Foresight Update 23.15: Robot pioneers automation of science - April 9, 2009
Discuss these news stories at http://foresight.org/nanodot.
Top News of the Week
There's been much note in the blogosphere in recent days about Aberystwyth University's Robot Scientist project and its Adam robot…To my mind, while the construction of the physical machine is quite impressive and will save some graduate students some drudgery, the really important aspect of the work is that they had to formalize the ontology for enough of the field…
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Wrapping Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWNTs) with a molecular sleeve made from an analog of Vitamin B2 protects the SWNTs from defects caused by oxygen and renders them much more useful for nanotech applications…
It is difficult, even for someone who has been working with these ideas and numbers for the past couple of decades, to get one's head around the utter raw power potential of real nanotechnology…
A Newsdesk feature by Kelly Morris titled "Nanotechnology crucial in fighting infectious disease" in the April 2009 issue of Lancet Infectious Diseases surveys some highlights in developing nanotech efforts to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases…
A piece in The Christian Science Monitor compares Nadrian Seeman, founder of the field of structural DNA nanotechnology and winner of the 1995 Foresight Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, with Henry Ford—implying that his recent accomplishment with his collaborators in creating a two-armed DNA nanorobot could point to a role for DNA nanorobots in future nanotech assembly lines…
The Washington Post site has an item from Bloomberg News reporting Google has started a venture-capital unit to fund new technologies, including nanotechnology…
—Nanodot posts by J. Storrs Hall and James Lewis
Foresight Events – Lectures
Foresight Lectures
May 28-29, 2009
1st Annual Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence Symposium
Palo Alto, California
Christine Peterson will speak on beneficial medical nanotechnologies.
Click here for conference details
June 17-18, 2009
Size Matters 2009: the future fields of application, opportunities and ethical challenges of nanoscience
Saarbrücken, Germany
Christine Peterson will speak on Nanotechnology & Open Source Sensing.
Click here for conference details
Advancements in technologies such as nanotech, robotics, and biotech are promising to make major differences in our lives in the not-too-distant future, as the Industrial Revolution did to the agrarian world — to do for the physical world what the computer and Internet have done to the world of information.
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