Entrepreneurs have long sought markets that can drive enough demand for space transportation to stimulate investment in new low-cost vehicles. David Hoerr argues that the issue is not new markets, but creating a large enough supply of space transports.
Many space advocates believe that space access is poised for a revolutionary advance along the lines of microprocessors. Michael Turner believes that a Moore's Law for spaceflight is by no means inevitable.
The life of the silicon chip industry may last 10 or more years longer, thanks to a new manufacturing process using carbon nanotubes developed by NASA scientists.
The first supercomputers to approach and even surpass the processing power of the human brain are to be built by IBM, under a contract announced by the US Government.
Engineers have crossed a symbolic barrier with a new way to make microchips with transistors that are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair or as small as a flu virus. The 90-nanometre width is regarded as a major milestone because scientists believe it will eventually lead to the production of transistors with atomic level dimensions.
The author introduces "Dickerson's formula", the biological equivalent of Moore's law, that predicts an accelerating pace of discovery in the burgeoning field of protein structure determination.
The current economic boom is likely due to increases in computing speed and decreases in price. Charles Mann argues that there are some good reasons to think that this trend may be over as technology may soon be no longer able to produce the dramatic increases in computing power predicted by Moore's Law.