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We are very pleased to announce the dates and location of the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend, to be held November 3-4 in at Yahoo! headquarters here in Silicon Valley. 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 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? [...] Aharia Nair brings to our attention the new term Nubot, for Nucleic Acid Robots. Wikipedia explains: 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: 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: 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: 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. [...] Roger Brent, director of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, is a leader in open source biotech: News from Howard Lovy, now working with Nanorex: 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. Alexander Grigorovich-Barsky has designed a large nanotechnology poster (1.2 MB pdf) which attempts to give an overview of the whole topic, from history to today’s work to tomorrow’s atomically-precise manufacturing. An ambitious goal, but he has prudently asked for your help. In a release titled First nanotechnology journal from a major publisher to offer open access, Springer announced its new journal “Nanoscale Research Letters (NRL), which will be the first nanotechnology journal from a major commercial publisher to publish articles with open access. The new journal provides an interdisciplinary forum for the open communication of scientific [...] Writing in The Jakarta Post, Indonesia’s leading English language newspaper, is attorney Mohamad Mova Al ‘Afghan. He looks specifically at molecular nanotechnology, which he defines as “the capability to assemble any product than can be designed directly from atoms and molecules.” See the full article, or these excerpts: bhelfrich writes "Nano-Hive version 1.1.0 for win32-x86 is now available for download. *nix distros will be made available in the coming weeks. This release adds support for running multiple, multi-threaded simulations simultaneously, each able to access multiple Physical Interaction plugins. We've also added new plugins.
Also included in this release is an alpha version of the HiveKeeper Graphical User Interface for Nano-Hive (http://www.nano-hive.org/hivekeeper/). The capabilities of the alpha version includes visualization of the molecular structures even while the simulation is running. Visit http://www.nano-hive.org/ to learn more. Nano-Hive's open source development and distributions are hosted at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nano-hive/" Editors comment — but when will the software be available for non-windows systems? "*nix" distros in coming weeks sounds rather vague. It would appear that Adrian Bower, a lecturer at the University of Bath, is promoting an open source project for a "Replicating Rapid-Prototyper" that can reproduce not only itself but other macroscale objects. More on self-replication… Andrew Pollack of the NYT reports: "The open-source movement, which has encouraged legions of programmers around the world to improve continually upon software like the Linux operating system, may be spreading to biotechnology. Researchers from Australia will report in a scientific journal today that they have devised a method of creating genetically modified crops that does not infringe on patents held by big biotechnology companies. They said the technique, and a related one already used in crop biotechnology, would be made available free to others to use and improve, as long as any improvements are also available free. As with open-source software, the idea is to spur innovation through a sort of communal barn-raising effort." I have met the project's leader Richard Jefferson — impressive fellow.–CP Anonymous Coward writes "The Southern California Linux Expo has announced plans to host a panel discussion on the future of open source and voice over IP technologies at SCALE 3x. SCALE 3x, the Third Annual Southern California Linux Expo is the premier grass roots Linux and Open Source conference." More… PKA writes "Pratul K. Agarwal from Oak Ridge National Laboratory has released VigyaanCD (homepage, mirror). Vigyaan, a Knoppix customization, is an electronic workbench for computational biology and computational chemistry. The user can choose from more than 20 science applications. In addition to bioinformatics software, it provides GROMACS, TINKER for biomolecular modeling and Ghemical, MPQC, PSI3 for quantum chemistry calculations. VigyaanCD is a live Linux CD containing all the software required to boot the PC into workbench environment and is suitable both for beginners (12 demos and tutorials) and experts. Learning computational biology/chemistry has never been easier, so grab the free ISO image from several mirrors around the world and put your PC to work." Glenn Fishbine writes "This material was produced as part of a ten hour course designed to introduce the scope of nanotechnology. Use is hereby granted for educational purposes only." |
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