A medically-oriented nanotechnology game is now available in Beta form, presumably for the PC. NanoMission is aimed at 12-to-18-year-olds: Our aim is to inspire some of the brightest teenagers about the world of nanotechnology, potentially opening their eyes to choosing it as a career. You can see videos here. The action of the game appears [...]

Nanotechnology career advice is available from the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education at CareerVoyages.gov. It’s a pretty good place to start for people who are entirely new to the field. Most of the link lists include useful sites. A couple of areas could use additional work. The Nanotechnology — Tools and Technology section lists [...]

Regular readers of Nanodot know that we rarely use this space to “bleg” (i.e., request donations via blog). We make an exception for our annual $40,000 Challenge Grant, during which your donations are doubled. As this is posted, we have about $30,000 to go. Take each example below and multiply the payoff by two — [...]

Switzerland’s Centre for Technology Assessment has issued its report Public Reactions to Nanotechnology in Switzerland (428 KB pdf), and — not surprisingly — it’s relatively balanced. From page 33 (page 35 of pdf file): “There’s a good and a bad side to everything” — This saying sums up quite well the way that the publifocus [...]

Allison Stoddart of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s magazine Chemical Science interviews nanotechnology researcher David Leigh on the joy of molecular machines in a piece titled “The magic of chemistry”: What motivated you to study molecular machines? I worked in Fraser Stoddart’s group before he made any catenanes or rotaxanes. We made our first catenane [...]

Nanotechnology will soon be taught in Mexico’s public schools, but Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post explains that it’s a different story in the U.S.: Scientist Robert P.H. Chang of Northwestern University had no trouble persuading education officials in Mexico to introduce the burgeoning field of nanotechnology to schools there, but it’s been a far [...]

In the November 2006 issue of Nano Today, researcher-turned-science-journalist Jason Palmer urges nanotechnology researchers to open up to the public about the long-term promise of their nanotech work: In this sense, it is as important to consider and discuss what can be done as it is to rule out what cannot. Because they are careful [...]

Today’s young gamers don’t have much patience with boring textbooks and droning teachers. Fortunately, soon this may not hinder them from learning nanotechnology concepts, thanks to the London-based firm PlayGen, which looks like a serious, competent visualization and game producer. Managing director Kam Memarzia reports that the firm has signed up to the challenge of [...]

The FIRST organization — inspired by inventor Dean Kamen — and the Lego Group are sponsoring the 2006 Nano Quest Challenge, and sadly for the rest of us, it seems to be limited to kids 9-14 years old, plus 6 to 9-year-olds in the junior league in US and Canada. But wait — all the [...]

In the U.S., psychoanalysis has fallen a bit out of fashion. But in Italy, a psychonanalyst heads up their bioethics organization, Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship. A year ago, Professor Emilio Mordini presented on “Dreams, Hopes and Uncertainties in the Nano Revolution” at EuroNanoForum 2005: Nanotechnology and the Health of the EU Citizen in [...]

[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. If you like to get nano news, free subscription to our e-newsletter is at the right, part way down, on this blog's home page.] From scientific animation company XVIVO in collaboration with Harvard comes an 8-minute video showing nature’s nanotechnology: molecular machinery of the cell, in action: Nuclei, proteins and lipids [...]

Philanthropist Fred Kavli has extended his nanotech research giving to found the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology at Harvard. From the Harvard press release: The Kavli Foundation and Harvard University have agreed to establish the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology (KIBST). The endowment from the Kavli Foundation will help to boost [...]

I just received two copies of a beautiful brochure from the California NanoSystems Institute describing the new nanotechnology facility they’re building at UCLA, opening informally this fall and formally on September 7-9, 2007 (there will also be one at UCSB). They’re looking for sponsorship. My first thought was, boy do they have the wrong list, [...]

The Society of Manufacturing Engineers, who’ve done two conferences focusing in part on molecular nanotech, now have a video on nanomanufacturing. The script is free, and so is a video clip with some images, so if the cost is an issue for you ($99 SME members/$280 nonmembers), you can get quite a bit just from [...]

We at Foresight see a lot of nanotech websites and books of limited usefulness, to put it nicely. For quite a while I’ve been getting ads for an online multimedia library on nanotechnology from Nanopolis, and ignoring them. Now for the first I dug around in their website a bit and am pleased to be [...]

The Woodrow Wilson Center Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has a cute short (8:25) movie posted in which Bethany Maynard interviews her dad Dr. Andrew Maynard and Dr. Barbara Karn on nanotech. Worth showing to kids, and even adults may enjoy it. The best part is when Bethany and her brother Alex apply mustard to her [...]

Probably because I’m an IEEE member — see their Nanotechnology Council and journal — I’ve just received the nanotechnology book catalog from Wiley. This 16-page catalog shows that Wiley, long a leader in high-quality technical publishing, is probably the dominant force in nanotech books today. To save 20% on orders through October 31, 2006, use [...]

High school students in the COSMOS program were treated to an early version of the NanoEngineer-1 modeling software for atomically-precise nanotechnology. Foresight Director of Education Miguel Aznar reported to Nanorex president Mark Sims on the nanotech course results: Success! NanoEngineer-1 greatly enhanced my nanotechnology class. My students were excited to manipulate and simulate the world [...]

The U.S. NSF has a program in Nanoscale Informal Science Education, awarding $20 million over five years to a network of science museums and related institutions. This is the largest single award NSF has ever given to science museums. One of the main three museums getting the award is the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and [...]

Edward Iwata of USA Today reports that Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia has ambitious plans for India: The most ambitious project may be “Nano City,” a $10 billion, environmentally sustainable development unveiled in April by entrepreneur Bhatia and the Haryana state government in northern India. Modeled after Silicon Valley, Nano City will feature R&D and educational [...]