Foresight Update 23.45: Physics Nobel for graphene research—October 22, 2010
ISSN 1078-9731
Discuss these news stories at http://foresight.org/nanodot.
In this issue:
Foresight Events – Lectures
Foreseeing Future Technologies - Join Foresight
Events
Contact Foresight
This humorous essay at Cracked.com by David Wong has a lot of truth in it about the change we are now seeing in how the economy functions, as so many goods and services are produced using automation …
…Several times a year, Humanity+, the world’s leading nonprofit for the ethical use of technology, holds conferences about the sciences, technologies and social issues concerning the future. Past Humanity+ conferences have taken place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard University and Irvine, California. Our next conference, Humanity+ @ Caltech, will take place on December 4-5th (Saturday-Sunday) at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
Speakers will include many of the top visionaries and leaders of the transhumanist community, as well as new voices from the worlds of science, art, media and business.…
Researchers at Louisiana Tech University have developed a nanostructured device that uses the effects of light and thermal energy on a carbon nanotube film to generate enough power to operate some low power microsensors and integrated circuits. …
The already numerous uses of DNA origami have been still further extended by the demonstration of topological reconfiguration—specifically, turning a 50-nanometer diameter Möbius strip into an open ring of twice the diameter by cutting along its centerline by removing the DNA “staples” along the centerline. …
An important precept of proposals for advanced nanotechnology/molecular manufacturing is that precisely applied mechanical force will control chemical reactions specifically enough to permit atomically precise construction of large (on a molecular scale), complex objects. Further, structural DNA nanotechnology, particularly scaffolded DNA origami, has been proposed to provide frameworks for use in nanotechnology to spatially organize functional components (see, for example “Modular DNA nanotubes provide programmable scaffolds for nanotechnology” and “Advancing nanotechnology by organizing functional components on addressable DNA scaffolds”.
Now, these two threads, mechanical control of chemical reactions and DNA nanotechnology have been brought together.…
From ScienceDaily “Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 for Graphene — ‘Two-Dimensional’ Material”:…
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both of the University of Manchester, “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.”…
An IEEE Spectrum podcast asks the question, Why Are Terrorists Often Engineers? The blurb:…
With terrorism back in the news, so, too, is a curious footnote: Of the hundreds of individuals involved in political violence, nearly half of those with degrees have been engineers. …
We have reports from a couple of Foresight members who have toured the Allosphere, part of the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara, and it sounds truly impressive. From their website…
Projects exist for aggregating personal computers into one large project for various worthy purposes, from space to biology research, some nanotech-related such a protein folding. Now IBM has a similar project with the goal of developing nanotechnologies for clean water. From Grist.org …
—Nanodot posts by Christine Peterson and Jim Lewis
Foresight Events – Lectures
Foresight Lectures
October 27, 2010, 04:15 pm- 06:15 pm
Bioethics Center
The Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University
77 Prospect St, room B012
New Haven, Connecticut
Josh Storrs Hall, Founding Chief Scientist of Nanorex, Inc. and past President of the Foresight Institute will speak on "Technology Indistinguishable from Magic".
Click here for event announcement
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.
Since 1986, the Foresight Institute has been in the forefront of a worldwide community of visionaries who work to help shape these possibilities into a positive, beneficial reality. If you would like to help us understand the potential of these technologies, and influence their direction, please consider becoming a member of the Foresight community. With your support, Foresight will continue to educate the general public on these technologies and what they will mean to our society.
To join:
http://foresight.org/members/index.html
Events
Nanoinformatics 2010
November 3-5, 2010
A Collaborative Roadmapping Workshop
Arlington, VA
Nanoinformatics 2010 is a collaborative roadmapping and workshop project at which informatics experts, nanotechnology researchers and policy makers, and other stakeholders and potential contributors will jointly develop a roadmap for the area of nanoinformatics.
Nanoinformatics 2010 is designed to survey the landscape, generate a roadmap, and stimulate collaborative activities in the area of nanoinformatics. By doing so, it will accelerate the responsible development and use of nanotechnology. Workshop themes include:
- Data Collection and Curation
- Tools for Innovation, Analysis, and Simulation
- Data Accessibility and Information Sharing
Humanity+ @ Caltech
December 4-5, 2010
Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change
Pasadena, CA
Several times a year, Humanity+, the world's leading nonprofit for the ethical use of technology, holds conferences about the sciences, technologies and social issues concerning the future. Past Humanity+ conferences have taken place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard University and Irvine, California. Our next conference, Humanity+ @ Caltech, will take place on December 4-5th (Saturday-Sunday) at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
Speakers will include many of the top visionaries and leaders of the future technology community, as well as new voices from the worlds of science, art, media and business.
The Humanity+ @ Caltech program will be divided into four main sessions, each one of which will cover a key area of futurist thought:
- Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media and Methods (Saturday morning)
- Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan (Saturday afternoon)
- Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement and Substrate-Independent Minds (Sunday morning)
- Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis (Sunday afternoon)
Contact Foresight
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