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>>

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

 

Parsing the future of the World Wide Web

Here’s cool bit from Technology Review with short responses from a number of luminaries when asked where the Web will be in five to ten years.

A sample of the responders:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the Web; Cambridge, MA

Vint Cerf
Vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google and co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet; McLean, VA

Richard Stallman
Main developer of the GNU/Linux system and founder of the Free Software Movement; Cambridge, MA

 

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>>

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>>

Ethernet cables for $500?

I’ve blogged about audiophile lunacy before and this certainly isn’t the worst example out there, but it seems Denon is marketing some ethernet cables to audiophiles for a whopping five hundred dollars.

From the Boing Boing (second) link:

The people who sell super-expensive cables are on the march from Audiophileland to Nerdasia. Are we ready for the onslaught? First up: $500 ethernet cables from Denon!

IP is what we usually send over these cables, error-corrected from end-to-end. This means, generally, that throughput, rather than quality, is what drops with interference or long runs—the networking cards perform integrity checks on incoming packets and ask for re-sends if they’re imperfect.

From a standard computing perspective, then, this cable is outright robbery if what you use it for involves ethernet networking, with routers and computers and what-have-you.

Conductive plastics

A potentially very useful nanotech application. Putting two insulating plastics together creates a two nanometer electrically conductive strip. This interface is more conductive than standard semiconductors.

From the link:

Jamming the right two pieces of plastic together creates a thin but strongly conducting channel along the junction that acts like a metal, say Dutch researchers. The discovery could lead to a whole new way of making electronics from non-metallic materials, and even new superconductors.

Alberto Morpurgo’s team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands attached a micrometer-thick crystal of the organic polymer TTF to a similarly thin organic crystal of the polymer TCNQ.

The thin, flexible crystals conform to each other’s shape and stick together due to van der Waals forces, says Morpurgo.

Metal surprise

Both TTF and TCNQ are electrical insulators. But Morpurgo’s team found that a 2-nanometre-thick strip along the interface between the two crystals conducts electricity as well as a metal.

(Hat tip: KurzweilAI.net)

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>>

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.”

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>>

Spectrum Singularity special

IEEE Spectrum Online has a special report on the Singularity.  I haven’t read much of it just yet, but looks pretty cool.

Vernor Vinge pens one article.

Here’s an excerpt:

In that event, I expect the singularity will come as some combination of the following:

 

The AI Scenario: We create superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) in computers.

 

The IA Scenario: We enhance human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces—that is, we achieve intelligence amplification (IA).

 

The Biomedical Scenario: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological operation of our brains.

 

The Internet Scenario: Humanity, its networks, computers, and databases become sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

 

The Digital Gaia Scenario: The network of embedded microprocessors becomes sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

 

The essays in this issue of IEEE Spectrum use similar definitions for the technological singularity but variously rate the notion from likely to totally bogus. I’m going to respond to arguments made in these essays and also mine them for signs of the oncoming singularity that we might track in the future.

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>>

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>>

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>>

Science fiction in the real world

From KurzweilAI.net — a city of the future is going up in Abu Dhabi, and “Fantastic Voyage” gets one step closer to reality.

Building the Zero-Emissions City

Technology Review, May 8, 2008 Construction has started on a city in Abu Dhabi that will house 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses but use extremely little energy, and what it does use will come from renewable sources. The city, which is expected to cost $22 billion, will implement an array of technologies, including thin-film solar panels that serve as the facades and roofing materials for buildings, ubiquitous sensors for monitoring energyuse, and driverless vehicles powered by batteries that make cars unnecessary. The city’s founders hope that it will serve as a test bed for a myriad of new technologies being proposed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.   Read Original Article>>

Nanoworms target tumors

KurzweilAI.net, May 8, 2008 Scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT have developed nanometer-sized “nanoworms” that can cruise through the bloodstream without significant interference from the body’s immune defense system and home in on tumors, reminiscent of the science fiction movie, Fantastic Voyage. The scientists constructed their nanoworms from spherical iron oxide nanoparticles that join together, like segments of an earthworm, to produce tiny gummy worm-like structures about 30 nanometers long. Their iron-oxide composition allows the nanoworms to show up brightly in MRI diagnostic devices. Using nanoworms, doctors should eventually be able to target and reveal the location of developing tumors that are too small to detect by conventional methods. Carrying payloads targeted to specific features on tumors, these microscopic vehicles could also one day provide the means to more effectively deliver toxic anti-cancer drugs to specific tumors, organs and other sites in the body, in high concentrations without negatively impacting other parts of the body. University of California, San Diego news release

Display nanowires, ultramicroelectrodes, more affordable solar news

From KurzweilAI.net — Upright copper nanowires may be key to better flat panel displays, single-walled carbon nanotubes form ultramicroelectrodes, more news on solar electricity that rivals fossil fuels in cost.

Nanowires for Displays

Technology Review, May 6, 2008 Researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign have developed a simple process to grow upright copper nanowires on different surfaces. The nanowire arrays could find use in field-emission displays, a new type of display technology that promises to provide brighter, more vivid pictures than existing flat-panel displays.   Read Original Article>>

Nanotube production leaps from sooty mess in test tube to ready formed chemical microsensors

PhysOrg.com, May 6, 2008 University of Warwick chemists have produced single-walled carbon nanotubes that instantly form ultramicroelecrodes that could be used to create biocompatible, ultrasensitive sensors with high signal-to-noise ratios and fast response times. The research team is exploring how these ultramicroelecrodes could be used to measure levels of neurotransmitters and catalysis in fuel cells.   Read Original Article>>

Focusing on Solar’s Cost

Technology Review, May 7, 2008 Solar startup Sunrgi says that it will soon be able to produce electricity from the sun at costs that are competitive with fossil-fuel generation. The company has created a concentrated photovoltaic system that uses a lens to focus sunlight up to 2,000 times sun concentration onto tiny solar cells that can convert 37.5 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity. Stronger concentrations of sunlight allow engineers to use much smaller solar cells, making it more economical to use higher-efficiency–but higher-cost–cells.   Read Original Article>>

Reason mag interviews Peter Thiel

Here’s an interesting Reason interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and angel investor of Facebook. They discuss libertarianism, The Singularity and the ongoing progress of science.

From Ronald Baily’s introduction:

I first met Peter Thiel—co-founder of PayPal, angel investor in Facebook, founder of the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, adviser to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and self-described libertarian—at a party in his San Francisco home last September. Perhaps 100 digerati wandered through Thiel’s sleek Marina District townhouse, chatting amiably over wine and canapés in rooms filled with up-to-the-minute abstract art.

The party launched the second annual Singularity Summit, held at the nearby Palace of Fine Arts during the ensuing two days. The Singularity, a term coined by the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1983, refers to the eventual technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. Just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to describe the center of a black hole, Vinge observed, our attempts to model the future break down when we try to foresee a world that contains smarter-than-human intelligences. The Singularity Institute takes it for granted that exponentially accelerating information technology will produce such artificial intelligences; its chief goal is to make sure they will be friendly to humans.

In 1987, while studying philosophy at Stanford, Thiel helped found the libertarian/conservative student newspaper The Stanford Review. As a law student at Stanford he was president of the university’s Federalist Society. After working briefly for the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell in New York, Thiel switched to trading derivatives for Credit Suisse Financial. In the mid-1990s, Thiel transformed himself into a venture capitalist and a serial entrepreneur. He returned to California, where he has backed a number of startups. In addition to PayPal and Facebook, Thiel has invested in the social networking site LinkedIn, the search engine company Powerset, and the Web security provider IronPort.

Thiel also joined the culture wars by co-authoring The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1996), and was an executive producer for the 2005 feature film Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley’s politically incorrect novel of the same name. Besides backing the Singularity Institute, Thiel pledged a $3.5 million matching grant in 2006 to the Methuselah Foundation to support its anti-aging research agenda.

I interviewed Thiel between sessions at the Singularity Summit.

Nanotrees and nanomotors

From KurzweilAI.net, nanotrees are a new type of nanowire and Arizona State researchers have created the fastest nanomotor.

Spiraling nanotrees offer new twist on growth of nanowires

PhysOrg.com, May 1, 2008 University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have discovered a new way of growing nanowires that leads to “nanopines”–elaborate pine-tree-shaped nanowires–caused by a “screw” dislocation, or defect, in their crystal structure. Dislocations are fundamental to the growth and characteristics of all crystalline materials, but this is the first time they’ve been shown to aid the growthof one-dimensional nanostructures. Engineering these dislocations may allow scientists to create more elaborate nanostructures, and to investigate the fundamental mechanical, thermal and electronic properties of dislocations in materials.   Read Original Article>>

 

Revving up the world’s fastest nanomotor

PhysOrg.com, May 1, 2008 Arizona State University researchers have developed a new generation of nanomotors with an average speed of 60 micrometers per second. Tracks left by various types of speeding nanomotors (American Chemical Society) Existing catalytic nanomotors–made with gold and platinum nanowires and fueled with hydrogen peroxide–have top speeds of about 10 micrometers per second. The new design adds carbon nanotubes to the platinum (boosting the average speed) and spikes the hydrogenperoxide fuel with hydrazine to increase the nanomotor’s top speed to 200 nanometers per second.   Read Original Article>>

Cheaper solar, “erasable” printer paper and medical imaging simplification

Nice group from KurzweilAI.net today. News that solar is coming down in price, “erasable” printer paper, and a simplification for sending medical imaging data.

A Price Drop for Solar Panels

Technology Review, May 1, 2008 A shortage of the silicon used in solar panels is almost over, industry analysts predict. This could lead to a sharp drop in prices over the next couple of years, making solar electricity comparable to power from the grid. Added silicon production capacity is now starting to begin operations. While only 15,000 tons of silicon were available for use in solar cells in 2005, by 2010, this number could grow to 123,000 tons. And that will allow existing and planned production of solar panels to ramp up, increasing supply and reducing prices. Prices for solar panels could drop by as much as 50 percent from 2006 to 2010. In areas that get a lot of sun, that will translate to solar electricity costs of about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, matching the average price of electricity in the United States.   Read Original Article>>

 

Xerox touts erasable paper, smart documents

Computerworld, April 29, 2008 Xerox has developed paper that can be reused after printed text automatically deletes itself from the paper’s surface within 24 hours. A single piece of paper can be reused up to 100 times for black and white printing. The paper contains specially coded molecules that create a print after being exposed to ultraviolet light emitted from a thin bar in a printer. The molecule readjusts itself within 24 hours to its original form to delete the print, or heat can readjust the molecule instantly. Xerox scientists also demonstrated technologies to make documents more intelligent by providing a deeper meaning to text and images. This is done by cross-referencing similar data and images mined off the Internet and incorporating other sources like e-mail messages and corporate networks.   Read Original Article>>

 

Cellphones used for medical imaging?

ZDNET, April 30, 2008 University of California at Berkeley researchers have developed a technique for transmitting medical images via cellphones. The cell phone, hooked up to the data acquisition device(breast tomoography sensor, xray or MRI machine, etc.), would transmit the raw data to a central server, where the information would be used to create an image. The server would then relay a highly compressed image back to the cell phone, where the doctor could view it on the cell phone screen. The system makes medical imaging much cheaper and more accessible to the poor because the apparatus at the patient site is greatly simplified, and there is no need for personnel highly trained in imaging processing. Video   Read Original Article>>

Nanoassembler prototype announced

From KurzweilAI.net:

US researchers have built a proto-prototype nano assembler

Nanowerk, April 28, 2008 Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed an early prototype for a nanoassembler. The NIST system consists of four Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) devices positioned around a centrally located port on a chip into which the starting materials can be placed. Each nanomanipulator is composed of a positioning mechanism with an attached nanoprobe. By simultaneously controlling the position of each of these nanoprobes, the team can use them to cooperatively assemble a complex structure on a very small scale, using using a scanning electron microscope for real-time imaging of the nanomanipulation procedures. The researchers suggest it should be possible to have multiple nanoassemblers working simultaneously to manufacture next-generation nanoelectronics.   Read Original Article>>

 

Supercomputing and nanotech products in the news

Today’s KurzweilAI.net news includes a quantum computer breakthrough and news on the ubiquity of nanotech products:

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