Sunday 27th July 2008:
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Saturday 26th July 2008:
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Saturday 26th July 2008:
Nano Stripe Bass: $15.00
Nano Noodles (In Soup): $12.00
Nano Deluxe: $20.00 Chef`s assortment of 12 pieces sushi with spicy tuna roll...
We have designed and fabricated a new hybrid nanoparticle that combines the intense local fields of nanorods with the highly tunable plasmon resonances of nanoshells. This dielectric core-metallic shell prolate spheroid nanoparticle bears a remarkable resemblance to a grain of rice, inspiring the name "nanorice". This geometry possesses far greater structural tunability than either a nanorod or a nanoshell, along with much larger local field intensity enhancements and far greater sensitivity as a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) nanosensor than any dielectric-metal nanostructures reported previously. Invoking the plasmon hybridization picture allows us to understand the plasmon resonances of this geometry, as arising from a hybridization of the primitive plasmons of a solid spheroid and an ellipsoidal cavity inside a continuous metal.
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Friday 25th July 2008:
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Wednesday 9th July 2008:
Nano Odour Killer [+ Sandal] - Neutralising agent & Air freshener Eliminates all offensive smells. Applied onto various types of surfacesin order to provide long lasting deodorizing and air purifyingfeatures. Opposite to common deodorants it does not operate temporarilythrough spraying additional odour into air or using chemical agentsneutralizing smells. Use Nano Odour Killer in the home, hospitals,restaurants, shops, cars etc.
Bio-Sim contains over ten thousand (10,000) varieties of food-grade diatomaceous earth, nanoized to create just the right size particles to be most effective in your body.
This diatomaceous earth is uniquely treated and processed to give immune-system support. After nanoization, it is combined with minute quantities of sugar cane and kosher, distilled vinegar to serve as bait for hidden parasites.
Timing, temperature, and blending all play a part in Bio-Sim's success.
Bio-Sim's Action
Because ridding the body of Candida and other yeast overgrowth, parasites, worms, fungus and amoebas is the fundamental basis for any cure that brings back health to the body, this product is a must in your total healing program.
Once the Bio-Sim is absorbed by the body, the sugar and vinegar start attracting parasites, fungus, Candida, worms, and amoebas out of hiding. Then the nano-silica acts like a cutting knife toward the intruders. And because of the perfect size of the diatomaceous earth, Bio-Sim touches only the pathogens, leaving the healthy body intact. It took many years to find this sizing!
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Thursday 3rd July 2008:
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Wednesday 2nd July 2008:
The prediction comes from Ray Kurzweil, one of 18 influential thinkers chosen by the US National Academy of Engineering to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. It’s a bizarre suggestion and I for one will refuse to snort nanobots, no matter who recommends it. Apart from anything else, if the nanobots have human-equivalent intelligence why wouldn’t they just plug themselves into your nervous system and then chew your brain to pieces as soon as they realized that they didn’t need that redundant meat computer that occupies your skull.
They could then enjoy themselves demonstrating their humanness by getting drunk, watching hours of advert-interrupted television and surfing the Internet for porn.
More Accurate Clocks
Luckily the nanobots will be able to experience even more accurate clocks. News broke yesterday that US physicists have constructed a clock so accurate it will neither gain nor lose even a second in more than 200 million years. No living being is likely to appreciate such accuracy, but you just know it’s the kind of thing that’s gonna appeal to nanobots, especially those who like to plan ahead.
Admittedly, I’m assuming that the nanobots will be able to keep a human body in good repair for those hundreds of millions of years or at least be able to migrate from one human body to another through a convenient mechanism (like the human sneeze for example).
HD DVD: Dead Very Dead
Sadly those nanobots are unlikely to ever experience an HD DVD, as Toshiba has given up the fight and filed the HD DVD in the attic with the 8 track tapes and Betamax videos. I called this a while ago (here, here and here), the last time excusing Gartner for its deficiency of spherical objects (100 percent probability). I could claim that I possessed incredible insight, but the truth is that even current nanobots have achieved the requisite intelligence to understand that when BlockBuster Video ceases to support your DVD format, it’s time to start writing the eulogy.
Who Would Jesus Bomb?
That was the question asked by a bumper sticker I saw yesterday. It made me think about the unexpected turnaround that has occurred in American politics in the past few months and which is (as yet) unremarked. The “Christian Right” has gone from being a potent political force to an irrelevancy. As a consequence, there will not be much debate about the teaching of intelligent design/evolution, stem cell research or gay marriage in the coming presidential election.
It may have happened because Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney represented very similar constituencies and they divided the Christian vote to some degree, while Giuliani’s campaign imploded and McCain, the Republican maverick came waltzing through. Or it may have happened because Ray Kurzweil was lying to us about the nanobots and, in fact, they are already as clever as we are and they have already been released among the American population.
The nanobots care nothing either way about evolution (it’s in our hands now), stem cell research (who needs it?) or gay marriage (whatever floats your processor), but they are burning teraflops over the big question:
Who Would Jesus Bomb?
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Tuesday 20th May 2008:
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Friday 2nd May 2008:
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Wednesday 9th January 2008:
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Friday 29th December 2007:
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Wednesday 27th June 2007:
Uncyclopedia entry for Nanotechnology:
"Use In Modern Science:
Scientists have also discovered that the word "nanotechnology" itself seems to generate government funding and science grants without question or limit. This has baffled many in the review selection process, who realize it is just a buzz-word. "
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Monday 7th May 2007:
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Sunday 20th August 2006:
You may be interested in the blog which has a lot of usual boring comments among some gems. The nanoshite page stimulates the full spectrum of human emotions... http://www.gpforums.co.nz/thread/328289/?s= DELIGHT 10 Jul 2006 3:54 pm Simply had enough of the buzz and the shit, I'm glad someone else out there feels the same way I do and made a webpage about it, for the sole purpose of humouring me. I have a dream, and that dream is that one day I'll be able to look up high strength materials on the internet without 3000 hits including the words nano and rod I'm sure cynos will like it, it distinctly has NO round corners. http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/nanoshite/ BOREDOM 10 Jul 2006 4:09 pm HOS, what a boring thread DEFENSIVENESS 13 Jul 2006 1:00 pm Having to work with researchers involved in nanotechnology, its really an amazing technology and it will become our way of life in the not too distant future.. ANGER 13 Jul 2006 8:58 pm It's a name given to a very interesting field of technolgy crossing multiple scientific disclipines, that yes has been around for quite some number of years. As a member of the Institute of Nanotechnolgy I do not find this amusing, check out something informative if you like http://www.nano.org.uk/ It's simply hugely misunderstood by the general populace. MORE ANGER 14 Jul 2006 11:36 am Don't get me wrong, technology on that scale is exciting, whacking the word nano on the front of anything small is not. AGREEMENT 14 Jul 2006 12:50 pm I'm also referring to the host of companies that use chemicals, which as we all know are small things made of atoms, in their products and so bullshit on about their nano involvement. If it's on a nano scale, nano can be attached to its name. This makes it very hard to find out information about anything scientific based on the net, because lots of scientific based 'stuff' is on a very small scale and you have to wade through the shit to find what you're looking for
Monday 17th April 2006:
"Excess DHT is a waste by-product and hair loss is the bodies primary response to the excess DHT. However like all clean up mechanisms the body will concentrate it immunological response on the most toxic waste product in the body, in this case the proximity to the skin organ. Our research has shown that by placing toxic by-products directly onto the scalp, the skin concentrates it immunological resources on removing the toxity and not on removing hair. Hair loss is prevented." "Our research has shown that the most effective and naturally occuring non-harmful topical waste product is in fact human excrement, using our unique patented nanosal technology of encapsulation, the shit is scattered into microfine nano-bubbles each 1/100 i.u in diameter and suspended in a colloidal suspension to form nanoshite suspensions. Studies have shown a 187% increase in absorption over simple application of human-excrement in its raw unprocessed state. Customers need not worry about the smell since nanoshite is suspended and the smell is diffused it has been described as having a "heady woody farmland smell"
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Wednesday 12th April 2006:
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Sunday 2nd April 2006:
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Monday 27th February 2006:
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Wednesday 15th February 2006:
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Saturday 4th February 2006:
Methods of artificial weather control are a potential weapon of war. Methods like Cloud-top seeding can confuse you and make you believe that such techniques are primitive. But such methods when integrated with nano-bacteria technologies can produce devastating effects.
Tiny particles linked to a number of painful and sometimes deadly diseases may spread across the globe by hitching a ride in clouds, claim researchers in a recent issue of the Journal of Proteome Research. But cloud steams across the globe can also be controlled by artificial means. This means artificial clouds with nano-bacteria can be created and spread in a specific region by covert human hands.
Counter nono-weather actions are also in effect. Classified and secret projects are in place to counter this new devastating technologies. Many coutries wary about artificial weather control by their potential adversaries are busy looking into all possibilities which can make their skies, air, soil and water dangerously polluted, compromised, biologically affected and vulnerable.
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Sunday 1st January 2006:
And all of this will happen in our lifetime, for we are approaching the Singularity: a point at which scientific advance will happen so fast that technology will become indistinguishable from magic. This is the picture of the future presented in Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. A renowned inventor and entrepreneur, Kurzweil is a leading voice of the extropian (or transhuman) movement, which preaches that we are on the threshold of a golden age of techno-supermen.
Unsurprisingly, extropianism is largely an American phenomenon, combining two potent traditions: Christian millenarianism and the cult of technology. This enthusiastic brand of futurism may appear harmless, charming even, but it has an ugly side.
Kurzweil's central belief is that technological and scientific progress is exponential. That is, science and technology do not only improve, but the rate of progress also accelerates, tending towards infinity, at which point we will experience "an expansion of human intelligence by a factor of trillions through merger with its non-biological form". A variation on the Enlightenment myth of rational progress, Kurzweil's model departs from a restricted notion of technology (basically, processing power). In the final analysis, it is based on a bad inference.
Kurzweil's technological determinism is equally myopic. The political and social environment that shapes the nature and direction of technology is completely missing from his picture. Technology is neither an autonomous force nor an outgrowth or continuation of biological evolution. The recent debacle concerning AIDS drugs for Africa underscores the fact technology means nothing in the face of political unwillingness and the profit motive. Life extension can be granted now to most of the world's disadvantaged with remarkably low-tech means, such as food and cheap medicines.
An entrenched political conservatism underlies the transhuman vision of the future. Social change is not necessary for Kurzweil, since it will be precipitated by the inherent acceleration of technological progress and driven by the free market model.
Today's machines represent the principles of the neo-liberal economy, just as in the 16th century the mechanical clock embodied the values of the monarchic state. Robots and computer systems "self-organise", just like selfish individuals under the invisible hand of the market.
And technology gets better and cheaper all the time, so that eventually it will trickle down to the poorest people, just like capital does in right-wing economics. The Singularity, Kurzweil tells us, is an economic imperative. Like human knowledge, economic growth is also exponential and the market will become the main engine of future change. We will not only be immortal but filthy rich.
Incredibly, Kurzweil argues that factories and farm jobs in the US have dropped from 60per cent to 6 per cent because of automation; no mention of Third World sweatshops or corporate outsourcing and downsizing. He even argues that modern warfare claims fewer casualties thanks to more accurate weapons. We should mention that Kurzweil is an adviser to the US military and sits on the board of directors of Seegrid, a robotics company (founded by fellow extropian Hans Moravec) that subcontracts to the US Army. This may explain the absence of ethical concerns in his discussion of the military applications of new technology.
Also central to Kurzweil's argument is the notion that our minds can be copied into computers built in the image of the brain. This runs up against gigantic problems and relies on several unproven assumptions. The information sciences have sparked the mystic belief that everything is made of ethereal data and that consciousness or identity can be separated from the complex electro-biochemical dynamics of the brain. This is a curious technological rewriting of the notion of the individual soul, transcendent from embodiment. It may be a reassuring story but there's no evidence to support it. Kurzweil believes the simulation of intelligence (or consciousness, he can't see the difference) is a matter of fast processing power.
But he is not speaking to our more rational instincts. Though dressed in the garb of science, these fantasies are addressed mainly to the anxieties of ageing baby boomers. As governments of developed nations brace for an imminent huge swell in the population of elderly and retirees, this vision of a future ruled by an army of narcissistic baby-boomer cyborgs sounds like a bad joke. Kurzweil, however, feels naturally entitled to the fruits of the latest biomedical knowledge. And he has some ideas on how to handle the accompanying strain on economic and natural resources: nanobots will produce all the energy we need, cheaply and in an environmentally sustainable manner. And the oil giants needn't worry, as the nanobots will clean the environment too.
For most of its history, technology has remained inseparable from religion, illusionism and magical thinking. Things haven't changed much and modern science and technology continue to inspire beliefs as baroque as anything concocted by our forebears. The road to the uncertain future is littered with the carcasses of brave new worlds that never were.
So far, the only reliable law of futurism was pronounced by J.G. Ballard: "If enough people predict something, it won't happen."
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Friday 30th December 2005:
China would send robots to land on the Moon before dispatching its yuhangyuan ("astronauts") in future lunar exploration, Xinhua News Agency reports today (Oct. 16
Even though it may sound far off at times, within the decade Nanotech will have huge effects on many practical industries, including manufacturing, health care, energy, agriculture, communications, transportations & electronics.
The industries that nanotechnology will likely disruptively affect in the near term include the following: (Amounts are in Billions of US Dollars).
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Tuesday 13th December 2005:
Monday 12th December 2005:
Ray Kurzweil: [In the recent book,] we present three bridges to radical life extension.
We provide a detailed program--bridge one--based on today's knowledge of how to slow down aging and disease processes. I've been reprogramming the biochemistry of my own body for 20 years, and this has become more intensive with my collaboration over the past five years with Dr. Grossman. I take about 250 supplements each day and weekly intravenous therapies. A biological aging test pegged me at about 38 when I was 40. I'm now 56, and an extensive biological aging test says that my biological age is now 40, so I have not aged very much in the last 16 years.
Dr. Grossman and I describe a program of how to slow down each of the dozen aging and disease processes. This program will enable baby boomers who are aggressive enough to remain in good shape until the full flowering of the biotechnology evolution--bridge two, in which we reprogram the information processes underlying biology. Biotech will reach its peak in ten to twenty years.
Computers are playing a vital role in biotechnology. The decoding of the genome would have been impossible without computers, and we're using computers today to design highly targeted therapies that perform precise biochemical missions, such as destroying a cancer cell, with minimal side effects. We're starting to place computerized biochemical sensors in our bodies that can monitor our health and make diagnostic decisions. An artificial pancreas is now undergoing clinical trials; it combines a glucose sensor, an insulin pump, and a computer, all embedded inside the patient's body.
Biotechnology in turn will lead to bridge three--nanotechnology--in which we will go beyond the limitations of biology to enhance our physical and mental capabilities by factors of many thousands, eventually millions. The golden age of nanotechnology will be in the 2020s. We will ultimately replace our frail "version 1.0" bodies with a greatly enhanced version 2.0. In our book, we describe all three bridges in detail.
The killer app for nanotechnology, about twenty years away, is nanobots. Inside our bodies and brains, nanobots will provide radical life extension by destroying pathogens and cancer cells, repairing DNA errors, destroying toxins and debris, and otherwise reversing aging processes. Nanobots are computer-based robots small enough to travel in our bloodstream.
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Sunday 11th December 2005:
A series of nanodevices can be devised to revolutionize water treatment process. Nanobots like nanoflocculant or nanocoagulant can be devised to neutralize the surface charge of suspended solids. They are non-chemical and 100% reusable. Smart non-fouling nanomembrane or nanoseparator can be developed to selectively separate dissolved solids while keeping beneficial minerals in the water, or to desalinate brine water (20,21). Nano-disinfectant such as UV nanobots can accomplish germicidal task without leaving toxic residual and producing no THMs. Nanocondenser can be developed to extract water from air. Integrating these unit nanoprocesses and powered by abundant nano-solar energy, different water treatment systems can be designed to fit specific geographical conditions. Such development will make huge waterworks with messy piping system obsolete. On-demand and on-location generation of drinking water from liquid or vapor will make decentralized water supplies extensive, affordable, and environmentally clean. A MNT's future on-demand and on-location generation of drinking water system is conceptualized as Fig. 7.
Nanobots like nano-catalytic-converter can also be sent up into atmosphere to converter NOx into nitrogen and oxygen. If the agriculture technology still needs fertilizer, nanobots like nano- NOx-reducer can be sent up to capture NOx and transform it into ammonia and bring it down to the ground. For ground level treatment, the acidified waterbodies and soil, we can disseminate a troop of nano-buffer to increase their buffer capacity in resisting acidity. We can also deploy an army of nano-neutralizer to dynamically adjust pH in water or soil to their original condition, either by capturing H+ from the environment or giving off OH- to the environment.
Underground nano-atom smasher powered by cheap solar cells can also be devised to treat nuclear wastes. This is a reverse process of nuclear engineering. Instead of smashing nonradioactive target and harvesting for radioactive substance, the nanomachine will smash radioactive target and harvest for nonradioactive substance. The smashing and harvesting process will continue stability is achieved. Fig. 9 illustrates a few routes for resolving nuclear waste piles that accumulated in the environment and TDBT is at loss on dealing with them.
Other scenarios feature the ability to harness biological processes such as protein replication or DNA information encoding to produce ultradense memories and computing devices.
Other possibilities include nanobots that would circulate through the bloodstream to attack cancer cells, or industrial nanomachines that build superstrong materials one atom at a time.
Though tantalizing, such futurism has also come under attack. Introducing a healthy dose of scientific skepticism, Scientific American recently ran an article questioning whether the field is actually going to deliver in the near term.
That sparked a spirited debate among nanotechnology proponents. The debate is presented online at a page that also presents a concise overview of the field
The colony could scout out in different directions to survey the entire planet. Such fleets would be mechanical versions of the great human terrestrial exploring teams of the past, such as Lewis and Clark.
And the nanobot will be too small to carry an on-board heater. Scientists could give it heat shields to keep it warm (as well as to protect it from high-speed interstellar particles called galactic cosmic rays), but the added weight of shielding would obviate the advantage of its small size.
So the JPL team is trying to develop nanobots whose electronics can endure the temperature extremes of deep space - which range from boiling-hot daytimes to nighttime temperatures about 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, far colder than the South Pole.
On Thursday, NASA announced plans to launch into Earth orbit three small satellites, dubbed the "Nanosat Constellation Trailblazer" mission. Each satellite would be an octagon 8 inches high and 16 inches long. Among other things, the minisatellites - to be launched in 2003 - will test the ability of new electronics and other equipment to survive "near the boundary of Earth's protective magnetic field,"
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Saturday 10th December 2005:
The field sports its share of hype: Surely, promised "nanobots" to attack cancers and other human ailments - or even repair cellular damage and revive cryogenically frozen human beings - remain in the far-distant future. Similarly, the proposed "Starlight Express" carbon-nanotube elevator to outer space - from a NASA-funded outfit called Highlift Systems - belongs to the realm of science fiction.
It is certainly a long term goal. No one wants to live in a hole while their neighbor lives in a national forest. But there might be a high percentage of the population that would trade surface rights for a tax break. All factories, office buildings and warehouses should, in my view, be underground. With high resolution voice and video communication as common as telephone and email is today, we may find our living styles adapt quickly to a home and community tens of meters below the surface.
How does a nano robot dig a hole big enough in which to build a house? Since we are not in favor of self reproducing nanobots, we would need to create the mass quantity of robots sufficient to do the job on site. We would need an outdoor bot generation facility to actually build the enormous quantity of nanorobots required to build any structure large enough for human habitation. Probably something that is moved from one site to the next. This bot generation facility would probably be a mobile collection of large boxes that arrive on site after you call and set up an appointment.
Talk to it, verify your identity and give it the go-ahead. It's already knowledgeable of what you want it to do. It taps into a local power grid, runs off a fuel cell or else extrudes and erects a temporary solar collector depending on conditions at the site. The boxes contain enough intelligence to carry out the task, but are not what we would consider a person. The boxes couple, divide and generally put together all the systems needed to deliver material down into the hole and to extract the earth and rock from the hole. They brought one big block of carbon that is usually sufficient for a job of this size. They may need additional carbon on site. They need fuel to run the robots. They need to transport a few thousand tons of excavation material to a local fill location or load it onto surface transport to some other location. Assuming they can't tap into a local underground material transport tunnel. Should be one within a few hundred meters, but we might have to wait to build a spur line to make that connection if the building site is isolated.
If carbon material is not available as organic rubbish, you will probably have had a pile of carbon feedstock delivered to your site. Anything from organic waste to diamond grit. The digger systems will find it and, once it's original carbon is gone, eat the pile to create the umpteen trillion nanobots that are needed. Since the nanobots get recycled over and over, the job only requires a limited quantity of carbon.
Once the digger starts to dig, one object shaped like a big bass drum becomes the focus. The lower surface extrudes a thick liquid that sinks into the dirt below it. You can watch the drum sink into the ground dragging it's umbilicals behind it. The pipes pulse with material going in and coming out. The excess rock and dirt is extracted and the hole grows slowly.
Within two days, the hole is essentially excavated. The slick interior surface is a single mechanical unit with walls a meter thick and waterproof. The entire building stucture is crack proof up to a Modified Mercalli of XI. The building rides with the earth movement like any other rock embedded in the earth.
The interior is sculpted to provide essentials like floors, walls, plumbing, hardware attachment features, lighting pipes, and other unique features designed in long before the digger was on site.
The surface entrance may be the equivalent of a rest booth that blends into a grove of trees. You would need to be within 20 meters to know it was there. That depends on whether the building is part of a below ground community with transportation, and walking space close to the unit. If not, it may require access to a road as we do now. The surface installation might be more substantial and include a garage and other features of a house we have today.
I hope this short trip into the future paints an alluring picture. I'd love to breath clean, cold air with the smell of pine trees and honeysuckle vines. Living in a city, that never happens.
"Still building cars when you could grow'em?"
Well, not for very long... Present economics are a product of first wave industrialization... economics in the age of this second wave are analogous to medieval vs. 20th century and require considerable contemplation. Humanity will be faced with an industrial, monetary and social quake as a result of molecular manufacturing - programmed self assembly.
In the near future, a team of scientists will succeed in constructing the first nano-sized robot capable of self-replication. Within a few short years, and five billion trillion nano-robots later, virtually all present industrial processes will be obsolete as well as our contemporary concept of labor. Consumer goods will become plentiful, inexpensive, smart, and durable. Medicine will take a quantum leap forward. Space travel and colonization will become safe and affordable. For these and other reasons, global life styles will change radically, drastically impacting human behavior.
The prudent corporation wishing not only to survive, but to prosper in the first half of the twenty-first century, would do well to start research projects now on how to utilize a nanotechnology based universal assembler when it arrives. Such a company should consider how to design the products they make today, through this new technique.
Examine this simple, yet universally relevant, example: After the first assemblers arrive there will still be demand for cotton bath towels until a superior product is engineered. A manufacturer should get a handle on just what a bath towel physically looks like on a molecular level, figure out what proportions of carbon, oxygen etc. are involved, and start writing the software for their full line of towels with all their various colors, weaves, and patterns.
By determining in advance how to utilize assemblers before they exist, a company would be able to start production day one of availability by plugging in their pre-engineered software. Such a company should examine today the sparkling numbers that appear when the cost of cotton, synthetic dyes, machinery and (gulp) most of their labor is substituted with inexpensively available carbon black and atmospheric gases (and of course, the lease payment to Xerox for the assembler). Perhaps such a company should also consider designing software for a line of elegant Persian rugs as well!
Since the industrial revolution, manufacturing has been creating unavoidable, wasteful by-products. These by-products are usually harmful to life yet too expensive to disarm, so they are spewed into the air, dumped into rivers and seas, or buried underground, only to eventually work their way back into our neighborhoods. Compared to the wretched lifestyle of the middle ages, we all enjoy great wealth, health and materialism from our current industrial technology. Unfortunately, with population growth and all, our lifestyle is destined for the dumps as we bury ourselves in our own toxic waste. Would it not be ideal if manufacturing had zero by-products and all goods recycled themselves with virtually no human energy? What a green fantasy. It simply can't be done with traditional technology.
To make a plastic, chemical reactants are combined in various complex steps under specific conditions to form a desired product. The reactant rarely converts into 100% product. What's left over is nasty and disposal is expensive. In contrast, if you make a plastic with nano-technology, you can use feed stocks of pure elements like carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen and force individual atoms deliberately into chemical bonds without intermediate steps. You could also build the plastic into the final shape you desire without injection molding. All "reactant" becomes "product" with no embarrassing and wasteful by-products.
If you wanted to build something out of steel, you could release "nano" machines (or nanites) into an unsightly junkyard to scavenge iron and, again, build your desired structure atom-by-atom into its' final form without burning coal for smelting and leaving a heap of slag full of heavy metals. You want wood? Which do you prefer: mahogany, teak, cherry, zebra, or another exotic? No problem... Just whip out your software for the wood of your choice, turn on the feed stocks and press GO! We can stop destroying tropical rain forests as well as the creatures who live there, releasing dangerous viruses, and changing the world's climatic patterns.
All of the participants except two were from Germany, so I had to dust off the German I learned at school in Meinerzhagen and pay attention. Two things were apparent at this event. Firstly that the state of Hessen is very strongly supporting nanotechnologies, and secondly there has been little impact on industry so far. Hessen is doing everything right at the academic level, with networks and conferences like this with four hundred attendees, but most of the fifty exhibitors were either academic institutions or companies wanting to sell tools to academic institutions, with few companies actually applying nanotechnology to anything.
Perhaps the oddest company was Neosino who extol the health benefits of ingesting, inhaling and being massaged with 3-10nm silica particles and even claim to be the official supplier (of nanoparticles?) to FC Bayern Munich. I didn’t notice them during the talks on toxicology and risk.
NEC are not alone with bullish predictions about nanomaterials, Toshiba and Casio were also claiming similar time scales.
It is a salutary lesson about the huge gap between the initial enthusiasm of engineers (material x could revolutionise…) and the dull reality of trying to manufacture materials reliably and in bulk, at an economically viable price. Every day we see many nanotech articles with qualifiers such as ‘could’ or ‘may, rather than statements such as ‘is’ or ‘will’ – which is what it takes to convince the business community that nanotech is not vapourware.
The report finds that, unfortunately, it’s the same old solution, akin to finding that some chemicals are explosively reactive and then calling for the regulation of chemistry.
Perhaps the silliest comment came from David Rejeski director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, although this may be somewhat out of context.
“Some nanospheres, for example, are extremely slippery, "like the nano version of banana peels," said Rejeski, director of the center's foresight and governance project. With slips and falls a major cause of workplace injury, he said, this is the kind of thing that deserves attention but can be easily overlooked, given the lack of an overarching national nanotechnology research strategy -- something he and others are calling for.”
Call us cynical, but if you have a workplace plastered with unfettered nanoparticles, then slipping on them would be the least of your worries!
On the other hand, articles such as this one in the UKs Independent seem to balance hype with hype and should come with an "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here" warning. A typical example is:
"Cancer cells could be destroyed by tiny silicon combs; "nanobots" could clear blocked blood vessels. Hydrogen-based fuel cells using "nanotubes" could allow cars to travel 5,000 miles on a full tank. Minute solar cells in building façades and on road surfaces would produce cheap energy."
Given that the report author is so obviously out of touch with current science and technology, it is safe to treat statements such as "each type of nanoparticle may be as deadly as asbestos" with similar caution.
Carbon nanotubes have exceeded all other materials and appear to have a theoretical tensile strength and density that is well within the desired range for space elevator structures and the technology to manufacture bulk quantities [4] and fabricate them into a cable is somewhat developing. While theoretically carbon nanotubes can have tensile strengths beyond 120 GPa, in practice the highest tensile strength ever observed in a single-walled tube is 63 GPa, and such tubes averaged breaking between 30 and 50 GPa. Even the strongest fiber made of nanotubes is likely to have notably less strength than its components. Improving tensile strength depends on further research on purity and different types of nanotubes. .Most designs call for single-walled carbon nanotubes.
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Friday 9th December 2005:
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Thursday 8th December 2005:
It isn't a nanocar. It has no engine and can't pull itself. If anything, it's a nanocart. The nano-machine gimick is running old. Say you're doing something nano, and people throw money at you. So silly, yet nobody bothers to build any actual machines that DO anything. They just do some organic chemistry to make a nanometer sized molecule and call it a nanomachine. Call it whatever you want, but it doesn't DO anything.
The concept of making real world objects nano-size is just stupid. If you're really interested in developing nano-machines, we need to think about how one could do that and what kind of engine we could use to drive the machine, instead of just goofing around.
I have an idea... let's make a molecule that looks like a horse and attach it to the nanocart! ROFL!!!one11!!
What a colossal waste of money.
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Saturday 26th November 2005:
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Wednesday 9th November 2005:
Sunday 30th October 2005:
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Sunday 30th October 2005:
Jones describes the contortions often required to achieve atomic control of matter. In 1989 two IBM researchers penned their employer's acronym by manipulating 35 xenon atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope-a device that dragged the atoms across a nickel surface. The atoms moved because of chemical bonding interactions that occurred when the microscope's tungsten tip came to within a tenth of a nanometer or so of each atom. Jones notes the difficulties involved: The IBM logo was created in an extremely high vacuum at the supercooled temperature of liquid helium using inert xenon atoms. Outside this rarefied environment, the world becomes much less stable. "Single atoms of more structurally useful elements at or near room temperature are amazingly mobile and reactive," Jones writes. "They will combine instantly with ambient air, water, each other, the fluid supporting the assemblers, or the assemblers themselves."
Jones believes that the nanoists fail to take into account critical questions about the thermodynamics and information flow in a system of assemblers. "How do the assemblers get their information about which atom is where, in order to recognize and seize it? How do they know where they themselves are, so as to navigate from the supply dump [where raw atomic material is stored] to the correct position in which to place it? How will they get their power for comminution [breaking up material] into single atoms, navigation and, above all, for massive internal computing?" The list continues before Jones concludes: "Until these questions are properly formulated and answered, nanotechnology need not be taken seriously. It will remain just another exhibit in the freak show that is the boundless-optimism school of technical forecasting."
The nanoists' response to this fusillade is simple: read Drexler's technical tome Nanosystems, which contains a response to virtually any general point raised by detractors. Acoustic waves, for example, can be used to supply power to assemblers, an answer to one of Jones's objections.
The nanoists' legacy may be to stoke science-fiction writers with ideas for stories. The latest genre in science fiction employs nanotechnology as its centerpiece. A follow-on to the cybernetic fantasies of authors such as William Gibson, it is sometimes even called "nanopunk." The world depicted by nanowriters goes beyond cybernetic mind control and downloading one's brain into a computer. It postulates ultimate control over matter. "It seems like nanotech has become the magic potion, the magic dust that allows anything to happen with a pseudoscientific explanation," says Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., an editor of the journal Science-Fiction Studies, published by DePauw University.
"They're doing everything right," Feynman said. "The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land." Similarly, some scientific endeavors rely on wish fulfillment-and an inability to consider why something may not work, Feynman noted. "So I call these things cargo cult science," he concluded, "because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigations, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land." Until the nanoists can make an assembler and find something useful to do with it, molecular nanotechnology will remain just a latter-day cargo cult.
I was dismayed to read in your April 1996 issue ("Waiting for Breakthroughs") an extended quotation from Richard Feynman's essay "Cargo Cult Science" used as a critique of nanotechnology. I am sure he would have found such misuse of his idea quite unreasonable. I should know, because I talked with him at length about the prospects of nanotechnology.
As the article itself points out, Richard Feynman saw no basis in physical laws that would preclude realization of the concepts of nanotechnology. To claim that nanotechnology is cargo cult science because its proponents analyze the capabilites of devices not yet constructed is as absurd as to say that astronautics was cargo cult science before Sputnik.
Richard Feynman did not regard setting "stretch" technological goals as cargo cult science. Quite the opposite. In the course of his 1958 talk in which he proposed manipulating atoms, he offered cash prizes from his own financial resources for breakthrough achievements in working at a very small scale. If he were still alive, I think that he would be pleased to have his name associated with a large cash prize that seeks to accelerate the realization of one of his most exciting ideas. That is why I have participated in defining the conditions for winning the Feynman Grand Prize, and have agreed to naming the prize in his memory.
Sincerely,
Carl Feynman
We have received your email dated 5 April concerning "unauthorized use of SciAm materials" in the Web document http://www.foresight.org/SciAmResponse.html published at the Foresight web site.
We have consulted with copyright counsel. We believe that the quotations from the news story "Trends in Nanotechnology: Waiting for Breakthroughs" (April 1996) fall within the safe harbor of fair use principles stated in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. We do not believe we have any obligation, under either Section 107 or the First Amendment, to cease to use these quotations in an effort to set the record straight and to defend our organization's work. For information on fair use, see these Web pages:
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"A few years ago, Scientific American published an article that began with the words, 'That's the messiah,' and proceeded to inform us that Eric Drexler sounded like Mr. Peabody. This, we assume, was because they had nothing more substantial to say, but for some reason felt a pressing need to oppose Drexler's work on molecular manufacturing. The article was so bad that it evoked a strong protest from Carl Feynman, son of the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, about their abuse of his father's name and reputation.
Just this week, a nano blog that used to be trustworthy and even-handed has gone down the same path. In response to Robert Freitas' recent publication of Nanomedicine Volume IIA: Biocompatibility, Cientifica posted an article containing such phrases as, 'swarm of nanobots - more idle speculation,' and 'books of this ilk,' and most dishonorably, 'a hobby pursuit.'
A book with six thousand references is not a hobby pursuit. I wonder why they are trying so hard to persuade people that it's not worth reading. What is their motivation?
I've been saying 'they,' but in fact, Paul Holister recently left Cientifica. It appears that Tim Harper is now free to vigorously -- and irresponsibly -- oppose the more advanced kinds of nanotechnology. I'm not usually so openly critical. But false claims that 'Martian nanobots ... are equally feasible' should not go unchallenged. This is shabby journalism, and it damages the serious and ongoing discussion of the potential effects of advanced nanotechnology.
A new volume in the Nanomedicine book series by Robert A. Freitas Jr. describes "the many possible mechanical, physiological, immunological, cytological, and biochemical responses of the human body to the in vivo introduction of medical nanodevices, especially medical nanorobots."
And we thought that we had enough issues to grapple with concerning humble nanoparticles and fullerenes.
While there is a lot of good information in the Nanomedicine series, it is well researched and thought out, albeit with a rather odd focus, we cannot help wondering whether the immense amount of effort put into determining the effects of accidentally ingesting diamondoid flying nanorobots and other decices yet to be invented may have been put to better use?
Understanding the products that are currently on, or coming to, the market, as the scientific community is curently engaged in, may have been a good place to start. After all, the Martian nanobots from Olaf Stapledons SciFi classic "Last and First Men", published in 1930, may have similar effects on the human body, and are equally feasible.
While books of this ilk do reference scientific results, that does not make them any more credible than any other forms of fiction. We would be far more interested to hear the views of scientists, the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) for example, or even a someone with some medical training.
While there is a place for these types of works, and we will leave readers to speculate as to where that place may be, attempting to pass off a hobby pursuit as real science is dangerous, counter productive and merely confuses people. It also propagates the myth that nanotechnology is something dreamt up by a handful of Star Trek fanatics, and provides yet more ammunition to the critics of MNT.
The enemy isn't just the politicians here though - the majority of the malice towards MNT comes from the scientific community itself, because many of these scientists feel threatened by this idea, and fear that their careers will be in jeapordy - which, in all honesty, they will be. They have every right to be scared - but denial of this technology and Drexler's vision is kind of a stupid way to go about doing things, and is looked down upon.
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Saturday 29th October 2005:
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"
"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.
I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it, "he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?"
I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"
They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!"
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress-- in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will-- including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes didn't land--but they don't land.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens.
Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous (?) field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person u
