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Gaming the Future: The Book!

Category: Nanodot

Vacuum packed cells survive days to weeks

RobertBradbury writes "A group lead by Fred Levine at UCSD is now reporting in Cryobiology (42:207) that simply drying cells in a vacuum is feasible method for cellular preservation. The highly unexpected discovery is discussed in a New Scientist article from October 22, 2001. This potentially provides a very different approach to cryonic suspensions where you would dehydrate the person first, then lower the temperatures to keep them in stasis. No water means no freezing damage due to ice crystal formation. The question becomes whether or not the extracellular structure of the brain (and other tissues) could survive the dehydration process? The shrinkage due to water loss seems like it would put a fair amount of stress on the proteins that bind the synaptic junctions together."

Physics Nobel given nanotech spin

from the OK-with-us dept.
Media coverage of the recent Nobel Prize in Physics — for demonstrating Bose-Einstein condensation — often portrayed it as an enabling step for nanotechnology. Sample excerpt: "The discovery that won the prestigious Nobel Prize in physics last week could lead to practical uses of nanotechnology, including molecular-scale electronics and microscopic computers."

NSF will fund six nanotechnology centers

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on 19 September 2001 about $65 million in funding over five years to establish six university centers to promote research and education in nanotechnology. The centers will each focus on a specific area in nanoscale science and engineering, and include collaborations with industry and other institutions. The six centers will be located at Columbia and Cornell Universities and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York, Harvard University in Massachusetts, Northwestern University in Illinois, and Rice University in Texas. Details are available in this NSF press release.

Additional coverage is available in an article on the Small Times website, and in individual press releases from Northwestern University, Rice University and RPI.

Computational nanotech seminar in 3 cities — free

from the talks-demos-&-lunch dept.
Accelrys is offering a free one-day computational nanotechnology seminar to be given in mid-October 2001 in DC, Houston, and Silicon Valley. While it includes some product demos, it also features speakers from outside the company, an "interactive session — creating complex structures from atomic building blocks (Audience participation)", and lunch. The invitation states "Entire nanoscale devices can be modeled on a computer in complete atomic detail". For a free event, this looks hard to beat.

Planning workshop for Oak Ridge nanotech center

The U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will be holding a Nanophase Materials Sciences Workshop on 24-26 October 2001 at the Garden Plaza Hotel in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The workshop will be part of the planning for a "highly collaborative and multidisciplinary Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences to address the national need for facilities to support state-of-the-art research on the synthesis, fabrication, characterization, and understanding of nanoscale structures, materials, and phenomena." The Center will include a Nanofabrication Research Laboratory, a Nanomaterials Theory Institute, and extensive facilities for materials synthesis and characterization. The purpose of the workshop is to facilitate community involvement in the planning for the Center. In particular, input is sought on equipment needs, candidate research areas, and user operations. A preliminary program is available online.

Lux Capital forms partnership for nanotech merchant bank

According to a press release on 10 September 2001, Lux Capital, a venture capital firm based in New York with a strong emphasis on nanotechnology, and McGovern Capital LLC have partnered to form Angstrom Partners LLC, a merchant bank providing intellectual property, corporate advisory and investment banking services to clients in the emerging nanotechnology industry. Angstrom Partners was formed as a Joint Venture between Lux Capital and McGovern Capital, a Greenwich and New York-based investment firm focused on capital formation, strategic transactions and alliances, and intellectual property.

Lux also released a major investor-oriented report on nanotechnology in August 2001.

Superconducting buckyballs

brian wang writes "Lucent scientists have inserted chloroform and bromoform between buckyballs and got them to superconduct at 117K. Up from 55K with previous mixes of buckyball. Read about it here."

Additional coverage of this research is available on the PhysicsWeb site.

Canada to create national center for nanotechnology

from the World-Watch dept.
With funding provided by the Canadian federal and the Alberta provincial governments, Canada will create a National Research Centre facility devoted to nanotechnology. The new NRC facility will be located at the University of Alberta in the provincial capital of Edmonton. Funding for the center will total about $CN 100 million, with roughly equal contributions from federal and provincial sources.

National and political motivations played a large role in the decision to establish the center in Alberta, which does not currently have a NRC facility. However, the University of Alberta is a good choice: UA already has made nanotechnology research a priority, and has 60 faculty members with expertise in the area — more than any other Canadian university.

Read more for links to press coverage of the announcement.

IBM researchers create nanotube-based NOT gate

from the circuit-logic dept.
Researchers at IBM have created and demonstrated the world's first logic-performing computer circuit within a single molecule, according to an IBM press release. The device, based on a carbon nanotube, functions as a voltage inverter and thus acts as a NOT gate — one of the three fundamental binary logic circuits that are the basis for digital computers. They encoded the entire inverter logic function along the length of a single carbon nanotube, forming the world's first single-molecule logic circuit.

The achievement was announced on 26 August 2001 at at the 222nd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) held in Chicago. The full research paper describing the device is available in the online ACS journal, Nano Letters ("Carbon Nanotube Inter- and Intramolecular Logic Gates")

In April 2001, the same IBM team became the first to develop a technique to produce arrays of carbon nanotube transistors, bypassing the need to separate metallic and semiconducting nanotubes. The team used these nanotube transistors to make the NOT circuit.

NSF will sponsor nanoscience symposium

from the wonk-session dept.
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) will is sponsoring a day-long symposium titled "Small Wonders: Exploring the Vast Potential of Nanoscience" on Thursday, 13 September 2001 at the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center, Large Amphitheater, in Washington D.C., from 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. A Program, Speakers & Exhibitors List is available online. Featured speakers will include NSF Director Rita Colwell, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Richard Smalley of Rice University, and Chad Mirkin of NWU Institute of Nanotechnology.

The event is open to the public, and apparently is free (no registration fee is mentioned). An invitation form is available as an Adobe Acrobat PDF. Attendees are requested to respond to [email protected] by 7 Spetember 2001.

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