The process, using an incredibly intense burst of laser light, holds the promise of making everything from fuel cells to a space telescope’s detectors more efficient–not to mention turning your car into the blackest black around. Guo is also quick to point out that the nanostructures’ remarkable increase in a metal’s surface area is a …
Ray Kurzweil has some more predictions about the future that he made at a speech at SC06 (supercomputer conference 2006). Most are in his book the Singularity is Near. Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science …
From foresights nanodot and the center for responsible nanotechnology it is reported that Isreal has a five year weapons program that Isreal labels a nanotechnology weapons program. It sounds to me like the Isreali’s are working on advanced robotics, MEMS and maybe NEMS. In terms of advanced weapons being usable by the enemy, the side …
From the New Scientist, cotton that has been genetically engineered so its seed is no longer toxic could provide protein-rich food for poor countries. The researchers say the technology used could make other toxic plants safe to eat. Cottonseed contains about 22% protein, and the cotton already produced worldwide has enough protein to meet the …
The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology talks about some discussion by Kofi Annan about safegaurds against biological terrorism Annan talks about sronger rules and treaties. Rules for scientists and treaties will be mostly useless. Unlike nuclear technology there are few bottlenecks to getting biological technology capabilities. As I noted in a prior post biotech labs and …
The Dec 2006 scientific american discusses how supercontinuum lasers could drive communication speeds to 1 pbit/s or faster UK report on global high speed communication plans. Japan has 2.5 gbps to the home in the works. End to end IP Communication speed records started 2006 at about 8 Gbps. The latest transmission record is 100 …
Robert Bussard the designer of the Bussard ramjet has an electrostatic fusion device that is 100,000 times better. The key discovery for the improvement was : no metal surface penetrated by B fields must occupy more than about 1E-4 to 1E-5 of the total surface available to the recirculating electrons. If this dead fraction is …
Surveillance cameras in the city of Groningen have been adapted to listen out for voices raised in anger. Microphones attached to the cameras feed the sound signals to software that can detect voices that are aggressive in tone. “Aggressive people tend to tense their larynx, and the sound made by their vocal cords is distorted,” …
Thomas Sterling is leading the Nasa Gilgamesh project to develop the MIND architecture, a fault tolerant space-borne PIM chip and is an investigator on the DARPA-sponsored Cray Cascade Project to build a Petaflops computer by 2010. Important near term developments are streaming, the Data Vortex network, processor in memory, multithreading, and parcel-driven transaction processing among …
They have resolved a major obstacle for building a particular kind of quantum computer, the phosphorus-and-silicon quantum computer Boehme’s new study deals with an approach to a quantum computer proposed in 1998 by Australian physicist Bruce Kane in a Nature paper titled “A silicon-based nuclear spin quantum computer.” In such a computer, silicon – the …
The university of Minnesota has some maps that show leading countries in biotechnology Countries that are strong are in brown color. The next map shows which countries are permissive with stem cells. Permissive countries allow various embryonic stem cell derivation techniques including somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Brown shows permissive countries. The list for 2006 …