Abstracts and selected papers from the Foresight's Ninth Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology are becoming available online. The conference was held at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara, California from 9 -11 November 2001. Papers include:

"Molecular Electronics and Chemical/Biological Sensors"
"Nanostructures in Nature and Technology"
"Fullerene Nanotools from Biology"
"MolSpice: Designing Molecular Logic Circuits"
"Wireless Communication in Multi-Agent Networked Nano- and Micro-Electromechanical Systems"
"The hypernetwork architecture as a model for molecular computing"

Presentation Abstracts, Ninth Foresight Conference

Here's true comedic science writing as only the Brits can produce it ... from the 19 November issue of Nature:

"Cross-species coupling is generally frowned upon. But in the liberal labs of California it is actively being encouraged. Bugs that are persuaded to get down and dirty with hamster cells are rewriting sex manuals in the act."

Bugs enjoy hamster sex

Here we describe a programmable finite automaton comprising DNA and DNA-manipulating enzymes that solves computational problems autonomously.

Programmable and autonomous computing machine made of biomolecules

(Summary excerpted from Science, 9 November 2001)

According to string theory, fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks are concealing something. They may actually be composed of unobservable, shimmying loops, or strings, the vibrations of which dictate the particle's character. If that sounds fantastic, drop by The Official String Theory Web Site for a cheeky tutorial on string theory, the framework that many physicists believe will allow them to tie down a unifying "theory of everything."

Written by a Caltech Ph.D., the tutorial explains strings at two levels of difficulty: advanced for the calculus-savvy and basic for those stymied by the first chapter of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. In the introduction, you'll learn how these quivering filaments may reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity and why we can't detect them even with mammoth particle accelerators (strings are too small). Other sections explain how string theory ties in with cosmology and black holes. To learn more from the experts themselves, try the audio files of interviews with string savants such as Brian Greene of Columbia University, who's billed as "string theory's answer to John Cusack."

The Official String Theory Web Site

(Summary excerpted from Science, 23 November 2001)

"It may not expose the dark recesses of your soul, but the Implicit Association Test can reveal attitudes you may not admit to your closest friend--or even to yourself. By gauging your immediate reactions to sequences of words or images flashed on the screen, the five versions of the test supposedly disinter deep-seated biases on race, gender, age, politics, and academic subjects. The results can be illuminating and are occasionally disconcerting: In the racial associations test, the site reports, most Americans betray some preference for whites over blacks. To get in-depth explanations of the scoring and background, however, you have to visit the researchers' home pages, where you can peruse their papers on what they've learned from 3 years of probing attitudes online and read about the test's limitations."

The Implicit Association Test

"We present a formal specification of the PING protocol, and use three concepts of convergence theory, namely closure, convergence, and protection, to show that this protocol is secure against weak adversaries (and insecure against strong ones). We then argue that despite the security of PING against weak adversaries, the natural vulnerability of this protocol (or of any other protocol for that matter) can be exploited by a weak adversary to launch a denial of service attack against any computer that hosts the protocol. Finally, we discuss three mechanisms, namely ingress filtering, hop integrity, and soft firewalls that can be used to prevent denial of service attacks in the Internet."

On the Security and Vulnerability of PING

The Institute for Genomic Research, based in Maryland, is sponsoring a series of lectures on the future of science. The series begins on Thursday, November 29, with a talk by Hans Moravec of CMU. It continues through at least May 2002 with talks by Bill Cheswick of Lumeta (author of _Firewalls and Internet Security_) and Ralph Merkle of Zyvex (and _The Diamond Age_ fame), among others.

Defining the Boundaries of 21st Century Science

"Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a pressing problem on the Internet as demonstrated by recent attacks on major e-commerce servers and ISPs. Since their threat lies in the inherited weaknesses of the TCP/IP, an effective solution to DDoS attacks must be formulated in conjunction with a new networking paradigm, such as Active Networks. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework called Aegis, which we propose as a defense mechanism against DDoS attacks."

An Active-Network-Powered Defense Mechanism against DDoS Attacks

In NetCamo, we achieve prevention of traffic analysis by traffic rerouting and padding based on real-time traffic modeling theory. We implemented both host-based version (called NetCamo/M) on Windows NT and appliance-based version (called NetCamo/N) on Linux."

Network Camouflaging

The patent, number 4,873,662, was issued to BT in America in 1989 and expires in 2006. The company said it only discovered the patent in a routine trawl through its own patents four years ago. But the priority date for the patent is July 1976, which means that for the patent to be successfully challenged a company must show prior art before that date, according to Gregory Aharonian, editor of the Internet Patent News Service and a vocal critic of what he calls poor-quality patents.

Date set for BT hyperlink patent case