Pocket Supercomputers & Global Wealth

Pocket Supercomputers
      At the University of Michigan, Joel Gregory grabs a molecular rod with both hands and twists. It feels a bit weak, and a ripple of red reveals too much stress in a strained molecular bond halfway down its length. He adds two atoms and twists the rod again: all greens and blues, much better. Joel plugs the rod into the mechanical arm he's designing, turns up the temperature, and sets the whole thing in motion. A million atoms dance in thermal vibration, gears spin, and the arm swings to and from in programmed motion. It looks good. A few parts are still mock-ups, but doing a thesis takes time, and he'll work out the rest of the molecular details later. Joel strips off the computer display goggles and gloves and blinks at the real world. It's time for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He grabs the computer itself, stuffs it into his pocket, and heads for the student center.
Researchers already use computers to build models of molecules, and "virtual reality systems" have begun to appear, enabling a user to walk around the image of a molecule and "touch" it, using computer-controlled gloves and goggles. We can't build a supercomputer able to model a million-atom machine yet–much less build a pocket supercomputer–but computers keep shrinking in size and cost. With nanotechnology to make molecular parts, a computer like Joel's will become easy to build.
Today's supercomputers will seem like hand-cranked adding machines by comparison.

Global Wealth

     Behind a village school in the forest a stone's throw from the Congo River, a desktop computer with a thousand times the power of an early 1990s supercomputer lies half-buried in a recycling bin. Indoors, Joseph Adoula and his friends have finished their day's studies; now they are playing together in a vivid game universe using personal computers each a million times more powerful than the clunker in the trash. They stay late in air-conditioned comfort.
Trees use air, soil, and sunlight to make wood, and wood is cheap enough to burn.
Nanotechnology can do likewise, making products as cheap as wood–even products like
supercomputers, air conditioners, and solar cells to power them. The resulting economics may even keep tropical forests from being burned. Chapter 7 will discuss how costs can fall low enough to make material wealth for the Third World easy to achieve.

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Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution

Solar Energy
      In Fairbanks, Alaska, Linda Hoover yawns and flips a switch on a dark winter morning. The light comes on, powered by stored solar electricity. The Alaska oil pipeline shut down years ago, and tanker traffic is gone for good.
Nanotechnology can make solar cells efficient, as cheap as newspaper, and as tough as asphalt–tough enough to use for resurfacing roads, collecting energy without displacing any more grass and trees. Together with efficient, inexpensive storage cells, this will yield low-cost power (but no, not "too cheap to meter").


Medicine that Cures
        Sue Miller of Lincoln, Nebraska, has been a bit hoarse for weeks, and just came down with a horrid head cold. For the past six months, she's been seeing ads for At Last!®: the Cure for the Common Cold, so she spends her five dollars and takes the nose-spray and throat-spray doses. Within three hours, 99 percent of the viruses in her nose and throat are gone, and the rest are on the run. Within six hours, the medical mechanisms have become inactive, like a pinch of inhaled but biodegradable dust, soon cleared from the body. She feels much better and won't infect her friends at dinner. The human immune system is an intricate molecular mechanism, patrolling the body for viruses and other invaders, recognizing them by their foreign molecular coats. The immune system,
though, is slow to recognize something new. For her five dollars, Sue bought 10 billion molecular mechanisms primed to recognize not just the viruses she had already encountered, but each of the five hundred most common viruses that cause colds, influenza, and the like. Weeks have passed, but the hoarseness Sue had before her cold still hasn't gone away; it gets worse. She ignores it through a long vacation, but once she's back and caught up, Sue finally goes to see her doctor. He looks down her throat and says, "Hmmm." He asks her to inhale an aerosol, cough, spit in a cup, and go read a magazine. The diagnosis pops up on a screen five minutes after he pours the sample into his cell analyzer. Despite his knowledge, his training and tools, he feels chilled to read the diagnosis: a malignant cancer of the throat, the same disease that has cropped up all too often in his own mother's family. He touches the "Proceed" button. In twenty minutes, he looks at the screen to check progress. Yes, Sue's cancerous cells are all of one basic kind, displaying one of the 16,314 known molecular markers for malignancy. They can be recognized, and since they can be recognized, they can be destroyed by standard molecular machines primed to react to those markers. The doctor instructs the cell analyzer to prime some "immune machines" to go after her cancer cells. He tests them on cells from the sample, watches, and sees that they work as expected, so he has the analyzer prime up some more. Sue puts the magazine down and looks up. "Well, Doc, what's the word?" she asks. "I found some suspicious cells, but this should clear it up," he says. He gives her a throat spray and an injection. "I'd like you to come back in three weeks, just to be sure." "Do I have to?" she asks. "You know," he lectures her, "we need to make sure it's gone. You really shouldn't let things like
this go so far before coming in." "Yes, fine, I'll make the appointment," she says. Leaving the office, Sue thinks fondly of how old-fashioned and conservative Dr. Fujima is.
The molecular mechanisms of the immune system already destroy most potential cancers before they grow large enough to detect. With nanotechnology, we will build molecular mechanisms to destroy those that the immune system misses.

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How can online banking help you manage your taxes?

How can online banking help you manage your taxes?
Although some people experience anxiety when it comes to dealing with financial matters over the Internet, the practice is fairly secure as long as the Web site has a valid security certificate and your password is strong. It's no surprise then that online banking has become a growing trend. A 2009 survey conducted on behalf of the American Bankers Association found that for the first time, more than a quarter of U.S. bank customers preferred online banking to other methods such as visiting their local branches, using ATMs or banking over the phone [source: ABA].

While online banking offers enormous day-to-day convenience by allowing customers to bank from the comfort of their homes (and without the annoyance of a phone tree), it can also be of great service on special occasions. Namely, that delightful day each year when a person decides to sit down and deal with his or her taxes.

The IRS has jumped on the Internet bandwagon in a big way, and in 2008, about 90 million people filed their taxes online [source: IRS]. Those who also engaged in online banking throughout the year probably recognized how the two activities synergize to make the entire process a lot less painful and problematic.

Gone are the days of collecting and saving formidable stacks of receipts and records. With online banking, that information is all available at the click of a button. Some banks also offer features like a service that allows you to tag any tax-deductible expenses you accrue throughout the year and another that generates a report to summarize your annual spending habits.

Taxing Times
Aside from straight online banking, there are other ways the Internet can make taxes much less of a headache. As previously mentioned, you can file your tax returns electronically, which not only helps assure they get where they need to go, but also means you'll receive your refund (if you're lucky enough to get one) that much faster, too. Just so that you'll have everything you need, you might want to check with your bank to find out how long your records are available online.

The IRS allows you to pay any owed taxes and receive any incoming refunds electronically, so there's no hassle with making a trip to your actual bank. If you're impatient for your tax refund to arrive, you can track its progress online.

Another way to simplify the tax season is to purchase software like TurboTax. Instead of having to wade through difficult-to-decipher jargon, the software walks you through the process with a series of straightforward questions. Tax law changes from year to year, and TurboTax helps ensure you aren't messing things up or missing out on potential deductions and credits.

There's also the ease of importing data. Whether you keep your information stored in financial planning software or leave all your recordkeeping in the digital hands of online banking, you can just import it into TurboTax and get going. If you use TurboTax every year, you can even import your personal data from previous years into the current forms. There's also the obvious benefit for the mathematically challenged among us -- using TurboTax guarantees you won't mess up the math.

Factors like these mean tax time doesn't have to be the hassle it was back in the day. But even helpful services can still be bittersweet. After all, you're just parting with hard-earned money that much faster -- but at least you're saving time doing it. That's something, right?

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