Month: February 2005

Steve Barns, aka Nanopundit, looks at why venture funding for nanotech was down in 2004: "The drop in funding in 2001-3 has left a gap in companies ready for 'later round' funding. This gap is being filled with new investments and I expect to see a dramatic upsurge in funding as these nanostarts mature…as the pain from 2000 goes away [venture capital] will come into the market and fund all sorts of new companies. Then nano will be competing for venture dollars with bio, IT, security and who knows what else. It will be interesting and fun to watch…Is it time for nanotech to get some love? Itís going to happen, Iím just glad Iím not trying to go public right now."

ThinkEquity Partners has published Thinking Big About the Small World: A ThinkPiece on Nanotechnology by Stuart Pulvirent: "Nearly all industries and economies will be affected by nanotechnology developments…so will most investments…Nanotechnology is very complex 'to do' and equally complex to characterize and analyze. There are no 'nanotechnologists'. Progress requires multi-disciplinary teams of scientists, engineers and business development specialists working together. Do not expect nano-businesses to be created by college dropouts in their parent's garage or in front of their computers." True, unless the garage has a chem lab, or the business is molecular modeling…–CP

UCLA physicist Giovanni Zocchi, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute, explains: "We have made an artificial mechanism of allosteric control based on mechanical tension…We insert a molecular spring on the protein…By gluing together two disparate pieces of the cell's molecular machinery, a protein and a piece of DNA, we have created a spring-loaded protein which can be turned on and off."

Three interesting articles appeared today on /. related to security which bear some thought when we think about nanotechnology.

The first involves the ChoicePoint Identity Theft problem. This involves perhaps 40,000 people in California and more than 110,000 people nationwide (in the U.S.) whose complete personal information has been lifted from an integrated identity database maintained by ChoicePoint. The scary part seems to be that they weren't checking their own customers with respect to their trustability — they were selling the information in the database to allow their customers to confirm that J.Q. Public could actually be trusted and weren't doing that themselves.

The second, involves good old Microsoft warning the the next generation of Windows spyware inserts itself into the kernel using "rootkits". This potentially effectively negates all normal virus scanning software. Its a case of the virus scanning software asking "Do you have any viruses installed here?" and the system responding, "No sir, absolutely not sir, we wouldn't even consider retaining spyware, malware, viruses or worms on this system, sir!" Microsoft has some proposed solutions — boot up a copy of windows from a CD-ROM and compare the binaries to make sure they exactly match the binaries on your hard drive. And of course that is likely to happen because as we all know everyone in the world is running with the most recent MS security patches installed…

And finally, there is the nice little comment about the T-Mobile web site that allowed one cracker (Nick Jacobsen) to log into the T-Mobile web site (details) and not only download lots of information about the secret service agents investigating him but he also managed to access Paris Hilton's account and some of the pictures she had been taking on her phone.

Oh I am predicting such a bright future for nanosecurity experts…

From Brad Stone of Newsweek on Nathan Myhrvold's company: "The five-year-old firm's plan is to create or buy new ideas, accumulate patentsóexclusive rights to use the inventionsóand rent those ideas to companies that need them to do the gritty work of producing real products…But they charge that Silicon Valley companies have stolen other people's inventions for too long while slashing their own R&D budgets. Referring to Intellectual Ventures' portfolio of patents as his own…" The company's home page explicitly mentions nanotechnology.

Nanochallenge is a nanotech business plan competition, deadline 5 June 2005. The top twenty entries win 1000 euros and free lodging in Padua, Italy, for the two-day final competition. The winning team gets 300,000 euros and venture advice. Sponsored by Veneto Nanotech, funded by the Italian government.

As Science Daily is reporting a group at the BESSY lab in Germany has pioneered a technique using X-ray holography (Nature abstract here) that can image down to 50nm. Predictions are that when the "X-ray free electron laser" [1] aka Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) comes online at Stanford in ~2009 that they will not only have 10x the resolution of current systems (does that get us to 5nm?) and will be able to do femtosecond imaging.

Interestingly from a biological standpoint this may provide a way around the problem of molecules which for various reasons simply refuse to crystalize and whose structure cannot be determined by more classical (X-ray crystallography) based methods. This (and the optical methods mentioned recently) suggest that we are actually going to be able to *see* and watch our inventions operate in the nanorealm.

This book has a great title, but is it great? We could use a review of Self-Assembled Nanostructures. Unfortunately, it costs US$135, and is not much cheaper used. This list from AzoM has a number of other intriguing-sounding nano books.

Richard Jones over at Soft Machines has comments on molecular manufacturing. Richard: ì[S]ystems that make thingsî should only be a small part of the story. We need systems that do things – we need to process energy, process information, and, in the vital area of nanomedicine, interact with the cells that make up humans and their molecular components. CP: Yes, but as has been repeatedly pointed out, we need better systems that make things in order to build better systems that do things. Manufacturing may be a boring word compared to energy, information, and medicine, but it is fundamental to all. See Read More.

A book chapter on Nanorobotics, focusing on the molecular level, is available in pdf format: "If all these different components were assembled together they can form nanorobots and nano devices with multiple degrees of freedom, with ability to apply forces and manipulate objects in the nanoscale world, transfer information from the nano- to the macroscale world and even travel in a nanoscale environment…Active control of nanorobots has to be further refined. Hybrid control mechanisms, where in, a molecular computer and external (navigational) control system work in sync to produce the precise results seems very promising." Here's the research group, and the chapter is from The Biomedical Engineering Handbook, 3rd Edition, CRC Press, 2004.