Before swarms of nanites can organize to eradicate the human race, they’ll need a leader. Engineers in Japan have made the first steps in creating such a microscopic overlord, building a nanomachine that imitates human brain cells. The tiny machine can receive information from the macro world and transmit it to a small cadre of its companions. Working in concert, teams of the molecular contraptions could do everything from terminate tumors to crunch vast amounts of data in the blink of an eye.

Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, in Tsukuba, Japan, led the team that developed the nanobrain. It’s made from 17 molecules of an compound called duroquinone, 16 arranged in orbit around one. The whole thing is held together by weak hydrogen bonds. Using a scanning electron microscope, Bandyopadhyay was able to send electrical impulses to the central molecule to change its configuration or state. The lead molecule then transfers its state to the other 16, like dominoes falling one after another.

It’s basically parallel processing on a micro scale, the same kind of number crunching that our brains are capable of. In fact, Bandyopadhyay modeled the microbrain on human glial cells, which pass info between neurons in the brain. They call it “one-to-many computation” and it’s key to parallel processing.

So what can it do? Bandyopadhyay estimates that the simple assembly is capable of generating more than 4 billion different outcomes from one input instruction. There’s no comparing true parallel processing to current processors, which crunch computations linearly. Parallel processors can take on millions of lines of instruction at once. That’s the kind of computing power that can keep Moore’s Law of exponential computing growth chugging away into stratospheric heights. 

And it’s not just powerful—the nanocomputer would represent a completely new way of computing. It’s purely visual, using patterns to replace the differential equations that are at the heart of current computing.

There’s also a potential to manufacture billions of molecules of a custom drug with just one instruction. Imagine a single drop of water hitting a placid pool. Waves radiate out from the site of impact, quickly covering the entire surface. A single instruction dropped into a field of similar nanomachines would spread in the same manner.

Bandyopadhyay is currently working to create more complex versions of his nanobrain and hopes to have a functional computer within a few years. The trick is finding something other than a massive tunneling electron microscope to interact with the machines. Bandyopadhyay hopes other control methods will be developed, including optical readers for the nanocomputers, or chemical triggers for the medical nanofactories.

Link to MSNBC article.

Link to BBC article.

Researchers at the Zernike Institute of Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen have developed super-cheap plastic memory that will likely end up in next-gen RFID tags. It works like Flash memory, but it’s easier and cheaper to manufacture. How do they do it? Flash memory is like a club sandwich—layers of semiconductors between ferro-electric toast. The new memory mixes everything up into one blended semiconductor cake. Current can be channeled through the mixture, leaving programming in its wake. The researchers aren’t totally clear on how they’ve managed this feat, but they say it works wonderfully.

Link to ScienceDaily article.

I was bad at statistics. I spent hours in the math lab, laboring over undecipherable grids and long probability chains. I dumped more time and energy into that class than I’ve put into any other class in my college career and I still got a “C.” Turns out I’m not alone. Humans are inherently bad at calculating odds and dealing with statistics. George Johnson does a bang-up job of explaining our stupidity in his review of “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” by Leonard Mlodinow. Terse, clever and insightful, it’s a model of good prose. Check it out:

Link to George Johnson article.