Creacrete is a concrete based material which is highly dense making it possible to create filigree and thin-walled objects out of concrete. Unlike usual ceramics, Alexa uses the novel aesthetics of Creacrete for the design of tableware. Special processing makes it possible to achieve this glossy surface which is new to concrete. A nano-scale coating makes the cups and plates hydrophobic and food safe.

Link via core77.com

Tableware should be durable.

Just as we have come to expect, scientists have developed better technology enabling smaller, more powerful and lower power consuming devices in the future.

Put simply it means:

The capacity of MP3 players could increase 100 times from present levels.

But the IBM team say racetrack memory is still seven to eight years away from commercial use.

Here’s their cheesy explanation video:

Now, as I have said before, the day technology stops getting cheaper, smaller and more powerful there will be probably be riots.

But, this is especially good news for the creation of more functional and more unobtrusive wearable and implant technology.

Yay for Science!

From:textually.org

An MIT materials scientist’s research on abalone sea snails has helped transform battery technology and may end the era when cell phones die if they’re dropped and PDAs must be replaced if they get dunked in the tub. [via MIT News Office]

“Thanks to those sea snails and a eureka moment, Angela Belcher, Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, is developing smart nano-materials–hybrids of organic and inorganic components–beginning with a rechargeable, biologically based battery that looks like plastic food wrap.

… With MIT colleagues Paula Hammond, Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Yet-Ming Chiang, professor of materials science and engineering, Belcher grew the first biologically based, nano-scale rechargeable battery–the one that may end short-lived cell phones…..Ultra-tiny computer chips, fuel cells, “smart” nanocrystal sensors–anything is possible with hybrid materials, she says.

Belcher’s MIT battery is comprised of a virus she and her colleagues engineered to latch itself to cobalt oxide. It does look like a clear film. Transparent, efficient, it could one day be poured onto the object it’s powering, like a coat of energizing paint. “

Swarms of nanobots are all very well, but how do you control the blighters?  Scientists in Japan have now developed a machine made from 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone, which was able to control eight microscopic machines simultaneously in a test.

If [in the future] you want to remotely operate on a tumour you might want to send some molecular machines there,” explained Dr Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, Tsukuba, Japan.  “But you cannot just put them into the blood and [expect them] to go to the right place.”  Dr Bandyopadhyay believes his device may offer a solution. One day they may be able to guide the nanobots through the body and control their functions, he said.  “That kind of device simply did not exist; this is the first time we have created a nano-brain,”

BBC News has more details:

The machines resemble a ring with four protruding spokes that can be independently rotated to represent four different states…One duroquinone molecule sits at the centre of a ring formed by the remaining 16. All are connected by chemical bonds, known as hydrogen bonds.  The state of the control molecule at the centre is switched by a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM).  Researchers showed they could change the central molecule’s state and simultaneously switch the states of the surrounding 16.  To test the control unit, the researchers simulated docking eight existing nano-machines to the structure, creating a “nano-factory”.

MSNBC has a brief explanatory animation

Via approxamately 30 million emails:

The folks over at RyanIsHungry, bring us Worldchanging‘s Jamais Cascio on nanomanufactoring, global warming, changing public discourse and the open source future. (Video Link)

It’s a quick video and it doesn’t say much that we haven’t touched on here, but it’s succinct and it touches on a variety of transfigurative technologies, both mechanical and political.

But wait, there’s more! Since we’re talking about Worldchanging, they also recently posted a cool article on Information Visualization. Of particular interest is Oakland Crimespotting, an information aggregator and visualization tool that pulls local crime data together into an explorable map with many different ways to integrate and explore the accumulated data.

In the words of the site itself:

If the local papers didn’t report a rash of car break-ins in your neighborhood, how would you know? The web opens up opportunities to find information without having to rely on which stories make it to the front page of the newspaper, or the lead story on the evening news. We need to be able to explore public information, to draw connections, and to see new possibilities for questioning. Crimespotting enables us to do more than search for the things we already know.

We believe that civic data should be exposed to the public in a more open way. With these maps, we hope to inspire local governments to use this data visualization model for the public release of many different kinds of data: tree plantings, new schools, applications for liquor licenses, and any other information that matters to people who live in neighborhoods.

This project is a work in progress; a way of discovering what kinds of questions we can ask.

That statement hits close to home for me, especially in its acknowledgment that one of the fantastic end results of being able to experience the information clouds around us in new ways is the ability to formulate new questions to ask.

So I saw this fancy new futurephone via Whitechapel the other week. I glanced at it and thought it looked cool enough, but it’s seemed like yet another concept phone.

What I didn’t realize was that the pictures shown were of the same device.

Until just now, after Bruce Sterling blogged it again and I finally stopped and watched the video (this fact has nothing to do with me getting dual monitors at work, move along):

Writing for Grinding I’m starting to develop something of a fetish for techno-concept pr0n and man does this thing tick all the boxes.

This is a real next-gen concept; not existing tech ++, but a whole new set of technologies.

For me this marks an actual point of futurity; when we’ve gone from here (ie now) to the there represented by this concept video, we’ll have reached somewhere new. And then we get to start over.

And how far away is this future? Well, according to Nokia’s press release:

Elements of Morph might be available to integrate into hand-held devices within 7 years, though initially only at the high-end.

Seven.Years. Sure, the ISS will probably still be a joke, but at least we’ll have nano-tech communicators in our pockets.

And what else can you make with self-cleaning, auto-powered nano-tech computers? A lot.

The only thing better than this that I can possibly imagine is the mythical Computronium.

Researchers at MIT have developed a stretchy, biodegradable tape that could replace surgical sutures and staples. The new sticky tape could also be made into drug-delivery patches for placement directly on organs including the heart. The tape, which has been tested in mice, slowly breaks down inside the body without causing any irritation.

The adhesive is inspired by geckos’ feet, which allow the reptiles to walk along the ceiling and up and down smooth walls. Gecko toes are sticky because they are covered with millions of flexible nanopillars, giving them a very large surface area. The MIT tape, which relies on both nanoscale pillars and a chemical glue, is the first such tape to show good adhesive strength and safety in animals.

The tape is made of a biodegradable elastomer that can be laced with drugs.

Go grind, patch yourself back up, and feel good while doing it.

According this engadget article, a University of Wisconsin study has found that fully two thirds of Americans polled find the idea of nanotech to be “morally unacceptable”.

In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.

A quick hunt for more information finds this:

The answer, Scheufele believes, is religion: “The United States is a country where religion plays an important role in peoples’ lives. The importance of religion in these different countries that shows up in data set after data set parallels exactly the differences we’re seeing in terms of moral views. European countries have a much more secular perspective.”

The catch for Americans with strong religious convictions, Scheufele believes, is that nanotechnology, biotechnology and stem cell research are lumped together as means to enhance human qualities. In short, researchers are viewed as “playing God” when they create materials that do not occur in nature, especially where nanotechnology and biotechnology intertwine, says Scheufele.

That thumping sound you hear is me smashing my head into my desk, over and over until America makes sense.

Sick of the short battery life of your gadgets? Constantly having to check that they’re powered up before you head out? Well, running out of juice whilst in the field could soon be a thing of the past. US scientists are getting close to generating functional power via the piezoelectric effect, by weaving nanofibres into our clothing:

The nano-generators, as the technology is known, consist of pairs of fibres that look similar to tiny, bendable bottle-brushes. At the core of each fibre is a Kevlar stalk. Each tiny wire is 30-50 nanometres (billionths of a metre) in length and is made of zinc oxide. They are grown in solution. One of the bristled fibres is also dipped in gold to act as an electrode. When the pair is scrubbed together they create a small amount of electrical energy

More important than stopping our iPods running out, this could also eliminate the need to fit medical implants with batteries, making them smaller and reducing the amount of follow-up operations to check on them. As Ottilia Saxl, chief executive of the Institute of Nanotechnology says:

It could perhaps be used to power tiny medical devices like a true cochlear implant or heart pacemaker, or a delivery mechanism for subcutaneous drug delivery implants or antibiotic drug reservoirs for preventing infection in retinal implants

Still, this could well trigger a new trend for flowing capes, cloaks and scarfs; the iCape perhaps:

via /.

Eurekalert has news about yet another innovation in drug delivery: a new thin-film coating developed at MIT to deliver controlled doses to specific targets in the body following implantation.

The 150 nanometers (billionths of a meter) thick films are made from alternating layers of two materials: a negatively charged pigment and a positively charged drug molecule, or a neutral drug wrapped in a positively charged molecule.

The pigment, called Prussian Blue, sandwiches the drug molecules and holds them in place. When an electrical potential is applied to the film, the Prussian Blue loses its negative charge, which causes the film to disintegrate, releasing the drugs. The amount of drug delivered and the timing of the dose can be precisely controlled by turning the voltage on and off. The electrical signal can be remotely administered using radio signals or other techniques that have already been developed for other biomedical devices.

“You could eventually have a signaling system with biosensors coupled with the drug delivery component,” said Daniel Schmidt, a graduate student in chemical engineering and one of the lead authors of the paper.

If that’s a bit dry for you, why not invest in your own V-Frog?  Just $100 buys hours of fun for all the family simulating endoscoping the GI Tract

or simply messing around with organs

all in loving 3D.  And no need to scrub up.

Engineers create new adhesive that mimics gecko toe hairs (c/o Physorg):

Researchers have developed a directional adhesive, inspired by the gecko, using microfibers made from a hard polymer, polypropylene. The polymer fibers are 600 nanometers in diameter, just 1/100 the diameter of a human hair, and are formed by a casting process. Like the gecko, the synthetic microfiber array is not sticky except when fibers slide a small distance along a surface.

The adhesive can support significant weight. Increasing weight increases contact area for the adhesive (contact area is the bright area near the top of the patch). As the load increases, more fibers are recruited to make contact, increasing the strength of the adhesion parallel to the surface. When the sliding force is removed, the fibers straighten, and the patch is easily released with negligible pull-off force.

What sets this new adhesive apart from others is that it is directional, only “sticking” when it slides along a smooth surface, not when it is pressed down.

“This difference is critical because if you’re climbing up vertical surfaces, you can’t afford to use a lot of energy pressing down into the surface to stick,” said Ron Fearing, UC Berkeley professor.  “Using force to attach also requires force to detach. A gecko running uphill may be attaching and detaching its feet 20 times a second, so it’d get very tired if it had to work hard to pull its feet off at every step.”

We just need this to be wearable…

New Scientist has the juice on tentacles self-assembling DNA.  Brrr:

‘Strands of DNA can be programmed to assemble nanoparticles into 3D structures, pointing towards a new way to engineer materials from the bottom up.

Two research groups have demonstrated the technique, using squid-like gold nanoparticles with “arms” made of DNA. After that the nanoparticles just need to be mixed together. The DNA strands start linking to one another, corralling the particles into crystal-like spongy lattice.

“These are fundamentally new structures of matter,” says Chad Mirkin of Northwestern University in Evanston, US, who led one of the groups.  “We are now closer to the dream of learning how to break everything down into fundamental building blocks, which for us are nanoparticles, and reassembling them into whatever structure we want.” ‘

Giving nanoparticles arms of carefully designed DNA can let them assemble themselves into complex 3D structures (Image: Nature)

So it’s slightly old news, but maybe you missed the debut of Infest Wisely last year. Or maybe you checked out the streaming eps and found it too grainy. Well, now you’ve got no excuse – ’cause they’ve released the whole thing in high-res on bit torrent.

Wait, sorry – no idea what I’m on about? Why it’s this damn cool on-line only ‘movie in seven parts’ – each by a different director, all written by Jim Munroe. Here’s the spiel:

There’s a new, chewable nanotechnology that lets you take photos with your eyes, cures cancer and eliminates body odour. But the early adopters are realizing they got extra “features” they didn’t count on. And no one told them once they spread through the bloodstream, it’s harder to uninstall than your average computer virus.

And here’s the trailer even: