Human life after advanced nanotechnology has been developed will be fundamentally different from life up until that point.

Excellent lineup of speakers again this year for the Open Science Summit, Oct. 22-23, and you can get in for only $100 if you register by this Friday:  http://opensciencesummit.com Hope to see you there!  —Christine Peterson, President, Foresight Institute

Proposed projects to use smartphone networks to gather data and inform authorities are opening discussion of how such data should be used.

An energy cell containing a lead zirconate titanate cantilever coated with a carbon nanotube film uses nanotechnology to produce electricity from scavenged light and thermal energy.

An IEEE Spectrum podcast asks the question, Why Are Terrorists Often Engineers? The blurb: With terrorism back in the news, so, too, is a curious footnote: Of the hundreds of individuals involved in political violence, nearly half of those with degrees have been engineers. This finding, first published in 2008, has been substantiated by two [...]

The Open Science Summit on July 29-31 in Berkeley is looking better and better. Topics include OpenPCR, DIY biology, open source hardware, brain preservation, synthetic biology, gene patents, open data, open access journals, reputation engines, crowd-funding and microfinance for science, citizen science, biohacking, open source biodefense, cure entrepreneurs, open source drug discovery, patent pools, tech transfer, and [...]

Not able to attend the Open Science Summit on July 29-31 in Berkeley, California? We’ll miss you, but you can watch the conference live at: http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010 Put it on your calendar now!  Or we’ll hope to see you in person, especially for the session where I’m speaking: “Safety and Security Concerns, Open Source Biodefense” at [...]

I’ll be speaking at the following event. If you miss the early registration rate, you can get 20% off regular registration with the discount code ‘Foresight’: Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0 July 29-31 International House Berkeley http://opensciencesummit.com Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for [...]

The UK-based Institute of Physics (IOP) publishes, among other things, the journal Nanotechnology, one of the leading journals in the field, and has had special issues with papers from Foresight conferences gaoing back to the 90s. It was thus somewhat surprising, yet gratifying, to find them submitting quite a strongly-worded critique of practices in climatology [...]

Foresight Institute Feynman Prize winner Dr. Ralph Merkle, perhaps better known to Nanodot readers for his nanotech work, has just won the IEEE’s Hamming Medal along with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie: Thirty-five years ago, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle developed an easy method for sending secure messages over insecure channels. With the [...]

From the February 2009 issue of the “science is culture” publication Seed magazine, not yet online: Hypothesis: Civil Nanotechnology Starting in 2009, nanotech-based sensing will enable a level of environmental monitoring that could help reduce pollution tremendously. Such devices could be of immense benefit to the environment, but unfortunately, without careful attention they will trigger [...]

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 [...]

For many years, Foresight has been pointing out that nanotechnology will be used for surveillance. Now Kevin Mitnick makes a long-term prediction on nanosurveillance. An excerpt: Warrantless Surveillance: The Worst is Yet to Come …Far from censuring the president, most of Congress seems completely unconcerned by the issue of warrantless surveillance. And telecom companies are [...]

Nanowerk brings our attention to a story at Forbes.com looking at anticipated developments in sensing and monitoring: At their annual meeting this fall in Montreal, there was little of the traditional talk among the international privacy people about the nuts and bolts of data protection. Instead, there were urgent and distressed discussions about “uberveillance,” “ambient [...]

Jamais Cascio offers four nanotechnology policy scenarios over at CRN, looking at options resulting from two axes: centralized vs. decentralized, and precautionary vs. proactionary. His two decentralized scenarios describe some territory similar to that which Foresight is investigating as part of our Decentralized Physical Security project: The third scenario, combining Distributed rule-making and Proactionary technology [...]

Registration for Foresight’s Nov. 3-4 Vision Weekend focused on nanotechnology and other advanced technologies — traditionally restricted to Foresight Senior Associates — is being opened to the general public this year as an experiment. Space is limited and participants are advised to register very soon. To warm up for our Sat/Sun afternoon unconference, in the [...]

This year as an experiment we are opening up a subset of seats at the Nov. 3-4 Foresight Vision Weekend to members of special groups such as Nanodot readers. The event is usually open only to Foresight Senior Associate members: http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/2007 I encourage you to check out this event. Since it is an Unconference, you [...]

Registration is now open to new and renewing Senior Associate members; cost for Senior Associate members to attend the meeting is $65. Space is limited. Join us! —Christine 1st Foresight Unconference to Be Held November 3-4 in Silicon Valley Event will explore nanotechnology, advanced software, life extension, future technologies Palo Alto, CA — Foresight Nanotech [...]

Like me, perhaps you normally prefer more traditional art: oil paintings, perhaps. But new art can have an important societal purpose beyond its aesthetic value, and artist Nina Waisman has taken on a key nanotech issue to raise in her work: the relation between nanotechnology, sensing, and privacy. From SignOnSanDiego: If airport security were run [...]

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. We’ve learned that you demand a highly interactive meeting, so this year we’ll be experimenting with a new format including big chunks of time for the [...]