Future R&D Environments A Report for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix G: Innovation's Quickening Pace: Summary and Extrapolation of Frontiers of Science/ Frontiers of Engineering Papers and Presentations
Appendix G: Innovation's Quickening Pace: Summary and Extrapolation of Frontiers of Science/ Frontiers of Engineering Papers and Presentations
Pages 143-166
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G Innovation's Quickening Pace: Summary and Extrapolation of Frontiers of Science/ Frontiers of Engineering Papers and Presentations, 1997-2000 James Schultz CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Constraints and Limitations, 144 TREND 1: COMPUTATION CONTINUES TO ADVANCE TREND 2: A QUICKENING MEDICAL-GENETICS REVOLUTION Genomic Medicine, 146 Genetic Cures? , 148 TREND 3: THE NANOTECHNOLOGY POTENTIAL Tools of the Trade, 149 Tiny Building Blocks, 150 TREND 4: NATURE AS ENGINEERING TEMPLATE Microscale Materials, 155 TREND 5: THE MATURATION OF AUTONOMOUS MACHINES ADDITIONAL TOPICS OF NOTE Climate Change, 159 Fluorescence Sensing, 160 Neotectonics, 161 Extrasolar Planets, 162 Femtochemistry, 163 Biometric Identification, 164 143 144 145 146 149 153 156 159
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Symposia presenters generally credit interdisciplinary approaches to fields of study as a means of providing new insights and techniques while significantly advancing specific disciplines. A survey of the symposia presentations indicates this cross-fertilization appears likely to intensify.
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More promising still is quantum computation, which employs individual atoms, molecules, or photons in exploitation of quantum interference to solve othiFrontiers of Engineering/l999. "Evolution of Large Multiprocessor Servers," Kourosh Gharachorloo, pp.
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The quartet assert that implementation of quantum computers presents a profound experimental challenge. Quantum computer hardware must satisfy fundamental constraints.
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say that precise identification of behavior-influencing candidate genes in humans and animals should lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the molecular/neurobiological underpinnings of complex behavioral disorders, as in animal studies that examine vulnerability to drug abuse. Classical human genetic studies also indicate significant genetic contributions to drug abuse, while genetic influences on human drugabuse behaviors can be found in strain comparison, selective breeding, quantitative trait locus, and transgenic mouse studies.
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As defined by authors Kay et al., gene therapy is the introduction of nucleic acids into cells for the purpose of altering the course of a medical condition or disease. In general, with some exceptions, the nucleic acids are DNA molecules encoding gene products or proteins.
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Increasing the interaction strength between probe tip and sample in a controllable manner has become important for the fabrication of well-defined nanometer-scale structures. It has even become possible to synthesize artificial structures by sliding individual atoms and molecules on surfaces by means of the probe tip.
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The four assert that studying single molecules is important because molecular individuality plays an important role even when molecular structure is complex. An intricate internal structure such as that found in a biomolecule, for example, results in a complex energy landscape.
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cantilevers have been developed for use as scanning probe tips. Such tips have a number of advantages, including crashproof operation and the ability to image deep structures inaccessible to conventional tips.
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Recent attempts at fabricating magnetic nanocrystals have made much progress, and studies of their magnetic properties are under way. Hard magnetic thin films have also been fabricated using magnetic nanocrystals, even though the use of such nanocrystals in patterned magnetic media is not imminent.
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Integrated circuits themselves play a role in bionics projects aimed at constructing smart materials or mimicking the movement, behavior, and cognition of animals. Biological structures are complicated; only recently have engineers developed a sophisticated enough toolkit to mimic the salient features of that complexity.
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Designers and engineers can mimic and utilize biological structures, Dickinson believes, provided that it is possible to fabricate the artificial material with the precision required to produce the desired effect. In the case of synthetic sharkskin, once engineers determined the correct groove geometry, it was relatively easy to mold plastic sheets that reproduce the pattern.
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Their challenge is not simply to replicate an insect wing, Dickinson notes, but to create a mechanism that flaps it just as effectively. Microscale Materials Chakraborty believes that certain classes of plastics polymers could be designed from the molecular scale up in order to perform microscale functions.~4 Nature uses proteins and nucleic acids in much the same way, he writes: Evolui4Frontiers of Engineering/1999.
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A smart structure, explain the three scientists, is a system containing multifunctional parts that can perform sensing, control, and actuation; it is a primitive analogue of a biological body. Smart materials are used to construct these smart structures, which can perform both sensing and actuation functions.
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A smarter structure would develop an optimized control algorithm that could guide the actuators to perform required functions after sensing changes. Active damping is one of the most studied areas using smart structures assert Cao et al.
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The human operator supplies motive power and exerts forces directly on the payload, while the mechanism of the cobot serves to redirect or "steer" the motion of the payload under computer control. The computer monitors the force (direction as well as magnitude)
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Long climate-change records show alternations between warm and cold conditions over hundreds of millions of years associated with continental drift. Large glaciers and ice sheets require polar landmasses, continental rearrangement, and associated changes in topography that affect oceanic and atmospheric circulation; in turn, these affect and are affected by global biogeochemical cycles, which include high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, associated with warm times.
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Of concern to Alley et al. is that some global warming models project North Atlantic freshening and possible collapse of this conveyor circulation, perhaps with attendant large, rapid climate changes.
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However, plate boundary zones involving continental lithosphere absorb relative motion by deforming over broad zones that are hundreds to even thousands of kilometers wide. An understanding of the forces at work in these zones is important because many of the most damaging earthquakes occur within these zones, say Clement et al.
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slip to slow aseismic slip is fundamentally important in the quest to assess the danger of active geologic faults. The use of GPS arrays capable of continuously monitoring a large region provides the resolution needed to monitor short- and long-term displacements that occur during and after earthquakes.
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Chemical reactions are, therefore, ultrafast processes, and the study of these elementary chemical steps has been termed "femtochemistry." According to Tanimura et al., a primary aim of this field is to develop an understanding of chemical reaction pathways at the molecular level.23 With such information, one can better conceive of new methods to control the outcome of a chemical reaction. Because chemical reaction pathways for all but the simplest of reactions are complex, this field poses both theoretical and experimental challenges.
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Experimental efforts in the field of femtochemistry have exploited the pumpprobe technique, wherein a pump laser pulse initiates a chemical reaction and a probe laser pulse records a "snapshot" of the chemical reaction at a time controlled by the temporal delay between the pump and probe pulses. By recording snapshots as a function of the temporal delay, one can follow the time evolution of a chemical reaction with time resolution limited only by the duration of the laser pulses.
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Robust, reliable, and foolproof personal identification solutions must be sought to address the deficiencies of conventional techniques. At the frontier of such solutions is biometrics-based personal identification: personal physical or biological measurements unique to an individual.
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The feature vectors are designed to characterize the underlying biometrics so that biometric data collected from one individual at different times are similar, while those collected from different individuals are dissimilar. In general, the larger the size of a feature vector (without much redundancy)
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