Bloomberg news has an excellent article about the people and companies involved in developing the Bakken oilfield AFS Trinity’s 150 mpg SUV hybrid car is generating a new round of press coverage AFS trinity appears to be looking to sell the 150 mpg SUV’s to operators of car fleets In Europe there is already a …
Michael Anissimov introduces 22 (so far) questions to help detail larger views of future technology concepts like the technological singularity. This website believes that technological change can be seen to be accelerating in many segments and by many metrics. However, there are important segments that are slower changing or constant. This is why day to …
Duke university makes new MEMS (microelectromechanical system) based robots. Each microrobot is shaped something like a spatula but with dimensions measuring just microns, or millionths of a meter. They are almost 100 times smaller than any previous robotic designs of their kind and weigh even less. The devices are about 60 microns wide, 250 microns …
A team of scientists from Boston College and Duke University has developed a highly-engineered metamaterial capable of absorbing all of thelight that strikes it – to a scientific standard of perfection – they report in Physical Review Letters. The team designed and engineered a metamaterial that uses tiny geometric surfacefeatures to successfully capture the electric …
Knowledge of Health provides a review of cancer treatment that is leading up to human clinical trial in the summer 2008 where cancer-killing granulocytes obtained from humans who exhibit high immunity against cancer will be injected into cancer patients. The review is selective and the author believes that vitamin D would also help with some …
Sirtris’ resveratrol formulation is now in Phase II clinical trials for diabetes. When it hits the market in four or five hears, David Sinclair [co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, discovered the molecule resveratrol. Sirtis Pharmaceuticals was bought by GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million] said, “It’ll be on the market as a diabetes drug. It’ll have to sell …
Nantero partnered with SVTC Technologies to offer the first eight-inch nanotube thin-film development foundry. SVTC uses Nantero’s process to prototype commercial CMOS carbon nanotube designs for fabless chip houses. Nantero has developed a “CMOS-friendly” proprietary CNT process that it will install at SVTC’s two state-of-the-art development fabs, in San Jose, Calif., and Austin, Texas. Together, …
Vernor Vinge wrote about “Signs of the Singularity” However, some of the signs will be more obvious when they are actually occuring. Robin Hanson talks about the economics of the Singularity where economic growth rates accelerate 60-250 times. This site has talked about Singularity Lite where the 2-3 times increase in economic growth rate from …
by Christina Wong When people talk about the Technological Singularity and advanced robots and artificial (general) intelligence, it seems a large part of the denial of that future is the idea that “a machine cannot do what I do” or “a machine cannot replace my job”. It does not necessarily take more “intelligence”. People have …
Engineers at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have whipped up, for the first time, permanent nanoscale bubbles—bubbles that endure for more than a year—from batches of foam made from a mixture of glucose syrup, sucrose stearate, and water. Future applications of these microbubbles could significantly extend the lifetimes of common gas-liquid products …
IEEE Spectrum has a special report on the Singularity with contributions from several authors. Vernor Vinge first postulated the concept of a technological Singularity and he has an essay “Signs of the Singularity” and a video “How to Prepare for the Singularity” Richard Jones has an article “Rupturing The Nanotech Rapture”, but the essay criticizes …