The field of nanotechnology is divided between those who think it will simply improve our lives and those who think it will completely transform them.
The former group thinks of nanotechnology as essentially a new branch of materials science. The latter group, inspired by nanotechnologist Eric Drexler, hews to a more ambitious vision in which molecular manufacturing, nanomedicine, and even nanoweapons will radically reshape the world.
From science fiction to the halls of Congress, the promise and perils of nanotechnology have become big news. But just what is nanotechnology, what are its prospects, and how should policymakers and citizens think about it? Adam Keiper explores the surprisingly varied meanings of nanotech, and the implications of our growing control over the very small.
The nano future is emerging through the haze of hype: the road to terabit memory and cheap flat-screen displays will be paved with carbon nanotubes.
Carbon nanotubes are, in theory at least, the ideal material for building tomorrow’s nanoelectronics. And now, a little more than 10 years after their discovery, nanotubes seem ready to make the transition from exotic laboratory wonders to materials useful in actual technologies. Prototypes of… read more
Nanotech file sharing could bridge the “nano divide” by helping developing countries launch their own nanotech industries.
Aptimize, a startup based in Wellington, New Zealand, that launches its service for websites in the United States today, says its software can speed up website load times, bringing increases of 200 to 400 percent in some cases.
The software gets into the middle of the normally sluggish page-processing pipeline and makes it more efficient. It combines resources so they only have to be downloaded once. For example, it… read more
Proteus Biomedical has developed a system that monitors pill taking and its effects, using pills that report when they’ve been taken and sensors that monitor the body’s responses, allowing doctors to monitor compliance and side effects.
Each pill contains an “ingestible event marker” (IEM), a sand-grain-size microchip with a thin-film battery activated upon ingestion. Each IEM sends a unique high-frequency electrical current throughout the body’s tissues, logged by a… read more
Artificial neural networks could surpass the capabilities of conventional computer-based pattern recognition systems.
Research reported in PLoS Biology shows that very young infants are sensitive to both the number and identity of objects, and these pieces of information are processed by distinct neural pathways.
3-months-old infants were watching images of objects where the number or identity of objects occasionally changed. Electrical activity measured on the scalp showed that the infant brain responded to both changes, but in different brain regions, which map… read more
Religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks, scientists at UCLA and other universities have found.
They used fMRI to measure signal changes in the brains of committed Christians and nonbelievers as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, belief (judgments of “true  read more
The amygdala plays a key role in the brain during the “ah ha!” moment (“perceptual insight”), researchers at the Center for Neural Science at New York University have found.
Perceptual insight is where the sudden realization of a solution to a visual puzzle is triggered by an external cue. Specific brain activity that occurs during an “A-ha!” moment may help encode the new information in long-term memory.
Their… read more
Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran believes that “other awareness” may have evolved first and then, counterintutively, the same ability was exploited to model ones own mind–what one calls self awareness. He also suggests that a specific system of neurons called mirror neurons are involved in this ability.
Levitating high-speed trains, super-efficient power generators and ultra-powerful supercomputers would become commonplace thanks to a new breed of materials known as high temperature superconductors (HTSC).
Scott Borg, the director and chief economist of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a Department of Homeland Security advisory group, believes that attacks on computer networks are poised to escalate to full-scale disasters that could bring down companies, destroy power grids, and kill people.
Spurred by the risks from roadside bombs and terrorist ambushes, the military is aggressively seeking to replace troops with battlefield robots, including new versions armed with machine guns.
Diamond microchips could handle higher temperatures than today’s microprocessors, allowing them to run at speeds that would liquefy ordinary silicon.
“If Moore’s law is going to be maintained, processors are going to get hotter and hotter,” says Bernhardt Wuensch, an MIT professor of materials science. “Eventually, silicon is just going to turn into a puddle. Diamond is the solution to that problem.”
Two startups are developing multicarat, gem-quality… read more