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POPSNano-Solar Power -Will it Be the Next Revolutionary Technology? Not that the technology is perfect. The system can absorb energy very well, but that's no good to anyone until they work out a way to harvest it from the sheet - when you're dealing with a hyper-complex web of millions of units oscillating at trillions of cycles per second, you can't just solder copper wires to the ends and call them plus and minus. This isn't a mistake or a weakness in the concept though; it's an issue because no-one has ever done this before. You know, the kind of thing that happens with cutting edge invention.
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POPSLockheed and Nanotech Further evidence of the government's interest in nanotech. As we noted here (http://www.forbes.com/businessinthebeltway/2008/07/24/nanotechnology-altair-nanphase-biz-wash-cz_atg_0724nano.html) Uncle Sam, for its fiscal 2009, is set to spend $1.5 billion to nanotech on nanotech (mostly research). The Department of Defense accounts for 28 of that money.
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POPSSurge in Food Nanotechnology Worries Consumers Davies quoted David Rejeski of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, who advocates a U.S. investment of $150 million a year in such research by 2010, to benefit from an industry that will involve “15 percent of globally manufactured goods, worth $2.6 trillion, by 2014.”
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POPSNanotech regulation under the spotlight The report concerns regulations in Australia, but nanotechnology that may have benefits that can cause problems or 'side effects' to be either overlooked, or ignored. It's easy to overlook a problem if there is no test for it, and often we may not know what to test for. Then there are both short term and long term effects. It's easy to ignore the possible long term effects, if some of the criteria examined are cost effectiveness and profitability, Perhaps a case of too many bells and whistles, making researchers deaf. For some reason i was just reminded of Pierre and Marie Curie.
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POPSThe power and the glory The market for energy is huge. At present, the world’s population consumes about 15 terawatts of power. (A terawatt is 1,000 gigawatts, and a gigawatt is the capacity of the largest sort of coal-fired power station.) That translates into a business worth $6 trillion a year—about a tenth of the world’s economic output—according to John Doerr, a venture capitalist who is heavily involved in the industry. And by 2050, power consumption is likely to have risen to 30 terawatts.
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POPSdangerous? I think this is way beyond any monster science fiction world possible to conceive. How did humanity get so far astray?
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POPSEarth 2030 - healthier, safer, more enjoyable Forward-thinkers believe that by 2035, memories, personality, and feelings ¬ non-physical elements that describe a human being ¬ could be scanned and uploaded into a robot, or newly-cloned human body, enabling life to continue indefinitely.
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POPSNew Nanotechnology Products Hitting The Market At The Rate Of 3-4 Per Week While polls show most Americans know little or nothing about nanotechnology, in 2006 nanotechnology was incorporated into more than $50 billion in manufactured goods. By 2014, Lux Research estimates $2.6 trillion in manufactured goods will incorporate nanotechnology--or about 15 percent of total global output. Despite a 2006 worldwide investment of $12.4 billion in nanotech R&D, comparatively little was spent on examining nanotechnology's potential environmental, health and safety risks.
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POPSNanotech raises 'toxic sock' alert I didn't know it was Silver that they used as an antibacterial in socks, but now I'll have to treat my socks with more respect. Like with color, sometimes the silver was 'set' sometimes most of it was gone in the first wash. They need to work with the manufacturers to find a way of getting the silver to stay on the sock.
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POPSNanotech in food poses unknown risks
There are barriers between the us and outside world in the skin, between the digestive system and the bloodstream, and organs. The most crucial barrier, is the 'blood - brain' barrier which for example will only let molecules, such as sugars have access to the brain. one of the effects of this is the prevention of larger molecules, and particularly things like germs and viruses entering the brain, which cannot deal with the inflammation that is caused by the immune system fighting an invader. Nanoparticles in food can be of an unspecified size, and so there is the possibility, that they will go places they should not be, and are in fact dangerous. Some of the reasons food companies haven't tested, are that tests are expensive, they don't want to go looking for a problem with their new 'wonder' product in case they find something that is dangerous or that the public doesn't like, or because it didn't occur to them there was a danger. These days that's unlikely and certainly no excuse.
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POPSHuman beings only have a 50-50 shot of making through the 21st century nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler. Drexler describes grey goo in Chapter 11 Engines Of Destruction: "...early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms. 'Plants' with 'leaves' no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough, omnivorous 'bacteria' could out-compete real bacteria: they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies."
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POPSA nanotech Bible " A nanometer is equal to one billionth of meter or one millionth of a millimeter. The resulting letters can be observed only with a scanning electron microscope. " the original nano-Bible ia the size of a crystal of sugar. It will be displayed near a 7 by 7 meter photo (10,000 times expanded) hung in the Technion physics faculty. make the 10 mullion bits text possible 2b read with a naked eye.
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