PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct 06, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology education and public policy think tank based in Palo Alto, has announced the winners of the prestigious 2009 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology. Established in 1993 in honor of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, two $5,000 prizes are awarded in [...]

Spammers hacked into Foresight.org recently and inserted junk into some of our pages;  we think we’ve gotten rid of it but let us know if you see any more!

The nominations for Foresight’s 2009 Feynman Prize will be closing soon, so if you know someone who has done outstanding work to advance the goal of molecular nanotechnology, please visit the Instructions Page to nominate them. Research areas considered relevant to MNT (e.g., productive nanosystems and molecular machine systems) include but are not limited to: [...]

Nominations are now open for the Foresight Institute Prizes for 2009, due June 30. Our best-known prizes of course are the two annual Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology, one for Experiment and one for Theory: Description Instructions Also open are nominations for the Foresight Prize in Communications: Description Instructions And the Student Prize: Description [...]

The Foresight Institute has appointed Dr. J. Storrs Hall to the position of President.

Once upon a time, or so the story goes, there was a young man who was hauled up before the court on charges that he had killed his father and mother. He readily confessed to the crime, but nevertheless pled for clemency: after all, he pointed out, he was an orphan. Recently on his blog [...]

Josh Hall, author of Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology, sends this message to Nanodot readers: Dear Foresight members & friends, It’s the time of year when many of you are renewing your Foresight memberships, and helping us meet our $30,000 goal for our Challenge Grant by December 31: http://www.foresight.org/challenge I believe that the next decade [...]

It is with great sadness that we report the death of Prof. Arthur Kantrowitz, a founding Advisor of Foresight Institute and an early supporter of molecular nanotechnology concepts when they were first developed at MIT in the late 1970s by then-student K. Eric Drexler. Arthur was an amazingly innovative scientist and technologist, as described in [...]

You might think that by now the definitions of terms like “nanotechnology” and “nanosystems” would be firmly established. In fact the process of arriving at an international consensus is more difficult than you might expect. Representing Foresight in the effort to define these and other terms is David R. Forrest, Ph.D., President of the Institute [...]

On the Editor’s Page at Medical DeviceLinkCom, Shana Leonard writes about the crucial need for design and modeling techniques to guide nanosystems development toward fabrication, and cites the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. From “A Different Kind of Intelligent Design” Drawing from numerous workshops held from 2005 to 2007, Battelle (Columbus, OH) and the Foresight [...]

Sunday, May 18th at 7:00 PM Pacific / 10:00 PM Eastern, FastForward Radio will feature a distinguished panel discussing the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. The panel will discuss the background and history of the roadmap, and explore how it will serve to help realize these horizons. The panelists are: Christine Peterson, Acting President of [...]

Longtime Nanodot readers and Foresight members know that our goal here at Foresight is to maximize the benefits and minimize the downsides of nanotechnology. Our friends over at the Wilson Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies share that goal, as shown in their mission statement: The Project is dedicated to helping ensure that as nanotechnologies advance, [...]

Dear Foresight members and friends: It is with great pleasure that we announce the availability of the first Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. Some of you have seen earlier drafts, but the document is now official. Files can be downloaded at: http://foresight.org/roadmaps Below is the text of the press release going out today. We look [...]

Sonia Arrison over at TechNewsWorld takes on the issues of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and steering innovation toward responsible uses: “When we look at cells as machines, it makes them very straightforward in the future to design them for very unique utilities,” Venter told participants at DLD. Of course, Venter has often referred to the possibility [...]

Our favorite nanotechnology VC is Steve Jurvetson, who is interviewed over at LiveMint.com from India, which is affiliated with The Wall Street Journal. An excerpt: How are the elements of the nanotech start-up ecosystem different from other sectors? First, it is hard to find human talent because a lot of the really interesting breakthroughs happen [...]

We hope you find Nanodot useful all year long. Now we need some assistance from our loyal readers: we have a Challenge Grant going, with every dollar you donate being matched one-for-one up to US$40K. But as of today we’re only about a quarter of the way to our goal. You can track our progress [...]

Foresight president Dr. Pearl Chin was interviewed on nanotechnology by Stephen Gordon and PJ Manney on Dec. 16, and the show can now be downloaded for your listening edification. A brief summary appears on Phil Bowermaster’s blog The Speculist: Dr. Chin is excited about [the] medical advance that nanoparticles are making possible – particularly with [...]

An article in Small Times by Paul Burrows of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory covers the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems (TRPN) aimed at Atomically-Precise Manufacturing (APM), a joint project of Foresight Nanotech Institute and Battelle, funded by the Waitt Family Foundation and by Sun Microsystems. Some excerpts: The Foresight-Battelle roadmap aimed to address this “vision [...]

Foresight Nanotech Institute has received a large Challenge Grant, but to fulfill the challenge we need to raise $40K in matching gifts. You can watch our progress on the pie chart as we work toward our goal. Are you up for the nanotech challenge? Thanks to contributions like yours, we’ve been able to advance beneficial [...]

If you are planning to attend this year’s Foresight Vision Weekend Unconference in Silicon Valley this weekend, now is definitely the time to register, since registration closes today at 4 PM Pacific time. After that, you will need to phone Alicia Isaac at +1 (650) 289 0860 ext 254 or email her at foresight@foresight.org to [...]