More items from the bafuture list:

Nanoguitar at Cornell

(Photo credit: Cornell)

Self-assembling POM molecules

(Photo credit: Brookhaven Nat’l Lab)

Wireless cancer-detecting nanosprings in pill form… Would you like the red or the blue?

PARC’s printable semiconductors

And in case you missed it, microprocessors are dead

Realistic Japanese Female Actroid Robot

65-nm and counting… Intel: 2005

45-nm and counting… Intel: 2007

Interesting clips from WTA’s November News:

Audio of talks from Transvision 2003

TransVision 2004: Art and Life in the Posthuman Era

A new issue of the Journal of Evolution and Technology (Vol. 13, Issue 2) is out

Max More writes on Democracy and Transhumanism

Cyborg Democracy Blog:
“A new blog for transhumanists, nanosocialists, revolutionary singularitarians, non-anthropocentric personhood theorists, radical futurists, leftist extropians, bioutopians and biopunks, socialist-feminist cyborgs, transgenders, body modifiers, basic income advocates, world federalists, agents of the Culture and the Cassini Division, Viridians and technoGaians - transmitting a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future”

Nature isn’t classical dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem because it doesn’t look so easy.” - Richard Feynman

Brave new world of the nano

We are going on a new journey, into inner space, to find out how materials really work at the nano-level. We are on the cusp of a new age of enlightenment.

(Photo credit: Sydney Morning Herald)

ISAC’s John Smart echoed this perspective in his Quantum Theology lecture last spring:

Inner space, not outer space, now appears to be our constrained developmental destiny, incredibly soon in cosmologic time.

A primer on MEST compression, a driving force behind Moore’s Law and other evolutionary phenomena.

And what does this have to do with spirituality and consciousness? Ask the monks and shamans, they were concentrating inward long before modern scientists conceded that the fabric of reality was more flexible and illusory than they originally claimed…

Perspectives from a transhumanist-minded bioengineer:

This totally new type of being won’t be a cyborg, a part machine/part human. Rather, Homo technicus will be a fusion of biology and technology at the atomic level. Its living and non-living materials will be indistinguishable. And its appearance, Goldstein argues, will spell the end of the Darwinian age for humans.

After 4 billion years of evolution, carbon-based life on Earth has learnt to make use of only a few dozen chemical reactions. But Homo technicus, with the whole periodic table of elements and an array of biological molecules at his disposal for nanofabrication, would be able to exploit trillions of chemical reactions to produce the desired result.

We need to start the debate now…

An innovative investigation into the nonlinear dynamics of crack tip propagation and hyperelasticity:

In their studies, the scientists show that hyperelasticity, the elasticity at large strains, can dominate the dynamics of fracture. Cracks moving in solids absorb and dissipate energy from the surrounding material. ‘We discovered a new length scale characterizing the zone near the crack tip from which the crack draws energy to sustain its motion,’ says Gao. ‘When materials are under extreme stress, this length scale extends only a few dozens nanometers.’

(Photo credit: EurekAlert)

Future nanotechnologies as envisioned by Feynman are based on molecular manufacturing, or as Drexler would now call it, zettatech:

Large-scale mechanosynthesis based on positional control of chemically reactive molecules

Small Time’s Howard Lovy responds in his Nanobot to the Guardian article Should we be scared? that embodies the confusion emerging from the rapidly spreading NanoMeme.

“As the game universe becomes intricate, as transactions start to cross the boundary between the game world and the real world, it becomes more complicated as to what you’re going to call defamation.”
(from Wired)

Interesting Newsweek article by Steven Levy. While the piece acknowledges the unyielding force of Moore’s Law, there is no direct mention of nanotech, which could lead to many stirring and dramatic developments. Instead, levy’s examples of future innovations include a more obvious assortment: faster management software, better search software, and rfid…

“…the question that really terrifies tech vendors was asked by Bill Joy, then chief scientist at Sun, at last winter’s World Economic Forum in Davos: ‘What if the reality is that people have already bought most of the stuff they want to own?’”

“For many people, the productivity is not apparent,” says Edward Tenner, author of “Why Things Bite Back.” “Despite technology, they’re not working shorter hours for more pay. They ask, ‘What does productivity mean for me?’ Certainly there’s been no increase in self-reported happiness.”

“’I’ve been hearing about the end of innovation since the 386 chip [more than 20 years ago],’ says Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s chief technology officer. ‘But we’re not about to go backwards.’ Nick Donofrio, senior VP of IBM, concurs. ‘Our point of view is that we’ll see six magnitudes of improvement in the next 35 years,’ he says.”

Amazing new user interface by James Patten from MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group

“These tangible interfaces aim to let people take advantage of the skills they already have when using a computer…”

“I’m a very strong and passionate advocate of microchipping all dogs” (more)

“What problem is Mr Carter trying to solve? Micro chipping is not going to stop dog attacks” (more)

“Then random thoughts began to cycle through her head, faster and faster, each with the terrifying force of reality. And then the terror was gone, all emotion was gone. There was a moment where her hands seemed to swell to enormous proportions, her torso shrink, her face filled the sky. Then her body was gone. All was silence. And her awareness was filled with strange symbols, which she knew she should recognize but couldn’t quite place, and then the symbols consumed her and there was only confusion.”

… in Metaphysics [H. E. Puthoff, Ph.D.]

All of this characterizes the underlying, ambient, random quantum zero-point-energy sea as a blank matrix upon which coherent patterns can be written, such information constituting at the bottom end of the scale, coherent particle and field structures, and… an ascending ladder of possible other information structures, whether it be coherent electromagnetic filed structures around living organisms, possibly non-biochemical components of memory, or other more esoteric aspects of Nature. If my goal for this research comes to full fruition, what would emerge would be an increased understanding that all of us are immersed, both as living and physical beings, in an overall interpenetrating and interdependent field in ecological balance with the cosmos as a whole, and that even the boundary lines between the physical and “metaphysical” would dissolve into a unitary viewpoint of the universe as a fluid, changing, energetic/information cosmological unity.

What is the Matrix? That’s an old question. The real head-scratcher is: When is the Matrix?

Using background culled from the three movies and Animatrix shorts, The Associated Press compiled an estimated timeline of the war between men and machines:

2010-60 — Humans create humanoid drone robots with artificial intelligence to fill jobs as construction laborers and servants.

2069 — The hovercraft transport ship Nebuchadnezzar, later to be captained by Morpheus, is constructed in the United States.

2075 — AI programs evolve and some robots began to resent their human overlords.

2077 — In the first case of a machine rising up against its owners, the butler robot B166ER slaughters two humans, leading to B166ERs eradication and a backlash against robots and artificial intelligence.

2080-85 — Rioting and violence against machines prompts robots to flee major cities and establish their own community — known as Zero One — in a remote part of the Middle East.

2085-2095– Zero One thrives, creating superior vehicles, computers and weaponry and decimating the economies of many human nations, which now lack the machine-based labor that made them strong.

2096– United Nations officials refuse to accept the robot civilization of Zero One as a sovereign nation. A trade blockade of robot goods leads to war.

2097 — Zero One survives a nuclear attack — its inhabitants are impervious to the heat and radiation and casualties are quickly replaced. Counterstrikes launched against humans.

2098 — As cities fall beneath the might of mechanized forces, desperate military leaders attempt to block the main source of energy for the robot city: the sun. The plan destroys the atmosphere and fills the sky with choking black smoke — but does not stop the machines.

2099– Machine forces overtake human armies and capture survivors and civilians for experimentation, determining that human bio-electricity can be harnessed to replace the sun’s energy.

2100 — Machines create the Matrix, a dreamlike world set in 1999, to extend the lives of the comatose human batteries.

2105 — The first human known as The One, locked in bondage inside the Matrix, learns he can manipulate the world through thought and manages to break free. Seeks sanctuary in the underground human stronghold of Zion.

2105-2150 — Zion resistance movement created, although The One later dies under unexplained circumstances.

2161 — Morpheus born in a Matrix womb; freed in childhood.

2167 — Trinity born in a Matrix womb; freed in early childhood.

2175 — The Oracle prophesizes that Morpheus will discover the second coming of The One.

2199 — Trinity and Morpheus discover Neo, a hacker in the Matrix. They free him and do battle with Agent Smith, a program designed to rid the Matrix of humans who detect its flaws.

2201 — The Osiris, another human rebellion ship, discovers machines drilling through the Earth above Zion. Crew members send a message through the Matrix to their compatriots shortly before being destroyed.

2201 — Now living in Zion and working with the rebellion against the machines, Neo encounters The Architect, the artificial intelligence program that created the Matrix.

2201 –The Architect reveals that the Matrix places rebellious humans in Zion, which it then targets for destruction, thus eradicating bugs in its system. He states that Zion has been destroyed five previous times — suggesting the Matrix may be much older than he thinks.

TRADITIONALLY, converting gravity into electricity has involved building huge dams to tame vast rivers at great expense and no little environmental cost.

- From Nanopower: A new way of generating electricity