Researchers are building electronic circuits that mimic the brain, producing an agile controller that can maneuver robot vehicles with speed and precision.
The new technology imitates the olivocerebellar circuit, which controls balance and limb movement.
Visionaries are making robots that can perform music, rescue disaster victims and even explore other planets on their own.
Nantero plans to create NRAM, a high-density nonvolatile random access memory chip using nanotubes, on a standard semiconductor production line.
Like today’s flash and SRAM memories, carbon nanotube designs can maintain data when power is turned off; but they can also operate faster and on less power than flash memory, and are much cheaper and more compact than SRAM.
Bill Joy says he thinks the probability of a “civilization-changing event” is most likely in the double digits, perhaps as high as 50 percent.
He doesn’t merely ascribe these odds to terrorism; he suggests a pandemic disease might arise from a sudden accident or as a consequence of cutting-edge research. For disquieting evidence, he points out that a couple of years ago scientists assembled polio in a lab.… read more
Carbon nanotubes have been picked up and moved with a laser beam for the first time. The trick may make it easier to build nanotube-based microchips.
The “optical trapping” technique exploits the ability of a laser beam to trap small particles: when the beam moves, the particles move with it.
A new generation of “targeted” therapies are transforming cancer treatment by attacking the underlying molecular mechanisms of the disease — a harbinger of a future in which cancer, while not cured, will be held in check for years by drugs tolerable enough to take on a continuing basis.
Practical quantum information processing is likely to require atoms to process and store information and photons to transmit information within and between quantum computers.
Researchers from the University of Michigan have taken a significant step in finding a way to transfer information from atoms to photons and back by entangling a cadmium ion held in a vacuum by radio waves, and a single, free-flying ultraviolet photon. The technique is… read more
A useful self-replicating machine could be less complex than a Pentium IV chip, according to a new study of of “kinematic cellular automata” performed by General Dynamics for NASA.
Through simulations, the researchers demonstrated the feasibility of this kind of self-replication, which could in a decade or more lead to the mass manufacture of molecularly precise robots, display monitors and integrated circuits that can be programmed in the field,… read more
Researchers deleted huge chunks of the genome of mice without it making any discernable difference to the animals.
The result is totally unexpected because the deleted sequences included so-called “conserved regions” thought to have important functions.
Amid new warnings about a possible summer of terror, the U.S. government is preparing to spend $5.6 billion over a decade to coax pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs to fend off a biological or chemical attack.
By contrast, a single cholesterol drug — Lipitor — rakes in $9 billion in revenue each year.
The risk of somebody somewhere triggering a radioactive “dirty bomb” is growing, evidence gathered by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency suggests.
The IAEA’s records show a dramatic rise in the level of smuggling of radiological materials..
Imagine what it would be like if we could turn our brains into remote controls, sending wireless commands to computers, robots and other machines.
Researchers hope ultimately to eavesdrop on the brain’s signals with electrodes, transmit them to a computer that can read the brain’s code and then use those signals to control a machine either locally or remotely via wireless or even the Internet.
Imagine a quadriplegic… read more
Mice with sky-high metabolic rates live far longer than their sluggish cousins, UK researchers have found, raising the prospect that human lifespan might be lengthened with metabolism-boosting drugs.
The group of animals with the highest metabolic rates lived over a third longer than the group with the lowest rates, they found, and had metabolisms that ran about 30% faster. If the same is true in humans, this means that… read more