Ultracold – Two Ion Quantum Computer Proposal

Apparatus for generating a two-color optical lattice. Co-propagating beams at both wavelengths are incident on a diffractive optical element (DOE) shown in (a), formed by a photolithographed gold-coated fused silica surface consisting of a regular array of raised equilateral triangles. The image shown was obtained with an atomic force microscope. In (b), reflected light is …

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What We Might Expect of Early Nanofactories

J Storrs Hall, President of the Foresight Institute, considers what will be the likely situation with early nanofactories. The first nanofactories will probably be DNA/RNA/protein gadgets requiring thousands of steps by skilled scientists to coax them to build a new gadget (which will consist only of DNA/RNA/protein), or diamondoid gadgets in high vacuum requiring thousands …

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Beyond Cloud Computing, Global Computers and World Operating Systems

*TFLOPS is the actual teraflops from the software cores, not the peak values from CPU/GPU/PS3 specs. Please see our main FAQ, FLOPS FAQ, PS3 FAQ, NVIDIA GPU FAQ, or ATI GPU FAQ for more details on specific platforms. Active means those that have returned within 10-50 days depending upon the type of processor. Folding@home the …

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Carnival of Space 103

Chandra blog has the Carnival of Space Week 103. This site submitted a look at computer and television technology in the first 43 years since Star Trek started and looking forward 43 years. Phil Plait, the bad astonomer, looks at ten things you did not know about Hubble. Centauri Dreams has Athena Andreadis’ look at …

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DNA Origami Self-Assembled Growth Details

This is a more detailed follow up to the original nextbigfuture article announcing the development of a method to grow DNA origami. This article discusses more details of the methods and error rates of what was done. This is a pathway to assembling larger complex molecularly precise structures. Recently there was success with the algorithmic …

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1 MW and 20 Megawatt Kitegen Wind Power Systems Funding of 15 million Euro Announced

The radical italian Kitegen wind power system appears to have funding of 15 million euro (announced not distributed). An interesting synergy is possible with large Kitegen systems and nuclear power plants. Kitegen systems could be co-located with nuclear power plants to help prevent any illegal airplanes from hitting the nuclear plant. (Kite flying would be …

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What is DARPA Doing Now ?

1. DARPA has funded Rice University to develop platform-aware compilation environment”. Enable compilers which are the everywhere to be faster without needing highly skilled people spending a lot of time tuning each one. If they succeed all computers would become faster. “When a compiler translates human-written code into executable code, it makes myriad choices that …

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McKinseys View of Chinas Future Urbanization: Chinese Cities in 2025 and 2030

A 560 page report on the future of China’s cities. * China is leading the global urbanization trend of developing countries and in 2025-2030 one in five of the global city dwellers will be in Chinese cities* Based on current trends, China in 2025 will have 221 cities with more than one million people compared …

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Michael Sargent Co-blogger at the Speculist Died

Michael Sargent, co-blogger at the future technology blog the Speculist, was killed in an automobile accident. The web community of futurists and technology enthusiasts will be poorer for his absence. In lieu of flowers, Peggy Sargent has asked that donations be sent to the American Heart Association. Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader …

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