Gold “nano-bullets” — tiny silica particles plated with gold and heated with near-infrared light — could seek and destroy inoperable human cancers, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We believe that we should also be able to treat very small metastases, not detected yet,” said Jennifer West, who led the study at Rice University,
“Future dangers from new technologies may appear alarming when considered in the context of today’s unprepared world,” says Ray Kurzweil. “The reality is that the sophistication and power of our defensive technologies and knowledge will grow along with the dangers.
“GNR [genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics] technologies cannot be stopped, and broad pursuit of relinquishment will only distract us from the vital task in front of us: to rapidly… read more
“From the anti-Jewish blood libels of the Old World to the modern mythology of tainted Halloween candy in the New, public hysteria usually begins with the idea that unseen forces are conspiring to poison us or kill our children.
“This article in Resurgence magazine, The Heart of Darkness: Small is not always beautiful, is such a perfect example of how the misrepresentations, distortions and half-truths that I’ve… read more
A new light detector made of silicon could fuse microelectronic and light-based information processors. Carved directly onto silicon chips, such devices could make circuits smaller, cheaper and more robust.
The Inevitable Collision System (ICS) aims to make it impossible for robots to bump into objects, including people.
It works by continuously calculating an exclusion zone (for possible collisions) around the robot based on its motion and that of the objects around it.
To date there has only been one recorded roboticide. In 1981, Japanese factory worker Kenji Urada was killed by a robot in a manufacturing plant… read more
The 10-micron-long Cornell nano-guitar, first built in 1997 but only now played for the first time, twangs at a frequency of 40 megahertz, some 17 octaves (or a factor of 130,000) higher than a normal guitar.
There is no practical microphone available for picking up the guitar sounds, but the reflected laser light could be computer processed to provide an equivalent acoustic trace at a much lower frequency. The… read more
“Robots are people, too! Or at least they will be, someday.” That’s the rallying cry of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, and it’s beginning to become a genuine issue.
Questions:
Rice University researchers have demonstrated that molecule-sized electronic devices can be used for both logic and memory, despite being randomly wired, error-prone and inaccurately formed at the nanoscale.
Rice professor James Tour said his work demonstrates that today’s chip makers can achieve increases of two to three orders of magnitude in chip density by leveraging the lithographic tools they already have to form random-access addresses into arrays of nanoscale… read more
Because of strong overseas sales and rising demand for wireless phones and mobile personal computers, the chip industry finally appears to be on the mend.
The Semiconductor Industry Association is expected to predict that in 2004 the worldwide chip industry will grow far more than the 16.5 percent to 17 percent that it forecast earlier this year.
Investors and policy makers are finding that pinpointing the potential environmental and health impacts of nanotechnology could take years.
The federal government has projected that sales of products based on nanotechnology will reach $1 trillion by 2015. That pace of industrial adoption is on a collision course with the measured pace of toxicology and environmental impact research.
Scientists at Stanford University have created an “expanded DNA” (xDNA) artificial form of the DNA molecule with a double helix 20 percent wider than any found in nature.
It is more heat resistant than natural DNA and is fluorescent, which could prove useful in detecting genetic defects in humans by observing fluorescence in a base pair for a complementary strand of natural DNA or RNA in human tissue. A… read more
Researchers at Berkeley at the University of California have created the world’s smallest electrical device: a motor using a multiwall nanotube as axel and bearing.
Researchers say a new CMOS-compatible tunnel diode process could extend the lifetime of existing silicon fabs by leapfrogging the next node in the semiconductor road map.
A SRAM circuit using tunnel diodes could reduce the chip component real estate required so as to achieve four times the density of a conventional SRAM memory cell. A process is in place to begin building such devices on standard CMOS fab lines.… read more
Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have created a new atlas that would enable scientists to determine when and where specific genes are switched on in the central nervous system (CNS).
Researchers can use such clues to explore the molecular machinery that coordinates neural development and chart the functional circuitry of the brain and spinal cord. All data from the Gene Expression Nervous System Atlas (GENSAT) BAC Transgenic Project will… read more
A research team in Japan says it has successfully demonstrated for the first time in the world in a solid-state device one of the two basic building blocks that will be needed to construct a viable quantum computer.
The team has built a controlled NOT (CNOT) gate, a fundamental building block for quantum computing. The CNOT gate is one of two gates used with quantum bits (qubits). The other,… read more