Metamodern » Brevia

Darwin portraits on sale, ₤10 — exactly

Eric Drexler — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:20:22 +0000

The ₤10 note honors one of Britain’s historic scientists:

There’s a different view of science here.

For more posts with a Darwin theme, see:

And for a view on learning science, see:

How to Learn About Everything

Video of my talk at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum

Eric Drexler — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:51:29 +0000

A video of my talk at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum is now on YouTube. I gave this talk on advanced nanotechnology prospects to an audience drawn from local technical universities during my recent Moscow visit.

A rich visual display of quantitative money information

Eric Drexler — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:25:53 +0000

Here’s a huge, data-rich visualization of the money dimension of McDonald’s meals, billionaires, the Moon landing, income quintiles, and the like. It’s well done, spans 12 orders of magnitude, and kept my attention for entirely too long.

A Busy Day in Moscow

Eric Drexler — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:31:41 +0000

I am no longer in possession of a Russian secret regarding the lineup of speakers during the opening plenary session of Rusnanotech 2011 this morning.

Rusnanotech is organized by Russia’s state-sponsored nanotechnology investment corporation, Rusnano. My plenary talk followed a speech by Anatoly Chubais, the Chairman of Rusnano and former First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. The secret had been the arrival of Dmitry Medvedev, the President of the Russian Federation, who spoke next, closing the plenary session.

Other events today included a press conference, followed by a longer talk and discussion with an audience drawn from several technical universities, and then a relaxing time spent in a Moscow traffic jam.

More news later.

Science and engineering at NIH

Eric Drexler — Tue, 10 May 2011 21:56:47 +0000

In response to (yet another) proposal to reorganize and redirect the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Russ Altman writes in Nature that

…it is crucial to separate the engine of discovery from the engine of application. Discovery is stochastic and opportunistic; application is the stuff of engineers. That is why attempts to over-engineer discovery fail and why science should not drive its application.

As the Chairman of the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford, he’s in a good position to speak out on this.

I’d go further with his second point: Where the aim is to build complex systems on an emerging, science-intensive technology base, it is absolutely necessary to direct scientific research to projects defined and judged by engineering criteria. To build a working system, the parts must fit together and form a complete set, and only systems-level design-oriented thinking can identify and define the problems to be solved. (This post discusses some of the coordination issues involved.)

Scientists move from nature to explanation; engineers move from aims to implementation. These are radically different tasks, and neither can substitute for the other. As Prof. Altman observes, they must be organized differently.

NIH reformers take note.

For a deeper view, see “The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering” and links from there.

Polyoxometalate papers

Eric Drexler — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:42:31 +0000

Background: polyoxometalate nanostructures are cool (more here).

Lee Cronin sent me a pdf of the polyoxometalate paper I discussed in my previous post, and he notes that readers can download it here, with other papers on his group’s website here.

The Israel Journal of Chemistry has a new special issue, “Frontiers in Metal Oxide Cluster Science”, that includes an overview with the provocative title “Oxo-Metalate Building Blocks: Conceptual Competitors for Tetravalent Carbon?” [pdf]. Excerpt:

These developments offer options for controlling structure and function—in principle analogous to activities in organic chemistry.

Note that part of the story is bridging POM chemistry to organic chemistry itself.

In this connection, chemists may find this Chemical Communications review particularly interesting: “Functionalization of polyoxometalates: towards advanced applications in catalysis and materials science”. I’d intended to post a link to the pdf, but the free version has apparently disappeared.

(By the way, in exploring the literature across a range of disciplines, I’ve found that chemistry journals are among the worst for open access. Even my ACS membership gives me online access to exactly zero ACS journals — and members are starting to complain.)

Fukushima — best video, possible recriticallity [*?]

Eric Drexler — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:13:29 +0000

Here’s current video showing the steam, smoke, and wreckage at Units 1, 2, 3 & 4, seen with good optics from a helicopter at a safe standoff distance. It gives tantalizing glimpses of what’s going on, but what would be visible around the corners inside?

The mobilization of technology here is pitiful. An off-the-shelf Parrot.AR drone (see previous post) could fly inside, see a lot more, and return samples from plumes for gamma spectroscopy. This isn’t esoteric stuff — they’re sold on Amazon for $300!

What’s in the (many) plumes of smoke and steam? Where is the smoke from No. 4 coming from, day after day, if not from the spent fuel pool?

This would be of considerable interest. Recently reported (then denied) isotope data from water in the turbine halls points to recriticallity — the data shows intense radioactivity that includes short-half-life products of fission and neutron activation. A forum at Ars Technica has an informed ongoing discussion.

[?* Updated: There’s now a reasonable explanation for the report of abundant short-lived fission isotopes (it involves a measurement error multiplied by a many-half-life backward extrapolation).]

Across the blood-brain barrier with exosomes

Eric Drexler — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:47:05 +0000

New work with exosomes promises wide-ranging advances in medicine, courtesy of an emerging biomolecular nanotechnology.

As pharmaceutical chemists know, the blood-brain barrier blocks delivery of many molecules that do wonderful things if injected directly into the brain, but injecting the brain isn’t quite as convenient as injecting a vein.

Exosomes are lipid vesicles manufactured by cells for transporting diverse molecules to other cells, including signaling molecules such as micro RNAs. Now, they’ve been shown to carry their contents across the blood-brain barrier, and other work has shown that exosome-like particles can be made synthetically, with membranes chock-full of functional molecules for targeting cells and inducing responses from them. With diameters of 30 to 100 nm, exosomes have room for a lot of payload.

BBC report here: “Breakthrough in delivering drugs to the brain”, abstract of paper in Nature Biotechnology here: “Delivery of siRNA to the mouse brain by systemic injection of targeted exosomes”.

The biomedical potential of siRNA is enormous, and delivery has been the main obstacle to wide-ranging applications.