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Integrated Circuits the Size of Molecules
RiotNrrrD writes "Electronically Configurable Molecular-Based Logic Gates with "wires" the size of molecules, much smaller than paths created by light or x-rays, have been developed by HP at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto. The bottom line is that "In ten years potentially, we will have entire computers not just in your wrist watch, but woven into our clothing. Or a slurry of computers painted on your wall." "
cuz I'm crazy like that.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Imagine a little nanomachine you inject in your body that does nothing but run around killing the AIDS virus. Or, imagine fighting the war on drugs by injecting every baby with nanotech machines that seek and destroy varois known drug molecules. You could shoot heroin up your nose into your brain, but it would get eaten by the nanos before it could affect you. Or they could be programmed to rebuild tissue, you could get shot in the leg and be completely healed in two hours. Tons of fun, them nanos.
You can do that already with drugs... Paranoia sucks...
this is great, technology is finally being made to conform to society instead of vise versa. for those who do not know, MIT has been working on a project coined "oxygen." the concept is interesting, along with some of their uses- this molecular level chip could be just what they are looking for. Interested? read scientific american augest 1999. forgot the mit url, but im sure some of you "addicts..4hr a day" will be able to find it!.
great minds often encounter violent opposition from medocre minds. -albert einstein
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either a visionary or a pre-cog;) (thankyou philip dick....)
Death is inevitable, too, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to take medicine and try to live longer.
The exact opposite of the Priest's argument in Camus' The Plague
Visionary in the sense that he read the published work of K. Eric Drexler? Come on!
yeah, right after computers are woven into toilet paper to determine the cleanliness of your anus
credibility . . . fading . . . meaning . . . lost . . .
Didn't this happen a few weeks ago? I remember the media was all hyped up on it.
Apparently from the article I read in Chemical & Engineering News, the transistors in the test-chip are one-way: that is, once they are switched from 0 to 1, they can't go back. Talk about planned obsolecence - you can only do one calculation on thing and its useless.
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Tis "The Art Of War".
That's why you never give it access to those areas of your brain. Of course, it would still leave you open to someone cracking your system and then feeding you bogus visual and/or auditory data. That could get really nasty. If you were a mental health person, you would have to first make sure that the patient wasn't connected to a compromised system, if they appeared to be suffering from halucinations of some kind. The key thing is to never let the system have a level of access where you can't simply pull a plug or whatever, and break the connection. If, however, you had a full sensory interface (visual, auditory, olifactory, tactile inputs, but not necessarily motor control), as oposed to just visual and auditory, how could you ever be sure that you had actually unplugged instead of being fed that input by a program?
Thats weird you were thinking of tattoos, i was going to post something on that but you beat me to it, only i wasn't thinking conspiracy crap. If they were talking turning your wall into a tv, why not do the same with your body? You could flash and change color like a chameleon or octopus, very trippy. Just think of the possibilities of being able to play porno movies on your chest... And if the chemical processes were ever hacked to mass produce these things, they would have to be pretty cheap, because they would have to be self constructing (no one is going to manually wire up the nanotubes on a billion molecule computers...). This somewhat implies that computational power will be a very cheap and abundant resource, so i don't see how exactly the gov't is by default the controller of this any more than they control the air (well there are epa laws...).
Anybody who wants to know a little more about nanotechnology shoould read Eric Drexlers book "Engines of Creation" from 1986. Its now freely available on the web.
http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html
Kinda gives a new meaning to 'core dump', doesn't it?
By the way, don't place too much faith in BlueTooth. Its hardware has some serious power-consumption problems.
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The bottom line is that in 10 years, kids will be breaking a lot more than lamps and glass. I don't even want to imagine the consequences of busting Dad's computer. first post?
what about tattoed into your skin? that would make a wonderful government tracking device for every single person born in the u.s. and they could just tell us its for statistical and identification purposes. go big brother!
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Great! I always wanted to paint my walls with a Beowulf cluster!
Q: How does a Unix guru have sex? A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;umount;sleep
From the facts presented in the article, it seems as though costs will rapidly approach those of current ic technology, only much smaller - and possibly even become much cheaper. I mean, yeah, a lot of the things the guy said were pure speculation, but he certainly was talking about a manufacturing process that's cheaper than what goes into a Pentium. And as for the 'they'll get swallowed' argument, we currently have the technology to make a wristwatch that's too small to read - you may have noticed that we don't.
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"Your wall maybe becomes your television screen, or your computer screen."
...when they get stepped on, bumped into, swallowed [accidentally], lost....etc, etc.
"THE ENTIRE WALL RATHER THAN A MACHINE?
Yeah, an entire wall."
-Here we go again with that home-of-the-future crap. You know they avoid the issue of cost.
"Because the machines themselves start to disappear."
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Diamond Age. (further proof neal stephenson is a visionary)
The "slurry on the wall" idea is intriguing. If the l'il buggers can be trained, be self-organizing, sorta like some of the neural network simulations...
:)
Not sure how one does the backfeed for a complex idea like "Hey, stupid, I said 'Feed the fish,' not 'Fry the fish!'"
The early training would be hell.
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All we need now is to figure out an interface w/ our optical and auditory systems and then we could use these puppies to tap in. Wear your computer and have it display directly to your optic nerve. We could even do interfaces to our olifactory (sp?) senses (and you thought you didn't have to shower since you're working from home) and what not.
Computers that are woven into our clothes, painted on our walls, all networked with bluetooth or jini, folks this only means one thing and one thing alone. In 2015 woodstock will be one giant beowulf cluster.
> "HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN TALKING TO INTEL? I'M THINKING THAT INTEL PENTIUM CHIPS WOULD EITHER BE RUNNING SCARED OR THEY WOULD BE TRYING TO BUY UP YOUR IDEAS."
:) I'd like to count how many times he repeated the question "so it's the size of molecules?"
/want/ a computer woven into my clothes. And I'm a Linux geek programmer type 21 year old too. I just think there's a limit to the amount of computers we should have managing our lives.
Is it my imagination or did the interviewer sound like a complete moron?
You know, I gotta say, I'm scared s***less of the day computers go on our walls, our clothes, etc. I'm already suffering from sensory overload from my computer at work, my two computers at home. I know the Unabomber was a murder and never should have done what he did, but did anyone read his dissertation on technology and society? I'm beginning to think he may have had a very good idea about where all this is headed - surrogate happiness where we value the amount of calculative power we own as being more valuable than freindship and community. I don't know about any of you, but I don't
G
"Old man yells at systemd"
I've found that usually, if you think of a good idea (or even a bad one) related to some putative technology, you can find some SF story that's already used the idea. It's kind of frustrating. I once went to a talk by Douglas Adams where he admitted that he no longer reads SF for just this reason: Either he sees people ripping off his ideas, or he finds ideas he's inadvertantly echoed. Not much fun.
As long as we're talking about SF, I'd like to trot out this great quotation I came across in the Philip K. Dick novel The Divine Invasion this morning:
Sound familiar? ;)
(Sig screwed up due to Slashdot weirdness)
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The secret to constructing these things is using self-assembled monolayers. They use a material.. gold or something, I think... and the rotoxane molecules will lie down in a perfectly uniform pattern all on their own... quite nice, really. Conclusion is, they can't really manipulate them individually - for construction of a nanorobot, say.
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The "collapsings" the article talks about are also collapsings of distinctions - the disctinctions between hardware and software, and the distinctions between mechanical and electronic. When your information's patterned as shapes of molecules, the hardware is the software and the software shapes the hardware. And when 0s and 1s are represented by flipping the shapes of molecules, you're performing mechanical work with electronic computation. Of course, this is exactly how it works now - EXCEPT that the mapping is far less precise.
Perhaps this is the destiny of computers: to shape not just the Net, but also the physical world. There's a lot of sand in the Sahara I'd like to pattern my MP3s into.
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A coating of computers? Or possibly a patina.
In fact, what if this has already been accomplished, and all the sensory input you're getting right now is bogus? The red pill or the blue pill? AHH!!! I"M FREAKING MYSELF OUT!!!
:)
As an aside, I'm in for anything that could teach my fat ass kung fu without actually removing it from my chair.
--Jaybill
WTF? How does making ICs the size of atoms translate to spreadable or wearable computers and why does the interview keep bringing that up? This is in such a theoretical stage that you could pull just about anything from your ass and claim it could be an application, why deal in these inane specifics? "Ohhh... we can make a car out of them that can share processes with the sex bot we made out of them when they are in contact." While such an idea is almost erotic to a nerd such as myself, I couldn't restrain from beating my head against my keyboard everytime the interview interjected. (post script rant: and why would these ICs be changing colors anyway?)
I'm done now...
"These aren't the flames we're looking for, you can go about your business... move along"
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
Sorry, but the interviewer really didn't seem to know beans about basic science. Considering that many of us don't learn much about it, that isn't surprising. I thought the scientist from H-P being interviewed was quite patient and diplomatic, being fed some rather dumb questions.
Heh, weave a cloak with alternating light sensors and light emitters. Have one side of the cloak emit what's being seen on the other side of the cloak. You'd also want it to be insulated so that you don't show up in IR (Down side is, it'd be pretty hot.)
Man, what a cool horror story this subject would make. Out of control nanobots reverse engineer their maker. "Attack of the killer tomatoes" would start to be scarier than it was funny!
just my blog and pix
Can't remember if this is something I saw here in /. so just in case...
The Virtual Alchemists - how you'd design such a molecular computer.
...and of course if you can make it into an ink, you can just as easily tatoo a computer onto any part of yer body.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Or, can I have a "gaggle" of computers? Or, maybe, a "brace"? A "cluster" of computers just doesn't seem to convey the right meaning in this case.
This may sound far fetched, but this technology could be used to make the mark or of the beast. I know not many /. readers are religous, but if you are (like me :-)) this could mean a lot.
BTW - The reasons that the mark has to be on the hand or forehead, is beacuse those are the parts of the body that produce the most heat (which can be used to make electricity).
That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
JM
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first computers in the wall, then in our clothes, then tattooed to our skin, then in our brain, then controlling our brain...
/. about gov't invasion of privacy, but i haven't gotten the chance to read it yet. but before you dismiss my comments as crazy, why don't you see what uncle sam is up to (or what the gov't admits being up to... i'm sure that what actually is going on is very Enemy of the State.
hmm, this nano-computing thing sounded like a good idea at first, but now it's kinda seeming scary. i hope that our government (and other governments/seedy organizations worldwide) can be trusted with this kind of technology because otherwis, once transmitting/receiveing technology shrinks to the cellular size, we're all screwed. good-bye constitution, good-bye freedom, etc.
of course, it can also be put to good use like monitoring for cancer, AIDS, etc. but is the risk to high?
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"I wouldn't be so paranoid if they weren't all out to get me"
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p.s. i saw that there is another article on
Where do you plug the keyboard?
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
Revelations also says that no man will be able to buy their daily bread without the mark of the beast.... Nanotechnology + the mondex electronic money system + a tatoo?
could these be arranged into global mass storage devices? i.e. your hard drive residing on a satelite, accessible from anywhere.
It's long been felt that the first reasonable nanotech creations would be chains of molecules assembled in a biochem process. It looks like these guys have taken it to the step of differentiating the pieces to be able to create them. There's still the macroworld interconnect problem. Do a search on gray goo on any of the nanotech news servers.
If you're interested in this kind of stuff, check out the work done by Tom Knight at MIT also. I was at Symbolics with Tom in the mid-80s. He's an amazing person.
I would be interested to know how much the rotoxane molecules change shape when altered electrically, and whether this shape change could be used as a mechanical funtion.
:)
For example, could a few molecules be strung together into a leg, or a turning mechanism for wheels?
The applications for this type of IC on the back of a rotoxane limbed nanobot would be unlimited, from fixing computer parts in satellites, space stations, etc, to exploring Mars, the deep sea, your colon.
--- Apparently I have an old
Take a step back and look at the parent site, Earthfiles. Take a look at the "Headline News" section. Over half of it seems to be on UFOs and crop circles.
Just think, twenty years from now, we could have geometric patterns of these things laid out in the middle of cornfields!
So now, the goal of this is to have a computer so small, that you can't even SEE the BSOD.
Out of sight, out of mind.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I would love to have a screen painted into my wall.. That would be great to be able to pop any image onto any wall.. computers in my clothes, well.. I can't really see much use in that. Big deal, so my clothes can change colors, or I can surf the web on my pants leg.. hmmm.. that could be cool.. just dont ask what the pointing device would be. :-)
But a lot of this is just crap. Speculation of the possiblities. Technology is one thing, the consumer market is another. If people don't want computers in their clothes, they won't buy them. And if no one buys them, they stop making them. The world is market-driven. Dont ever think otherwise.
The potential exists to do a lot of things that aren't done because no-one thinks they're very useful. The "computers in clothes" concept is a by-product of researchers making computing devices smaller and smaller, and they need a way to describe possibilities from this. It may or may not actually occur that way.
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