New Scientist has an article about a new fab@Home system for $2400 The fab@home This system is in the fabber category which has different systems of different capabilities. The MIT Fab lab is described in many places The MIT fablab is more expensive at $20,000-40000 There is also the inexpensive Reprap system which is about …
I have made some contributions to the public blog for the EPSRC Ideas Factory “Software Control of Matter”, directed by Richard Jones. My ideas on trying to creatively create new breakthroughs in capability Looking at gatling gun architectures and breaking up a working surface like ice cubes from an ice cube tray. This is and …
Christian Joachim, has lead a research team that has made a molecular rack-and-pinion device for which an STM tip drives a single pinion molecule at low temperature. The pinion is a 1.8-nm-diameter molecule functioning as a six-toothed wheel interlocked at the edge of a self-assembled molecular island acting as a rack. They monitor the rotation …
An article discussing evidence for and against ice on the moon I agree that we should continue with sending the robotic probes necessary to be absolutely certain about what ice is or is not there and what can be used. An article that discusses getting energy from space or deflecting sunlight to counter global warming. …
Futurehype by Bob Seidensticker is an interesting book and there are excerpts at his website He does point out some problems that make technology and societal predictions hard. However, I believe it is possible to be quite accurate. I agree with him that understanding the past and the past of technology matters.I agree with him …
Mostafa Ronaghi, one of the inventors of this sequencing chemistry, group at Stanford is working on an inexpensive superscaler pyrosequencer. It would use $10 CMOS imaging instead of $100,000 CCDs. The objective is to run 400 million sequencing reactions in parallel that can produce between 60 and 100 gigabases of data per run with 200-base …
The World Future Society makes forecasts which show that the forecasters do not seem to really understand some of the technology that they are forecasting. Forecast #2: The era of the Cyborg is at hand. Researchers in Israel have fashioned a “bio-computer” using the DNA of living cells instead of silicon chips. This development may …
New lighter ceramic armor with some nanotechnology material aspects may appear in Iraq in 2007 They intend to mimic sea snail shells. By alternating very thin layers of a hard chalk-like material with layers of its own sticky proteins (snail spittle, if you will), sea snails create shells that are tough, light and durable. “We’re …
George Church predicts 2007 as the year of personal genomics The price to sequence the 1% of the genome that differentiates people will drop to a street price of $3000 in 2007. Momentum is thus building for millions of people to volunteer to have their genome data correlated with their physical-traits to benefit the billions …
A link from CrNano, a paper called Making molecular machines work which surveys recent advances in the achievement of control of motion at the molecular level including solid-state and surface-mounted rotors, and its natural progression to the development of synthetic molecular machines. Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger …
The Chinese government supports university research and gives them money to pay for the use of the service [supercomputer grid]. That is better than to spend money on buying thousands of separate smaller systems and none of them can do significant work. China only has two supercomputer centers now. Steve Chen is recommending and apparently …