In case you missed the China webcast by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, here’s a short summary from IT Week by Clement James: China bets big on nanotech Country takes aim at $3 trillion global market in nanotech products Nanotechnology is key to the future economic success… Continue reading China rapidly gaining in nanotechnology competition
Public attitudes toward nanotechnology are being tracked closely — perhaps more closely than for any previous set of newly-arriving technologies. The surveys vary a bit, but here’s one by Prof. Steven Currall of University College London that fits my informal observations: One core finding of our research revealed that current public sentiment towards nanotechnology is… Continue reading Public still sensible about nanotechnology
UK nanotech researcher David Leigh and team have published new work in Nature on a nanotechnology achievement — an information rachet, inspired by Maxwell’s Demon but not violating the Second Law — that sounds possibly important for molecular nanomachines. At rotaxane.net, you can read the full paper (pdf), or a more accessible explanation: Chemists at… Continue reading UK nanotechnology team makes motor-mechanism for nanomachines
It’s a challenge to study something that hasn’t happened yet, but they’re taking a shot at it over at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University, as part of a lecture series titled Studying the Future of Nanotechnology: Establishing Empirical and Conceptual Foundations (pdf). Powerpoint slides and mp3 recordings are now available… Continue reading Studying the future of nanotechnology
Long-time nanotechnology trackers have assumed that nanotech will be useful for chemical and biological defense, and sure enough, at least one national government is exploring this issue. See the website for the Nanotechnology Initiative at the Special Projects Office at the Joint Science and Technology Office for Chemical and Biological Defense, which falls under the… Continue reading Nanotechnology for chemical and biological defense
EurActiv.com reports on a citizens’ panel on nanotechnology held by the Ile de France region: Citizens find nanotechs ‘elitist’ A citizens’ conference on nanotechnologies in France found public information on nanosciences difficult to access for non-specialists. The report itself (PDF) is in French, but an Altavista automatic translation gives English speakers some limited access: Efforts… Continue reading French citizen panel: Nanotechnology is too technical
Those of you who have tracked nanotechnology for a long time know that Sun Microsystems was one of the first corporations to take an interest in the field, e.g., sponsoring the Foresight Conferences over the years, and more recently helping to fund the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. Now that foresight, combined with their compatibility… Continue reading Sun's nanotechnology vision paying off
We at Foresight are often asked for advice on nanotechnology investing, which we are not qualified to give, so we refer folks elsewhere. Most sources of nanotech investing advice are boosters, so it’s also useful to hear from those taking another view. Over at Nanotechnology Now we get some unusually blunt comments from columnist Pearl… Continue reading Blunt advice on nanotechnology investing
Speigel Online reports that nanotechnology work at the University of Texas is leading toward a nanotech “exoskeleton” for military use: Now the superpower’s military is hoping to profit from the findings of nanotechnologist Ray Baughman from the University of Texas. He has managed to develop chemically grown nanotubes, which are like tiny muscles. The microscopically… Continue reading Nanotube yarn targeted for nanotechnology exoskeleton
Physorg.com and many others report a molecular nanotechnology achievement by a UCLA/Caltech nanotech team: A team of UCLA and California Institute of Technology chemists reports in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Nature the successful demonstration of a large-scale, “ultra-dense” memory device that stores information using reconfigurable molecular switches. This research represents an important… Continue reading Ultra-dense memory device uses molecular nanotechnology
