From the monthly archives:

October 2009

Nanotechnology research papers:
The world’s most prolific authors

October 30, 2009

Today, while reading about patterns of research publication in nanotechnology, I came across as striking table that presents the number of nanotechnology papers published by the world’s most prolific authors, listing them together with their countries and institutions:

 

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Knowledge about Knowledge:
The most popular posts in the first year

October 29, 2009

Metamodern’s readership shows what I consider to be good taste. Five of the six most popular posts in the blog’s first year (and several more in the top 20) have been, not about news or about the specifics of a technology, but instead about something deeper and more durable: knowledge itself — the structure of [...]

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First Anniversary
(and the scientific method revisited)

October 25, 2009

Metamodern is one year old today, and I wish I’d started a blog years earlier. I have some notes on popular posts in the last year — there are some interesting patterns that I’ve been pleased to see — but here, today, it seems fitting to revisit the first.
My 25 October 2008 post, “The Data [...]

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An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

October 24, 2009

This week, with the help of Viking Press, Stewart Brand has offered the world an important book on the collision between humanity and the Earth’s limits — on the facts, the problems, the passions, the politics, and the realistic possibilities for better outcomes.
After Whole Earth Discipline appeared in my mail, I opened it and skimmed [...]

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Reflections on nanotechnology
(in a curved mirror)

October 23, 2009

Earlier today, Nanowerk.com posted an article I wrote. It begins like this:
Yesterday, an article in Nanowerk presented yet another description — by someone else — of what I think about nanotechnology. Since I am a leading expert on that topic, perhaps I can offer a more direct and reliable statement of my actual views, together [...]

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Molecular Electron Holography:
Progress toward atomic-resolution imaging?

October 20, 2009

Hans-Werner Fink’s group reports a remarkable advance in imaging individual biomolecules, with surprising physics, and (to me, at least) a somewhat mysterious date of publication.
The surprise is that it doesn’t destroy the molecules before imaging them.
The new generation of aberration-corrected electron microscopes achieve atomic resolution, but with a caveat — they succeed with robust, inorganic [...]

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What can scaling laws
tell us about nanomachines?

October 14, 2009

I recently posted my MIT doctoral dissertation, which (like my book on Nanosystems) discusses scaling laws in an introductory section.
The scaling laws inherent in geometry, classical mechanics, and the properties of materials can tell us a lot about what to expect from nanoscale systems. In particular, they show why an advanced mechanical nanotechnology can [...]

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Nobel Prize for Productive Nanosystem Research

October 7, 2009

The 2009 chemistry Nobel Prize has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for their studies of the structure and function of programmable nanoscale manufacturing systems. See news story here, and videos of the machines in action here.

 

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Molecular Nanomachines: Physical Principles and Implementation Strategies

October 1, 2009

I’ve migrated another paper to E-drexler.com:

Drexler, KE. “Molecular Nanomachines: Physical Principles and Implementation Strategies”, Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure, 23:377-405 (1994).
(With thanks to Robert Bradbury for the original HTML conversion.)

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See also:

The Physical Basis of Atomically Precise Manufacturing
A Telescope Aimed at the Future
Productive nanosystems: the physics of molecular fabrication [pdf] (from [...]

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