Engineering isn't science. Successful engineering (unlike successful science) requires coordination. Tightly managed projects that deliver products to market are at one end of a spectrum of coordination mechanisms; international, cross-disciplinary roadmapping in the exploratory stages of technology development is at the other. Both can be invaluable. That's the bottom line of an interesting Eric Drexler post that notes how valuable technology maps have been for current industries such as semiconductors, and why maps are needed for emerging technologies such as quantum computing and nanosystems. For decades now, a formalized roadmapping process with a 15-year horizon has helped to drive the Moore’s Law revolution in electronics. This cooperative, industry-spanning effort produces and updates the massive ITRS document, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. ... Without shared expectations for coordinated development on a known timeline, the situation will tend toward deadlock. Not much happens if everyone waits for everyone else to provide what’s needed to create demand for everyone’s next-generation product....

When bodies get very close together there is rapid heat transfer. But we knew that. Planck's blackbody radiation law, formulated in 1900 by German physicist Max Planck, describes how energy is dissipated, in the form of different wavelengths of radiation, from an idealized non-reflective black object, called a blackbody. The law says that the relative thermal emission of radiation at different wavelengths follows a precise pattern that varies according to the temperature of the object. The emission from a blackbody is usually considered as the maximum that an object can radiate. The law works reliably in most cases, but Planck himself had suggested that when objects are very close together, the predictions of his law would break down. But actually controlling objects to maintain the tiny separations required to demonstrate this phenomenon has proved incredibly difficult. . . "Experimental confirmation has proved elusive because of the extreme difficulty in measuring temperature differences over very small distances," Pendry says. "Gang...

Humanity may have a cure for its senior moments. "the Domesday Book, the great survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086 and written on vellum, has survived over 900 years, while the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, a multimedia survey marking the 900th anniversary of the original Book, required migration from the original high-density laserdiscs within two decades because of media failure." Zettl and his collaborators were able to buck data storage history by creating a programmable memory system that is based on a moveable part – an iron nanoparticle, approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair, that in the presence of a low voltage electrical current can be shuttled back and forth inside a hollow carbon nanotube with remarkable precision. The shuttle's position inside the tube can be read out directly via a simple measurement of electrical resistance, allowing the shuttle to function as a nonvolatile memory element with potentially hundreds of binary memory states....

It may be possible to catch and release light. The key to this new research is the "exciton". This describes the pairing of an electron that has been kicked into a higher energy state by a photon, with a hole or gap it (or another electron) leaves within the shell or orbit around the nucleus of an atom. Despite its new high energy state the electron remains paired with one of the holes or positions that has been vacated by electrons moving to a higher energy state. When an electron's high energy state decays again it is drawn back to the hole it is linked to and a photon is once again emitted. That cycle usually happens very quickly but if one could find a way to freeze or hold an exciton in place for any length of time one could delay the reemitting of a photon and effectively slow or even freeze light. . . When creating these...

Something was missing. Since electronics was developed, engineers have made circuits using combinations of three basic elements – resistors, capacitors and inductors. But in 1971, a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, realised something was missing. He was toying with the non-linear mathematics that describes how the four variables in a circuit – voltage, current, charge and flux – behave in the three basic elements. The three building blocks each relate two of the four electronic properties of circuits, creating a chain linking charge to flux via voltage and current. But his calculations showed there should be a fourth device to directly link flux and charge. But, no one could make such devices and the idea was mostly forgotten. . . until some fellows worked out why their work to develop titanium dioxide memory circuits was glitchy. . . . these efforts have been dogged by bizarre electronic effects, says Williams, who has...

Remaining coherent for seconds. "How do you control something that can't interact with anything"" You do it gingerly and indirectly, the Harvard physicists report in Science. They found that nuclear spins associated with single atoms of carbon-13 -- which make up some 1.1 percent of natural diamond -- can be manipulated via a nearby single electron whose own spin can be controlled with optical and microwave radiation. The excitation of an electron by focusing laser light on a nitrogen vacancy center, a stable defect in a diamond lattice where nitrogen replaces an atom of carbon and develops an electronic spin in its ground state, causes the single electron's spin to act as a very sensitive magnetic probe with extraordinary spatial resolution. Using the nitrogen center as an intermediary, a single carbon-13 atom's nuclear spin is cooled to near absolute zero, creating in the process a single, isolated quantum bit with a coherence time that approaches seconds. The controlled interaction...

Out of the lab, into the fab. IBM today announced the first-ever application of a breakthrough self-assembling nanotechnology to conventional chip manufacturing, borrowing a process from nature to build the next generation computer chips. The natural pattern-creating process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and enamel on teeth has been harnessed by IBM to form trillions of holes to create insulating vacuums around the miles of nano-scale wires packed next to each other inside each computer chip. In chips running in IBM labs using the technique, the researchers have proven that the electrical signals on the chips can flow 35 percent faster, or the chips can consume 15 percent less energy compared to the most advanced chips using conventional techniques. . . providing the equivalent of two generations of Moore's Law wiring performance improvements in a single step, using conventional manufacturing techniques. . . The secret of IBM's breakthrough lies in how the IBM scientists moved the self-assembly process from the...

Brad DeLong has an interesting post speculating about the likely economic and social impacts of nanotechnology. He frames his argument relative to past technological revolutions such as the industrial revolution in U.K. and the current information revolution and then speculates: Now, assuming it is a useful framework, how would it guide our thinking about nanotechnology? What's going to become absurdly cheap? What human activities are going to turn out to be bottlenecks, and become well-rewarded indeed? What risks are we failing to guard against? What risks that aren't really there will wind up warping our society? And how big will it be? The computer-and-communications technology revolution we have been living through transforms twice as large a share of the economy as did the British Industrial Revolution, looks to last three times as long, and proceeds at a pace three times faster than the revolution in spinning and weaving: it is, relative to the size of the economy, eighteen times...