Category: Found On Web

from the World-Watch dept.
While the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) and various state and regional programs in the U.S. tend to dominate the news from North America, there is a very significant and increasingly well-coordinated nanotechnology effort underway in Canada as well.

The primary source for current news about Canadian efforts can be found on the Nanotechnology home page of the Canadian National Research Council (NRC), which includes information about policy, government and industry research activities, and an extensive listing of nanotechnology work at Canadian universities.

The establishment of the Canadian National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, part of the NRC system, was covered here on Nanodot on 15 November and 27 August 2001.

Some interesting historical background can be found in the policy discussion that led to the establishment of the NINT:

• A National Workshop on Nanotechnology was held in Banff, Alberta (11-12 January 2001). A brief summary of the proceedings is available as an Acrobat PDF file, and the Welcoming Address and Closing Remarks by Peter Hackett, NRC Vice President for Research, are also available. Hacket also delivered some opening remarks at a follow-up Microsystems and Nanotechnology Workshop in Banf on 8 November 2001.
• A brief report on the proccedings of a Workshop on Nanotechnology hosted by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and funded by Candian federal agencies, held on 9 March 2001, discusses research opportunities and emerging research areas where Canadian researchers could be competitive and lead at the international level, and where this could have significant benefits for Canada. It also served to identify the infrastructure that will be needed by Canadian researchers.
• If you read French, a pair of reports (undated, but apparently produced some time during 2001) on Les nanotechnologies – La maîtrise de l'infiniment petit (Nanotechnology: Mastering the infinitely small), issued by the provincial government of Quebec from the Conseil de la science et de la technologie (Science and Technology Council), are available as Acrobat PDF files. An English version of the executive summary is also available.

from the Blast-from-the-past dept.
Those of you with an interest in history may be interested in the transcript of the hearing held by the Subcommittee on Basic Research of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science on 22 June 1993. The transcript is available from the U.S. Government Printing Office website as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. Caution: it weighs in at a whopping 5.7 Mb.

These hearings, titled "Nanotechnology: The State of Nano-Science and Its Prospects for the Next Decade", included testimony by Nobel laureate Richard Smalley of Rice University and nanotechnologist Ralph Merkle, then at Xerox PARC and now a researcher at Zyvex Corporation. The House hearings were held in response to an interagency workshop that called for establishment of an integrated federal program to support nanotech-oriented research and development efforts, and were important in solidifying support for the proposed U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), which was then under consideration by the Clinton Administration. The NNI was formally presented as part of U.S. federal policy in February 2000 with the FY2001 budget request. NNI is now being funded at about $US 500 million annually.

The six new national Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers (NSECs) established by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in September 2001 have begun establishing their presence on the web. For more information about the research programs at the centers, visit the websites:

• Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) at Rice University (http://cnst.rice.edu/cben/)
• Center for Electronic Transport in Molecular Nanostructures at Columbia University (http://www.cise.columbia.edu/nsec/)
• Center for Integrated Nanopatterning and Detection Technologies at Northwestern University (http://www.nsec.northwestern.edu/)
• Center for Nanoscale Systems in Information Technologies at Cornel University (http://www.cns.cornell.edu/)
• Center for Science of Nanoscale Systems and their Device Applications at Harvard University (http://www.nsec.harvard.edu/)
• Center for Directed Assembly of Nanostructures at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (no website yet)