Electrons can flow through carbon nanotubes 10 times faster than they can in circuits made using silicon, and carbon nanotubes can carry 100 times the current and dissipate 20 times the heat of circuits made with silicon. Carbon nanotubes in transistors can also amplify about 20 times more current than conventional silicon-based transistors, Ochiai said.

• Tools design DNA-nanotube logic
• Intel in new chip breakthrough

Update: I'm down to two invites, so if you need one, now's the time for asking!

Further update: Make that one invite left.

• NEC positions carbon nanotubes for prime time

Using pulsed lasers, researchers have coaxed the metal nickel to self-assemble into arrays of nanodots — each spot a mere seven nanometers (seven billionths of a meter) across -- one-tenth the diameter of nickel nanodots and on par with the world's smallest.

Because the method works with a variety of materials and may drastically reduce imperfections, the new procedure may also bolster research into extremely hard materials and efforts to develop ultra-dense computer memory.

"By investigating the fundamental design rules for the control of self-assembled supramolecular structures, we can now organize large functional molecules into nanoscopic arrays," said Gerard Wong, a professor of materials science and engineering and of physics at the University of Illinois. Wong and his colleagues report their latest experimental results in the September issue of the journal Nature Materials.

"We showed that the self-assembly of charged membranes and oppositely charged polymers into structures can be understood in terms of some simple rules," said Wong, senior author of the paper. "We then applied those rules and demonstrated that we could organize molecules into regular arrays with pore sizes ten times larger than in previous DNA-membrane complexes."

• Tools design DNA-nanotube logic

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

Despite the commonly held belief that the Singularity rests on the creation of an Artificial Intelligence, Vinge's vision of the event rests on the premise of the development of something broader, i.e. the creation of entities with greater than human intelligence. While these may be AI's, Vinge identifies several other possible triggers:

• Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.

• Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
• Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

• TechnologicalSingularity
• The Evolution Will Be Mechanized

The singularity's biggest flaw isn't that it's hard to imagine, but that it flatters its human inventors. We may be on the verge of an astounding breakthrough! Or, with equal likelihood, we may be at the edge of a new dark age of plagues, mass hunger, and climate destabilization. More likely yet, we live in a dull, self-satisfied, squalid eddy in history, blundering around with no concept of progress and no sense of direction. We have no idea what we really want from our own lives or from society. And no Moore's law rising majestically on any 2-D graph is ever going make us magnificent or spiritual when we lack the will, vision, and appetite for spiritual magnificence.

While I can understand Sterling's cynicism about humanity, I believe the mistake he makes is in defining the Singularity as something transcendent, something "magnificent or spiritual." While any number of over-zealous proponents of transhuman technologies certainly envision the Singularity this way, this definition is rather far-afield of the original vision of the Singularity Vinge paints in his paper "The Coming Technological Singularity."

I prefer to define the Singularity in far more basic terms: a technology-mediated intelligence "runaway," after which the human life will be drastically changed. This could easily (perhaps more easily) mean human extinction as it does something "magnificent or spiritual."

• Vingean Singularity
• Thoughts on the so called "singularity" and nationalistic arrogance.

Even if the behavior of industry is somewhat suspect after the debacles of the late '90's, this makes some sense. If nothing else, regulating too early may not only retard any positive outcomes from the implementation of RFID technology, it may completely miss some egregious means of violating citizen's privacy that wasn't anticipated when the technology was in its infancy.

It strikes me that seeking to heavily regulated RFID technology at this stage is largely analogous to legislation aimed at regulating P2P nets - just because a technology has the potential for abuse doesn't mean that all uses are bad.

• Human chips more than skin-deep

Seriously spooky stuff.

The tools are designed to build computer circuits at a density of 2,500 transistors per square micron, which is about 30 times more closely packed than devices made using current chipmaking technologies, according to Chris Dwyer, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. A micron is one thousandth of a millimeter.

Transistors are arranged into logic gates, which in turn are combined by the millions into the complicated circuits that process and store data. Being able to assemble individual nanotube transistors is the prerequisite for developing a nanotube-based chipmaking technology. The key is finding ways to combine them into logic circuits.

One of the issues that could possibly derail future computing advances (as well as any potential Technological Singularity) is the so-called expiration of Moore's Law, where it becomes impossible to build faster, larger computers. This rapidly approaching problem arises from the physical limits imposed on current chip making technologies, where it becomes impossible to place circuits any closer together. DNA-nanotube technology offers one possible successor technology to current chip making methods that has the potential to circumvent this problem.

• Self-assembly generates more versatile scaffolds for crystal growth
• NEC positions carbon nanotubes for prime time