Image: Dan Saelinger
Revolutions often spring from the simplest of ideas. When a young inventor named Steve Jobs wanted to provide computing power to “people who have no computer experience and don’t particularly care to gain any,” he ushered us from the cumbersome technology of mainframes and command-line prompts to the breezy advances of the Macintosh and iPhone. His idea helped to forever change our relationship with technology.
What other simple but revolutionary ideas are out there in the labs, waiting for the right moment to make it big? We have found 10, and in the following pages we explain what they are and how they might shake things up: Computers that work like minds. Batteries you can top off at the pump. A crystal ball made from data. Consider this collection our salute to the power of a simple idea.
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12 Comments
Add CommentSo...If you don't know how to do anything, you can't fix anything when it fails to work or becomes too pricey.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat's the point?
I think you may get more hits on a page like this if you related it to sexy pictures. I hate when you put a link up that leads to a to see more pay up. How much cheaper do you want SCIAM to look cause it is really starting to look more like discovery than the Scientific America I use to love. Please at least put a warning that this link will lead to an advertisement to buy a paper.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce again I find that Steve Jobs delivered us from evil.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJim,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAren't you a little irritated by these teaser. I mean I get to this page and see if you want to see the beef deposit coins here. This magazine and I go back to the sixties and I think it is getting Alzheimer syndrome as it continues to dumb down and then thinks we are going to pay for information that they post as a news story.
If I wanted that kind of news I would subscribe to WSJ or the NYT. But Scientific America is not USA Today but it is sure trying to be.
See you on a story that is printed take care my friend.
David
Is there a way to subscribe to an online Scientific American and not article-by-article?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI read the article and they talk about computers that don't freeze up. Haven't they heard of UNIX? It even comes with tools to find the guilty parties (top) but I also noticed not many people mentioned the passing of Dennis Ritchie who was a true genius not a showman like Jobs. I truly will miss Dennis he was brilliant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@David -- The potential discovery in any subject is endless. I for instance realized while flying a high cambered aircraft upside down that flight was really all about thrust and atmospheric controlled free fall.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour discovery today via scientific american magazine is a cure for all disease including cancer (magic magee healing device)
From 2006 Sciam article and good luck finding it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRESEARCH LEADER OF THE YEAR
Angela Belcher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This eclectic investigator draws inspiration from nature's genius for building things at the nanoscale
The crux of nanotechnology is the problem of self-assembly, getting uncooperative atoms to link and align themselves up in precise ways. We know it can be done, of course: life persists by turning molecules into complex biological machinery. How fitting, then, that one of today's most creative materials scientists, Angela Belcher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has turned to nature for assistance. Belcher has pioneered the use of custom-evolved viruses in synthesizing nano-scale wires and arrays, fusing different research disciplines into something uniquely her own.Belcher got her start with abalone, a cousin to oysters. The mollusk had evolved a system for accreting a hard shell from calcium carbonate, the same material of which chalk is made. As a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Belcher elucidated the molecular assembly scheme abalone employed to grow its shell and tweaked a key protein to accelerate the growth process. Soon head of her own lab, she was standing on her desk one day, pondering the periodic table of elements and wondering how far she could push nature's ability to manipulate inorganic elements.Abalone had learned to control calcium. She decided that she would teach nature to work with the rest of the list."The aim is to work our way through the whole periodic table and be able to design materials of all kinds in a controlled way. My biggest goal is to have a DNA sequence that can code for the synthesis of any useful material,"
she told MIT's Technology Review.
She started with the DNA sequence of the M13 bacteriophage, a long, tubular virus six nanometers wide. She engineered a version of the virus that latched onto quantum dots, nanometer-size specks of semiconductor with desirable electromagnetic properties, by repeatedly selecting the virus particles best able to cling to the dots. In a matter of months she evolved a virus that held a chunk of material steadfastly on one end, like a ball and chain.
And now the rest of the story:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy dissolving the virus particles she could make them align themselves thickly like hairs all capped with quantum dots. The viruses are packed so densely that they essentially form thin films, which can be stacked closer together than other means can quickly achieve. More recently she customized M13 to stud its length with metal particles such as cobalt oxide and gold, yielding metal nanowires that could be used in high energy-density electrodes. By growing the virus on a film she could make a thin, flexible metal oxide coating suitable for storing energy chemically. Those could be incorporated, for example, into thin-film batteries that coat the surface of a device or fit into nonstandard shapes. Belcher cofounded Cambrios Technologies in Mountain View, Calif., to turn some of her demonstrations into commercial devices such as solar cells and light-emitting diodes. She has her sights on other organisms too and has started working with yeast in order to engineer more complex nanostructures.
The sad part this work was done in 2006 and to date only the military is using it and it took a lot of searching to find the article. Wonder why we aren't making jobs it is because the military is buying and hiding what is new and exciting. The problem with that is either Russia or China will steal the ideal, technology and it will see the day of light on some one else's bankroll.
Another little goodie that was first realized in 93, saw the day of light last year and has less comments than this page has had please take a minute to see what could change the world and save the climate damage we are responsible for with H2 delivered in just in time delivery there fore eliminating the storage issue which to date has been the show stopper. It is prolific and sustainable and cheap as hell. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hydrogen-production-comes-natu&posted=1
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut I guess a bankrupt country that can't make anything is a better way to go. These are dots that connect but we keep depending on big oil and the funniest part of all this is the Shell ad on the story page. Yuk Yuk and the other word that rhymes with Yuk.
Dennis Ritchie taught computers to be more than one user and one job at a time and his passing was hardly noticed because of the loss of Jobs the same week. Starting with OSX all Macs had BSD UNIX as the core of the system and they still only really did one thing at a time. So while the world weeps for Jobs I am so happy I got to work with some of the people that knew Dennis and was a contributor to UNIX SV R4.01. It was one of my finest days and these were real programmers I worked with and I got to savor Bob Pikes code with the Pads system.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, go to sciamdigital.com
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