There’s so much relevant news from the past week, I can’t just focus on any one thing… so here are five of the most significant things to hit my radar in past week:

In ascending order of importance.

5. On Marginal Revolution: What are some unknown but incredibly important inventors? Why can’t we get rid of the penny? And what is the moral basis of capitalism?

4. Lawrence Berkeley lab and Oxford University researchers developed a particle accelerator that takes electron beams and powers them up to a billion electron volts (1 GeV) in only 3.3 centimeters using a technology called laser wakefield acceleration. If these particle accelerators become popular and start to edge out conventional accelerators, then we’ll both learn a lot more about particle physics, and put ourselves at greater risk for creating a stable strangelet. Doing a risk/benefit calculation is difficult because of uncertainty in the probabilities involved.

3. If all goes well, we may start running our automobiles on ceramic ultracapacitors which take us 500 miles on only $9 worth of electricity using a battery that recharges in 5 minutes. Eric from Digital Crusader did a few basic calculations and found that transferring that amount of energy would require a rate of 1.2 megawatts, much greater than anything seen in current home electronics systems. The inventors of this technology claim that one day it will completely replace the internal combustion engine.

2. The mouse brain has been mapped down to individual cells. It only cost $41 million to do. A 3D atlas of the common lab mouse brain can be found here. If we had computers a couple orders of magnitude more powerful than today, we could start trying to simulate that mouse’s brain in a virtual environment. The success of the mouse brain mapping project is also a testimony to the success of high-level philanthropy. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, contributed $50 million to the project, more than it even needed. This Merkle paper is relevant as background.

1. Chris Phoenix proposes the creation of cubic micron DNA structures. Specifically, Chris proposed “solid molecular constructions, using DNA as a backbone, plus other arbitrary molecules precisely positioned within the volume. ” He estimates that it would be possible to design one for $10 million to $100 million once the entire process is automated. The idea came out of a thought experiment about what would be possible with today’s technology and only a “moderate amount of engineering”.

The idea would be to build bricks that can independently manufacture other bricks, to produce a rudimentary DNA nanofactory. Less ambitiously, you could design bricks that perform specialized tasks, like breaking down garbage efficiently, and then mass-produce the bricks to perform that function. The power of the approach is that, with current technology, you can precisely specify the DNA structure within a cubic micron volume, making it possible to eventually build any structure that can be designed. Because the density of DNA is about 1.3 nm^3 per base pair, it would take about 500 million base pairs worth of DNA to fill a cubic micron space. At current DNA synthesis prices ($0.10 if it’s your machine) that works out to $50 million/block, but the cost is rapidly falling.

Chris expounds a bit more on the concept here. Meanwhile, CRN argues “yes, it’s coming soon“.