A recent study by Yale Law School on how people’s views on nanotechnology change when they learn more information found that people seem to use whatever they are told to reinforce what they expect to hear. See the graph and analysis on this page: There were even more dramatic differences in the reactions of subgroups [...]

A while back I offered to write more about Health and Nanotechnology: Economic, Societal, and Institutional Impact, a report from a conference convened with the cooperation of the U.S. Dept. of State and the European Commission, part of a series called Perspectives on the Future of Science and Technology, which has a ten-year time horizon. [...]

Environmental Defense and DuPont are pleased to announce the public release of a DRAFT version of their Nano Risk Framework — a framework for the responsible development, production, use and disposal of nanoscale materials. They’d appreciate your feedback so that they can make this framework as effective, practical, and useful for as wide an audience [...]

Nanowerk covers a February 2007 report from the U.S. Defense Science Board titled 21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors (pdf). Excerpts: DOD must also keep abreast of the most rapidly changing and emerging technologies as a necessary complement to the mission-driven perspective that is the focus of this report. Today these include bio-, info-, and nano-technologies. [...]

A recent issue of the useful journal Nanotechnology Law & Business includes a review (pdf) by Daniel Moore of J. Storrs Hall’s book Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology. The conclusion: Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology will be of interest to those looking for an introduction to the concepts of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing. It is [...]

Though we do not always agree with Gregor Wolbring, his column on nanotech and the military reminds us of a very difficult potential problem: The start of a nano arms race, and the lack of willingness to regulate potential synthetic biology through the modification of existing treaties or the application of existing treaties or the [...]

Fortunately for us, Elsevier and the Institute of Nanotechnology — both based in Europe — are competing for eyeballs in the nanotechnology magazine race. This means they are letting us see their publications for free online, at least for now. From the IoN we have the excitedly-named new monthly “NanoNOW!”, the first issue of which [...]

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the nanotechnology classic book Engines of Creation is out in a new, free e-book version (5.4 MB pdf) from WOWIO. Material added since the original edition includes a Letter from the Author, Feynman’s 1959 talk, Advice to Aspiring Nanotechnologists (very similar to the author’s Foresight Briefing 1: Studying Nanotechnology, a longtime [...]

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. Excerpt on molecular [...]

On the plane back from last week’s U.S. National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office-sponsored workshop on ethics and nanotechnology, I dug into the report “Health and Nanotechnology: Economic, Societal, and Institutional Impact” (not on web, as far as I can tell). This was the result of a meeting sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the [...]

The U.S. National Academy of Engineering is requesting your input on Grand Challenges for Engineering over the next 100 years. This being Nanodot, we hope you’ll nominate nanotechnology. It’s a serious effort funded by $500,000 from NSF. From the MSNBC coverage: The comments will be winnowed down, then reviewed by an 18-member blue-ribbon committee headed [...]

The Institute for the Future, in a UK-funded study published on the Stanford website, presents eleven outlooks for nanotechnology over the next 50 years: • Better drug delivery through nanotechnology • Carbon nanotubes and lighter vehicles • The coming nanoshell revolution in oncology • The dream of biochemical nanocomputing • Manufacturing with programmable materials “Advent [...]

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 [...]

Cognitive enhancement technologies already exist — if you drink coffee, you’re a user — so it seems likely that nanotechnology will eventually be used for this purpose. A new report (pdf) from the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at ASU summarizes the results of a workshop on this topic held with Sandia. They identified [...]

Funded by the European Commission, the Nanologue project has released its report titled The future of nanotechnology: We need to talk. It presents three scenarios: Scenario 1: Disaster recovery A lack of regulation resulted in a major accident. Public concern about nanotechnology is high and technology development is slow and cautious. Scenario 2: Now we’re [...]

A new book by German physicist Jürgen Altmann of Dortmund University looks at Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (Routledge, 2006). Both near-term and long-term applications are examined. From the abstract: NT applications will likely pervade all areas of the military…By using NT to miniaturise sensors, actuators and propulsion, autonomous systems (robots) could [...]

IEEE Fellows are a plausible group of engineers to ask about the timing of nanotech and other technology developments. No one is really great at doing this for nanotech, as it is always hard to do in any field and, for nano, more multidiciplinary than any one person can be. So with that in mind, [...]

First a confession: I have not, in fact, read the entire article “Living with Uncertainty: Toward the Ongoing Normative Assessment of Nanotechnology” by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Alexei Grinbaum of the Ecole Polytechnique in France, published in Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. It is about 10,000 words long and has a great deal of philosophy [...]

Eoin Clancy writes from the Institute for Nanoscale Science & Technology at University of Newcastle: Recent paper published in Nano Letters “Medium Scale Integration of Molecular Logic Gates in an Automaton” by Joanne Macdonald et al. From the abstract: We now report a second-generation deoxyribozyme-based automaton, MAYA-II, which plays a complete game of tic-tac-toe according [...]

[Instapundit readers: you can sign up for nanotech news emails on the right side of this page at "free registration."] A nanotechnology report has come out from the World Council of Churches titled “Science, Faith & New Technologies: Transforming Life — Volume I: Convergent Technologies.” (PDF) The World Council of Churches is a group of [...]