Eric Drexler, one of the primary originators of many of the concepts of molecular nanotechnology, has written an article which clarifies his position on diamond based molecular nanotechnology. Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle and others in the Nanofactory Collaboration have written a response indicating why they have chosen the direct to diamondoid development path. Our …
This a follow up to prior article about re-inventing civil defense using and one on improving blast resistance of buildings. The U.S. Army has developed a new blast-protection adhesive tape called X-Flex. This X-FLEX tape would be used to coat the interior sides of exterior walls in order to absorb the shock of a blast, …
The $99 iPhone are refurbished phones available until Dec 31, 2008 and require a two year AT&T service plan. Wal-Mart will offer the 8GB iPhone 3G for $197 and the 16GB model for $297. That’s a whopping $2 off AT&T’s iPhone prices and includes the same two-year service contract. Best Buy, in contrast, is currently …
South Africa’s Sasol Synfuels has a US$10 billion project to build 1.1 million barrels per day of oil equivalent with a massive coal to liquid operation in Indonesia. Until recently coal to liquid cost $1 billion for 10,000 barrels per day of oil equivalent. So the Sasol operation is eleven times more cost effective at …
The technological and other developments to watch was expanded to four parts:1. Computers, robots, electronics and communication2. Energy and transportation3. DNA/biotech/synthetic biology, nanotechnology – this section4. Medicine, life extension, space, manufacturing and anything else that was not covered 1. DNA nanotechnology There was a lot of activity with DNA nanotechnology in 2008 with new synthetic …
The Space elevator blog discusses the needed tether strength based on work by Ben Shelef, CEO of the Spaceward Foundation: A tether which has a tensile strength of 30 GPa-cc/g would be strong enough to create a useful Space Elevator provided the Climber power system can generate at least 1.5 kWatt/kg. If the tensile strength …
A large increase in the capability of computers to augment our intelligence and productivity is coming but the societal impact will be dwarfed by the increasing democratization of the capability of many more people to have meaningful opportunities to tackle the big problems. Intelligence and Productivity Enhancement with Computers 1. Besides the basic connection, there …
Here is a video showing what General Fusion is doing. As previously described: if you can get within ten to hundred times the cost of regular power, you would still have huge uses for nuclear fusion. You could revolutionize space travel even if it costs more for nuclear fusion than it does for regular power. …
Eric Drexler at Metamodern points out a two page roadmap to low cost DNA production by one of the top people in the field of DNA synthesis, George Church. George lays out a roadmap synthesize DNA material for dollars per kilogram of DNA. This price is about a billion times cheaper than current costs for …
J Storrs Hall has conceived of Utility Fog and a Space Pier and now his idea for nanotechnology enabled climate control. Version One: 1000 Times More Powerful than Global Warming You build a little balloon—my guess is the balloon needs to be somewhere between a millimeter and a centimeter in size. It has a very …
A new-found aspect to superconductivity, called the “paramagnetic intrinsic Meissner effect,” is that a strong magnetic field could be used to raise temperatures at which materials become superconducting. A superconductor in a weak magnetic field expels the external magnetic field, but a superconductor in a strong magnetic field sometimes concentrates magnetic lines rather than loses …