Author: Allison

Roland Piquepaille writes "BusinessWeek Online is publishing today a technology special report, Inside Nanotech. Here are the contents.

• Slugfest in the Nanotech Trenches
  Competitors in this young field, fearful of being elbowed aside, are going all out to establish themselves as the leaders. With the stakes so high, it's no wonder
• High IPO Hurdles for Nanotechs
  It's not easy for them to go public these days, especially for the broader "nano-platform" companies. Their time may be coming, however
• The Worries over Nano No-Nos
  Could the same properties that make the tiny particles so effective also turn them into efficient troublemakers inside the human body?
• Oklahoma: Nanotech Hotbed?
  Yep, along with Cleveland, Albany, and other areas way off tech's beaten coastal paths. This time, the geographic field is wide open
• A Nanotech Pioneer's Sober Assessment
  Goundbreaking researcher Stan Williams of HP says it's clear that "the 'knee' in the curve is still another five or more years away"

Ed. Note… The pages will load faster if you disable Javascript…

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…

Roland Piquepaille writes "Many teams of nanoscientists around the world are using 'quantum dots.' But even if they're able to use them, not a single team has been able to consistently control their quantum mechanical states — or their properties — at the nanoscale. Now, a team from Ohio University claims it found a flaw in quantum dot construction and proposes a solution. And guess what? As it happens often in research, this new finding is based on a very simple fact: an interference between two physical phenomena. Read more for other details, references and a picture showing a quantum dot bombarded with laser light."

The New York Times (registration required) has recently posted a review regarding the book On Bullshit by Princeton philosopher and professor emeritus Harry G. Frankfurt.

It is interesting to note his observation that while honest people and liars both think they know (and respect) the truth, the bullshitters simply do not care what the truth is. They only care whether or not they are believed. The book is short and inexpensive and may be of interest to nanodot readers who are trying to separate fact from fiction from hype as nanotechnology develops.

Scientists from NIST (noted by SpaceDaily) are reporting that using some clever optical trickery such as a "structured illumination field" and a heap of computer processing to reconstruct what the light is scattering off of they can use visible (violet) light to image features as small as 40nm — well within the nanoscale realm.

Speculation: If they push this a little (using UV wavelengths) they may be able to get down into the 20nm realm. That scale is sufficient to see if your nanorobot subassemblies self-assembled properly…

Roland Piquepaille writes "It's an antenna, it's a MEMS device, and it's a macroscopic quantum system. This antenna, made of 50 billion atoms, is so far the largest structure to display quantum mechanical movements. It's also the fastest device of its kind in the world, oscillating about 1.5 billion times per second. Such technology might soon be used in our cell phones. But more importantly, this device bridges classic and quantum physics. Such "mechanical/quantum mechanical hybrids could be used for quantum computing" in the future. Read more for other details, references and a picture showing different views of this world's fastest nanomechanical structure."

Ed. Note: This submission has been edited to correct misleading terms. See first comment.

Richard A. L. Jones, author of Soft Machines: nanotechnology and life is documenting a debate about the feasibility of mechanosynthesis between Philip Moriarty, a nanoscientist from Nottingham University, Chris Phoenix, Robert Freitas with some comments by Hal Finney. There may have even been some comments by Eric Drexler though he appears to requested those not be included in the documented exchanges.

The debate with archived discussions and current comments is here.

Christine Peterson points us to this story: "A new nanotechnology institute requiring an investment of $88 million will be set up at the Technion… The new institute will be the biggest established in the country to date, with an almost unprecedented financial investment – in terms of both the field of nanotechnology and university research centers in general… In a manner reminiscent of the high-tech euphoria, the Technion, and Israel in general, is gripped by 'nano fever.' "

It is worth drawing attention to the forthcoming conference on Nano Ethics being held at the Univ. of S. Carolina in Columbia, SC, March 2-5, 2005.

The particpants include Scott Mize, Christine Peterson, Mike Treder, and Mark Gubrud. All prominent people well known to the within the nanotechnology community.

I would highly urge people in the SE U.S. or others with an interest in nanotechnology and nanoethics to consider attending one or more days of this conference. As it is an academic conference the fee is minimal. The important factor is that you get to schmooze with the people who contribute to policy at the breaks and diners and potentially influence them.

As Buckminster Fuller once once pointed out there are "trim tabs" in life as well as engineering. Such opportunities are where a small force applied properly can produce a significant result. Given that the clash of cultures (the nanotechnology intelligentsia vs. the academia vs. government) involves many people who are just now wading into the swamp it would seem to be a significant opportunity to educate such individuals.

This is associated with Nanodot's previous reference to The Online Student Journal for Nanotechnology which appears to be affiliated with ⁿSTS.

There are multiple paths leading to molecular nanotechnology. Two of the more visible are chemistry and physics.

The chemists at U. Michigan (Choi & Baker) have recently combined dendrimers and DNA to allow directed assembly of more complex structures (here). This is an extension of our previous discussion of DNA based directed assembly methods (here). A memorable quote is by Baker, "So it's like having a shelf full of Tinker Toys."

Now at the same time the physicists and electronics engineers at HP (Kuekes, Stewart & Williams with Heath) are publishing significant advances in molecular electronics with a molecular scale crossbar latch (here, here and here). This technology is based on nanoimprint lithography (and here). They hope to combine this with existing semiconductor methods at the 32nm scale by 2013. The capacity of this technology is in the vicinity of a trillion switches per cm² which is at least 10,000 times the density of current chips. Methods that likely to plug into existing technologies have a significant advantages by providing incremental improvements in existing industries.

Rumors circulate that behind the scenes that patent(s) may be in preparation for an assembly process that could legitimately be called directed mechanosynthesis (vs. self-assembly, directed-assembly or bulk-assembly (i.e. lithography based methods))¹. But one has to ask, "What is the state of parallel mechanosynthesis?" For it is the parallelization of mechanosynthesis that could play a large role in it becoming an important manufacturing process. If that cannot be achieved it would appear that self-assembly or directed assembly (even of large molecules or lacking complete precision) would appear to have advantages. The only other alternative would seem to be that mechanosynthesis has to be extremely fast. Some might say that using mechanosynthesis assemblers can assemble themselves (after all this is what happens in biology). But that fails to take into account the amount of time that nature put into the development of the self-replication process. Lacking a complete self-replicating system the only alternative is a bootstrap process.

Finally, there is biotechnology. It provides all of the benefits of molecular nanotechnology with the possible exception high density of covalent bonds per unit volume. But with respect to parallelization and production costs it is way out in front because it can easily take advantage of self-replication. It has atomic precision and assemblers of many types. The costs of production blueprints (genes) in this arena has recently been significantly reduced by technologies for DNA synthesis using microchips (Gulari, Katz, Church, Gao) (here). The only thing it is lacking is the intelligent design of enzymes. But that similar to the hurdle that the semiconductor industry had to overcome with the semi-intelligent design and layout of chips over the last 20-30 years. It is simpler in some respects (enzymes may contain thousands to tens of thousands of atoms while chips have millions to tens of millions of transistors) but more complex in others (enzymes are 3D structures while semiconductor chips are largely 2D structures.

So asking the question of "Who's on First?" is not unreasonable.

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