Creating Nanotech Of The Nearly-Now 70
Believe writes: "CNN has this article about how recent advances in nano technology could be used in consumer appliances (CRTs, Hard drives, etc) as soon as next year. It's nice to see some nanotech applications that could be seen in the real world sooner than the '5-10' year range." What's most intriguing here to me (besides Weija Wen's "white powder of tiny particles") is the establishment of an Institute of Nanoscience and Technology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. One million dollars though, seems like, well -- like nanofunding.
Re:Sick feeling in my stomach... (Score:2)
None of the things mentioned in the article involve self-replication. The question of whether or not you should start worrying about "grey ooze" is unrelated to this article.
Re:slashdot must pay well... (Score:2)
To see a non-nanobudget, check the annual report on andover.net's "investors relations" (PDF only). I love the cover, a giant "O" asking investors to "Open Up." Fair warning, given what they ask you to swallow!
uh oh (Score:1)
Please don't. Slashdot's the only place on the net you can escape that sort of thing.
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Re:Electrorheology (Score:2)
Great - they whack me twice
- first to melt the clutch
- the second to resolidify it as it drains through the gearing
just let me know when I can start screaming
Re:I doubt there are Catholics in Scotland (Score:1)
Re:Sick feeling in my stomach... (Score:3)
Only if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons.
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Re:This is DANGEROUS! (Score:1)
Fortunately they have developed a substance [everything2.com] which can protect the magic goo from unwanted current or immersion. However, personal safely during this "accident situations" is still a problem. :P
Furthermore, what is to prevent the problems that could come with inconsistent or degraded functioning in nano-parts as the parts age?
Well, aren't you just the go-getter? Why don't we sit down and see if we can iron out all the details of commercial uses of this project, and rush our ideas to market? ... Obviously magic goo needs to be employed in a useful application. It would seem we have an idea [everything2.com] which might facilitate this as well.
Science only shows us the how. It is for the marketriods to decide if we should.
"Like, chill out, or something." - Beavis
Funding (Score:1)
Well, like they said in the last paragraph, it seems like they'll do the basic research there and leave the actual implementation research up to private companies, which is probably where most of the expense goes. Actually developing an application for a new science take lots more bucks than the initial discovery itself.
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Re:This is DANGEROUS! (Score:1)
Nanosuits (Score:1)
Re:Information Technology and Moving Parts (Score:4)
For perspective, CD-R in the early 90s cost about $1500 for a drive and $20 for media. CD-R didn't see consumer acceptance until these numbers fell about 4x, to ~$400 for the drives and $5 for media. Widespread use required a 10x drop in prices. And this is a technology whose competitors (floppies, Zip disks) had serious flaws. ATA Flash, on the other hand, needs prices to drop by a factor of about 400, just to be on par with a mature, reliable, accepted technology. And, even if those prices were achieved tomorrow (via some miracle) there are still a lot of cons:
- it's slow -- under 4MB/sec [kingston.com] versus 20+ MB/sec for a typical hard drive .
- it's not especially dense: it appears you can get 1GB on a PC card, which works out to maybe 20GB in a 3.5" IDE enclosure. New magnetic disks fit 20GB on a single 3.5" platter; you can put five such platters in one enclosure.
- it has a finite life, typically <500000 rewrites per sector. This is fine for digital cameras, but it's no good for a busy database or swap partition.
So when will ATA Flash replace Winchester drives? Considering it took CD-R 10 years to overcome one obstacle against weak competition, and flash has many obstacles and strong competition, I'd say never.That doesn't, of course, preclude the invention of some new solid-state product. A cheap, dense, low-power, reliably non-volatile SS technology would be truly great. But these innovations aren't falling out of the sky (new memory-related inventions are few and far between) and it has a lot of catching up to do before it bests the phenomenal attributes of a $200 hard drive. I didn't sell my Quantum stock today, and I probably won't tomorrow.
cheers,
mike
Microsoft announces .NANOTECH (Score:1)
Re:Why are so many people scared of Nanotechnology (Score:1)
Why the Future Doesn't Need Us [nasa.gov]
"One Meee-leon Dollars!" (Score:2)
"We shall fund the company with
Re:This is DANGEROUS! (Score:1)
Ever hear of spark plugs? Their operation depends on electricity. Putting an electric charge across a spark plug at the wrong time can cause problems with your engine's operation. What about that thing that controls your fuel mixture, ignition timing, and on some cars the transmission? Unless you're driving a pre-1985 car, it's handled by a computer. Computers, as you might be surprised to hear, can malfunction or even be damaged by unexpected electric currents. So driving over a downed power line is a bad idea? No shit, Sherlock!
Also, nanotech parts might degrade with age. One more reason to stick with the old stuff, where every part of the car works perfectly forever, and never has to be replaced. Uhmmm, yeah.
Try driving for a few years with the same set of brake pads. You just might get a Darwin award for your trouble, but you also might survive the crash. Also, see what happens if you never change your piston rings, oil, trans fluid, brake fluid, etc. Cars that need maintenance are nothing new.
My point is, where do you get off saying that old technology is more reliable when the new technology hasn't even been tested? What if the tests show that the electromagnetic trans fluid will last 10 or 15 years before showing any signs of degradation? Besides, driving with a completely untested liquid clutch is no more dangerous than driving with a Ford transmission.
Re:Electrorheology (Score:1)
Much the same thing would happen if your clutch unexpectedly turned to liquid. Your brakes still work fine in both situatuations, though.
Nanofunding (Score:1)
Re:Information Technology and Moving Parts (Score:2)
This is DANGEROUS! (Score:3)
In a car, such a clutch might last longer than a mechanical one, Wen said. In a small hard-disk drive, such as for a handheld device, it could remove the need to make tiny, expensive gears and clutches. If used to replace existing parts, the technology could be commercialized in just two or
three years, he estimated.
First of all, the strategy to slowly replace existing parts with nano-parts is a difficult one. in the laboratory, the electrical responses can be very well regulated. In a car, a downed power line, a bolt of lightning, immersion, and many accident situations that will flip the car off its rubber tires that ground it could expose the parts to electricity, making them solid/liquid when they should not be.
Furthermore, what is to prevent the problems that could come with inconsistent or degraded functioning in nano-parts as the parts age? I don't want something that will only change phase in bits and pieces when I need a fast, rapid-reaction, total phase change. The current non-nanotech parts are cheaper and more reliable.
The application for this stuff is currently in the lab and high level industrial applications- places that have got the money and the people to use these tools in a consistent, well supervised environment.
Geeks, geeks, geeks.. technology is not ALWAYS for the masses. Or lets put it this way; the masses will benefit more by the useful application of new tech by a few, instead of the gimmicky application of new tech to mass consumer goods.
RAM (Score:2)
They just came up with a type of Radar Absorbant Material (RAM). Sounds like a nice coating for my stealth fighter...
Re:Time to start retraining? (Score:3)
99.99% of inventions never see the light of day. Of the remaining 0.01% few are ever applied in the timeframe their inventor first imagines.
Go through the back issues of any periodical and you'll find predictions of all sorts of things; few pan out.
The most useful skills one can develop are the most timeless: The ability to learn. The ability to communicate. The ability to reason. The ability to empathize.
These are the skills that will serve you well in any future scenario be it post-holocaust desert or a nano/quantum paradise.
In the meantime just focus on the mid-term and let the blue-sky folks keep plugging away.
-- Michael
I want my silver body-suit! I want my personal jet-pack! I don't care that they make me look like a flying baked-potato!"
Re:Nanotubes Rock (Score:1)
Re:This is DANGEROUS! (Score:2)
Re:Nanotech background (Score:1)
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but... (Score:1)
This is an extract directly out of my glossary:
grey goo scenario A concept first formulated at some stage during the late twentieth century, based on the projections of a possible runaway "breeding" situation with nanites. At the time, research into the construction of nanites using a biological engine was underway in America by several independent research organizations, with many varied and generally benevolent goals in mind. Nanites, had they been developed to a viable solution, could have theoretically done anything from repairing damaged tissue at a cellular level in cancer patients to building a car, or even a skyscraper, from the ground up. The idea was that you would start out with a certain number of nanites, which would then "breed", creating more of themselves from raw materials in order to increase the speed at which a job could be performed. Since it involved an exponential growth factor something like that of bacteria only around thirty times faster, a single nanite placed on a table and instructed to multiply could theoretically result in a patch of "grey goo" about ten millimetres square by one millimetre high in just twenty minutes, which would be approximately 25 million nanites. This was an exciting prospect, however if the nanites could turn a bit of table into goo (which is what a large number of them clustered would look like) then what would happen if they didn't stop there? Theoretically, operating at maximum efficiency, there could be in the order of 5.369 10 ^17 nanites in just twelve hours and 1.441 10 ^18 in a day. A more realistic estimate, assuming that each nanite would have to extract raw material from its surroundings in order to build another, and allowing for the necessary travel time (otherwise the inner nanites would have no food), would calculate them to take probably four times that long to reach this number. So, in four days there could be over one quintillion nanites. Each nanite takes up around four cubic microns, so a number this large would occupy a space of 5.765 10 ^12 m^3. The volume of the Earth is only 1.083 10 ^9 metres cubed. This being the case, and even allowing for vastly slower reproductive speeds, an out-of-control nanite growth could easily consume the mass of the Earth in well under a week. In such a situation, the "grey goo scenario", there is virtually nothing that could be done to prevent the nanites from spreading. For this reason, research into nanites was banned by international treaty in 2007.
[After the Earth, the nanites would have to wait a while before they could consume another planet, and while I don't think that it's within my capabilities to work out how long they would take to consume the galaxy (how would they eat a star, I wonder?) I am sure it would be sooner rather than later. Pretty scary huh? Humanity responsible for the destruction of the galaxy--and who said we were insignificant?]
Hmm. Just some thoughts, probably erroneous. If anyone wants to correct the maths, or anything else for that matter, I would be grateful, not annoyed. Oh, and I know that something occupying 4 cubic microns is technically not on the nano-scale, but that's beside the point. They're still called nanobots because the name has become synonomous with a microscopic machine.
return 0;
Gray Goo, Buggy Software, Privacy (Score:2)
Buggy Software - Nanothings are small computers that do what they're programmed to do. Surely by 20-50 years from now when we've got the hardware technology well-developed, we'll have figured out how to write bug-free software - after all, it's just a Simple Matter of Programming, and the mere fact that the machine is so small that you don't program it directly, you just use other software to transmit object messages to negotiate with it shouldn't create any problems. (Bwah-hah-hah!) Yeah, right.
Then there's the privacy issues - what are the implications of Smart Dust computers that are networked together? Vernor Vinge's book A Deepness In The Sky discusses the issues of locators in a fictional environment.
Re:Aren't we supposed to have flying cars? (Score:1)
Derek
Re:Maybe I'm just paranoid, but... (Score:1)
How hard would it be for a nanobot manufactured at, say, 100 atoms length, to manipulate any kind of object realistically? Sure, it can stick atoms together, and rudimentary molecules if it's clever, but try shifting a skin cell with something that small. You'd need about five hundred nanites just to be able to put a composite picture of the cell together, surrounding it and viewing it from a relatively large distance. So patching up your cuts like you're hoping will be slightly hard when the cut is on such a large scale compared to the machines that stitching up the skin would be like one of us trying to pull two continents back together.
Then you want the poor things to start building you cars and skyscrapers, and doing all sorts of things. This goes beyond the ludicrous; hell, with enough power I guess you could pull two continents across the oceans, tearing up the Earth in the process (and how would you manage to apply the force evenly over the masses, I wonder? You sure couldn't just pull on one point), but to put a skyscraper together would be like building a structure almost the size of the Solar System, and a lot more complex, and filled with more material. Don't just think in terms of linear distance; think cubicly and you get an idea of the enourmous scale involved. Just so you don't have to go and look up useless information like this yourselves, the Solar System is around 4.5 Tm (terametres), or 4.5 billion kilometres in radius, using the so-called new standard that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet (which I think I saw on SlashDot also). If you include Pluto, that's 5.9 Tm; 11.8 Tm in diameter. This is around 860 Tm cubed. Rather a lot of space for one of us to cover, so relatively speaking it's about the same for the poor nanite. This is obviously looking at quite a small cut, and quite a large skyscraper.
Subsequently, I decided on cell-sized nanites, which made sense anyway, since their movement engine is based on the molecular motion engine found in plant cells.
Deus Ex (Score:1)
Re:Sick feeling in my stomach... (Score:2)
Problems with this scenario:
1) A tiny little nanobot has to be able to break all common chemical bonds for this to become a disaster. If a nanobot normally cannot muster the energy to do so, then it's going to have a bitch of a time self-replicating, so the speed of a GGN colony would be slowed by the time it takes a single GGN to do something useful like break a chemical bond. So it's not like we have a rapid, speed-of-sound conversion of Earth into grey goo.
2) GGNs would in theory still be susceptible to things like heat, electrical charges, and physical shock. If you have a colony of grey goo eating away at a mountain, it wouldn't seem particularly difficult to blow it up, burn it, melt it, or maybe engineer counter-bots to tear the little bastards to shreds.
3) As far as I know, GGNs wouldn't be able to replicate very fast. Yes, I know it would be geometric growth in theory (each bot makes 2, which each make 2 more, etc.), but that's only allowing for infinite surface area of the growing mass. In theory a GGN colony would form into a sphere, growing outward, but it could only disassemble things along the surface of the colony, not the inside.
4) A GGN colony could not go very deep, lest it be crushed by the mass of the colony above it, or collapse thousands of tons of dirt upon it, which would no doubt slow its progress (even a tiny little nanobot can be rent to pieces, right?). Or, if they went WAY deep, the heat of the inner parts of Earth would melt them. Or maybe they'd dig a hole into a magma pocket, and the entire colony would collapse through it into the magma, being melted.
I feel a lot better now
Metric Prefixes (Score:1)
Nanotubes Rock (Score:1)
I heard.. (Score:4)
Information Technology and Moving Parts (Score:2)
Personally, I don't think this is going to be an issue in the near future. We already have companies making fast, solid-state ram drives. It can't be much longer before the first fast solid-state eprom drives hit the market.
Sick feeling in my stomach... (Score:2)
Moderators: This is not a troll. The grey ooze is a term for corrupt nano-bots that create too many replications until it suffocates our air.
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further education in nanotech (Score:1)
Which is more frightening? (Score:1)
At least they will be wreaking havoc once the first nanobot virus is written (will it be in Visual Basic? Damn those script kiddies)
Aren't we supposed to have flying cars? (Score:1)
My car still drives on the ground.
Little nano robots in 3-5 years? Not likely.
Why must we persist in investing so much effort in following vaporware?
Time to start retraining? (Score:2)
Also, I have to confess that I find the technology a little scary in some ways. I mean, I really would not like to see a Von Neumann machine running amok (I know I will get flamed for this. It's just my irrational Catholic upbringing in Scotland).
My ex-boyfriend (thankfully) was always talking about nanotech, and I think I have been interested since because of that. He also introduced me to Science Fiction.
Anyroad, I think that it is amazing that these devices will actually be in use in little over a year! And to think I thought it would be closer to 50.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
Re:Nanotubes Rock (Score:1)
Could they change rocks into gold? ;-)
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Nanotech background (Score:2)
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era in Nanotechnology
Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation
The former is cheaper and less technical than the second one (which I still haven't gotten around to buying).
Certainly looks like the direct route to nanotech is going to reach a usefull state before the biologically based bootstrapping that I was always more interested in. Myosin motors and DNA/RNA computers, Oh My!
--Bleyddyn
Re:Time to start retraining? (Score:1)
Re:Nanotubes Rock (Score:4)
Dude, electrons ARE quantum particles, and ALWAYS behave as them. Namely, they're 1/2-spin fermions, are indistinguishable from each other, obey Pauli Exclusion Principle, and under the central-force potential of nucleons (ie, protons and neutrons), make atomic orbitals possible, which account for most chemical interactions we witness everyday.
losing none energy, emitting no interference, and theoretically display superpositioning and entanglement
Man, don't bogart the buzzwords. :-)
Entanglement is interference of the individual spin (or angular momentum) of several particles, giving an apparent total spin (angular momentum) of the system of particles. Ie, it's not possible to measure the spin of the total state of particles while simultaneously measuring the spins of the individual particles. This is how you can have an even number of fermions (half-integral spin) behave as a boson (integral spin), etc.
So there IS interference, which is how the entanglement is realized.
Also, they supposedly can be used to make a capacitor that holds up to a billion amps.
Dude, get your terminology straight. A capacitor stores charge (manifested as an electric field between the two terminals). It does NOT store current!!! Maybe you meant to say is that nanotubes can function as superconductors, passing a current of 10^9 amps. However, I don't know if this is true or not. (hopefully I'll have a better understanding of condensed matter physics in a few years). .V / _` (_-<_-<
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Re:Information Technology and Moving Parts (Score:2)
Yeah, an idiot I know actually bought a mechanical hard drive the other day! $180 down the tubes for 30 gigabytes. Talk about old-school.
I told him, "ya know, it's 2001, you can get 30 gigs worth of non-volatile stick memory these days." Sure it retails for around $100,000, but it's quiet, and you can sleep without fear of mechanical failure.
It's almost criminal that stores are still allowed to sell mechanical hard drives, let alone manufacturers allowed to continue "innovations" on such passe technology.
Liquid clutch in F1 (Score:2)
Re:Liquid clutch in F1 (Score:1)
Actually we've had liquid clutches for ages now - they're called tourqe convertors and just about every car with an automatic transmission has one. Granted they aren't as efficient as mechanical clutches and probably can't be as closely controlled.
Re:Nanotubes Rock (Score:1)
Re:Nanotubes Rock (Score:1)
Hey, no problem. I've noticed that nanotech seems to be a big topic here at /., but few people seem to understand what it's all about (including me). I'm just want to shed a little bit of light onto this often mystified subject (which is heavily based on quantum mechanics, which is finally starting to make sense to me this time around).
my background is political science
seems like we're in opposite positions. i'm from a physics background (i just started physics grad school now), and have been getting interested in poly-sci in the last several months (due to some degree to the election brouhaha)... .V / _` (_-<_-<
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Re:Sick feeling in my stomach... (Score:1)
It's a given that this is going to be a relevant problem to be solved while developing molecular nanotechnology anyways. It's not like they'll only build things out of un-bound atmos (after all, many elements are very difficult to keep in atmoic form), so they'll have to break chemical bonds anyways. There's already been a little evidence that mechanical force at that level won't be too difficult, except for maybe a few that bond very tightly. By the time the black goo scenario is possible this likely won't be a problem.
(Remember, intentional creation is BLACK GOO, grey goo is accidental, and highly unlikely.)
GGNs would in theory still be susceptible to things like heat, electrical charges, and physical shock. If you have a colony of grey goo eating away at a mountain, it wouldn't seem particularly difficult to blow it up, burn it, melt it, or maybe engineer counter-bots to tear the little bastards to shreds.
You'd have to get them all. Every last one of them. If a few, or even just one, are left, they can start multiplying again.
Counter-bots are definately something that will be considered. Drexler covers this in Engines of Creation - some sort of defense system will be necessary to watch for such bots and to fight them off. A "nanobot immune system" for the planet, if you will.
As far as I know, GGNs wouldn't be able to replicate very fast. Yes, I know it would be geometric growth in theory (each bot makes 2, which each make 2 more, etc.), but that's only allowing for infinite surface area of the growing mass. In theory a GGN colony would form into a sphere, growing outward, but it could only disassemble things along the surface of the colony, not the inside.
As far as we know, we know very little about possible replication speeds for assemblers. Remember that because of the smaller scales, things can move a lot faster (compare the wing speed of an eagle vs. a hummingbird vs. a fly vs. a mosquito). I think conservative estimates suggest 1 hour per replication. That's still enough to theoretially (assuming perfect 2^x replication) use up the earth in, what, a week or less?
And I would suspect only a nitwit maniac bent on the goo would bother not giving the bots some means to spread around a little, avoiding the problem with being purely a growing sphere.
I do feel it would be a difficult task, at least difficult enough that it's not that real a threat for a while, and by the time it is, defenses may be set up. But don't discount it entirely - blowing it off could lead to people being too content with the idea it won't happen.
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Re:Why are so many people scared of Nanotechnology (Score:1)
Plz do a google search on "Bill Joy GNR Wired" or something like that... you get the idea...
Re:Aren't we supposed to have flying cars? (Score:1)
This seems to be a common misconception here at /.
Nanotech != Nano robots
Nanotech refers to applied physics that occur at the nanometer scale. How this will apply to magnetic storage, as the link to the article suggests, is by utilizing things called GMR and CMR (giant magneto-resistance and colossal magneto-resistance). These are sort of analogs of resistance in the magnetic domain instead of the electronic domain. In ways I don't understand yet, you can use these technologies, together with some nanometer-scale structures, to create really small read/write heads for magnetic drives.
This is just one example of nanotech, and it's being applied in labs now, so it may be incorporated into consumer devices in not too long of a time. Magnetic storage industries have invested lots of $$$ for this kind of thing. .V / _` (_-<_-<
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You ain't scared enough yet! (Score:1)
Re:This is DANGEROUS! (Score:2)
Since when did pieces of rubber conduct electricity?! Car tires INSULATE the car. Plus, asphalt doesn't conduct electricity either.
That's why when a live power line falls on your car, it doesn't melt, since the electricity isn't flowing through it (since it's INSULATED from ground).
Imagine that.
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Re:Maybe I'm just paranoid, but... (Score:1)
This was my first thought when you said that nanites could potentially consume the entire Earth within the span of a week: it's that the Earth has a diameter of 8000 miles, and 8000 / (24 *7) = 47.6 miles an hour. Your nanites would have to be running at cheetah-like speed to accomplish this.
The point is the rate of expansion of a nanite population can't exceed the rate at which they can move (ignoring for the moment airborne distribution of the things, and backpacking effects). They have to move, eat, reproduce, and move to more food. The mechanics of population expansion will slow the growth rate considerably.
GrayThe tires don't do jack. (Score:1)
Offtopic?? (Score:1)
Check it out at:http://www.adcritic.com/content/sony-playstati
slashdot must pay well... (Score:1)
Errr... Yeah, how bout giving me some nanofunding timothy.... :)
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
Actually... (Score:3)
Electrorheology (Score:3)
This is true weirdness from the article (link added):
Over the past year, Assistant Professor Weija Wen has created a white powder of tiny particles that, when combined with oil, can be either a fluid or a solid. It changes its state when an electrical charge is applied or removed, a property known as electrorheology" [sandia.gov]. Wen's is not the first substance that can do this, but the molecular properties of Wen's particles make this fluid much more rigid than those that have gone before, he said. For instance, it exceeds the rigidity standard set by General Motors Corp. for use in a clutch, which the auto maker has been researching for more than ten years.
In a car, such a clutch might last longer than a mechanical one, Wen said. In a small hard-disk drive, such as for a handheld device, it could remove the need to make tiny, expensive gears and clutches. If used to replace existing parts, the technology could be commercialized in just two or three years, he estimated.
I don't know, I have visions of someone zapping the car, and watching it melt around me as I fly down the pavement at unhealthy speeds.
Re:Time to start retraining? (Score:1)
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Re:Sick feeling in my stomach... (Score:5)
Of course, simple engineering choices can eliminate this possibility from ever occuring. The "black goo" scenario, where it is intentional, is probably more likely than grey goo.
Regardless, it's not really relevant at this time, they're far far away from reaching that point yet. They don't mean "molecular nanotechnology" here, they just mean working at the nanoscale level. "Nanotechnology" has become a buzzword.
It's not molecular nanotechnolgoy until they're creating machines at that level.
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Tubeular (Score:1)
This could be great. It's been shown by Balents and Decker that by creating a single nanotube, with a natural junction where a straight section joined to a helical section created a rectifying diode--a half-transistor in a single molecule. That spells speed, baby! (see what happens when you don't sleep for a week...)
One of the problems, though, is not making the tubes small, but making them clean (that is, non-nested) But on the bright side even messy mixtures of multiwalled tubes are good at field emission--they emit electrons under the influence of an electrical field. And field emission is the force behind flat-panel displays. So maybe a t.v. in my cell phone (and people drive poorly when they *talk* on cell phones...)
But in the short term, perhaps the most applicable realm for nanotubes is materials science. NASA spends huge amounts of money trying to make materials stronger. But right now the tubes are too expensive, and it's been dificult to magnify thier properties over large scales.
And a million dollars isn't that much money for reasearch in this area...
WHERE ARE MY BOTS! (Score:1)
Why are so many people scared of Nanotechnology? (Score:1)
I'm not sure I understand the why this is such a scary field. First of all nanotechnology is defined in the article as "the study of devices that measure less than a nanometer, or one billionth of a meter" What's so intrinsically scary about that? If manage to create an AMD CPU that measures less than a nanometer in length, would people be scared of it? (Ooh, that AMD chip is out to get me!!!)
Second, even if you combine Nanotech with Artificial Intelligence you have to work at it to come up with a scary application. Sure, its scary to think about millions of intelligent machines running around doing whatever they want, but that's probably decades, if not hundreds of years away. And even if we did combine AI with Nanotech in this way, we'll probably figure out a way to limit the AI to a specific task long before we get to a technological implementation.
I doubt there are Catholics in Scotland (Score:1)
So, you were really raised Anglican, or perhaps Presbyterian, right? (though to be honest, there isn't a rat's ass of a difference between a typical liberal American Catholic church and an Anglican church, except for the woman priest thing).
Nano-research in China (Score:1)
Nanotech is closer to home than you think! (Score:2)
Sheilding your brain (Score:2)
Wen envisions a small shield on a cell phone that users could flip up next to the phone's antenna, to shield their heads from radiation.
Haven't we had these [zapatopi.net] for years?
Re:Electrorheology (Score:2)
^_^
Almost, but not *quite* as dangerous.
Yes, EMP the grey goo! Save us all!
Definately needs more funding. (Score:1)