Robot scientist makes discoveries without human help:

A robot scientist that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries.

MIT: Batteries built with viruses, nanotech to power cars, devices:

MIT researchers have combined nanotechnology with genetically engineered viruses to build batteries that could power hybrid cars and cell phones. The batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being considered to power plug-in hybrid cars and personal electronic devices.

Implantable Telescope for the Eye:

Humanoid robot helps scientists to understand intelligence

Inventor James Tour a professor of chemistry at Rice University won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for developing a car that is just four nanometers across and slightly wider than a strand of DNA. Tour’s nanocar car has a pivoting suspension, rotating axles attached to wheels, and even an engine!

The nanocar is able to move by using light or heat. When the surface that the cars are on is heated it excites the molecules that make up the car and as a reaction the nanocar moves forward until ultimately it hit’s an object. The light method works on the principle of Photoactivation.

Tour hopes that within the next 30 years his technology could construct quantum-dot memory which string together metal atoms in patterns that could then store data.

“Until now, engineers have built things by taking larger objects and cutting them down to make smaller ones,” Tour said. “In the future, things will be built not from the top down, but the bottom up -- as in nature.”

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Roughly every 18 months transistors get smaller but at the same time also increase in processing power. It was Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in particular who predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors that can fit on a processor would roughly double every two years or so. Today this growth occurs every 18 months. But this exponential growth is not indefinite; there will be a time when the laws of quantum physics prevent any further shrinkage using conventional methods. And this is where atomic-scale computing comes into play with an essentially different solution to the problem.

“Nanotechnology is about taking something and shrinking it to its smallest possible scale. It’s a top-down approach,” says Christian Joachim of the (CNRS).

Using devices such as the scanning-tunnelling microscopes and atomic-force microscopes both devices which can measure and move individual atoms Joachim’s team has managed to design a simple logic gate with 30 atoms that perform the same task as 14 transistors. More?

Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick.The technology could potentially provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius and radiation that would make solid-state disk memory disintegrate...Continue

"Rather than infer that nanotechnology is safe, members of the public who learn about this novel science tend to become sharply polarized along cultural lines, according to a study conducted by the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School in collaboration with the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. The report is published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology..."Continue

A MICROSCOPIC swimming machine that works like a paddle steamer could help deliver drugs inside the body and move chemicals around inside miniaturised labs. The device is the first artificial microswimmer to move without using chemical propulsion or bending itself into different shapes..."Continue

The memristor is the fourth element in integrated circuitry. Scientists are discovering the mathematic equations used to govern memristors are similiar to those which govern synapses in the brain.

In addition, memristors do not "forget" the voltage charge channeled through them. This will yeild billion-fold times the capacity/performance than current hard drives. That, however, is just one of the multitude of products yet to utilize this incredible new component.

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil explains how and why in the 2020s, we will reverse-engineer the human brain and completely transform the human mind as we now know it. He then talks about how nanobots will be apart of us. He explains how nanobots in the future will be operating your consciousness and your body.