At one of the Accelerating Change conferences I saw Prof. Beth Noveck introduce for the first time her ideas on improving patents via peer review. Now, the nanotechnology field will be envious to hear that another field has been chosen to carry out the first pilot project — software, as reported in IEEE Spectrum: The… Continue reading Patent peer review: now software, soon nanotechnology?
The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 in the U.S. gives patent rights for federally-funded research done in universities to the universities themselves, in effect. Many people regard this strategy as a succcess, and many countries around the world are copying it. But is this the best way to handle this publicly-funded intellectual property? After over 25… Continue reading Maximizing nanotechnology patent benefits
Aharia Nair brings to our attention the new term Nubot, for Nucleic Acid Robots. Wikipedia explains: Nubot is an abbreviation for “Nucleic Acid Robots.” Nubots are synthetic robotics devices at the nanoscale. Representative nubots include the several DNA walkers reported by Ned Seeman’s group at NYU, Niles Pierce’s group at Caltech, John Reif’s group at… Continue reading Meet the Nubot: DNA nanotechnology robots
Small Times reports on a meeting held in Oregon among a wide variety of nanotechnology-based business participants, at which many commercialization challenges were discussed. One was difficulties encountered with the U.S. Patent office: Start-ups expressed frustration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Long waits for patent award decisions make it difficult for them… Continue reading Nanotechnology patent problems blamed on unionization
In the long term, we’ll need effective security techniques for advanced nanotechnology-based systems. This will take a while to figure out, so come help us do it at an upcoming open source conference, Penguicon: Open Source-style Security for the Whole Physical World Christine Peterson, Bruce Schneier One of the biggest problems society faces this century… Continue reading Open source security for nanotechnology
John Walker brings to our attention an apparently distressing set of concerns regarding the new version of Windows, known as Vista, written up by Peter Gutman as A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. Excerpts: The only way to protect the HFS [Hardware Functionality Scan] process therefore is to not release any technical details… Continue reading Windows Vista: potential negative impact on nanotechnology
Given our interests in both nanotechnology and open source, we are happy to see that Wikibooks has an open-content textbook called The Opensource Handbook of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. It includes not just text, but also demonstration experiments and media files. This online book was voted Wikibook of the Month for December 2006. Excerpt on molecular… Continue reading Help write open source nanotechnology textbook
Roger Brent, director of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, is a leader in open source biotech: Putting his patents where his principles are, Dr. Brent’s institute has drafted an “Open Source Policy” which commits to “[making] reagents and methods freely available to the research community.” You can see MSI’s open source policy and a… Continue reading Nanotechnology: Lessons from open source biotech
News from Howard Lovy, now working with Nanorex: I wanted to make sure you saw this news item about molecular simulation software maker Nanorex acquiring Nano-Hive, developer of a powerful open source tool that speeds up nanoscale simulation through distributed computing. Together, Nanorex’s NanoEngineer-1 and the renamed NanoHive-1 are going to produce faster, better-quality animations.… Continue reading Open source nanotechnology CAD with distributed computing
The open-source research model continues to spread, now to biomedical research. An article by Sarah Everts in Chemical & Engineering News explores Open-Source Science, referencing a paper by Matthew Todd titled Open-Source Research—The Power of Us. For an earlier look at whether open source could work for nanotech, see Bryan Bruns’ article Open Sourcing Nanotechnology… Continue reading Open-source research for nanotechnology?
