Month: July 2002

Tony Garnock-Jones writes "The MacDiarmid Institute, a recently-establshed New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence, is organising an international conference on Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, AMN-1, to take place in early 2003. Three Nobel Laureates, Professors Alan MacDiarmid, Alan Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa, have agreed to participate."

from the give-credit-where-credit-is-due dept.
In his column Unfogging the Future on Tech Central station, Foresight Director Glenn H. Reynolds writes about a new government report entitled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (the subject of a Nanodot post July 13, 2002) as a salient example of something the government did right. Reynolds applauds the report's frank assessment that radical technological changes are coming, and its realization that delay in dealing with these changes may mean being overwhelmed by catastrophe.

from the let-us-reason-together dept.
Technology Fear Factor, by Daintry Duffy and Sari Kalin, originally published in Darwin Magazine May 2002. Published on KurzweilAI.Net July 21, 2002.

Three futurists — George Gilder, Ray Kurzweil, and Jaron Lanier — agree that emerging dangerous technologies will require smarter defenses, such as standards diversity, decentralized systems, a transparent society, better communications between factions, and mutually beneficial collaboration of business leaders.

from the new-tools dept.
Gina Miller writes "A July 23, 2002 EE Times.com article, Finding the charge within angstroms, reports that a team from Munich has built a highly sensitive charge detector from the combination of a quantum dot with a nanomechanical device. The team is comprised of researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians University and the Walter-Schottky Institute. This device could support realtime scanning with resolutions down to the sub-Ångstrom level. According to the group leader, Prof Blick, 'This system allows for ultra-sensitive displacement detection, which is quite important for any scanning probe application.' Applications of the technique include communications electronics as filter elements and sensor components."

TimHarper writes "Trends in Nanotechnology 2002 09 Sep 2002 – 13 Sep 2002 – Santiago de la Compostela, Spain Europe's largest scientific and technical applied nanotechnology conference, "Trends in Nanotechnology" conference (TNT2002) will be held in Santiago de la Compostela, Spain. Keynote speakers from IBM, HP, Samsung, NASA and NEC will be presenting the latest applications of their nanotechnology reseach. For more information: http://www.cmp-cientifica.com/TNT2002.html"

from the bang-for-the-buck dept.
An article in Red Herring dated July 12, 2002, Slow starts: Canada and Europe slouch toward nanotechnology blames the bureaucratic culture in Europe and in Canada for slowing efforts to commercialize nanotechnology, despite very sizeable public investments in nanotechnology research.

from the seeing-what-you're-doing dept.
A news article in Scientific American, Scientists Create Smallest Ever Laser-Like Light Beam, describes a table-top apparatus that focuses 25-femtosecond pulses of visible light to create (using a process called high-harmonic generation) highly coherent femtosecond-scale pulses of extreme ultraviolet light, suitable for creating holograms of micron-scale objects.

from the seeking-growth dept.
Gina Miller writes "The Korea Times reports ROK to Emerge as 8th Largest Economy, July 17, 2002. " …the Korean government will be adopting industrial development strategies designed to place such promising sectors as biotechnology and nanotechnology on the global map." The article explains that Korea would like to become a leader (eighth by 2010) in the manufacturing and technology areas and the new government programs will help to attain these goals. Read previous Nanodot coverage April 9th, 2002"

from the Who-ordered-this? dept.
A group of Australian scientists has published experiments demonstrating that microscopic systems (such as a nanomachine) followed for short time periods (as long as a second) could sometimes violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that is, they extract useable energy from the temperature of their surroundings. In so doing, these systems become spontaneously more ordered and entropy decreases, in violation of the second law. It has long been known that the second law is subject to statistical fluctuations in very small systems (a few molecules), but it is surprising that such fluctuations occur in systems microns in length followed for a second or more, systems containing many billions of atoms. It would appear that these results have implications for micron-sized molecular machine systems: how microbes and other cells function, and how nanomachines should be designed to take into account that they could run backwards for short periods. For a concise summary, see the AIP Bulletin of Physics News, Pushing the Second Law to the Limit

from the at-what-price-security? dept.
A prominent civil libertarian and member of the Foresight Board of Advisors has sued the U.S. government and two major airlines in favor of the right of U.S. citizens to travel anonymously: Suit challenges airline ID requirements

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco, John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that requiring ID from travelers who are not suspected of being a threat to airport security violates several amendments to the U.S. Constitution.