Unlike many people fear that computers will overtake humans, Ray Kurzweil states that robots will merge with humans, robots the size of cells which can do the job way more efficient than our actual cells. An example on this are respirocytes; robots the size and functions of a red blood cell, but way more efficient (movie).
Respirocytes are able to store 1.51 billion oxygen molecules, 100% of which are accessible to the tissues. In contrast, our blood cells store about 1 billion of red blood cells and only 25% is accessible to the tissue. Replacing 10% of your actual red blood cells will enable you to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or allows you to stay underwater for four hours.
In his TED-talk Kurzweil calls this 2020 technology. Many major steps have been made within the field of nanotechnology and Respirocytes are quite likely to be actually manufactured someday. Hence, we may anticipate some new doping scandals world records at the Olympics of 2020.
Related: Voyage of the bacteria bots, How biotech will drive our evolution, Craig Venter: catalyst of evolution, Build a better being.
Nanotechnology has been hailed for its benefits because of the potential ability to create drugs that could cure cancer and radiation poisoning, make miniature pollutant filters resulting in healthier air and even produce better tasting food. Excitement over these benefits has led to corporations heavily investing in the technology for their products.
However, the same properties that allow nanotechnology to be valuable give it the potential to cause unforeseen consequences for ecological and human health. To date, it’s unclear whether the benefits of nanotech outweigh the risks associated with environmental release and exposure to nanoparticles.
Environmental Heath News reports that nanoparticles in sunscreens, cosmetics and hundreds of other consumer products may pose risks to the environment by damaging beneficial microbes.
Researchers Cyndee Gruden and Olga Mileyeva-Biebesheimer from the University of Toledo added varying amounts of nanoparticles to water containing bacteria. The bacteria were grown in a lab and stained with a green fluorescent. It turned out the nano-titanium dioxide – also used in personal care products – reduced biological roles of bacteria after less than an hour of exposure. The findings suggest that these particles, which end up at municipal sewage treatment plants after being washed off in showers, could eliminate microbes that play vital roles in ecosystems and help treat wastewater. Oops!
Nanotechnology is yet another example of mankind playing with fire: It requires enormous care and restraint, yet on the other hand, playing with fire is perhaps one of the very special abilities that defines us as humans.
Via: Environmental Health News.
Getting information as fast as possible and on the spot is the trend. So what could be more direct than having information fired directly into the eye?
Today — together with his students — Babak A. Parviz, bionanotechnology expert at University of Washington, is already producing devices that have a lens with one wirelessly Radio Frequency powered LED. To turn such a lens into a functional browser, control circuits, communication circuits and miniature antennas will have to be integrated. These lenses will eventually include hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye: words, charts, imagery enabling the wearers to navigate their surroundings whithout distraction or disorientation. The optoelectronics in the lens may be controlled by a seperate device that relays information to the lens’s control circuit. Read the rest of this entry »
What if a scratch on your car door could heal itself, just like the human skin does?
Engineers are working on a way to transfer the self-healing ability of the skin to surfaces and materials. The idea behind this, is to evenly distribute fluid-filled capsules into an electroplated layer on top of the material that could be subject to corrosion and rust. If the surface is damaged, the pellets burst and a coating fluid runs out to ‘repair’ the scratch. Read the rest of this entry »
John Hart, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, is inventing techniques for growing carefully structured forests of high-quality carbon nanotubes. Hart made these images with a scanning electron microscope; all show vertically grown nanotubes.
Carbon nanotube arrays could be the basis of high-density energy storage devices and efficient chip cooling systems. The performance of such devices, however, depends on the quality of the nanotubes and the precise structure of the array. Read the rest of this entry »
The American Chemical Society is holding a contest seeking short videos that answer the question: “What is nano?” UC Berkeley graduate student Patrick Bennett and his colleagues got creative and submitted their “Nano Song.”
I guess small things aren’t all that complicated. :{ Want more you say? Read the rest of this entry »
This smart-looking image is a model of what James M. Tour at Rice University (Texas) and his research team like to call a ‘nanocar’. The clustered molecules can roll around on a glass slide at about nine nanomiles per hour, and its wheels actually turn. The nanocar is no more than 4 nanometers across, which is slightly wider than a strand of DNA. Nanovehicles like these are designed to study the materials and movements, to make it easier for researchers to build more sophisticated molecular machines. Eventually the researchers want to build tiny trucks that could carry atoms and molecules around in miniature factories.
So in the future, we could have tiny ambulances racing through our veins instead of antibiotics.
One of the minor details that need to be solved: At room temperature, strong electrical bonds hold the buckyball wheels tightly against the gold, but heating to about 200 degrees Celsius frees them to roll.
Via: wired.com | Related: Ball of Being | Nanotech Food | Voyage of the Bacteria Bots | Nanoflowers | Nanotechnology Crashcourse
This mashup video project integrates various video clips that ask: What is nanotechnology?
Via Posthumanblues, via Futureblogger. See also: Small Talks, Bacteria Bots, Nanosculpture, Nanoflowers.
The 1966 science-fiction movie Fantastic Voyage famously imagined using a tiny ship to combat disease inside the body. With the advent of nanotechnology, researchers are inching closer to creating something almost as fantastic. A microscopic device that could swim through the bloodstream and directly target the site of disease, such as a tumor, could offer radical new treatments. To get to a tumor, however, such a device would have to be small and agile enough to navigate through a labyrinth of tiny blood vessels, some far thinner than a human hair.
At the IEEE biorobotic conference 2008, researchers of the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in Canada, led by professor of computer engineering Sylvain Martel, showed to have coupled live, swimming bacteria to microscopic beads to develop a self-propelling device, dubbed a nanobot. While other scientists have previously attached bacteria to microscopic particles to take advantage of their natural propelling motion, Martel’s team is the first to show that such hybrids can be steered through the body using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). To do this, Martel used bacteria that naturally contain magnetic particles.
Read the whole story at Techreview. See also: Bacteria that eat waste and shit petrol.
Why not use the human body to grow products for the medical industry? The designer Michael Burton envisions Future Farm where the body is used as a farm to cultivate clinical and pharmaceutical products with bio and nanotechnology.
