic molecules can penetrate cells without killing them, MIT researchers have found. Such materials could offer a more effective way to deliver drugs or imaging agents to the interior of a cell.   Read Original Article>>

Peter Thiel invests in libertarian micronations

From KurzweilAI.net — I’ve recently blogged about PayPal founder, Peter Thiel. He’s making news again by investing in offshore communities destined to become libertarian strongholds. Pretty cool idea if you ask me …

Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies

Wired, May 19, 2008 With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.” Artist’s conception of a large seastead based on the spur design (Valdemar Duran) The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a “spar platform.”   Read Original Article>>

Self repairing planes

This is a damn cool technology …

From the link:

The technique works like this. If a tiny hole/crack appears in the aircraft (e.g. due to wear and tear, fatigue, a stone striking the plane etc), epoxy resin would ‘bleed’ from embedded vessels near the hole/crack and quickly seal it up, restoring structural integrity. By mixing dye into the resin, any ‘self-mends’ could be made to show as coloured patches that could easily be pinpointed during subsequent ground inspections, and a full repair carried out if necessary.

This simple but ingenious technique, similar to the bruising and bleeding/healing processes we see after we cut ourselves, has been developed by aerospace engineers at Bristol University, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It has potential to be applied wherever fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites are used. These lightweight, high-performance materials are proving increasingly popular not only in aircraft but also in car, wind turbine and even spacecraft manufacture. The new self-repair system could therefore have an impact in all these fields.

(Hat tip: KurzweilAI.net)

Nanoscale cell spying and bacterial computing

Two Kurzweil AI.net bit with a biological bent today — a 3D light microscope that resolves to 40 nanometers and E. coli engineered to compute a math puzzle.

Looking into Live Cells at Nanoscale Resolution

Technology Review, May 20, 2008 A super-high-resolution 3-D light microscope developed at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry will allow biologists to watch the workings of the tiniest organelles and even individual clusters of proteins in living cells at a resolution of 40 nanometers. Mitochondrion images (Nature Methods/Stefan Hell) The Max Planck group developed a way to get around light’s fundamental wavelength limitations by using two beams instead of one. The first light beam plays the same role–and is the same spot size–as light in a conventional microscope. It moves through the cell under study, exciting fluorescently labeled molecules inside the cell to fluoresce. The second beam “sculpts” the first, says Hell, inhibiting fluorescence created by the edges of the first beam. That reduces the effective spot size to 40 to 45 nanometers in diameter. Molecular-resolution microscopy is expected to improve patient care and play an important role in advancing personalized medicine in the future.   Read Original Article>>

 

Engineered bacteria become the first living computer

Science News, May 19, 2008 Davidson College researchers genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli to coax its DNA into computing a classic mathematical puzzle known as the burned pancake problem. The problem: start with a stack of pancakes of varying sizes burned on one side, and try to get the pancakes into order from largest to smallest — all burned side down — through a series of flips. The figurative spatula can flip at any point in the stack, but has to include all the pancakes above. The researchers inserted the Hin recombinase enzyme into E. coli. The enzyme could then flip segments of E. coli’s DNA that are marked by genetic flags. The researchers designed these segments so that, when lined up in the correct order like pancakes stacked from biggest to smallest (burned side down, of course), the DNA spells out the code for a gene that gives the bacterium resistance to an antibiotic. That way, applying the antibiotic to the colony of engineered bacteria killed all of the bacteria that had not yet solved the puzzle. Only those that had “stacked their pancakes” would survive. Measuring how long it took the bacteria to reach the solution indicated how many flips were required.   Read Original Article>>

Aging 2008 dates announced

From KurzweilAI.net:

Methuselah Foundation Announces Aging 2008 at UCLA

KurzweilAI.net, May 19, 2008 On Friday June 27th, leading scientists and thinkers in stem cell research and regenerative medicine will gather in Los Angeles at UCLA for Aging 2008 to explain how their work can combat human aging, and the sociological implications of developing rejuvenation therapies. Aging 2008 is free, with advance registration required. Dr. Aubrey de Grey, chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation, said “Our organization has raised over $10 million to crack open the logjams in longevity science. With the two-armed strategy of direct investments into key research projects, and a competitive prize to spur on scientists racing to break rejuvenation and longevity records in lab mice, the Foundation is actively accelerating the drive toward a future free of age-related degeneration.” The speakers at Aging 2008 will argue that the near-term consequences of intense research into regenerative medicine could be the development of therapies that extend healthy human life by decades, even if the therapies are applied in middle age. Peter Thiel, president of Clarium Capital, initial investor in Facebook, and lead sponsor of Aging 2008, said, “The time has come to challenge the inevitability of aging. This forum will provide an excellent opportunity to look at the scientific barriers that must be overcome to substantially extend healthy human life, as well as the ethical implications of doing so.” Aging 2008 also serves as the free opening session for the technically focused Understanding Aging Conference, which will run at UCLA on June 28th and 29th. What: Aging: The Disease, The Cure, The Implications, hosted by Methuselah Foundation When: Friday, June 27, 2008, Drinks 4pm, Presentations 5pm, Dinner 8pm Where: Royce Hall, 405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90024 Who: * Dr. Bruce Ames, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UC Berkeley * G. Steven Burrill, Chairman of Pharmasset and Chairman of Campaign for Medical Research * Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chairman and CSO of Methuselah Foundation and author of Ending Aging * Dr. William Haseltine, Chairman of Haseltine Global Health * Daniel Perry, Executive Director of Alliance for Aging Research * Bernard Siegel, Executive Director of Genetics Policy Institute * Dr. Gregory Stock, Director of Program on Medicine, Technology & Society at UCLA School of Medicine * Dr. Michael West, CEO of BioTime and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley About Methuselah Foundation The Methuselah Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to extending the healthy human lifespan. Founded in 2002 by entrepreneur David Gobel and gerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey, the Methuselah Foundation funds two major projects: The Mprize, a multimillion dollar research prize, and SENS, a detailed engineering plan to repair aging-related damage. Learn more at http://mfoundation.org.

50 years of DARPA

Here’s a cool NewScientist article on 50 years of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Just in case you didn’t know, you owe DARPA for the ability to read this blog. The earliest version of what has become the World Wide Web was a DARPA project, ARPANET.

(Hat tip: KurzweilAI.net)

Nanowire solar cells and black holes

From KurzweilAI.net, nanotech that may boost solar efficiency and black holes may have an escape hatch of sorts …

Nanowires may boost solar cell efficiency, engineers say

PhysOrg.com, May 14, 2008 University of California, San Diego electrical engineers have created experimental solar cells spiked with nanowires that could lead to highly efficient thin-film solar cells of the future.   Read Original Article>>

Physicists Demonstrate How Information Can Escape From Black Holes

PhysOrg.com, May 14, 2008 Physicists at Penn State and the Raman Research Institute in India have discovered such a mechanism by which information can be recovered from black holes. They suggest that singularities do not exist in the real world. “Information only appears to be lost because we have been looking at a restricted part of the true quantum-mechanical space-time,” said Madhavan Varadarajan, a professor at the Raman Research Institute. “Once you consider quantum gravity, then space-time becomes much larger and there is room for information to reappear in the distant future on the other side of what was first thought to be the end of space-time.”   Read Original Article>>

More science fiction turning into science fact

From KurzweilAI.net, taking steps toward an invisibility cloak …

New material may be step towards 3D invisibility cloak

New Scientist, May 13, 2008 A researcher at the University of California at Berkeley claims to have made a 3D metamaterial with a negative refractive index, the first 3D material of this kind. Physicists have in recent years made it possible to bend, or refract, light in the opposite direction to any natural materials. These metamaterials make it possible to create invisibility cloaks that hide an object by steering light around it. The materials and “invisibility cloaks” built so far have all been flat, working only in two dimensions. The negative refraction index will have to be confirmed by measuring the speed of light in the material. See Also Physicists draw up plans for real ‘cloaking device’   Read Original Article>>

Friday video fun — cool metronome clip

Great example of momentum resonance effect … (Go check out Phil Plait’s awesome explanation of this video.)

Hat tip: Boing Boing Gadgets