Competing teams will be racing their robotic vehicles across the Mojave desert this Saturday, attracted by a Pentagon promise to pay $1 million to the creators of the first self-guided vehicle to find its way along a programmed course from Barstow, Calif. to near Las Vegas.
With so many stories heralding the merits of carbon nanotubes as the channels of next-generation nanoscale transistors, you’d think the case was closed. Not so, say researchers, who claim nanowires can create better nanoscale transistors — ones that can be placed more accurately, can use application-specific doping, and can be more easily integrated with traditional silicon processing.
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.
Research in electroactive polymers (EAPs), a type of artificial muscle, seems to have finally paid off with some useful products. Among them: powerful pumps and motors, nearly silent propulsion technologies, and novel drug-delivery systems.
EAPs could fundamentally alter drug delivery. Marc Madou of UC Irvine is developing implantable, matchstick-sized capsules with microscopic pores. When sensors detect that a patient needs, say, more insulin, artificial muscles open valves under the… read more
A programmable biochip that uses an array of electrodes to place water droplets on a surface, insert substances into the droplets, and move and merge the droplets, with no moving parts, could eventually be miniaturized and incorporated into portable medical, biological and chemical diagnostic devices.
These can form the core of versatile, automated, microscale devices for performing chemical and biological assays at or near the point of care.
“Synthetic drug discovery,” a major shift in the way drugs have been discovered and made represents a future that some scientists fear — one where robots quickly draw from vast libraries of man-made molecules, then test them, mixing and matching with the same sort of equipment that transformed the Detroit automotive industry.
New tools to improve human performance will emerge from the convergence of nanotech, biotech, infotech and cognitive science.
When data from nanobiochips that can analyze DNA, RNA and proteins is combined with data from next-generation brain imaging systems , new tools for mental health will emerge.
Nanobiochips that can perform the basic bioanalysis functions (genomic, proteomic, biosimulation and microfluidics) at a low cost will transform biological analysis and… read more
Researchers are developing a magnetic nanoparticle-based technology that removes biological, radiological and chemical toxins from blood. The goal: a portable system that is fast and thorough using magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies or chemicals that complement toxins. The technology could be used for treating soldiers exposed to anthrax.
What makes 800 of the country’s smartest, most wildly successful architects, designers, inventors, chief executives, psychologists, ichthyologists, cosmologists, economists, digital artists and other members of the creative, academic and financial elite happy?
Answer: Ruminating about “The Pursuit of Happiness” at the TED conference, the annual $4,000-a-pop three-and-a-half-day hedonistic be-in for the brain that brings together “thought leaders” from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design.
PARC researchers have come up with an “enrollment station” device that lets new users securely sign on to a wireless LAN in less than five minutes, as well as a way for otherwise incompatible digital consumer devices to exchange data.
The White House’s policy on research with human embryonic stem cells has been put under new pressure by the dismissal of a leading biologist from the President’s Council on Bioethics last week and by the development, announced today, of new stem cell lines by a Harvard researcher.
Dr. Douglas Melton, a biologist at Harvard, reported today in The New England Journal of Medicine that he had developed 17 new… read more
NASA’s Opportunity rover has found convincing evidence that large quantities of water were once present in at least one location on Mars.
“The rocks here were once soaked in liquid water,” said Steve Squyres, principle investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, referring to the bedrock outcrop near the rover’s landing site in Meridiani Planum. Evidence suggests that, at some point in Mars’s past, water was present in… read more
Scientists are again claiming they have made a Sun in a jar, offering perhaps a revolutionary energy source based on sonoluminescence.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists used ultrasonic vibrations to shake a jar of liquid solvent. They squeezed tiny gas bubbles in the liquid so quickly and violently that temperatures reached millions of degrees and some of the hydrogen atoms in the solvent molecules fused, producing a flash of… read more