Quantum dots are one of many options for quantm computing. This is in no way saying THE END to attempts for QC. Holy grail of QC has already been predicted.
Quantum dot memories in transistor embodiment is still an option.
I am wondering if it will be same as making information about nuclear science all freely available and so that everyone can build nuclear power plants and decrease dependence on conventional sources.
Research in biotech is promising, but how much should be made opensource. No company is sacred and it can be misused. Biotech is another double edge sowrd which can be played either way. Do we want to find cure to deadly disease or start the next generation of bio-war ? Who should hold authority on the information and access to these ? Where should the control point be ? Shouldn't ethical issues related to science come into picture earlier ?
My personal favorite : Discovery of fire. Did we had a panel at that time where we discussed to continue using fire to cook food and keep ourselves warn. Did we stopped using fire thinking that it can be use in form of firearm ? But you don't want to give fire in everyone's hand and we know the consequences.
Freedom always comes with the price and we should evaluate it carefully.
I don't see anywhere in the abstract or full paper that things move without any supply. It may be very well just due to surface interaction and stray charges. Also this work is not entirely new. People have been using mechanical cantilevers to measure weight etc for long time. See this work from Cornell. Professor Carlo Montemagno was at Cornell before he moved to UCLA.
The abstract from the paper Current procedures for manual extraction of mature muscle tissue in micromechanical structures are time consuming and can damage the living components. To overcome these limitations, we have devised a new system for assembling muscle-powered microdevices based on judicious manipulations of materials phases and interfaces. In this system, individual cells grow and self-assemble into muscle bundles that are integrated with micromechanical structures and can be controllably released to enable free movement. Having realized such an assembly with cardiomyocytes we demonstrate two potential applications: a force transducer able to characterize in situ the mechanical properties of muscle and a self-assembled hybrid (biotic/abiotic) microdevice that moves as a consequence of collective cooperative contraction of muscle bundles. Because the fabrication of silicon microdevices is independent of the subsequent assembly of muscle cells, this system is highly versatile and may lead to the integration of cells and tissues with a variety of other microstructures.
I am sure lot of slashdot readers are into independent and foreign movies. This list doesn't have any of them. There is no place for documenteries either (example Qatsi trilogy).
I wonder why you still want to do Computers or Computer Engineering !! If I have spent 10 years doing one thing, I will move on and learn new things. And graduate school is the best way to change the field (if you really want to). I had a undergrad training in Electrical engineering and finishing doctoral studies in semiconductors and all that nano buzz. But 8-9 years is enough and I plan to move into biology in my post-doc.
To answer your 3rd question: After the bubble burst, there was atleast 2-4 time increase in graduate applications in US. Many people who lost jobs had no other option (market scene was really bad) and went for masters. Many professors like students with job experience (especially in engineering) as their learning time curve is shorter. The only, so called, problem is that you will still find yourself old in the old graduate student crowd. This at times may be depressing for some people. And remember graduate studies is equivalent of being slave. You will not be earning what you are earning now and your friends will still be roaming in BMWs etc. Engineering grad school is also worst for dating in case you are still single. You can count females on your fingers and most likely all of them will be taken.
Scholarships: I checked data from recent years and scholarships for masters haven't been any good. You can always cheat (which many do) and get admitted for doctoral program with financial aid and then leave after masters. Some professors have started asking for written committment or they will admit you to only phd program. Mengg programs do not provide any finanacial aid for sure (you can do part-time TA). Option of taking loans is always there.
This project sounds more realistic and well thought out than the Space elevator dream.
Few issues which still need to be resolved:
(a) How to place and grow nanotubes precisely ? Even after 14 years we struggle with that.
(b) How does carbon nanotube interacts with biology in human body ? What are the side effects ?
(c) Need to find an easy way of making conducting vs semiconducting nanotubes.
(d) Fuel cell efficiency. They have only said that they can convert the chemical energy to mechanical energy, but how well ?
(e) Ethical issue: This may not be a big deal if that person with artificial limbs can generate 100 times more force with no effort and break anyone's neck. But I am sure once we start augmenting human brain with more computational power (may be carbon nanotubes are faster than neurons, use them !!), then we may have to rethink !!
It was expected and is bound to happen. Even the money from the so called non-profilt organizations will be lot less when it trickles down to the real people. Lot of food and clothes will never reach the peoeple who need it. Don't be surprised if you hear that food was rotting in some stores because it didn't pass through the require paper work.
I wonder if they have done calculations regarding the tension in the looped cables for flying kites at that height (30,000 ft according to the article).
Also what will happen if the cable snaps. They worry about the kite, what about the heavy cables falling and destroying things down here.
With these cables how are they going to fly the kite from the ground ? Will they use turbines from the military planes to blow air ?
American Physical Society has published a mammoth 424 pages report (subscription required) in Reviews of Modern Physics on scientific and technical feasibility of boost-phase defense. Press release and short summary is available here (contains links to executive summary and findings for non-subscribers).Conculsion: Intercepting missiles while their rockets are still burning would not be an effective approach for defending the U.S. against attacks by an important type of enemy missile. The study also found that defending the United States against solid-propellant ICBMs would be impractical in many cases, because of their short burn times. The effectiveness of interceptor rockets would be limited by the short time window for intercept, which requires interceptors to be based within 400 to 1,000 kilometers of the possible boost-phase flight paths of attacking missiles. In some cases this is closer than political geography allows. Even interceptors that were very large and fast and that pushed the state of the art would in most cases be unable to intercept solid-propellant ICBMs before they released their warheads.
You are missing the point that all applications don't require high performance devices. Even in silicon it is hard to achieve mobility above 400 cm^2V^-1s^-1 these days, hole mobility being even worse. The key sellable point for these technologies is that they are cheap and possibly replacable. One of the other criterion of reliability has different meaning in this game.
If you can make it cheap, you don't need to require it to work for 10 years. If a LCD screen is $15 only and survives for even 2 years, people will still buy it and replace it.
And if you read the article, nowhere they claim to compete with mainstream silicon devices. In my opinion 10^7 on/off ratio is a very respectable device. Gain may not have too much meaning for these devices. In TFT applications you can bias it hard and pump the current anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Quantum dot memories in transistor embodiment is still an option.
Similar work has been carried out by Cornell and Caltech under Saul Teukolsky and Kip Thorne. Cornell's Black Hole Numerical Group Homepage has more details about simulating collision of black holes and other relevent information.
Similar effort by Boston Retina Implants and was covered on slashdot before.
You SOB ... few more kicks and cursings and my car is on its way. May be I can claim it as prior art before IBM patents it.
I wonder if slashdot patented option-of-posting-replys-anonymously.
Gallery of Computation is also very interesting way of generating "art" of a different kind.
India already made a cheap Simputer which is more like a powerful PDA for only $20.
Research in biotech is promising, but how much should be made opensource. No company is sacred and it can be misused. Biotech is another double edge sowrd which can be played either way. Do we want to find cure to deadly disease or start the next generation of bio-war ? Who should hold authority on the information and access to these ? Where should the control point be ? Shouldn't ethical issues related to science come into picture earlier ?
My personal favorite : Discovery of fire. Did we had a panel at that time where we discussed to continue using fire to cook food and keep ourselves warn. Did we stopped using fire thinking that it can be use in form of firearm ? But you don't want to give fire in everyone's hand and we know the consequences.
Freedom always comes with the price and we should evaluate it carefully.
The abstract from the paper
Current procedures for manual extraction of mature muscle tissue in micromechanical structures are time consuming and can damage the living components. To overcome these limitations, we have devised a new system for assembling muscle-powered microdevices based on judicious manipulations of materials phases and interfaces. In this system, individual cells grow and self-assemble into muscle bundles that are integrated with micromechanical structures and can be controllably released to enable free movement. Having realized such an assembly with cardiomyocytes we demonstrate two potential applications: a force transducer able to characterize in situ the mechanical properties of muscle and a self-assembled hybrid (biotic/abiotic) microdevice that moves as a consequence of collective cooperative contraction of muscle bundles. Because the fabrication of silicon microdevices is independent of the subsequent assembly of muscle cells, this system is highly versatile and may lead to the integration of cells and tissues with a variety of other microstructures.
And yes, the long awaited Babes of CES is on the way too!
Appropriately
To answer your 3rd question: After the bubble burst, there was atleast 2-4 time increase in graduate applications in US. Many people who lost jobs had no other option (market scene was really bad) and went for masters. Many professors like students with job experience (especially in engineering) as their learning time curve is shorter. The only, so called, problem is that you will still find yourself old in the old graduate student crowd. This at times may be depressing for some people. And remember graduate studies is equivalent of being slave. You will not be earning what you are earning now and your friends will still be roaming in BMWs etc. Engineering grad school is also worst for dating in case you are still single. You can count females on your fingers and most likely all of them will be taken.
Scholarships: I checked data from recent years and scholarships for masters haven't been any good. You can always cheat (which many do) and get admitted for doctoral program with financial aid and then leave after masters. Some professors have started asking for written committment or they will admit you to only phd program. Mengg programs do not provide any finanacial aid for sure (you can do part-time TA). Option of taking loans is always there.
Few issues which still need to be resolved:
(a) How to place and grow nanotubes precisely ? Even after 14 years we struggle with that.
(b) How does carbon nanotube interacts with biology in human body ? What are the side effects ?
(c) Need to find an easy way of making conducting vs semiconducting nanotubes.
(d) Fuel cell efficiency. They have only said that they can convert the chemical energy to mechanical energy, but how well ?
(e) Ethical issue: This may not be a big deal if that person with artificial limbs can generate 100 times more force with no effort and break anyone's neck. But I am sure once we start augmenting human brain with more computational power (may be carbon nanotubes are faster than neurons, use them !!), then we may have to rethink !!
Welcome to the real world Neo.
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Also what will happen if the cable snaps. They worry about the kite, what about the heavy cables falling and destroying things down here.
With these cables how are they going to fly the kite from the ground ? Will they use turbines from the military planes to blow air ?
Anyone has more information about it ?
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Yes this is a rejected story from slashdot.
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May be then we can talk about robot attack !!
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Mac OS, BSD (all flavors), AIX etc ..
I think time always move slow when relatives are there.
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I hope russian space program will survive till then to offer services.
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And if you read the article, nowhere they claim to compete with mainstream silicon devices. In my opinion 10^7 on/off ratio is a very respectable device. Gain may not have too much meaning for these devices. In TFT applications you can bias it hard and pump the current anyway.
-a
Merry Xmas and Happy new year
What .. they are still using B&W television over there.