Apply by December 31 for one of 20 $100,000 grants offered by the Thiel Foundation to those under 20 to develop their entrepreneurial dreams.

Sponsored by MIT Technology Review, the EmTech MIT conference covers important innovations in energy, IT, bio, and the Web, and examines their impact.

September 6, 2012. San Francisco. General admission to Design Night is $20 and student admission is $10. Admission fees include access to the exhibits, content such as a speaker, music, a hosted bar, and hands-on activities.

The Thiel Foundation is offering $100,000 grants to innovators age 19 or younger who want to skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education—Deadline Dec 31.

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

A cover article in Time magazine portrays the Singularity, Ray Kurzweil, AI, life extension, and nanotechnology as “an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.”

Sixteen-year-old nanotechnologist Amy Chyao won top prize at the 2010 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for her work on a nanoparticle to attack cancer cells and joined three other winners in Michelle Obama’s box during the State of the Union speech.

Palo Alto, CA – December 20, 2010 – The Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology education and public policy think tank based in Palo Alto, has announced the winners of the prestigious 2010 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology. Established in 1993 in honor of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, two $5,000 prizes are awarded in two [...]

Breakthrough Philanthropy presentation videos are available on You Tube.

The Foresight Institute was one of eight future-oriented organizations chosen by Peter Thiel to present at a ‘Breakthrough Philanthropy’ event attended by a couple hundred wealthy individuals.

(Atomic Age, that is.) From the University of Chicago Library site: On December 2, 1942, scientists at the University of Chicago produced the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a nuclear pile constructed in a squash court beneath the West Stands of Stagg Field, the University’s athletic stadium. This experiment, crucial to the control [...]

The blogosphere (and science news-cliposphere) is all agog aver the discovery of magnetic monopoles, from Nature to Slashdot.  Nanowerk Physicsworld What’s happened is the publication of some papers and preprints about observation and measurement of monopoles in spin ices, particularly in the complex crystal structures of compounds such as Ho2Ti2O7 and Dy2Ti2O7 at cryogenic temperatures. [...]

Longtime Foresight associates may remember Robert Birge, then of Syracuse, who spoke at the very first Foresight Conference in 1989. He has just won the Connecticut Medal of Science for his work in photoactive biochemicals. Story here (Hartford Courant).

From Azonano: Physicists to Brief Media and Public on Real Science of Antimatter On May 15, 2009, Sony Pictures will release “Angels and Demons,” and bring the world’s largest particle physics laboratory to the silver screen. Based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, this major motion picture, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, focuses [...]

In an interesting coincidence and counterpoint to Jim’s Nanophobia post this morning, I ran across the following on Nature News: Fearing the fear of nanotechnology. It is, surprisingly perhaps, by our old friend Richard Jones. The thrust of the article is that a study in Nature Nanotechnology seems to show that the public’s reaction to [...]

DARPA and a Texas fund have awarded $9.7M to investigate one nanotech path toward atomically precise manufacturing.

Christine Peterson passes along this news from the quarterly update of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) as something worth considering: “Foresight members and Nanodot readers may wish to join this collaborative forecasting effort.” The IFTF announced their First Massively Multiplayer Forecasting Platform (MMFG): MMFGs are collaborative, open-source simulations of imagined future scenarios. Designed to [...]

News from RIA Novosti of a promising nanotech partnership between Russia and Israel

A role for nanotech applications can be seen in the responses to the US energy crisis made by both candidates for the US Presidency.

Two researchers were rewarded with the 2008 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience for their pioneering discoveries of quantum dots and carbon nanotubes.