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from the World-Watch dept. The announcement said the Queensland Government, the University of Queensland and "an overseas philanthropic organization" are funding the new institute. Beattie said the Australian national Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) would also be a key contributor to the institute. Beattie had announced plans to establish the center at a biotechnology conference in June 2001. The St. Lucia campus is already home to the University of Queensland NanoMaterials Centre (NanoMac) and Nanotechnology and Biomaterials Centre. In a related development, on 18 December 2001 Premier Beattie also invited the collaboration of researchers in New Zealand with the new University of Queensland institute. "The NEST group (the Nanostructure Engineering, Science and Technology group) at the University of Canterbury [in New Zealand] is highly regarded by their colleagues in Queensland. . . . Links with the new Australian Institute would be a natural fit and could be beneficial to both parties," Beattie said. from the penny-wise… dept. from the Blast-from-the-past dept. These hearings, titled "Nanotechnology: The State of Nano-Science and Its Prospects for the Next Decade", included testimony by Nobel laureate Richard Smalley of Rice University and nanotechnologist Ralph Merkle, then at Xerox PARC and now a researcher at Zyvex Corporation. The House hearings were held in response to an interagency workshop that called for establishment of an integrated federal program to support nanotech-oriented research and development efforts, and were important in solidifying support for the proposed U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), which was then under consideration by the Clinton Administration. The NNI was formally presented as part of U.S. federal policy in February 2000 with the FY2001 budget request. NNI is now being funded at about $US 500 million annually. According to an article on the Small Times website ("Lieberman working on U.S. Senate bill that would ensure nanotechg funding", by Doug Brown, 26 December 2001), Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman is working with several U.S. senators to craft the nationís first broad nanotechnology bill, which will probably be introduced in February or March. The article cites an unnamed senior aide to Sen. Lieberman as its source. Other senators involved in drafting the bill were not named. According to the article, Lieberman is pushing a bill to ensure that nanotechnology receives as much money and overall federal support as it needs and will likely call for some changes in the way nanotechnology gets federal funding, the Lieberman aide said. Federal investments in nanotechnology education and infrastructure, too, will be addressed in the bill. The bill is also intended to ensure that the federal government is aware of precisely what types of nanotechnology research other countries are conducting and how much they are spending. Finally, the bill will also address potential societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology. According to a press release (21 December 2001), the American Society for Neural Transplantation and Repair (ASNTR) has issued a set of recommended guidelines "promoting ethical and rigorous research on investigational treatments for brain repair. " The "Considerations and Guidelines for Studies of Human Subjects" was published in the 24 December 2001 issue of the journal Cell Transplantation. The guidelines were endorsed by the society's full membership, which includes most of the world's researchers working on applications of fetal tissue, stem cells and gene therapy for brain repair. An article in a special issue of Red Herring Magazine on the "Top Ten Trends 2001" names nanotechnology as one of the developing trends to watch ("Small Worlds: Nanotechnology wins over mainstream venture capitalists", by Stephan Herrera and Lawrence Aragon, 18 December 2001): The article also quotes Richard Smalley of Rice University: "To the extent that there are solutions to practical problems like disease, feeding the world, and reconciling scarce energy resources with increasing consumption, a remarkable number of them can only be solved through nanotechnology." from the The-long-view dept. The first, making use of the body's own signaling factors to stimulate healing processes, is already being implemented. According to the article, the second phase of regenerative medicine, in his view, "kicks in when the body is injured beyond the point of repair, at which point you want to put in a new organ," he said. Tissue engineers have already learned to grow sheets of skin and are starting to learn how to grow replacement organs such as blood vessels and more complex tissues. "Further in the future, he believes, biologists may learn how to fashion new organs outside the body from adult stem cells, the body's guardians and regenerator of adult tissues. These would be taken from the patient's body so as to avoid problems of immune rejection. . . . This, he says, is the point at which regenerative medicine merges into rejuvenative medicine. . . . ëSince we are a self-replacing entity, and do so reasonably well for many decades, there is no reason we can't go on forever,í Dr. Haseltine said." "In the fourth phase of regenerative medicine, according to Dr. Haseltine's timetable, nanotechnology ó microscopic-scale mechanical devices ó will merge with biological systems. Humans are already becoming partly inorganic when they receive organ- mimicking machines like the AbioCor artificial heart. Artificial devices are likely to improve to the point that they will eventually interface with evolution's form of engineering. . . . Some people find immortality disturbing, seeing it as transgressing the line that separates people from gods. Dr. Haseltine sees it as an inherent property of life. . . . ëWhat distinguishes life from other forms of matter is that it is immortal — we are a 3.5-billion-year-old molecule,í he said, referring to the time when life on earth began. ëIf it were ever mortal, we would not be here. The fundamental property of DNA is its immortality. The problem is to connect that immortality with human immortality and, for the first time, we see how that may be possible.í " from the current-events dept. However, some spot news coverage is available in articles from Reuters News Service and Associated Press (via the New York Times). Advances in the field have also been covered extensively here on nanodot. Just use the keyword "molectronics" in the search field. from the Small-stuff dept. from the The-worm-turns dept. from the from-chemistry-to-nanotech dept. According to a press release (18 December 2001), a team of researchers led biophysicist Bing Jap led a team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Life Sciences Division have determined the structure and function of a cell membrane protein, called aquaporin 1 (AQP1), that is specific for water molecules. The structure reveals the how the AQP1 can transport water through the cell membrane at a high rate while effectively blocking everything else that is larger or smaller, even individual protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. Each AQP1 channel is made up of four identical subunits, each with an entrance chamber on the outside of the cell envelope, connected to a similar chambeer inside the cell by a long, narrow pore. "The secret of AQP1's specificity is two-fold: it selects for size and for chemical nature," Jap says. "There is a very narrow constriction in the pore, which admits no molecule bigger than water. To keep out molecules smaller than water there is also a chemical filter, formed by the specific orientation and distribution of the amino acid residues lining the pore." Molecules attempting to enter the channel are bound to water molecules that are stripped away in the pore; charged species are therefore left with net electrical charge. "The filter strongly rejects charged molecules or ions, even as small as single protons," Jap explains. The unique distribution of amino acid residues along the pore wall also accounts for the channel's ability to move water quickly. The channelís internal environment has both hydrophilic and hydrophobic components. Water molecules readily get in because of the hydrophilic sites, but the hydrophobic regions prevent them from binding too frequently. Thus water and only water flows freely in and out of the cell through AQP1's pores, the direction of flow depending only on changing relative pressure inside and outside the cell. Similar work on the structure and workings of an ion-channel protein sorter for potassium ions was reported here on 2 November 2001. Some recent work with macroscopic robots is aimed at developing the sorts of capabilities that are often envisioned for future nanorobotic systems:
According to a press release (19 December 2001), researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center have performed the world's most complicated quantum-computer calculation to date. They used a container full of billions of custom-designed molecules to create a seven-qubit quantum computer that solved a simple version of the numerical factoring problem at the heart of many of today's data-security cryptographic systems. Reporting their work in the 20 December 2001 issue of Nature, the team says they have provided the first demonstration of "Shor's Algorithm" — a method developed in 1994 by AT&T scientist Peter Shor for using a quantum computer to find a number's factors. Today, factoring a large number is so difficult for conventional computers — yet so simple to verify — that it is used by many cryptographic methods to protect data.\ The simplest meaningful instance of Shor's Algorithm is finding the factors of the number 15, which requires a seven-qubit quantum computer. IBM chemists designed and made a new molecule that has seven nuclear spins — the nuclei of five fluorine and two carbon atoms — which can interact with each other as qubits, be programmed by radio frequency pulses and be detected by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments similar to those commonly used in hospitals and chemistry labs. The IBM scientists controlled a vial of a billion billion (1018) of these molecules so they executed Shor's algorithm and correctly identified 3 and 5 as the factors of 15. "Although the answer may appear to be trivial, the unprecedented control required over the seven spins during the calculation made this the most complex quantum computation performed to date," a member of the research team said. Additional coverage of the research can be found in the New York Times and an article from the San Francisco Chronicle reprinted on the Small Times website. brianwang writes "The most recent issue of the Economist (20 December 2001) discusses a view of nanomedicine and recent developments. http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm? story_id=916725 They discuss examples of current work that have mostly already been tracked in nanodot.
They spin nanomedicine as being the ultimate of what we will see from nanotech rather than molecular nanotech with assemblers. They don't see it as being on the road to and part of molecular nanotech. Eric Drexler,as usual, is mentioned, as is "Fantastic Voyage"." from the pay-attention-to-reality dept. Dr. Drexler, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and Foresight Board Chair, spoke during a panel discussion "The War On Terrorism: What Does It Mean for Science?", held on 18 December 2001 in Washington, D.C. An article on the Small Times website ("Drexler warns terror symposium: Nanotech has ëextreme downsidesí ", by Doug Brown, 19 December 2001) provides extensive coverage: For some background, read the Foresight Position Statement on Avoiding High-Tech Terrorism, and an open letter from Dr. Drexler on "Nanotechnology: Six Lessons from Sept. 11". The Small Times article also covers comments by Foresight Executive Director Chuck Piercey on the funding of long-term nanotechnology research, and Gerald Yonas, vice president and principal scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, who described an emerging field he calls ìcognotechnology,î a convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology. With nanotechnology, he said, itís feasible to use brain implants to moderate behavior or brain functioning; he also discussed a developing field that focuses on remote sensing of brain function, including the intention to commit deception [Progress toward such systems was reported here on 13 November 2001.] Richard B. Cathcart writes "The World Development Federation's FIRST Virtual Global Super Projects Conference has many interesting reports posted at its temparary WWW site–available probably through the end of December 2001. GO TO: www.conway.com/wdf/gspc/virtual2001. In Session #3 a molecular nanotechnology-produced super-rope is proposed a a means to block the Strait of Gibraltar with a tensioned-fabric curtain. Such protective submarine screen would be made even more effective if it were held in place with braided nanotubes." from the computational-neuroscience dept. from the World-Watch dept. from the World-Watch dept. |
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