Nanomachines, son!
Photo Illustration: Google Gemini
I confess, the title is misleading, and I apologize for that, but we are inching ever closer to making microbots and one day, nanomachines.
Scientists at the University of Gothenburg have made light-powered gears that can fit inside a human hair. For reference, a human hair can range from 0.017 to 0.186 millimeters (mm) in diameter. If you tried to straighten out your hair and examine it head-on, you likely wouldn’t be able to see anything. A singular microgear is a mere 0.016 mm in diameter.
Researchers had initially only been able to manufacture gears as small as 0.1mm in size, but by using lithography, scientists manufactured gears with light-sensitive materials, so when a laser is shone on it, the gear wheel spins. The gear’s speed can be adjusted with the strength of the laser, and direction can be controlled by the polarization of light.
What’s more, these gears can be fitted directly onto silicone chips, opening the door for a plethora of uses, such as building microscopic devices that work on larger individual cells in the human body, autonomously.
Maybe life will have a chance to recreate art in the future, and we’ll get a real life Senator Armstrong fight from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
A solar awakening
Source: REUTERS
NASA’s saying that our Sun has been much more active over the recent decade than they had expected.
Solar events typically follow an 11-year cycle, and at our point in this cycle, there should have been historically low activity. But solar activity has been increasing ever since 2008, leaving scientists scratching their heads.
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (ejections of plasma from the Sun’s corona into the heliosphere) can disrupt our communication systems by damaging satellites, causing radio blackouts, and even making power grids fail.
If the Sun’s ‘waking up’ as they say, we may have to prepare for the time when we get hit by a flare so massive that it nukes most or all of our electronic systems. At least my mother won’t be able to blame that ‘damn phone’ whenever I complain about a headache anymore.
“AI’s moving too fast!”, says AI company CEO
Source: REUTERS
You’ve heard your friends say it. You’ve heard your co-workers say it. You’ve most probably heard your parents say it, or even your children at this point.
But now you’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, warns that at the pace at which AI is going, it may soon cause mass unemployment despite the many limitations of current technology, and is already replacing jobs.
Alarmist? Perhaps. AI is currently unable to replace many of the jobs that were projected to be replaced, like programming. Software developers and programmers are still very much needed, and while AI may augment their work, it cannot replace their work entirely. Even ‘vibecoding’, while it has potential, cannot replicate the quality and precision that a real person can provide.
On the flipside, Dario does point out that while people say that AI can’t do certain complex human-centric tasks, the fact that it can still do intermediate tasks that are relatively complex (like being a surgery assistant) shows that anything can be possible. And the improbable is fast becoming the probable.
We’d really only know for sure when we all get replaced, or if that solar flare hits us.
