The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has announced the first series of its research papers, in which experts in the field examine the potential outcomes of this technology; all but one of the essays are available for publishing or reprint under Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL). SF fans may be interested to note that David Brin is one of the contributors. Another is the redoubtable Ray Kurzweil, who is hosting discussions of the papers on his futurist site KurzweilAI.net.

I love airships. I love hotel airships even more!

Deep inside NASA’s Ames Research Lab, the researchers can hear your thoughts – at least, they can if they wire you up with sensors. By attaching electrodes to the throat, they can detect the weak electrical signals that your brain sends to yout voice apparatus, even when you don’t actually make a sound. They have already used this technology to drive a car around in a simulated city, and to execute Google searches using only subvocalised commands.

The planet is sucking up bandwidth relentlessly as the world becomes wired – so it’s imperative that we achieve faster data transmission with the hardware we have access to. A joint team of German and Japanese researchers, by experimenting with different frquencies, have managed to pump 2.56 terabits per second down a fiber optic cable. That’s equivalent to 60 DVDs of data every second, nearly twice the previous record rate.