The Economist reports that “…a bright future beckons, and some of the nanohype that has been swirling around might actually get translated into a useful product.”
The reason is that “…adding a sprinkle of nanoparticles to water can improve its thermal conductivity, and thus its ability to remove heat from something that it is in contact [...]How do you see whether critical valves in a blowout protector are open or closed, a mile deep in the sea and through inches of steel?
Gamma-ray imaging, as suggested by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu:
Atlantic: How is it that you know enough about gamma rays and oil spill technology to be helpful? I wasn’t aware [...]Irrational drug design (aka high-throughput screening) parallels other areas of data-driven science: it abandons the methodology of traditional hypothesis-driven science — which demands a focus on specific predictions — and pursues instead the weak and humble hypothesis that looking in a general area will find something. As I discussed here, genomics and synoptic sky [...]
Kevin Bullis reports in Technology Review:
Now Paul Rothemund, a computer scientist at Caltech, with a background in biology, has developed a relatively inexpensive way to quickly design and build arbitrary shapes and patterns using DNA — and, he says, it’s simple enough for high-school students to use…
It’s really spectacular work. I’m extremely excited about it,” says William [...]When I picked up my copy of this week’s Chemical & Engineering News this evening, I found that the lead article begins with this:
Futuristic visions of nanobots that travel the body to treat disease and construct compounds one atom at a time got a little closer to reality this week, thanks to two advances in [...]Text and graphics excerpted from Figure 4 of a recent paper on a new form of nanoscale lithography:
AFM scan of the replica of the Matterhorn written into the molecular glass (3D data source: geodata © swisstopo).
The maximum steepness of slopes is an important parameter in scanning probe lithography. It would be easy to misread the [...]I finally understand how a discrete model of spacetime can be Lorentz invariant.
To see the problem, note that a spacetime divided into little Planck-length parts would look different in a boosted reference frame — the lengths would differ. (A proposed workaround, “doubly-special relativity,” has been severely challenged at a very basic level.)
A recent review gives [...]Like most people with a conservative engineering mindset, I usually assume that major commercial technologies are designed to work reasonably close to the limits of current fabrication technologies (currently practical materials, subsystem performance, etc.). Then something like this comes along:
…an MIT-led team has designed a green airplane that is estimated to use 70 percent less [...]This post is displayed on Metamodern in a new format designed for brief posts, to be categorized as “Brevia”. This (and a bunch of other changes) reflects an upgrade in my Wordpress theme, Thesis.
The typical Wordpress theme centers a style provided by an HTML template, but Thesis is more like a PHP app. It has [...]