Fantastic Voyage vs Das Boot

New Scientist magazine carries a nice article this week about the difficulties of propelling things on the micro- and nano- scales. The online version of the article, by Michelle Knott, is called Fantastic Voyage: travel in the nanoworld (subscription required); we’re asked to “prepare to dive into the nanoworld, where water turns to treacle and molecules the size of cannonballs hurl past from every direction.”The article refers to our work demonstrating self-motile colloid particles, which I described earlier this year here - Nanoscale swimmers. Also mentioned is the work from Tom Mallouk and Ayusman Sen at Penn State; very recently this team demonstrated an artificial system that shows chemotaxis; that is, it swims in the direction of increasing fuel concentration, just as some bacteria can swim towards food.

The web version of the story has a title that, inevitably, refers back to the classic film Fantastic Voyage, with its archetypal nanobot and magnificent period special effects, in which the nanoscale environment inside a blood vessel looks uncannily like the inside of a lava lamp. The title of the print version, though, Das (nano) Boot, references instead Wolfgang Peterson’s magnificently gloomy and claustrophobic film about a German submarine crew in the second world war - as Knott concludes, riding in nanoscale submarines is going to be a bumpy business.

Source: Soft Machines.

Sci-Fi Weekly review Plausible Futures

The folks over at Sci-Fi Weekly has written an article about this blog.

Billing itself as a “news service for the future studies community,” Plausible Futures serves up a thought-provoking and entertaining buffet of video clips and Web links, along with ongoing discussion of emerging technologies, from robotics and biotech to alternate energy and even the human quest for life extension—not to mention out-and-out immortality.

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The interaction between technology and politics is examined closely in Plausible Futures‘ articles on privacy, information warfare and emerging medicines. Other entries look at the global economy, military inventions, out-of-body experiences and even a host of Existential Threats, such as the hypothetical risks posed by nanotech devices that haven’t been invented yet and the number of possible starvation victims in the event of a nuclear exchange in South Asia.

Science fiction—particularly hard SF—has come under fire in recent years from those who feel the genre has become too concerned with the present, that in a world already filled with marvelous gadgets, writers are failing to imagine vivid, wild and yet credible futures for humankind. Within that context, a site like Plausible Futures serves as a source of inspiration, not only to authors looking for the meat of their next story, but for anyone who wants to kick back and imagine what life might be like in another decade, century or even millennium.

Source: Scifi.com. Thanks!

SKorea draws up code of ethics for robots

South Korea, at the forefront of the drive to develop robots which can do anything from guarding the border to caring for the elderly, is now drawing up a code of ethics for them.

The nation, which has set an ambitious goal of a robot in every home by 2013, has launched a project to write what it believes will be the world’s first Robot Ethics Charter. It will be released by year’s end.

“We are setting rules on how far robotic technology can go and how humans live together with robots,” said Kim Dae-Won, a professor at Myongji University who heads a team of 12 scientists, doctors, psychologists and robot developers.

“A society in which robots and humans live together may come faster than we think, probably within 10 years.”

Source: Physorg.