Future technologies seem so impactful and fabulous that it is easy to jump to incorrect conclusions about what things would be like with their advent. Fallacy #1: Molecular assemblers will have a worldwide overnight rollout The conventional assumption is that once humans are able to make one molecular assembler, it will be able to self-replicate, and therefore within twenty-four hours everyone worldwide will have one. It is far more likely that a molecular assembler would follow the usual s-curve adoption pattern of any other newtech; early versions are expensive and clunky with minimal functionality, continued improvement iterations make the newtech more relevant and usable. The first molecular assemblers may be like a next generation 3d printer, printing the T-shirt a friend sent as an email attachment. Only early adopters will have the utility (read: money and interest) to purchase the first molecular assemblers. Also, the first molecular assemblers will not be able to self-replicate as the intricate molecular manufacturing processes will need to be conducted at special facilities. Join discussion...

The World Future Society recently published their top ten of future developments to keep an eye on in view of 2009 and beyond: Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030. Join discussion...

Intellectual attribution is far from perfect, but as we systematically quantify the nature of the vast Idea Sea in which we swim, we will also create a more effective and equitable market for new innovations. Last week a pair of Nobel Prize winning scientists conceded that much of their research had been based on an earlier study by a geneticist who now drives a shuttle for $8/hour just to keep food on the table, but of course didn’t go so far as to offer him a share of the $1.5 million prize they’d been awarded. This example clearly brings into focus the limits of our current idea attribution economy, a system that clearly isn’t encouraging a Nobel-caliber scientist to continue innovating for broader social benefit. Join discussion...

From this year's annual Clinical Congress, the American College of Surgeons is profiling two new technologies that are showing great promise in animal and clinical trials. One is an experimental technique to make sutureless arterial anastomoses, and the other the device you might have seen on our pages before: Dr. Gurtner [Geoffrey C. Gurtner, MD, FACS, plastic surgeon at Stanford --ed.] described his new technique by first explaining that when he is trying to sew tiny blood vessels together, they tend to collapse because there is no blood in them, as clamps have been applied to hold blood back. As these floppy, hollow vessels become smaller and smaller, he has increasing difficulty putting sutures into them. One thing that is easy to do, however, is to fill them with fluid. Instead of attempting to stitch hollow, floppy vessels together, Dr. Gurtner explained, he fills the blood vessels with a liquid poloxamer already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for other human-delivery purposes. He describes this material as a clear, colorless, hair-gel-like synthetic polymer. When the blood vessels are filled, he heats the liquid polymer using a convection blower, like a hair dryer. The liquid phases into a solid at 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and is solid at 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Join discussion...

The activation of a single neuron in the brain may be enough to help restore muscle activity in the arms of paralysed patients with spinal cord injuries. The research in this week’s Nature has potential for the future treatment of spinal cord injury, stroke and other impairments affecting movement, and could lead to more natural prosthetic devices. Using a brain–machine interface, US-based researchers re-routed motor cortex control signals from the brains of temporarily paralysed monkeys directly to their muscles. By creating artificial pathways for the signals to pass down, muscles that lacked natural stimulation after paralysis regained a flow of electrical signals from the brain. The monkeys were then able to tense the muscles in the paralysed arm, a first step towards producing more complicated goal-directed movements. Join discussion...

A space elevator is a type of surface-to-orbit transport, utilising a solid link to the surface of a planet and a counterweight placed beyond geosynchronous orbit at the other end. It would necessarily be at least 45,000 km (28,000 mi) high, and would, except in special circumstances, need to be constructed at the Earth's equator. Join discussion...

The dream of "invisibility cloaks" is at last becoming possible, and although the process will likely take another decade or two, steps have already been made in that direction. A group of graduate students at Duke University are already working on developing metamaterials-a special kind of material that causes light to bend in unusual ways, following the contours of the material's structure, and come back out the same way it went in. Provided that this technology is feasible, preliminary trials will be performed by the end of the decade, and the first economical cloak to be put into use (for hiding obstrusive structures from the riverfront areas) will be constructed before 2020. Join discussion...

In cryptozoology, a skyfish, or “rod”, is a supposed atmospheric entity that travels too fast to be seen by the unaided eye. A relatively new addition to the cryptozoological laundry list, rods were ‘discovered’ in the early 1990s but debunked by 2003 at the latest. It turns out that they are just videographic artifacts, produced by the motion blur of a conventional insect being filmed at 60 fps. How fast does something need to travel to move too fast to be seen? Of course this depends on its size and distance. According to this analysis of human vision, Air Force pilots were able to identify an image of a plane flashed in front of them for only 1/250th of a second. This is around the limits of human vision. If the flash were only for 1/500th of a second, it is nearly certain that they wouldn’t even notice it. Join discussion...

At a kickoff event for collaboration between IBM and the University of Southern California to explore the intersection of creative arts and science and technology, five IBM scientists offered their best guesses on how life would be different in 2050. In keeping with the Hollywood theme, the moderator of the panel, Bill Pulleyblank, noted that the Mini Cooper automobile has more computing power than Apollo 13--the space capsule that "almost got Tom Hanks killed," he said, referring to the 1995 movie of that name. Bill Pulleyblank Pulleybank led the development of IBM's Blue Gene systems, which account for 4 of the world's top 10 most powerful supercomputers. By 2050, he predicted, the capabilities housed in those giant supercomputers will be available in the palm of your hand. Join discussion...

When thinking about the future of robotics, it is important to understand how fast the field is progressing. To this end, I’d like to share with you two recent articles and a video. The first article explains how researchers are training robotic helicopters to perform complicated aerial maneuvers. What is in interesting about the work is that robots can study video footage and then learn these maneuvers in about 30 minutes. The second article highlights how a new robot can catch a baseball with a .750 fielding percentage. Join discussion...