The Convergence08 conference (www.convergence08.org) on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 2008 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event will use an innovative “unconference” format to enable participants to customize the event in a highly interactive way.

Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society, will keynote the event. About Convergence08 he observed, “A host of technologies that seemed like daring science fiction just a few years ago are racing toward practical application with breathtaking speed. Convergence08 is a unique opportunity to look into the coming NBIC future, examine its implications and prepare for the vast surprises in store for us all.”

Both days feature debates on controversial NBIC topics including Synthetic Biology, Longevity, and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Barney Pell, founder of Powerset and search strategist & evangelist at Microsoft, stated, “At this event we aim to use the power of collective intelligence to see farther along the convergence trajectories — each of the NBIC technologies is transformative on its own, and there’s a strong interplay among them.”

Debaters include:

• Dr. Bruce Ames, biochemistry professor at UC Berkeley, founder of Juvenon
• Dr. Chris Anderson, bioengineering professor at UC Berkeley
• Dr. Gregory Benford, physics professor at UC Irvine, founder Genescient
• Denise Caruso, executive director of Hybrid Vigor Institute
• Dr. Aubrey de Grey, chairman of The Methuselah Foundation
• Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of Novamente, chair of AGIRI
• Terry Grossman, MD, co-author, Fantastic Voyage
• Andrew Hessel, consulting biologist and author
• Dr. Chris Heward, president of Kronos Science Laboratories
• Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research at Google
• Dr. Steve Omohundro, founder and president of Self-Aware Systems
• Dr. Barney Pell, founder of Powerset, search strategist at Microsoft

Registration details available at http://www.convergence08.org/registration.

About Convergence08:

Sponsored by organizations focused on cutting edge technologies, Convergence08 will bring together an eclectic mix of visionaries, entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, and independent thinkers in general to merge their distributed knowledge into an improved view of where the NBIC revolutions are taking us, how to maximize benefits to humanity and the environment, and how to minimize any downsides.

Convergence08 Supporting Organizations are Foresight Nanotech Institute, Humanity+, ImmInst.org, Long Now Foundation, Methuselah Foundation, and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Cooperating Organizations include Acceleration Studies Foundation, CyBeRev, the Millennium Project, and Reason Foundation. Corporate Sponsors include eStitch and SciVestor.

For more information, contact Alicia Isaac, 650-289-0860 ext 254, or email alicia@foresight.org.

—Jim

Dr. K.M. Cherian from Frontier Lifeline Hospital in the India and six girls from India’s countryside who work in his research laboratory are using nanotechnology to improve animal vein, artery, and tissue implants for human hearts.

The International Journal on Disability, Community & Rehabilitation (IJDCR) has issued a call for papers on the potential implications of nanotechnology for people with disabilities, the communities connected to them, and rehabilitation practitioners for a special issue of the journal dedicated to the topic of nanoscale science and technology.

Chemically modified graphene has found in manganese oxide nanoflower/carbon nanotube array a rival nanotech material to improve energy storage using ultracapacitors. From “Nanoflowers Improve Ultracapacitors: A novel design could boost energy storage“, and article in Technology Review written by Prachi Patel-Predd and found via KurzweilAI.net:

Imagine a cell-phone battery that recharges in a few seconds and that you would never have to replace. That’s the promise of energy-storage devices known as ultracapacitors, but at present, they can store only about 5 percent as much energy as lithium-ion batteries. An advance by researchers at the Research Institute of Chemical Defense, in China, could boost ultracapacitors’ ability to store energy.

A capacitor consists of two electrodes with opposite charges, often separated by an insulator that keeps electrons from jumping directly between them. The researchers have developed an electrode that can store twice as much charge as the activated-carbon electrodes used in current ultracapacitors. The new electrode contains flower-shaped manganese oxide nanoparticles deposited on vertically grown carbon nanotubes.

The electrodes deliver five times as much power as activated-carbon electrodes, says Hao Zhang, lead author of the Nano Letters paper [abstract] describing the new work. The electrode’s longevity also compares with that of activated-carbon electrodes, Zhang says: discharging and recharging the electrodes 20,000 times reduced the capacitor’s energy-storage capacity by only 3 percent.

…Ultracapacitors can store millions of times more energy than the tiny capacitors used in electronic circuits.

But their performance still pales beside that of batteries, which store energy using chemical reactions. “If I gave you a cell phone with an ultracapacitor battery, you’d never replace the battery, and you could recharge it in a few seconds, but it would only last half an hour,” says Joel Schindall, an electrical-engineering professor at MIT.

…”The way of growing manganese oxide on carbon nanotube arrays is new and has produced beautiful structures,” says Yury Gogotsi, a materials-science and engineering professor at Drexel University. Gogotsi says that combining the high conductivity of the carbon nanotubes with the charge-storage capacity of manganese oxide is an attractive approach. But, he adds, “it is not practical for large volume, such as automotive applications, because the use of carbon nanotube arrays and tantalum foil makes them expensive.”

Indeed, says Schindall, cost could be the main barrier to ultracapacitors with nanostructured electrodes. “They’ve found a way to grow these structures,” he says, “but now they’ve got to be able to grow them densely enough and economically enough to be practical.”

—Jim