Thursday 19th November 2009:
Tuesday 28th April 2009:
Tuesday 21st April 2009:
slocklin said... Hey Josh! I'd leave out nanotech; Drexler is a snake oil salesman and a science fiction author. I worked next to fellows who took "nano" money; the word is just a synonym for chemistry. Most of the "nano" dudes were chemists or materials scientists. The idea of looking at little things as machines doesn't really help any. It's still just chemistry. A friend of mine (who I found by researching my name of all things) has a cool webpage called "nanoshite" which goes into amusing detail. http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/nanoshite/newnanoshite.html
Monday 20th April 2009:
FAR INFRARED BEAUTY & HEALTH The far infrared rays, also called the fertile ray, is part of rays of the sun. Its wavelength is closed to that of the human body's, and produces resonance vibration of magnetic wave with the human body by means of it. Thus, it is of great help to the health of the human body. Properties: 1. Promoting blood circulation, activating cells, and speeding up metabolism. 2. Burning excess fats, consuming extra calories, and shaping attractive curves. 3. Regulating autonomic nerves, and eliminating fatigue rapidly Using the weaving of high elastic fibers to design this product with human body engineering that has functions of restraining the abdomen and lifting buttocks. It is truly the killer of bulgy abdomens cooperating with the far infrared ray processed at the abdomen. Ways of Cleaning: 1. Cleaning in the warm water under 30 degree c 2. Do not soak with the chlorine series washing powder in order to avoid damaging the elasticity of fibers. Ingredients: 20% Magnetic Powder of Far Infrared Ray 20%LYCRA 60% Polyamide
Saturday 8th November 2008:
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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 used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen" he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using--not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.
Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms--and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments--they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that you can do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a million rats no, it's people this time they do a lot of things and get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?
This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of the things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent-- not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.
So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
I found the passage below particularly amazing:
What molecular manufacturing nutcase is making those irresponsible claims? U.S. Commerce Undersecretary Phil Bond, the same Phil Bond who, just a month before making those comments last year, told me that it's time to "aggressively" counter nanotech misinformation.
Sounds like the patriots at CRN are carrying out the undersecretary's orders.
Madonna's favourite Rabbi Rav Berg's book Kabbalistic Nanotechnology just popped up on our radar thanks to an anonymous tipster (see the description below).
The description sounds uncannily Drexlerain in its utopian nature, which makes us wonder how many of the attendees at this weeks Foresight Vision Weekend will have seen this particular light? This recent addition to nanotechnology's rich pageant gives us yet another flavour, KNT anyone?
"Two emerging technologies promise to transform the world in ways that will make the breakthroughs of the 20th century seem pedestrian. One has existed for less than 50 years and is called nanotechnology. The other has existed for 4,000 years and is called Kabbalah. On the surface, they seem to be divergent, even contradictory technologies. But in fact, they are complementary in the most profound ways possible. One promises to deliver a practical technology and a transformed world in the distant future. The other promises practical tools and remarkable changes now. In this book, Kabbalist Rav Berg isolates the common points of science and spirit to reveal the elusive path toward achieving humanity's noblest and most challenging aspiration - the manipulation of the physical world. The potential uses are staggering: pollution reversal, elimination of disease and genetic defects, eradication of poverty, microscopic computers faster than today's best supercomputers, and the indefinite extension of the human lifespan."
Ominously, the article starts with Michael Crichton's definition of nanotechnology as "the quest to build man-made machines of extremely small size, on the order of 100 nanometers, or 100/billionths of a meter."
It gets worse from here with the author suggesting that a good way to get a nanotech job would be to join an organisation such as Foresight. It's hard to think of a worse idea, as most nanotech related jobs are concerned with real world applications, not pontificating about possible nanobot related scenarios. In fact the mere mention of nanobots is enough to bring most job interviews to an speedy conclusion, whether in industry or the academic world.
It brings us back to the twin issues of the non-existence of any kind of nanotechnology industry, and the fact that nanotechnologies cut across a wide variety of academic disciplines and industries. While there are many jobs that may involve the application of nanotechnologies, there are very few companies entirely concerned with nanotechnologies, and even those will have specific requirements for chemical engineers or material scientists.
The mistake commonly made in this type of article is to assume that there exists some kind of industry often described as the digitisation of matter where anyone fascinated by computer games and science fiction can find a job. The harsh reality is no different from any other sector, you have to have the skills and experience that an employer wants, and a predilection for sci-fi usually comes low on the list of priorities.
Doctor, sci-fi author and Hollywood power broker Michael Crichton sees nanotechnology as "perhaps the most radical technology in human history."
What Is Nanotechnology?
Crichton defines it as "the quest to build man-made machines of extremely small size, on the order of 100 nanometers, or 100/billionths of a meter." In an article in Parade magazine, Crichton wrote about the potential power of the field: "Such machines would be 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Experts predict that these tiny machines will provide everything from miniaturized computer components to new medical treatments to new military weapons. In the 21st century, they will change our world totally."
No wonder techies of all types are scrambling to learn about this nascent field. "Lots of people are very interested in nanotechnology," says Christine Peterson, vice president of public policy for the Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotech think tank. "They can see this is the next big thing, and they want to participate."
As Foresight defines it, nanotechnology encompasses a number of technologies -- some with current or near-term applications, others with applications likely to be developed in the distant future. But experts say it is a field that utilizes a wide variety of technical skills and knowledge, including electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, physics, mechanical engineering and software.
"The good news is that you can come at nanotechnology from almost any technical direction," says Peterson. "The bad news is sometimes you need to go back to school."
How to Break In
Peterson, who counsels Foresight members on career issues, says she sees "a lot of software folks -- dotcom-bust people -- jaded with that field and wanting to do something new and exciting." But "the jump from software to nano is a pretty big jump," she cautions. "Some people in software are good about bits, but they can't think about atoms."
Those best positioned to enter the field include experts in materials science and applied chemistry as well as others "who have been thinking about molecules," as Peterson puts it.
Research is essential. Students should consider which aspect of nanotechnology is right for them, and then seek out leading local university scholars in that arena. To make your mark, tap into your school's resources and conduct research. Positions for those with nanotechnology research experience range from PhD scientists working on original ideas in the lab to those with bachelor's degrees carrying out experiments and filling other support roles.
You can also research the field by:
Ignore the Hype
Some in the field caution that excessive hype is driving interest in nanotechnology. "So far, it's an idea," says Lev Dulman, CEO of AngstroVision, a startup working on imaging for nanotechnology.
In Dulman's view, those considering a career in nanotechnology shouldn't focus on nanotechnology itself, "because there's still not a clear definition of what it is." Instead, he suggests focusing on the "problems associated with nanotechnology," such as developing instrumentation and tools to work toward practical applications.
Follow the Money
Others, however, see nanotechnology as happening now rather than far into the future.
"Follow the money," advises Peterson, noting the cash being funneled into nanotechnology in Europe, Japan and the US. Just one example: The federal government's 2006 budget includes more than $1 billion in R&D funding requests for nanotech projects in 11 departments and agencies. "It doesn't really matter whether there's hype or not. If there's money going into it, that's real."
Ironically, scientists are now working on a synthetic fibre and engineering materials containing carbon nanotubes. "Funnily enough, it turns out nature's already thought about nanotechnology - for at least a few million years," says Pierlot "because wool is a complex assembly of nano-sized fibres." "The human race is besotted by technology, but if you hang in long enough the worm turns and people come back to natural fibres … the challenge is to develop a range of products that have relevance to people's lifestyles now."
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Thursday 27th October 2005:
But that's not all! Did you ever wish your competitors would go out of business? Well, with smart food engineering you'll be able to get your food to install tiny machines in the eater's taste buds. Then, whenever a product similar to yours enters his mouth, these machines will check for your company's cryptographic signature and, if absent, make the food taste really bad. Then the poor shmuck will have no choice but to buy your product. Is that cool or what?
But why stop there? With the latest nanoengineering technology you can make food that is as addictive as cocaine, but without any effect on the brain. It just has really unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. That'll surely keep them coming back for more!
Smart food can also drastically improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Did you ever want to know which part of the city eats the most of your product? Tag it with special nanotracers and install simple scanning equipment in the city sewers. Since such equipment is easy and cheap to produce, there is no reason why every home shouldn't have one. Wouldn't you like to know exactly who is eating your stuff, when, and where? I thought so.
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Sunday 23rd October 2005:
But why build a Nanocar? For bottom-up fabrication, of course. The Nanocar was built to transport cargo across a nanoscale surface, which has always been difficult to do gracefully. This cargo could then be used for fabrication on the nano level. For example, a fleet of Nanocars could carry the materials necessary to build a computer chip on a silicon wafer, and deposit them in the appropriate location. According to Tour, this provides a more graceful strategy for chip fabrication, and should enable more precise construction and fewer defects.
The Nanocar will be only slightly larger than the cargo it carries. Why? "We're taking our cue from biology," Tour explains, since a transporter tends to be roughly the same size as the particle it carries. Each unit of hemoglobin, for example, is about the same size as the molecule of oxygen it carries around your body.
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Sunday 16th October 2005:
The ability to detect changes inside of individual cells while those cells are still inside your body would be a boon to medicine. NASA-supported scientists are developing a technology right now that could, if it works, do exactly that.
The scientists don't actually coax the cells into talking, of course. The idea is to place "nanoparticles" inside the cells to function as molecule-size sensors. Whenever these sensors encounter certain signs of trouble -- a fragment of an invading virus perhaps -- they would begin to glow, signaling the outside world that something is wrong.
In laboratories around the country, NASA is supporting the burgeoning science of nanotechnology. The basic idea is to learn to deal with matter at the atomic scale -- to be able to control individual atoms and molecules well enough to design molecule-size machines, advanced electronics and "smart" materials.
If visionaries are right, nanotechnology could lead to robots you can hold on your fingertip, self-healing spacesuits, space elevators and other fantastic devices. Some of these things may take 20+ years to fully develop; others are taking shape in the laboratory today.
Only this isn't Hollywood. This is real science.
The "seed" for the facility, to be landed on the lunar surface from Earth to start the process, was 100 tons (approximately four Apollo missions). Once this 100-ton seed was in place, all further raw materials would be mined from the lunar surface and processed into the parts required to extend the SRS. A significant advantage of this approach for space exploration would be to reduce or eliminate the need to transport mass from the Earth--which is relatively expensive.
The report remarks that "The difficulty of surmounting the Earth's gravitational potential makes it more efficient to consider sending information in preference to matter into space whenever possible. Once a small number of self-replicating facilities has been established in space, each able to feed upon nonterrestrial materials, further exports of mass from Earth will dwindle and eventually cease. The replicative feature is unique in its ability to grow, in situ, a vastly larger production facility than could reasonably be transported from Earth. Thus the time required to organize extraordinarily large amounts of mass in space and to set up and perform various ambitious future missions can be greatly shortened by using a self-replicating factory that expands to the desired manufacturing capacity."
"The useful applications of replicating factories with facilities for manufacturing products other than their own components are virtually limitless."
Establishing the credibility of the concept occupied the early part of the chapter. The theoretical work of von Neumann was reviewed in some detail. Von Neumann designed a self-replicating device that existed in a two-dimensional "cellular automata" world. The device had an "arm" capable of creating arbitrary structures, and a computer capable of executing arbitrary programs. The computer, under program control, would issue detailed instructions to the arm. The resulting universal constructor was self-replicating almost as a by-product of its ability to create any structure in the two-dimensional world in which it lived. If it could build any structure it could easily build a copy of itself, and hence was self-replicating.
One interesting aspect of von Neumann's work is the relative simplicity of the resulting device: a few hundred kilobits to a megabit. Self-replicating systems need not inherently be vastly complex. Simple existing biological systems, such as bacteria, have a complexity of about 10 million bits. Of course, a significant part of this complexity is devoted to mechanisms for synthesizing all the chemicals needed to build bacteria from any one of several simple sugars and a few inorganic salts, and other mechanisms for detecting and moving to nutrients. Bacteria are more complex than strictly necessary simply to self-reproduce.
Despite the relative simplicity that could theoretically be achieved by the simplest self-reproducing systems, the proposed lunar facility would be highly complex: perhaps 100 billion to a trillion bits to describe. This would make it almost 10 thousand to 100 thousand times more complex than a bacterium, and a million times more complex than von Neumann's theoretical proposal. This level of complexity puts the project near the limits of current capabilities. (Recall that a major software project might involve a few tens of millions of lines of code, each line having a few tens of characters and each character being several bits. The total raw complexity is about 10 billion bits--perhaps 10 to 100 times less complex than the proposed SRS.) Where did this "excess" complexity come from?
The SRS has to exist in a complex lunar environment without any human support. The complexity estimate for the orbital site map alone is 100 billion bits, and the facilities for mining and refining the lunar soil have to deal with the entire range of circumstances that arise in such operations. This includes moving around the lunar surface (the proposal included the manufacture and placement of flat cast basalt slabs laid down by a team of five paving robots); mining operations such as strip mining, hauling, landfilling, grading, cellar-digging and towing; chemical processing operations including electrophoretic separation and HF (hydrofluoric) acid-leach separation, the recovery of volatiles, refractories, metals, and nonmetallic elements and the disposal of residue and wastes; the production of wire stock, cast basalt, iron or steel parts; casting, mold-making, mixing and alloying in furnaces and laser machining and finishing; inspection and storage of finished parts, parts retrieval and assembly and subassembly testing; and computer control of the entire SRS.
When we contrast this with a bacterium, much of the additional complexity is relatively easy to explain. Bacteria use a relatively small number of well defined chemical components which are brought to them by diffusion. This eliminates the mining, hauling, leaching, casting, molding, finishing, and so forth. The molecular "parts" are readily available and identical, which greatly simplifies parts inspection and handling. The actual assembly of the parts uses a single relatively simple programmable device, the ribosome, which performs only a simple rigid sequence of assembly operations (no AI in a ribosome!). Parts assembly is done primarily with "self-assembly" methods which involve no further parts-handling.
Another basic issue is closure. "Imagine that the entire factory and all of its machines are broken down into their component parts. If the original factory cannot fabricate every one of these items, then parts closure does not exist and the system is not fully self-replicating." In the case of the SRS, the list of all the component parts would be quite large. In the case of a bacterium, there are only 2,000 to 4,000 different "parts" (proteins). This means that the descriptions of the parts are less complex. Because most of the parts fall into the same class (proteins), the manufacturing process is simplified (the ribosome is adequate to manufacture all proteins).
What does all this mean for humanity? The report says "From the human standpoint, perhaps the most exciting consequence of self-replicating systems is that they provide a means for organizing potentially infinite quantities of matter. This mass could be so organized as to produce an ever-widening habitat for man throughout the Solar System. Self-replicating homes, O'Neill-style space colonies, or great domed cities on the surfaces of other worlds would allow a niche diversification of such grand proportions as never before experienced by the human species."
The report concludes that "The theoretical concept of machine duplication is well developed. There are several alternative strategies by which machine self-replication can be carried out in a practical engineering setting. . . .There is also available a body of theoretical automation concepts in the realm of machine construction by machine, in machine inspection of machines, and machine repair of machines, which can be drawn upon to engineer practical machine systems capable of replication. . . . An engineering demonstration project can be initiated immediately, to begin with simple replication of robot assembler by robot assembler from supplied parts, and proceeding in phased steps to full reproduction of a complete machine processing or factory system by another machine processing system, supplied, ultimately, only with raw materials."
What implications does the NASA study have for nanotechnology?
The broad implications of self-replicating systems, regardless of scale, are often similar. The economic impact of such systems is clear and dramatic. Things become cheap, and projects of sweeping scale can be considered and carried out in a reasonable time frame without undue expense.
The concepts involved in analyzing self-replicating systems--including closure, parts counts, parts manufacturing, parts assembly, system complexity, and the like--are also quite similar. The general approach of using a computer (whether nano or macro) to control a general purpose assembly capability is also clearly supported. Whether the general-purpose manufacturing capability is a miniature cross-section of current manufacturing techniques (as proposed for the SRS), or simply a single assembler arm which controls individual molecules during the assembly process, the basic concepts involved are the same.
Finally, by considering the design of an artificial SRS in such detail, the NASA team showed clearly that such things are feasible. Their analysis also provides good support for the idea that a nanotechnological "assembler" can be substantially less complex than a trillion bits in design complexity. There are several methods of simplifying the design of the "Mark I Assembler," as compared with the NASA SRS. First, it could exist in a highly controlled environment, rather than the uncontrolled lunar surface. Second, it could expect to find many of its molecular parts, including exotic parts that it might find difficult or impossible to manufacture itself, pre-fabricated and provided in a convenient and simple format (e.g., floating in solution). Third, it could use simple "blind," fixed-sequence assembly operations.
Conceptually, the only major improvements provided by the Mark I Assembler over a simple bacterium would be the general purpose positional control it will exert over the reactive compounds that it uses to manufacture "parts," and the wider range of chemical reactions it will use to assemble those "parts" into bigger "parts." Bacteria are able to synthesize any protein. The Mark I Assembler would be able to synthesize a very much wider range of structures. Because it would have to manufacture its own control computer as a simple prerequisite to its own self-replication, it would revolutionize the computer industry almost automatically. By providing precise atomic control even the Mark I Assembler will revolutionize the manufacturing process.
Copies of "Advanced Automation for Space Missions" are available from NTIS. Mail order: NTIS, U.S. Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service, Springfield, VA. 22161. Telephone orders with payment via major credit cards are accepted; call 703-487-4650 and request "N83-15348. Advanced Automation for Space Missions; NASA Conference Publication (or CP) 2255." Publication date is 1982 (although the study was done in 1980). Purchase price is about $60.00, various shipping options are available.
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Thursday 6th October 2005:
Title of Email - quoting from within the article: "He scatters the seed in his garden and waits, and at some point, just l ike a flower, his dream car sprouts up from the earth":
Purchasing a new car in 2020 - the scenario: the showroom dealer, in addition to exhibiting BMW's latest shiny new models, also sets up a stand with small, colourful seed packets. The packets, however, do not have pictures of exotic plants printed on them but instead car models. The customer chooses a car, pays for it, and is then handed over his dream car in a seed packet. He scatters the seed in his garden and waits, and at some point, just like a flower, his dream car sprouts up from the earth. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule.
What today seems like science fiction could tomorrow be reality. This is because there is no reason why objects cannot be created on an atom by atom basis, the proof for this being provided as far back as 1959 by American physicist and Nobel prize winner, Richard Feynman. In 1986 US researcher Eric Drexler too prophesied that: "In the future programmable molecular-sized robots will be able to grab hold of individual atoms and place them at the exact location where we want them to be. We will be able to replicate each new object atom by atom, be it a strawberry or a car." Just one year later the first step in this direction was taken when the decisive tool for conquering the atomic world was discovered. Since then scientists have been able to precisely design and mix the building blocks of the universe. Also possible now is the construction of artificial molecules which can be used as minute machines - almost exactly as Drexler prophesied.
Over the past three years, the number of companies in the field of nanotechnology in China has grown and reached over 800. This growth rate is very rapid and it has yet to show signs of slowing down. The sales to date have been largely domestic, but with the increasing global interest on the development of nanotechnology and with the advantage of modern communication we can for sure speculate that this could be a very profitable investment in the near future.
Nanotechnology and nano-bio-info-cogno converging technologies are becoming more and more the decisive factor of the race between regions and nations to win the future markets and society’s wealth and political stability. The development shows that five nations are leading the competition today. China, as one of these five nations, has its unique advantage of high flexibilty, low labour costs, no barriers for new technologies, young and vibrant society, large amount of foreign venture capital, underestimated currency (today about 25 percent undervalue compared with the US Dollar), low taxes, goverment support and a home market with more than 1.3 billion people for applications.
Shi Jianlin, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Shanghai Institute of Silicate, led a research team to invent the nano-vehicle.
"The 200-nanometer-long vehicle can safely carry drugs and release them suspendedly at focuses targeted by physicians," Shi said, adding that unloaded nano-vehicles can go out of human bodies via alimentary canals.
"This method can reduce side effects as much as possible and make the curative effects of drugs into full play," Shi said.
Shi completed his sophisticated tests in his lab, delivering antiphlogistic and analgesic drugs and cancer curatives.
The invention was published by the American Chemical Society Journal and a German academic journal of Angew Chemical.
Shi said that one gram of drugs needs thousands of such vehicles for transportation.
The research team used layer-by-layer technique in a hollow mesoporous silica. Mesoporous materials are of great research interests for their potential applications as catalysts, absorbents, key components in chemical sensors and optical nanodevices.
The past decade has seen the fast development of nanocomposite materials from ordered mesoporous materials.
The size distribution and dispersion of nanomaterials, in addition to their dimension, are crucial for their performance, Shi said.
Angew Chemical rated Shi's achievement as a "very important paper."
Chinese scientists have achieved a lot in nanotechnology. Statistics showed that from January to August 2004, China was ranked first in academic papers in nanotechnology by the Scientific Citation Index.
Capable of cleaning the inner side of teeth more effectively, it is toothbrushes upgradeable from the traditional. Usage the Nano technology, prevent the toothbrush to become the carrier what the germ survive and spread.
"The product is rich with patented herbal-whitening-effective ingredient and bodhi fruits UAA that may fight against the reason of blemish skin formation.
It can fade the black, yellow or brown skin and make skin white and tender. The ingredient of plant whitening can also prevent blemish skin especially the development of Tyrosinase. The Nano element is added to enhance skin transparent. The plentiful nutrition elements added can instantly make skin more elastic and white. The effect of white is quick and long."
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Wednesday 5th October 2005:
Over the past three years, the number of companies in the field of nanotechnology in China has grown and reached over 800. This growth rate is very rapid and it has yet to show signs of slowing down. The sales to date have been largely domestic, but with the increasing global interest on the development of nanotechnology and with the advantage of modern communication we can for sure speculate that this could be a very profitable investment in the near future.
Nanotechnology and nano-bio-info-cogno converging technologies are becoming more and more the decisive factor of the race between regions and nations to win the future markets and society’s wealth and political stability. The development shows that five nations are leading the competition today. China, as one of these five nations, has its unique advantage of high flexibilty, low labour costs, no barriers for new technologies, young and vibrant society, large amount of foreign venture capital, underestimated currency (today about 25 percent undervalue compared with the US Dollar), low taxes, goverment support and a home market with more than 1.3 billion people for applications.
Comment from person: "You only have to look at the (3-sublevel)title and vomit
Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno-Socio-Anthro-Philo- HLEG
Foresighting the New Technology Wave Converging Technologies
Shaping the Future of European Societies
. .
Rapporteur Report 2004 Geo-Eco-Urbo-Orbo-Macro-Micro-Nano-
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Sunday 2nd October 2005:
Comment from person: "I like the prediction that nontech will bring us phones we don't need to speak to. I thought that was the definition of a phone: for spoken communication. Perhaps nano can give us food we don't need to eat, but only look at etc...":
Kudos to the person who passed this on. You know who you are, and I am in awe of your olifactory abilities with respects the sniffing of new, true nanoshite.
"As part of a five-day business trip here, Mr. Kim met with reporters in southern Seoul yesterday to introduce cutting-edge future technologies and offer predictions on the world’s information-technology industry.
"Elaborating on the new cell phone technology developed by the laboratory, Mr. Kim said that smell-transmitting sensors, lenses that follow the movement of eyeballs and microphones as narrow as a human hair already exist, and would be on sale within a decade.
"Mr. Kim said nanotechnology - techniques used to create structures as small as one-millionth of a millimeter - had played a key role in the development of the new technologies.
"Mr. Kim predicted that nanotechnology could bring huge changes to the way humans live, citing the example of a new computer that will enable simultaneous translation of telephone conversations.
"'If nanotechnology maintains its current pace of development, it will give birth to a computer that has the information processing capacity equivalent to every human brain combined by 2060,’ he said.
"Mr. Kim said that while communication technologies have so far mostly focused on speed, future developments will look to improve their convenience. Eventually, he added, phones will no longer need to be touched or even spoken to, but will instead respond to mental commands."
The nano ink's pigment particles have a maximum diameter of only 200 nanometres.
Pigment particle size is the key in producing ink for printers. The particle diameter should be less than 500 nanometres for high quality print.
However, traditional Chinese ink did not reach this requirement, China Radio International reported.
After three years of research, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences here have co-developed this new ink by applying nano technology.
The minimum diameter of the pigment particles is only 20 nanometres, which is considered to be ideal for both black and colour printing.
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Thursday 29th September 2005:
- Recipients
All the recipients are help seekers on the Internet, among whom 75 are females, 24 females with a total number of 99. The age range is from 7-51, with 36 cases feverish, 38 diarrheas, 12 liver and spleen tumescent, 9 stomatic respiratory infection, 47 weight loss and 17 lymph tumescent.
- Succor method
With the treatment method corresponding to the symptoms, 5 varieties of nano-teas manufactured by Qinhuangdao Taiji Ring Product Company Limited are adopted, among which dark-green tea, white tea and green tea are made from the selenium rich tea unique to Enshi of Hubei, China . The average size of nano-teas is 100nm, distributed between 10-200nm for above 95% ( of which some tea particles are very close to viruses in size, and others are so tiny that they can penetrate viruses). Based on the major symptoms described by the help seekers, different varieties of nano-teas are used, with the table shown as follows:
selenium content exceeding 25ppm, i.e. each gram of tea contains 25micrograms of selenium. Shishu nano-selenium rich tea. When taken, one should start from 1g of selenium rich tea two times a day and selenium content in blood should be measured when used, after which an increase of 0.5 g of selenium rich tea should be implemented each time and selenium content in blood is monitored with liver function indexes and body signs when increased to 2.5g each time. If no response, an increase of quantity should be effected continuously.
When increased to response of body signs such as flush face, smell of metal or garlic in the mouth, slight falling-out of hair, rise of GPT, restlessness in emotion, the quantity of intake should be reduced to 1g if there is one of the above-mentioned signs. If responses disappear, it proves to be the person's resistance to selenium, i.e. it is the fatal dosage for viruses or cancerous cells (hypodermic sarcoma). This is also the time when poisoning needs watching closely so as to avoid abnormalities for individualities, and timely treatment can be arranged thereinafter. The method of use should be summed up as "increase incrementally on a trial basis and decrease in case of response".
- Summary of succor
Tentative Summary for Treatment of Aids by Nano-Tea
Discussion:
1 ) A relatively large of number of anti-virus and anti-cancer cases for tea products (green tea in particular) have been reported at home and abroad, which is mainly attributed to the chemical composition of tea and the function of polyphenol in the tea. This website adopts the absorbent physical effect of small particles and small-size surface to absorb and eliminate viruses as well as the penetration effect (tunnel effect) of nano particles to penetrate cell walls so that viruses can be removed through penetration, which hasn't yet been read at home and abroad. This has blazed a new road for defeat of Aids viruses in terms of methodology
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Friday 23rd September 2005:
It's no Sci-fi movie script or dream. The concept is very much real and might come true some day in the future. Scripted by scientists, Robert A Freitas and Christopher J Phoenix, it involves changing the very essence of life-replacing the blood coursing through your arteries and veins with over 500 trillion oxygen and nutrients carrying nanobots. The vasculoid system as it is called will just about duplicate every function of blood, albeit more efficiently.
Respirocytes, for example, are just one type of the nanobots that will make up this artificial blood. Freitas envisages respirocytes to be made up of 18 billion structural atoms that are precisely arranged to the last atom. Each respirocyte will have a tiny onboard computer, powerplant and molecular pumps and storage hulls that can transport molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
The bots will be a thousand times more efficient than the RBCs they seek to replace. Agreed this nano-robotic blood will be more than a little time in the making. But who knows, one day it could very well change the course of human evolution.
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Sunday 18th September 2005:
Some of the latest avenues being explored, that are more in the nano realm, in space science, include smart materials for the hulls of spacecraft. These would be materials primarily composed of nanotube fibers with nano sized computers integrated into them. These materials along with being even lighter will also be far stronger too. One idea is to create a surface that will help transfer the aerodynamic forces working on a spacecraft during launch. When the craft is launched the nano computers will flex the crafts hull to offset pressure differences in the hull caused by the crafts acceleration through the atmosphere. Then the same nano computer network in the hull would go to work heating the shaded side of the craft and cooling the sun exposed side and to even create heat shielding for reentry. To equalize the surface temperature now, a spacecraft must be kept rotating and although a slight spin is good in maintaining the attitude of a craft somtimes it interferes with the mission plan, like when a spacecraft is taking photographs or is in the process of docking with another craft.
Another avenue being investicated is a concept of nano robotics called "Swarms". Swarms are nano robots that act in unison like bees. They theoretically, will act as a flexible cloth like material and being composed of what's called Bucky tubes, this cloth will be as strong as diamond. Add to this cloth of nano machines nano computers and you have smart cloth. This smart cloth could be used to keep astronauts from bouncing around inside their spacecraft while they sleep, a problem that arises when the auto pilot computer fires the course correction rockets. The cloth like material will be able to offset the sudden movements and slowly move the sleeping astronaut back into position. Still another application for the nano robot swarms, being considered, is that the smart cloth could be used in the astronauts space suits.
A space suit is nothing more nor less than an incredible space ship itself so this same smart cloth could be the super structure of a deep space probe replete with an on board A.I computer capable of creating the science experiments needed enroute to its destination and capable of not only making changes in mission plans but creating even new experiments as they are needed or wanted. The same super explorer could even create its own solar energy gathering panels if appropriate or utilizing R.T.G technology with plutonium also it will be able to repair itself. And while all of the above is going on the craft could even expand it's own computing capabilities if need be.
Another application of nano robots would be in carrying out construction projects in hostile environments, for example with just a handfull, of self replicating robots, utilizing local materials, and local energy it's conceivable that space habitats can be completely constructed by remote control so that the inhabitants need only show up with their suitcases. Colonization of space begins to make economic sense then, since it would only take one saturn type rocket to create a complete space colony on mars, for example. An engineer or a team of engineers could check up on the construction of the habitat via telepresents utilizing cameras and sensors created on the surface of Mars by the nano bots all from the comfortable confines of Earth. Then once the habitat is complete humans can show up to orchestrate the expansion of the exploration. Venus could be explored with nano robots too. Super Hulls could be fashioned by nano robots to withstand the intense pressures and corrosive gases of the venusian atmosphere, to safely house nano robot built sensors and equiptment. The potential in all of this is getting a lot more space exploraton accomplished with less investment of resources and a lot less danger to human explorers.
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Friday 16th September 2005:
Nothing, to my knowledge (send corrections if you know of something). But what the nanotech community can do today is send donations to relief organizations
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Thursday 15th September 2005:
Some day soon, in a remote village in the developing world, a health worker will put a drop of a patient's blood on a piece of plastic about the size of a coin. Within minutes, a full diagnostic examination will be complete including the usual battery of blood work tests, plus analysis for infectious diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, hormonal imbalances, even cancer.
That remarkable piece of plastic is called a lab-on-a-chip and it is one of the revolutionary products and processes currently emerging from nanotechnology research with the potential to transform the lives of billions of the world's most vulnerable inhabitants.
According to a new study by the Canadian Program on Genomics and Global Health (CPGGH) at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB), a leading international medical ethics think-tank, several nanotechnology applications will help people in developing countries tackle their most urgent problems - extreme poverty and hunger, child mortality, environmental degradation and diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. The study is the first ranking of nanotechnology applications relative to their impact on development; it was published today by the prestigious, open-access, US-based Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.
The study also relates the impact of nanotechnologies to the world's eight Millennium Development Goals, agreed in 2000 for achievement by 2015.
"Most waves of technology can increase the gap between rich and poor but the harnessing of nanotechnology represents a chance to close these gaps. The targeted application of nanotechnology has enormous potential to bring about major improvements in the living standards of people in the developing world," says CPGGH co-director and JCB Director Dr. Peter Singer.
"Science and technology alone are not going to magically solve all the problems of developing countries but they are critical components of development. Nanotechnology is a relatively new field that will soon be providing radical and relatively inexpensive solutions to critical development problems."
Nanotechnology is the study, design, creation, synthesis, manipulation, and application of functional materials, devices, and systems through control of matter at the nanometer scale (one nanometer being equal to 1 x 10-9 of a meter), and the exploitation of novel phenomena and properties of matter at that scale. When matter is manipulated at the tiny scale of atoms and molecules, it exhibits novel phenomena and properties. Thus, scientists are harnessing nanotechnology to create new, inexpensive materials, devices, and systems with unique properties.
Goals of the CPGGH study included identifying and ranking the 10 nanotechnology applications most likely to have an impact in the developing world. The study team asked an international panel of 63 experts which nanotechnology applications are most likely to benefit developing countries in the areas of water, agriculture, nutrition, health, energy and the environment in the next 10 years.
The top 10 nanotechnology applications are:
With a high degree of unanimity, panelists selected energy production, conversion and storage, along with creation of alternative fuels, as the area where nanotechnology applications are most likely to benefit developing countries.
"Economic development and energy consumption are inextricably linked," says Singer. "If nanotechnology can help developing countries to move towards energy self-sufficiency, then the benefits of economic growth will become that much more accessible."
Study leader Dr. Fabio Salamanca-Buentello explained that nano-structured materials are being used to build a new generation of solar cells, hydrogen fuel cells and novel hydrogen storage systems that will deliver clean energy to countries still reliant on traditional, non-renewable contaminating fuels.
As well, recent advances in the creation of synthetic nano-membranes embedded with proteins are capable of turning light into chemical energy.
"These technologies will help people in developing countries avoid recurrent shortages and price fluctuations that come with dependence on fossil fuels, as well as the environmental consequences of mining and burning oil and coal," he says.
Number two on the list is agriculture, where science is developing a range of inexpensive nanotech applications to increase soil fertility and crop production, and help eliminate malnutrition - a contributor to more than half the deaths of children under five in developing countries.
Nanotech materials are in development for the slow release and efficient dosage of fertilizers for plants and of nutrients and medicines for livestock. Other agricultural developments include nano-sensors to monitor the health of crops and farm animals and magnetic nano-particles to remove soil contaminants.
Water treatment is third-ranked by the panel. "One-sixth of the world's population lacks access to safe water supplies," says Dr. Salamanca-Buentello.
"More than one third of the population of rural areas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has no clean water, and two million children die each year from water-related diseases, such as diarrhea, cholera, typhoid, and schistosomiasis, which result from a lack of adequate water sources and sanitation."
Nano-membranes and nano-clays are inexpensive, portable and easily cleaned systems that purify, detoxify and desalinate water more efficiently than conventional bacterial and viral filters. Researchers also have developed a method of large-scale production of carbon nano-tube filters for water quality improvement.
Other water applications include systems (based on titanium dioxide and on magnetic nano-particles) that decompose organic pollutants and remove salts and heavy metals from liquids, enabling the use of heavily contaminated and salt water for irrigation and drinking. Several of the contaminating substances retrieved could then be easily recycled.
Disease diagnosis and screening was ranked fourth. Here technologies include the "lab-on-a-chip", which offers all the diagnostic functions of a medical laboratory, and other biosensors based on nano-sized tubes, wires, magnetic particles and semiconductor crystals (quantum dots). These inexpensive, hand-held diagnostic kits detect the presence of several pathogens at once and could be used for wide-range screening in small peripheral clinics. Meanwhile, nanotechnology applications are in development that would greatly enhance medical imaging.
Rounding out the top 10:
5. Drug delivery systems: including nano-capsules, dendrimers (tiny bush-like spheres made of branched polymers), and "buckyballs" (soccerball-shaped structures made of 60 carbon atoms) for slow, sustained drug release systems, characteristics valuable for countries without adequate drug storage capabilities and distribution networks. Nanotechnology could also potentially reduce transportation costs and even required dosages by improving shelf-life, thermo-stability and resistance to changes in humidity of existing medications;
6. Food processing and storage: including improved plastic film coatings for food packaging and storage that may enable a wider and more efficient distribution of food products to remote areas in less industrialized countries; antimicrobial emulsions made with nano-materials for the decontamination of food equipment, packaging, or food; and nanotech-based sensors to detect and identify contamination;
7. Air pollution remediation: including nanotech-based innovations that destroy air pollutants with light; make catalytic converters more efficient, cheaper and better controlled; detect toxic materials and leaks; reduce fossil fuel emissions; and separate gases.
8. Construction: including nano-molecular structures to make asphalt and concrete more resistant to water; materials to block ultraviolet and infrared radiation; materials for cheaper and durable housing, surfaces, coatings, glues, concrete, and heat and light exclusion; and self-cleaning for windows, mirrors and toilets.
9. Health monitoring: several nano-devices are being developed to keep track of daily changes in patients' physiological variables such as the levels of glucose, of carbon dioxide, and of cholesterol, without the need for drawing blood in a hospital setting. This way, patients suffering from diabetes would know at any given time the concentration of sugar in their blood; similarly, patients with heart diseases would be able to monitor their cholesterol levels constantly.
10. Disease vector and pest detection control: including nano-scale sensors for pest detection, and improved pesticides, insecticides, and insect repellents.
Addressing global challenges using nanotechnology
The study team found that several developing countries have already launched nanotechnology initiatives. India's Department of Science and Technology will invest $20 million over the next four years, for example, and China ranks third in the world behind the United States and Japan in the number of nanotech patent applications.
Researchers at China's Tsinghua University have begun clinical tests for a bone scaffold based on nanotechnology which gradually disintegrates as the patient's damaged skeletal tissue heals. This application of nanotechnology is especially relevant for developing countries, where the number of skeletal injuries resulting from road traffic accidents is acute.
In Brazil, the projected budget for nanoscience during the next five years (2004-2007) is about US $25 million, and three institutes, four networks, and approximately 300 scientists are working in nanotechnology. Brazilian researchers are investigating the use of modified magnetic nanoparticles to remove oil from oil spills; both the nanoparticles and the oil could potentially be recycled.
The South African Nanotechnology Initiative is a national network of academic researchers involved in areas such as nanophase catalysts, nanofiltration, nanowires, nanotubes, and quantum dots. And Mexico has world-class researchers in carbon nanotubes. Other developing countries pursuing nanotechnology include Thailand, Philippines, Chile, and Argentina.
"Resource-rich member nations of the international community have a self-interest and a moral obligation to support the development and use by less industrialized countries of these top 10 nanotechnologies to address key development challenges," says Dr. Abdallah Daar, MD, Director for Ethics and Policy of the McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine and co-director of the CPGGH.
"We propose an initiative, called Addressing Global Challenges Using Nanotechnology, that can be modelled on the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative launched last year by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
"A grand challenge directs investigators to seek a specific scientific or technological breakthrough that would overcome obstacles to solving significant development problems. In our proposed initiative, a specific Grand Challenges in Nanotechnology project would foster scientific and technological advances that would encourage development in less industrialized countries. The top 10 nanotechnology applications identified in our current study are a good starting point for defining these grand challenges.
"Our results can provide guidance to developing countries themselves to help target their growing initiatives in nanotechnology. The goal should be to use nanotechnology responsibly to generate real benefits for the 5 billion people in the developing world."
Source: University of Toronto Joint Center for Bioethics
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Monday 5th September 2005:
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Sunday 4th September 2005:
The new science of claytronics, which will use nanotechnology to create tiny robots called catoms, should enable three-dimensional copies of people to be "faxed" around the world for virtual meetings.
A doctor could also consult with a patient over the phone, even taking their pulse by holding the wrist of the claytronic replica, reports New Scientist.
And the nano "clay" could be carried around, shape-shifting into virtually anything when required. Your claytronic mobile phone could turn into a hammer for a spot of DIY and then a pair of shoes to go jogging.
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Sunday 14th August 2005:
"When people start investing in a technology as opposed to investing in an application [and] when people start hyping a technology, you're sure to have bad things happen," said Khosla. He said the sector would "almost certainly" create a bubble.
"And whether they are doing it knowingly or unknowingly, there is a reasonably high likelihood that they will defraud the public market," he said, referring to Nanosys.
It's not that he thinks that nanotech is bogus. Far from it: he's invested in two firms and regards nanotechnology breakthroughs in computer memory and batteries as inevitable in the next few years. But he doesn't think companies should go to market without a product and he's dubious that old companies have been able to repackage themselves as fresh nanotech startups.
Nanosys itself has licensing agreements with Intel and Matsushita (Panasonic) to exploit its portfolio. Nanosys' CEO Larry Bock has a slash-and-burn reputation with startups: of twelve biotechnology companies he took public in 2001, four have gone bust and the not one of the remaining eight is making money yet. ®
A partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, Khosla has invested in optical networking and silicon companies in recent years. You can find an account of his early years at Sun here - it's worth a hundred airport kiosk business paperbacks.®
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Tuesday 10th August 2005:
October 5, 2004 NPCT announces a deal to go into the business of chicken feed additive with Xact Industries. I tried to check out this PR and new business partner but so far it seems totally false and the new biz partner is as scammy as Paul. The new guy was sued by the US for making false statements.
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Thursday 9th June 2005:
A prototype of the "Viral Protein Nano Motor" is expected to be unveiled in 2007, with research and development funded by a four-year $1,050,017 grant from the National Science Foundation and its Nanoscale Science and Engineering program
The term "nano" refers to nanotechnology – the study and process of working with devices and assembling structures by using atom- or molecule-sized building blocks. In this case, Rutgers scientists are using biological molecules derived from virus-based proteins to build a bio-nano motor that can perform a linear opening and closing motion.
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Wednesday 8th June 2005:
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Tuesday 7th June 2005:
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Sunday 5th June 2005:
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Saturday 4th June 2005:
G. FJERMEDAL: Make it so practical that Middle America would just embrace it! Bathroom cleaners, wood preservatives.
G. BEAR: Might I suggest the fabric industry. There is apparently a huge grant available for anyone who can remove rust stains once they are set.
Though he admits that nanobots sound like something out of "Fantastic Voyage," this star scientist feels confident his dream will come true. "Already we can insert nano-biosensors into cells and observe their process," he says.
Officials at Foresight Institute, an industry think tank, agree that future nanobots will revolutionize healthcare. Ability to self-replicate makes them inexpensive, and because they can position each atom in place with perfect precision, they leave no doubts about the quality of performance.
Today, when a cell is damaged, doctors rely on drugs to instruct the cell to repair itself, a process that does not always bring the patient back to health. With nanobots, damaged cells are completely rebuilt, one atom at a time, creating a flawless and brand new, or better than new youthful cell.
Nanobots work like tiny surgeons as they reach into a cell, sense damaged parts; repair them by reformatting new atoms, and leave. By repairing and rearranging cells and surrounding structures, nanobots can restore every tissue and bone in the body to perfect health – including replacing aging skin with new, resilient skin, restoring youthful looks and good health.
Foresight thinkers compare nanotech with the importance of humanity’s taming of fire. Because assemblers build copies of themselves quickly, using inexpensive materials, little energy, and no human labor, a single nano-machine can copy itself billions of times with almost no cost.
However, opponents remind us that the human body contains about ten thousand billion billion protein parts, which make up an extremely complex machine called "life." Can nanobots really improve on what nature has accomplished through all its years of evolution? Advocates believe they can.
These amazing ‘bots will easily understand how healthy cells differ from damaged ones, and in the time it takes an enzyme to change a single bond, nanobots could perform more than a thousand steps, easily winning the "speed race" over nature.
Expected by many as early as 2020, nanobots will clearly revolutionize medicine, giving us the ability to drastically extend our lives. Since forward-thinking scientists now consider death a treatable disease resulting from damaged molecular machinery, chemical imbalances, and defective structures – all problems within the range of nano-repair devices – youthful health and indefinite lifespan could soon be available to every adult, regardless of age.
This "magical future" can become reality in our lifetime! Think positive and it could become your future.
"While applications for the technology are wide open and venture capital dollars are readily available - many of the companies assembled at the NanoBusiness Conference 2005, a trade show held here wherein nanotechnologists are rubbing elbows with each other and Wall Street types - the challenges are great for the industry, which is still in its infancy."
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Thursday 26th May 2005:
