analog is digital

smarterplanet:

Straight from Nature magazine, a leading scientific journal, comes a set of interviews in which leading chemists give their predictions for the future as well as discuss their favorite scientists. An example:

Paul Alivisatos

Replicate photosynthesis Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California This will be the decade when we finally learn how to make artificial photosynthesis work in a practical way. The goal dates back to Melvin Calvin (1911–97), who developed our understanding of the biological carbon cycle, and who appreciated the need to establish a stable cycle for human use of energy. An artificial photosynthetic system could provide us with a sustainable form of energy for the future. This grand challenge requires chemists to solve many deep and long-standing problems. For instance, we need to understand multi-electron and multi-step catalytic events more deeply, so that we can design better catalysts for oxygen generation from water and for the reduction of carbon dioxide to fuel. We need to learn how to assemble precise multi-component nanoscale light-absorbing and charge-separation systems and to integrate these with catalysts. These systems need to be grown from abundant materials, by processes that can be scaled to vast areas, by inexpensive means.

via betterworlds:

Interesting thoughts, but do we really need to “predict” the future…again?