Tired of garbled news articles on nanoparticle safety? I certainly am. Now, the International Council on Nanotechnology (which I serve as an Advisor) has published the first public database of peer-reviewed journal articles examining environmental, health, and safety issues arising from both engineered and incidental nanoparticles (press release in PDF). You can help improve it… Continue reading Free public database on nanoparticle safety
See the report by Ottilia Saxl, founder and CEO of the Institute of Nanotechnology, UK, for the European Commission Expert Group on Key Technologies for Europe. Titled Nanotechnology – a Key Technology for the Future of Europe (PDF), it includes on pages 26-28 a scenario of the role of nanotech in 2025. The technology will… Continue reading European view of nanotech in 20 years
On Athenaweb (free registration req’d), a new site brought to you by the European Commission, is a five-minute video called The Principle of Nanotechnology with enjoyable nano graphics, worth viewing. That the audio is in German is not a problem, since those of us who are language-challenged can simply enjoy the video portion. If you’re… Continue reading Fun nano video from Germany
From the ever-diligent Charles Q. Choi, on work by physicist Shubhra Gangopadhyay at the University of Missouri at Columbia: “The researchers [have] coated devices made of glass with a mixture of nanoparticle fuel such as aluminum and oxidizer such as iron oxide. The nanoparticle quality of the fuel and oxidizer provides far greater surface area… Continue reading Nanoexplosions-on-a-chip
From PhysicsWeb: “Physicists in Germany have created a material that is harder than diamond. Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues at the University of Bayreuth made the new material by subjecting carbon-60 molecules to immense pressures. The new form of carbon, which is known as aggregated diamond nanorods, is expected to have many industrial applications (App. Phys.… Continue reading Harder than diamond: Aggregated diamond nanorods
Chemist Derek Lowe describes some amazing-sounding work at Caltech: “They’re taking electron microscope snapshots, one trillionth of a second at a time. And what is this technique good for? Well, electron microscopy has long been used for imaging all sorts of materials and biological samples. Fast freezing of the samples has revealed an extraordinary amount… Continue reading We'll watch nanotech experiments as they happen
To tell what’s really going on, read the abstract, but here’s the BBC version: Professor David Leigh, of the University of Edinburgh, said the demonstration was one of the first examples to show molecular machines integrating successfully with the macroscopic world… The tiny machines that coat the surface are essentially rod-like structures with rings that,… Continue reading Step toward building nanomachine-based 'materials that today just sound like science fiction'
Jenny Hogan blogs for Nature.com: “The historic city of Edinburgh in Scotland is this week hosting hundreds of scientists and politicians discussing “Nanotechnology and the Health of the EU Citizen in 2020” [pdf] at the aptly named EuroNanoForum 2005 meeting… “[Using iron oxide nanoparticles to treat cancer], we are told, is the first anti-cancer therapy… Continue reading Medical nanotech conference blogged at Nature.com
In the popular blog Instapundit, Foresight director Glenn Reynolds interviews Foresight advisor Ray Kurzweil on the topic of his new book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Some excerpts: “Achieving the hardware requirement was controversial when my last book on this topic, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out in 1999, but is… Continue reading Reynolds interviews Kurzweil: Nanotech's role in AI
Scenarios have been written about how advanced nanotechnology could help victims of natural disasters, and those otherwise in need, in the future. And at the upcoming Foresight Conference we’ll be looking at how nanotech can provide clean water cheaply. But what can nanotech do, right now, for those affected by Hurricane Katrina? Nothing, to my… Continue reading How nanotechnology can help Hurricane Katrina victims
