Question by Shadar: Should I train for a new occupation?
I’ve become incredibly bored with what I currently do. It’s not a bad job, nor does it pay poorly, but I feel as though my talents are wasted and I’d like to make a better contribution to humankind. I’m leaning towards nanotechnology or genetics, as both of those fields appear to be on the cusp of producing some wondrous advances to benefit us all. Nanotech would likely be an easier route than genetics, given that I already hold an electrical engineering degree. Of course, I also have an interest in theoretical physics. Ultimately, I would like a profession that I enjoy, one that I look forward to doing everyday. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

Best answer:

Answer by PE2008
There are boring jobs in Electrical Engineering and exciting envelope-pushing jobs in Electrical Engineering. Why did you choose to go into a boring line of work?

At the PhD level, some electrical engineering looks a lot like theoretical (solid state) physics.

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Nanotechnology May Help Improving Fuel Ability

As we are facing the uncertainly in supply of crude oil, as well as affluent prices, other fuel source is a happening and hot topic. An interesting option could be ethanol, now made out of plants like corn and sugar cane. Companies and universities are eagerly working to grow this process of making ethanol from many other kinds of plant substance; that might considerably augment the amount of ethanol accessible as fuel. Nanotechnology might be to assist this important effort.

Presently ethanol that is used in fuel in the United States is made out of corn especially. The starch in the corn kernels is rehabilitated to sugar using enzymes. This starch is further fermented to shape up ethanol. Any how, in order to make a necessary reduction in the United States consummation of crude oil, we require up that production by a long way. The goal prepared recently by the United States government is to make 35 billion gallons of ethanol a year within the next ten years.

Researchers at Michigan State University are trying nanotechnology in a neat trick. They are heritably engineering corn to comprise the required enzyme. The plan is to make the enzyme unmoving until activated by high temperatures. When the cellulous part of the corn, like stalk, is procedures, the high giving out temperatures might set in motion the enzyme and change the cellulous to starch. This would avoid the added cost of creation the enzyme separately.

Researchers at the University of Rochester are as well studying how bacteria select an exacting enzyme, or enzymes, to break at specific kind of plant or other bio mass. They expect to make enzymes, which could change cellulous to ethanol in one step, other than the two steps used by the accessible processes. The advantage of cars that could be filled up with either fuel or ethanol has been verified in Brazil, they use much of its sugar cane crop to make ethanol. Using nanotechnology / genetic engineering to make ethanol from cellulous has the latent to make a serious dent in our use of crude oil. However we do require keeping an eye on some safety issues.

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What corporate world will transcend to and what marketers will do in the nanotech age of open source digital products and digitalized matter?

I would lie if I said that I know enough about nanotechnology, but from little I know, dangerous questions arise in my dangerous mind.

How nanotechnology and artificial intelligence development will effect the world of advertising and the business world as such?

To connect with my stream of thoughts, I suggest you to take 6 mins of your time and watch an interview with Ray Kurzweil who tells about his vision of the Singuarlity — a point around 2045 when artificial intelligence will blossom to such degree that technology will infuse itself with biology. Either you are skeptic or supporter, it will not matter when this picture becomes a matter of fact. Ray‘s theories have many supporters, as well as critics, but the fact that numerous Kurzweil’s theories and predictions he made few decades ago, now are the reality that seems obvious to us.

See the video on the IdeaMama’s blog where the article was originally posted:

http://ideamamaadnetwork.com/blog/2009/08/16/corporate-world-marketers-future-nanotech-nanotechnology-digital-products-business-strategy-compute/

“We have shown the feasibility of manipulating matter at the molecular level, which is what biology does. One of the ways to create nanotechnology is to start with biological mechanisms and modify them to extend the biological paradigm – to go beyond proteins. That vision of molecular nanotechnology assembly – of using massively parallel, fully programmable processes to grow objects with remarkable properties – is about twenty years away”, says Ray Kurzweil in one of his interviews. “The key issue is that information technology and information processes progress at an exponential pace. Biological evolution itself was an information process – the backbone is the genetic code, which is a digital code.” If indeed we decode the “DNA” of matter, creating ”things” out of the air (almost literally – all you need is a digital code that a friend sends to you via email or post on his blog) will become as easy as printing the fax page sent to you in a digital format today. Matter fabrication where the output of computation finds itself in a digital world, so any of products below become not more than a digital code, various combinations of 1 and 0 can effect all world processes to such to such degree that we can not even imagine now.

“We have shown the feasibility of manipulating matter at the molecular level, which is what biology does. One of the ways to create nanotechnology is to start with biological mechanisms and modify them to extend the biological paradigm – to go beyond proteins. That vision of molecular nanotechnology assembly – of using massively

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