The Foresight Nanotech Institute’s Christine Peterson was interviewed by Earth & Sky about nanotechnology and surveillance.Peterson raises serious questions about the types of data that will exist in the surveillance environments of the near future as a result of nanotech-enabled chemical sensing technologies.
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The Foresight Nanotech Institute have published glowing praise for the aspirations of PuramatrixTM founder, Prof. Shuguang Zhang. They approvingly quote Zhang from an eJournal article:
For example, aging and damaged tissues can be replaced with the scaffolds that stimulate cells to repair body parts or to rejuvenate the skin. We also might be able to swim and dive like dolphins or to climb mountains with a nanoscaffold lung device that can carry an extra supply of oxygen. It is not impossible to anticipate painting cars and houses with photosynthesis molecular machines that can harness the unlimited solar energy for all populations on every corner of the planet, not just for the wealthy few…[source]
The Puramatrix company website has an impressive publications list. The company is basing its business on nano-scaffolding techniques that can be used to facilitate the construction of any number of other structures and mechanisms.
Science Daily report that a technique has been developed allowing viruses to be indentified in seconds. The method involves measuring the shift in the frequency of light as it is scattered off DNA or RNA molecules - the Raman shift. The effect has been too weak to be of practical use until an interdisciplinary team deployed nanotechnology to take greater control of the light scattering event. The innovation involves laying nanorods at an angle of 86 degrees over the sample in order to amplify the measurable Rama shift.
“It saves days to weeks,” said lead author Ralph Tripp, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Vaccine Development at the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine. “You could actually apply it to a person walking off a plane and know if they’re infected.” [Source]
Bib Ref:
Rapid and Sensitive Detection of Respiratory Virus Molecular Signatures Using a Silver Nanorod Array SERS Substrate
Shanmukh, S., Jones, L., Driskell, J., Zhao, Y., Dluhy, R., and Tripp, R.A.
Nano Lett., 6, 11, 2630 - 2636, 2006, 10.1021/nl061666f
Plans for a space elevator as a cheaper, safer alternative to riding on explosives have encountered a hitch. New Scientist reports that:
humans might not survive thanks to the whopping dose of ionising radiation they would receive travelling through the core of the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth. These are two concentric rings of charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic fields.[Source]
Liftport plan to get around the problem by increasing the shielding on the lifts. Shield mass will entail 100-tonne lifters for a passenger complement of 20.
Wikipedia have an entry of the physics and history of the concept of space elevators.
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