A Mexican anti-technology terrorist organization called Individuals Tending to Savagery/Wildness (ITS) has
claimed responsibility for
two bombing
attacks on researchers in Mexico.
posted by jeffburdges
on Aug 10, 2011 -
42 comments
The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale looks at the cause of polarizing debates such as: global warming, gun ownership, school shootings, terrorism, nanotechnology, public health, nuclear power, foreign wars and just about every heated thread in Internet history. In short, the polarizing issue is "risk"- the perception of risk, and the proposed solutions to risk. It turns out people see risk in polarizing ways according to where they stand on a scale of cultural beliefs.
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 26, 2011 -
46 comments
Nanotech researchers have developed, quite by accident, the first all-natural metal organic framework (MOF) made from renewable sources. And it turns out, you can eat them too.
“They taste kind of bitter, like a Saltine cracker, starchy and bland”
Doesn't sound very promising as a snack food, but it is very interesting to those looking to use MOF to
store gases, say hydrogen, in a more renwable manner.
You can actually
make these for yourself, you just y-cyclodextrin, potassium benzoate, water, and, well, Everclear. Yum?
posted by cross_impact
on Sep 2, 2010 -
47 comments
Nanoparticles often get a bad rap in popular media. From discredited scenarios (
grey goo) to more plausible concerns (
cancer), often the emphasis in reporting is on its risks rather than its potential rewards. But this has been a good week for the tiny science.
[more inside]
posted by Hardcore Poser
on Dec 15, 2009 -
24 comments
Nanobliss "Nanobliss is a gallery of visualizations of small-scale structures of carbon nanotubes and silicon, created by John Hart."
I came for the awesome
Nanobamas [Flickr set here], but was impressed enough with the rest to share the whole. Enjoy---particularly the informative
techniques page. At the very least, have a look at some of the pretty nano pictures.
posted by kosem
on Nov 12, 2008 -
11 comments
The
Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm (ANTS) "...is a
generic mission architecture consisting of miniaturized, autonomous, self-similar, reconfigurable, addressable components
forming structures. The components/structures have wide spatial distribution and multi-level organization. This ‘swarm’
behavior is inspired by the success of social insect colonies...."
ANTS may one day
teem through the solar
system....
(last two links large QT files) [more inside]
posted by Kronos_to_Earth
on Sep 14, 2008 -
14 comments
Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions:
science,
invention,
space travel,
colonisation,
immortality,
water
shortage,
flooding,
nanotech,
techno-apocalypse,
extinction,
mental health,
smart machines,
robots, mind uploading,
AI,
Asia,
economics,
demographics,
goverance,
cities.
What is your prediction?
posted by MetaMonkey
on Oct 5, 2006 -
54 comments
Never wanna work/Always wanna play/Pleasure, pleasure every day. What happens when the jobs go away and
don't return? Should we take the surpluses generated and
pay people not to work? What happens to the assumption of scarcity when
nanotechology allows us to generate potentially anything we want from
grass clippings? Maybe Marx had it wrong all along. Maybe, instead of fetishizing work and the authoritarian mindset that it generates, we should have been reading Paul Lafargue
instead.
Just as a thought experiment, what would you do if your job category disappeared? How would you spend your time? Would you invest more time and energy in friendships and other relationships? Hobbies? If you were your employer, what technologies would you use to get rid of your position and save money?
posted by jason's_planet
on Jun 25, 2006 -
43 comments
New hope for blind hamsters. According to the Guardian, scientists at MIT have repaired brain damage and restored eyesight to rodents using nanotechnology. In the study, minute particles were injected into damaged parts of the brain, and subsequently arranged themselves into a "scaffold" gel throughout the damaged area. The scaffold allowed severed nerves to regrow and form new connections. 75% of test animals' injuries were improved with the new technique. (The article did not note if the test subjects offered any resistance to the therapeutic measures.)
posted by rob511
on Mar 14, 2006 -
18 comments
The Washington Post has one of the better articles about nanotechnology that I've seen, providing both a view of the billions of dollars of investment in the technology, and the concerns of environmentalists and consumer health advocates. The article predicts upcoming regulatory battles over how and when this technology should be released.
Perhaps one of the brighter points of light is that concerns have shifted away from the superlative
grey goo (IMHO: if a grey goo was chemically possible, bacteria would have done it already) towards the possible risks of disease due to exposure. Rice University has a page devoted to
current information on research regarding nanotechnology and health.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Feb 1, 2004 -
18 comments
Little robots in your pants -- Popular Science calls Dockers to investigate their claim that the stain-repellent "Go Khakis" use nanotechnology. Certainly my favorite headline of the day thus far.
posted by logovisual
on Jul 18, 2003 -
16 comments
The Grey Goo guys gain ground.
"The controversy involves the potential perils of making molecule-size objects and devices - a field known as nanotechnology ... The ultimate nightmare was the so-called Gray Goo catastrophe, in which self-replicating microscopic robots the size of bacteria fill the world and wipe out humanity."
While 'gain ground' may not be wholly accurate (it was alliterative), the theory is being given lots of play in scientific circles as nano-devices approach practical status.
posted by o2b
on Aug 19, 2002 -
26 comments
Kurzweil teleports to nanotech conference. Well, nearly... it looks like an oversized teleprompter - but according to those who were there, a lifesized 3D image of ace tech-visionary
Ray Kurzweil did indeed appear at a conference in Richardson, Texas, March 7, 2002.
"I thought it worked really well," said Steve T. Jurvetson, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. "I thought it was at least 95% of the real thing. In fact, the person that followed strangely enough seemed pale and flat. In comparison Ray almost was more realistic and three-dimensional." But will it share a Bud in the after-meet schmooze? In any case, we always knew that, in terms of the tech-spec,
The Force Was With Us.
posted by theplayethic
on Mar 12, 2002 -
19 comments
Nano-art. Japanese artist builds a sculpture of a bull that can only be seen with an electron microscope. It's the size of a single red blood cell. Next? Christo will wrap the head of a pin in pink tissue paper, I assume.
posted by rev-
on Aug 23, 2001 -
12 comments
If you`re like me, then you believe that as time goes on and technology gets better, information content providers will have fewer and fewer means of preventing their content from being freely distributed - until all information is free, essentially. We`re already seeing this - MP3, motion pictures and whatnot. But let`s stretch our imagination a little and try to conceive the convergance of this trend with
Nanotechnology... [more]
posted by SilentSalamander
on Jun 27, 2000 -
5 comments
