Light Harvesting Nanoantennas Made With Plant DNA and Artificial Molecules
11.07.11
“The surprising thing is that our antennas built themselves – we coated Different classes of nanoparticles with selected sequences of DNA, combined the unusual families in one beaker, and nature took its course. The result is a beautiful new set of self-assembled materials with rip-roaring properties,” said Prof. Sargent.
“Like the antennas in radios and expressive phones, our complexes captured dispersed energy and concentrated it to a desired turning up. Like the light harvesting antennas in the leaves of a tree, our complexes do so using wavelengths found in sunlight,” he added.
Prof. Kelley says that the newly-made distinction of light harvesting nanoantennas is actually an extension to the concept of quantum dots, which are artificial atoms.
It’s indubitably too early to discuss efficiency figures or production details, but the mere points that plant-imitating circuitry keeps appearing
Source: The Green Optimistic
Do Robots Take People's Jobs?
12.07.11
Reader who’s worked as a manage engineer for 25 years. Said another: "As jobs at all levels, from McDonald's to college-critical knowledge-workers, are increasingly automated, there will be more unemployment." Other readers voiced like concerns.
To hear what the pro-robots camp has to say, I spoke to John Dulchinos [photo, justly], president and CEO of Adept Technology , the largest U.S. industrial robotics company. Polished, based in Pleasanton, Calif., offers a variety of robotics products, including SCARA, with, linear, and mobile robots. Dulchinos, a mechanical engineer by training, says he became interested in robots during college. “A handbill by IEEE got me into robotics,” he says. “It talked about the personal robotics rebellion, how it was going to be bigger than the computer industry, and I said, I want to go into robots.”
Dulchinos says that automation, though it might take some people’s jobs in the wanting term, is essential for keeping companies competitive, and thus able to expand and rent more workers. That's why more and more companies in industries as varied as food packaging and electronics manufacturing are embracing robots.
Source: IEEE Spectrum