The Foresight/Battelle-sponsored International Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems working group will be meeting next week at Brookhaven National Lab in the U.S. The team is having good success so far, and new corporate or governmental sponsors can still join and participate. A conference is being planned for Spring 2007 to present the Executive Summary and… Continue reading Productive Nanosystems Roadmap meeting at Brookhaven Nat'l Lab
Howard Miller brings our attention to a big section on nanotech at National Geographic this month (June 2006 issue). You can get a taste of it on their website, but for the main article, it looks as though you’ll need to get ahold of the dead-tree version. An excerpt from the description: A tsunami is… Continue reading Nano's big future at National Geographic
It’s hard for anyone to learn the basics and then keep up with the technical side of nanotech. To the ressue: the National Center for Learning and Teaching in Nanoscale Science and Engineering: NCLT is the first national center for learning and teaching of nanoscale science and engineering education in the US. Its vision is… Continue reading Help in learning nanotech
I had heard rumors and today at a meeting at the British Consulate here in SF I heard again that there was a big protest in Grenoble in connection with the opening of their new nanotech center Minatec, which appears to have been delayed to the next day due to the protest. There’s very little… Continue reading French nanotech center opening delayed by large protest
Judy Conner here at Foresight brings our attention to a new 55-page report from International Risk Governance Council, based in Switzerland, titled Survey on Nanotechnology Governance: Volume D. The Role of NGOs (400K pdf). Nine organizations are featured: five from the U.S. (CRN, Environmental Defense, Foresight, NRDC, and one I had not previously heard about,… Continue reading NGOs weigh in on nanogovernance
Longtime Foresight participating member Richard Smith brings our attention to a piece at Technology Review by Kevin Bullis, the second page of which I was unable to access online (could only get a BMW ad instead), so the last paragraph below is taken from a paper printout (Update: second page is working now): One of… Continue reading Sponges inspire self-assembly of nanostructures
From a piece in Red Herring: “Mark Mansour, an attorney for Foley & Lardner, issued the warning during a talk at the NanoBusiness 2006 conference in New York City. He said nanotech businesses need to step up their efforts to explain the complex technology to the public—before their foes do… ” ‘Friends of the Earth… Continue reading Nanotech industry advocates gear up to fight back
Here’s your chance to relocate to sunny Arizona and get paid (okay, not well paid, but paid something) for studying the societal implications of nanotech. I suspect that most people entering this field are skeptical of technology, so let’s try to fill this job with someone who’s enthusiastic, to provide balance. This Center is looking… Continue reading Fun job open in Nano & Society studies
Tomorrow I’ll be speaking on “public perceptions” at the Nanotech & Food conference in DC. Rather than a discourse on public perceptions of nanotech in general — which are as yet pretty vague — I’ll focus on what consumers expect from their food companies in terms of responsible decisions on which engineered nanoparticles, if any,… Continue reading Heading off annoyance from nanofoods
Mark Sims of Nanorex, a Foresight participating member, reports that he has completed the first nanomechanical simulation of the Merkle/Drexler universal joint. He used the nanoENGINEER-1 software on a Dell laptop, taking about 24 hours to complete the simulation of a 3,846-atom structure. Mark explains: “A universal joint is a joint in a rigid rod… Continue reading Nanomechanical simulation of atomically-precise universal joint
