from the at-least-nano-has-a-business-model dept.
"Nanotech Offers Some There, There" by Ann Thayer (Chemical & Engineering News, 11/26/01, not easy to access) discusses the nanotech industry and current investor interest. Galway Partners' Chris Anzalone: "I believe there will be a nanotech boom over the next three to five years. The difference [from dot.coms], of course, is that there will be more there, there." Merrill Lynch's John Roy: "Where there's smoke, there's fire. Nanotechnology is closer than we think, and we need to be watching this. Although no one knows how big this will be, we do know that it never will match the hype." (Might Mr. Roy someday wish he'd left off that last comment?) A chart shows that venture capital is already about double US federal spending on "nanotechnology".

from the put-Nano-in-your-name-&-get-funded dept.
"New Hubs for Nano" by Alexandra Stikeman (Technology Review, Dec 2001) lists six new academic Centers for various flavors of nanotechnology. Some of them sound intriguing, e.g. RPI's Center for Directed Assembly of Nanostructures, whose director is quoted: "Lots of people can now make nanoscale building blocks. The question is how do you assemble them to create new materials and novel devices that you can control and manipulate." Time will tell whether they live up to these sexy nano-names.

An article on the Small Times website ("HP Official: 'Ignorance and greed' could spoil nanotech's credibility", by Jeff Karoub) reports an address to the Nanotech Planetís Fall 2001 Conference and Expo in Boston on 29 November 2001, by R. Stanley Williams, a leading nanotechnology researcher and director of Hewlett-Packardís Quantum Science Research. According to the article, Williams said a major challenge facing the immature nanotechnology field is not the science, but the combination of misleading media reports and venture capitalists looking for the next big thing in the wake of the dot-com collapse.
"Ignorance and greed meeting in the marketplace is a recipe for disaster," Williams told attendees from business, government and academia. "As a consequence, the field will lose credibility and momentum."

Williams also noted that even though most nanotech-related research in the United States is funded by the federal government, that funding represents only a tiny fraction of the federal research and development budget, and is unlikely to see any large increases. He said most nanotech research concepts currently go unfunded.

from the Cyberwarfare dept.
An article in the New York Times ("Plans for Technology National Guard", by Amy Cortese, 26 November 2001) takes a quick look at proposals for the development of a National Emergency Technology Guard, or NetGuard, to develop a corps of people to help protect and restore the information technology systems and infrastructure in the event of physical and, presumably, cyberspace attacks.

from the Go,-Huskies! dept.
According to a press release (29 November 2001), a team of researchers under Viola Vogel, director of the University of Washington's (Seattle) Center for Nanotechnology, have developed a new technique for observing large proteins that gives scientists the most detailed picture yet of the biological workhorses in action and promises to shed light on a wide range of protein functions, particularly in settings of medical interest.
"To a large extent, a protein's structure determines its function," said Vogel. "But, for very large proteins, the precise correlation is poorly defined. Now we have a very efficient way of tracking changes in structure so we can see how it relates to what these large proteins do."

brarrr writes "I'm a Materials Engineering student and have been interested in everything nanotech for about 4 years, reading about it in my own time and tailoring my coursework in such a manner to prepare me to work and research in the field. I am applying to graduate schools with the intention of studying something nanotech (NEMS, fabrication, materials, biotech), and am looking for any recommendations on schools or any up-and-coming programs that are not publicized yet. I am currently looking at Cornell, RPI, U Washington, JHU, and Northwestern."

According to a press release (27 November 2001), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $13.75 million to the the MIT Media Laboratory to create a Center for Bits and Atoms to explore how the content of information relates to its physical representation, from atomic nuclei to global networks. From the release:

"The center will bring nanofabrication, chemistry and biology labs together with rapid mechanical prototyping, electronic instrumentation and high-bay assembly workspaces. This integrated suite of resources is being developed to enable its researchers to shape simultaneously the information in a system and its physical embodiment, from microscopic to macroscopic scales. The NSF funding will help support research, education and outreach programs, as well as technological infrastructure. "

And:

"Among the challenges to be tackled will be developing "personal fabricators" to bring the malleability that personal computers provide for the digital world into the physical world; providing bidirectional molecular interfaces between computers and living systems; and bringing advanced information technologies to bear on some of the most intractable problems in global development and security."

from the intriguing-possibilities dept.
According to a press release, researchers at the University of Houston in Texas have found subtle signs of superconductivity in multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MNTs). The researchers did not see zero resistance in their bundles. They think this is because the connections between the tiny tubes never become superconducting. But they did see more subtle signs of superconductivity within the tubes themselves. The work is preliminary, and other possible explanations need to be eliminated.

from the Distant-airs dept.
(28 November 2001) – Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have been able to obtain data indicating the presence of sodium of a planet orbiting another star. This is the first direct detection and chemical analysis of the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. Their unique observations demonstrate it is possible with Hubble and other telescopes to measure the chemical makeup of extrasolar planets' atmospheres and potentially to search for chemical markers of life beyond Earth. The planet orbits a Sun-like star that lies 150 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. Its atmospheric composition was probed when the planet passed in front of its parent star, allowing astronomers to see light from the star filtered through the planet's atmosphere. Additional information is available in this press release from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and an article in the New York Times.

A pair of reports in the 21 November 2001 issue of Technology Research News (TRN) Magazine, provide some interesting examples of the many different approaches being pursued to develop nanoscale devices and tools.
The first ("Spot of gold makes tiny transistor", by Chhavi Sachdev) describes work by researchers from Sweden and Denmark at Lund University who have found a way to use carbon nanotubes as electronic leads that connect a circuit with a tiny particle of gold to form a single-electron transistor (SET).
The second ("Chemists create nano toolkit", by Eric Smalley) describes work by a team of researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan and the Communications Research Laboratory in Japan has come up with a kind of toolkit for building structures out of ring-shaped porphyrin molecules. But, as the article points out, "creating tiny structures is only half the game . . . The researchers also need to make the structures do something, like conduct electricity or convert light signals to electric signals. But even if the porphyrin molecules were not useful by themselves they could be augmented by other atoms or molecules."

from the chemists-at-work dept.
The November issue of Todayís Chemist At Work, a publication of the American Chemical Society, trumpets a pair of feature articles on nanotechnology. One article ("Manipulating molecules", by Hank Simon) provides an extensive overview of the development of the system that combined virtual reality and an atomic force microscope to create a nanoManipulator. The system was developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and is being marketed as a commercial product by a spinoff firm, 3rdTech.
A second feature article discusses organic conductive polymers in really flat panel displays (which you might roll up in your pocket), but the nanotech connection is tenuous at best.
There is also a very short news item on private investment in nano-materials and nanotech firms.

from the regional-conflicts dept.
An article in the Albany, NY Times Union ("Building a better high-tech soldier: New York colleges expected to compete for prestigious Army research grant", by K. Aaron, 25 November 2001) describes the competition among New York State-based universities to host the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) for the U.S. Armyís Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN). Universities across the United States have been competing for the contract for the center (as noted here on 1 November 2001); the deadline for proposals was 15 November 2001.
The Times Union article was also reprinted on the Small Times website.

from the World-Watch dept.
For those who do not read French, Minatec, a research and incubation center for microtechnology and nanotechnology startups Grenoble, France, now has a version of its website in English (in addition, of course, to its home site in French). You can keep up with developments at Minatec through their newsletter, which is available online or as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.

An article in the Daily Collegian (" Nanotechnology department gets recognized", by Catherine Turner, 26 November 2001), the campus newspaper of the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst, provides information on recent funding for nano-scale research projects there.

DavidForrest writes "Thanks to Kris Holley for finding this article on human cloning and the desire by some to regulate it:
http://cnn.technology.emailthis.clickability.com/e t/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=490262681 From my perspective, this continues to demonstrate how technological advances lead regulatory control. (I'm not necessarily advocating regulatory control for human cloning.) But in the case of nanotechnology I have proposed a regulatory framework (http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/ Forrest1989.html). It seems likely that nothing like this will be implemented prior to the development of molecular assembler systems. In the absence of that, all we have now are the IMM and Foresight Guidelines (http://www.imm.org/guidelines/current.html) and whatever inadequate laws can be adopted to molecular assembler systems (discussed in my 1989 paper).
- David Forrest"

The announcement by Worcester, Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology that its researchers had created cloned human embryos has set of a new round in the debates over cloning technology. ACT claims its work, reported in the 25 November 2001 issue of the Journal of Regenerative Medicine, is not aimed a producing fully-developed cloned humans, but at producing stem cells that can be used for generating individualized new tissues for therapeutic use. However, ACT also announced in a report in the 22 November 2001 issue of Science that its proprietary cloning technology has been used to produce healthy and normal adult animals (in this case, cattle).

Some additional background may be found in these articles from Reuters News Service on ACTís announcement, the renewed debate, and the companyís goals for therapeutic cloning.

A number of items on the KurzweilAI.net website present comments made by inventor-author Ray Kurzweil during a panel discussion on whether humans are an endangered species held in Washington, D.C. on 19 December 2001. Kurzweil proposed a major new national program to develop defensive strategies, technologies, and ethical standards to address the dangers of emerging genetic, nanotechnology and robotics (GNR) technologies. The panel also included Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, environmentalist Bill McKibben, and theologian Ann Foerst. Responding to calls for a halt or relinquishment of development of GNR technologies, Kurzweil said, "I believe that implementing such a choice would require a Brave New World type of totalitarian government in which the government uses technology to ban the further development of technology," said Kurzweil. An outright ban "would be destructive, morally indefensible, and in any event would not address the dangers."

Kurzweilís comments were reported in a news item on the KurzweilAI.net website. In addition to a brief news item on the panel, you can read a briefing paper on the issues that have been raised in the debate on how to deal with GNR technologies, as well as a set of questions posed to Kurzweil during panel discussion and his responses.

According to a press release, a team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel a simple biocomputer (a programmable two-state, two-symbol finite automaton) using DNA molecules and enzymes. The work was reported in the 22 November 2001 issue of Nature. According to the press release, ìCollectively, the computers perform a billion operations per second with greater than 99.8% accuracy per operation while requiring less than a billionth of a Watt of power. This study may lead to future computers that can operate within the human body, interacting with its biochemical environment to yield far-reaching biological and pharmaceutical applications.î

Additional coverage is available on from Reuters, the BBC Online, and the Nature Science Update website.

According to a press release, scientists at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois report they have been able to create nanoscale fibers that encourage mineral crystal growth and self-assemble into a matrix that resembles real bone. According to the researchers, the designer molecules hold promise for the development of a bonelike material to be used for bone fractures or in the treatment of bone cancer patients and have implications for the regeneration of other tissues and organs. Their research was reported in the 23 November 2001 issue of Science. Additional coverage is available in an item on the Nature Science Update website.

A.M. Soltaani submitted this brief summary of a recent nanotech seminar in Iran: "Iran centre for industrial research and development affiliated to Industrial development and renovation organization in Iran, and Nanotechnology Policy Studies Committee affiliated to Presidential Technology Cooperation office have [held] a seminar on nanotechnology opportunities for Iranian industry in Teheran on Tuesday. Please see for more: http://www.tco.gov.ir/nano/English/events/Idro.htm"

[Editor's note: This item was submitted on Wednesday, 21 November 2001, so "Tuesday" presumably refers to 20 November, or perhaps 13 November 2001; no date is given on the linked web page. See also the recent post on nanotech in Iran.]