Gina Miller writes "The Learning Channel will be airing a new show entitled "Science At The Edge", a new documentary series of emerging technologies. The first episode, "Beating The Odds" will be about groundbreaking medical procedures and will feature comments by Robert A Freitas Jr., author of Nanomedicine and Research Scientist at Zyvex Corporation, as well as those of Zyvex nanotech theorist Ralph Merkle, and a 1-minute microbivore animation. This first episode airs July 1, 2002 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT and repeats July 2, 2002 at 1:00 a.m. ET/PT."

Gina Miller writes "An article on the Physics News Update website Nanospintronics: A Single-Spin Transistor reports on the Institute for Microstructural Sciences that is responsible for the first prototype. "The spins of the electrons in the transistor are not random but depend on the number of electrons in the electron puddle, and on the applied magnetic field. Most importantly, by connecting the dot to spin-polarized reservoirs, one can insist that the electrons flowing in or out have their spins aligned up or down, and this criterion (is the electron's spin up or down?) can be used as a gate to allow a high or low current to flow through the dot." This new spin polarized phase technique could be used in quantum computing."

Gina Miller writes "Scientific American.com has an article Nanotech Tubes Could Form Basis of New Drug-Purification Techniques that reports a way to purify drug molecules away from their inactive mirror image molecules. The scientist's created antibodies that recognize only the proper mirror image and place the antibodies in silicon nanotubes inside a membrane. As a result the drug molecules flow across the membrane five times faster than the undesired mirror image."

An article on the ABC News.com website ("Nanotech: Will Small Stuff Become Big Business?", by Peter Dizikes, 26 June 2002) touts the potential of small-scale technologies, but then goes on to explain that investors are having a hard time figuring out how to make prudent investments in the broad array of research and development activity thatís lumped under ìnanotechnologyî ñ as well as developing realistic timeframes for a return:

Intriguing as it sounds, nanotechnology presents a conundrum to venture capital firms and other private-sector investors, for a couple of reasons. For starters, backing the right company, hard by any standards, is extremely tough in the nano field where companies are pursing a bewildering array of concepts.
The article also notes:
[E]ven boosters of the field acknowledge, many of the best-known and potentially useful nanotechnology applications ó ultra-fast computer chips, drugs targeted at cancerous cells ó may be a decade or more away from becoming commercial products. That means the hit-and-run style of investing favored by so many U.S. venture capital firms simply isn't suited to nanotechnology.
"A venture fund looking for an exit strategy in three to four years isn't going to get it from this area," says [Mark Modzelewski, head of the NanoBusiness Alliance]. Indeed, he thinks venture firms that tried to get rich quickly during the Internet boom are being too skeptical now. "Most of the biggest naysayers are the people who were shoveling their money into dogfood.com," says Modzelewski. "But it's going to be so much bigger than the Internet revolution."

Gina Miller also notes"The article describes the growth of nanotechnology firms, what nanotechnology is and how these developments could be applied to our daily lives. The article goes on to discuss venture funding "To this end, venture capital firms aiming to be the biggest players in the industry ó like Lux Capital of New York and Draper Fisher Jurvetson of Redwood City, Calif. ó have hired on specialized staff to evaluate the prospects of budding nanotechnology firms.""

Gina Miller writes "An article from EE Times June 25, 2002, says that Rolltronics Corp. announced on Monday they will be developing NanoMem devices. This thin film memory technology is estimated to be five times cheaper than flash memory and store 10 to 100 times more data. NanoMems is based on self assembly and is aimed to be on the market in 2004 in the form of display components like OLEDs and electronic paper."

An article from United Press International ("Nanotech will spur space medicine advances", by Scott R. Burnell, 25 June 2002) reports that

New developments in nanotechnology, the science of manipulating matter at the atomic scale, will find their way into devices and technologies important to the space program, particularly in medicine, speakers said Tuesday at NanoSpace 2002, a conference convened to examine common ground between the two areas of research.
As humanity moves beyond the Information Age, nanotechnology's ability to interact with the basic structures of life will spawn the "Biological Age," said Kenneth Cox, a researcher at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Johnson Space Center.
"It is extremely important to understand not just the downsides, but the benefits of diversity in science, diversity in terms of education and commerce," Cox told conference attendees. "We need to change the ways we innovate and adapt (with nanotech)."

A related story covers another presentation from the conference on the use of immunoassays based on spheres of silicon, only a few nanometers across, coated with gold atoms that could speed up blood tests for trace amounts of substances, as well as longer-term research examining how doctors might use nanoscale chemistry to guide the body's mechanisms for repairing tissue.

An extensive article on the Small Times website ("U.S. Army plans new center to develop military nanotech", by Doug Brown, 25 June 2002) reports that "The United States Army is reaching out to academia and industry to build a technology research campus that will simultaneously help armaments developers exploit nanotechnology and shepherd to the marketplace nanotechnology applications and products. . . . The partnerships have not been established yet. The Army is soliciting proposals for research from universities and businesses."

According to the article, "The U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) at New Jerseyís Picatinny Arsenal near New York City is committed to nanotechnology, said Mark Mezger, nanotechnologies program coordinator at the arsenal. The hope, he said, is that the Armyís investment in nanotechnology combined with industry and academic research will lead to a ìNano Valleyî in northern New Jersey."

from the World-Watch dept.
An brief item item on the eTaiwanNews.com website ("Nanotechnology program aims to make NT$300b", 24 June 2002) says the Taiwan government "will pump NT$23.1 billion (US$679.41 million) into nanotechnology research in the next six years in hopes of creating a NT$300 billion (US$8.82 billion) industry by 2008, the National Science Council said [on 23 June]. Under a National Nanotechnology Initiative, mapped out by the NSC, the government will help more than 800 companies probe the new frontiers of an emerging high-tech industry."

The report also notes: A prominent NNI feature is a national nanotechnology center, which will be one of the world's best institutes of research in that high-tech field. Commercialization of the new technology is expected to begin in 2004, the NSC spokesman said. "In that year," he added, "Taiwan hopes to generate at least NT$70 billion (US$2.05 billion) in sales of nanotechnology products."

Gina Miller writes "Business 2.0 June 2002 issue has a feature called "Untangling the Future". The author, Paul Saffo, discusses the difficulty with predicting future technologies due to his observation of non linear progress. He conjectures that advances are "spawned" and "cross pollinated" by others, with this in mind he has created a pdf map of future technologies with new disciplines — for example, Molecular manufacturing or Cognitronics. Also included, a timeline pdf of these future disciplines and another Business 2.0 article that can be linked to at the bottom of the page called 8 Technologies That Will Change the World."

Gina Miller writes "A story on thePhysical Review web site focuses on research reported in the 8 July print issue of PRL that uses statistical physics techniques to find the optimum technique for building functional devices from nanoscale components that are known to contain a percentage of defective parts. The answer they found "is that no matter how many defective parts you have, it's best to take about half of them" to build your device."

Mr_Farlops writes "Researchers in Finland and the United States have developed a method that may soon cheaply refine highly pure drugs. Using a membrane composed of tailored antibodies bound to the interiors of silca nanotubes, they discovered a way to separate wanted drug molecules from unwanted enantiomers (molecules with the same chemical composition but mirror-imaged structure.) and side products. The process might become commonly used in 5 to 10 years."

Gina Miller writes "A Nanotech Planet.com feature showcased Nanolayers — an Isreali company formed in 2001 to commercialize organic semiconducting materials developed at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The technology involves layering films of molecules on chips, producing organic semiconductors with electron mobility more than 30 times faster than previous methods. Initial applications may include flat-panel displays and semiconductor ICs."

The report containing the review of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) by the National Academies' National Research Council, is now available online. You can view the report, "Small Wonders, Endless Frontiers: A Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative", on an annoying page-by-page basis on the National Academies Press website, or order the print version.

Additonal information about the NRC review in the Nanodot post from 11 June 2002.

Gina Miller writes "The Chicago Sun-Times has an article ("Baxter, NU to team on nanoscience", June 19, 2002). Deerfield-based Baxter International a health care company has made an agreement to donate up to $2.25 million for nanoscience research at Northwestern University. The $450,000 a year over the next five years will allow Baxter right of first refusal over Northwestern's Institute for Bioengineering and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine's research in this area. Potential applications are new cancer medical delivery systems not yet practiced."

Tanya writes "Eric Drexler has submitted the following critique:

Wolfram's argument that the properties of certain automata "must almost inevitably succeed in reproducing the fundamental features of relativity theory" (A New Kind of Science, p.520) appears to be misconceived. This may explain why he offers no examples of automata in which particle-like features move, as physical particles do, at a range of relative speeds.

He describes a broad class of automata (yielding "causal invariant" networks) that are insensitive to update order. In these, one can generate an invariant structure by adding nodes in any of many orders — for example, adding parallel layers at one or another angle. Differently angled slices of this sort look a bit like spacelike surfaces in moving frames of reference. Wolfram states (and makes central to his argument) that "one can interpret slices at different angles as corresponding to motion at different speeds" (p.521).

One must ask, however, motion of what? Since these networks are insensitive to update order, differing update patterns can make no difference to structures within a network, hence tell us nothing about the relative motion of any particle-like features it may contain. Angled update slices do not necessarily correspond to motion of anything within the model world.

If causal invariant networks naturally modeled motion, then one would expect Wolfram's book to include pictures showing streaks corresponding to variable-speed particles, but it does not. Offered neither a coherent argument nor a concrete example, we are left with a model of physics that lacks a model of relative motion."

Gina Miller writes "June 18, 2002 Business Week Online carries a special report, Nanotech: Big Dreams, Small Steps. The author, Alex Salkever, paints a picture of nanotechnology making slow progress in the market and that the previously predicted forecast of today, has yet to arrive. Several opinions are voiced on the applications that should arrive in the next five years, such as diagnostic technologies and materials to aid in enabling gene chips. The article goes on to discuss even further timeline applications, such as nanoscale electronics and nanoscale drug delivery systems.

Other stories from Business Week:

• Business Week takes a positive look at nanotech
• Business Week profiles tech "gurus"
• Business Week: "It's a Nano World""

Gina Miller writes "Chemists at Washington University's Buhro group in St. Louis have created what is hailed as boron nanowhiskers. These are the first of these type of crystalline nanowires, using chemical vapor deposition, at a scale of 20 to 200 nanometers. Carbon has been thus far mainly used, but has been limited as a conductor. The new boron produced particles are more consistant and can be doped to increase conductivity, although the results are more varied in size and structure. The researchers have a glint in their eye for creating boron nanotubes, but have yet to figure that out. The application could be another alternative for the potential of nanoscale electronic wires."

Two articles on the Small Times website describe presentations at the Nanotech Planet conference held in Munich, Germany on 17 & 18 June 2002.

• "Europe longs to play catch-up in nanotech commercialization", by Kyle James, 19 June 2002:
  The 50-odd scientists, engineers and venture capitalists at this European Nanotech Planet Conference gathered here to talk business and look at ways Europe might bridge the "disconnect," as some were calling it, between the research lab and the board room.
  The conference verdict was that Europe is very strong on the scientific side, but when it comes to getting its new findings to the market, Europe needs to play catch-up.
  "If you look at the number of articles in academic journals, Europe is on a par with the U.S.," said Meyya Meyyappan, director of NASA's Center for Nanotechnology at the Ames Research Center. But when it comes to the number of companies and new opportunities, he continued, Europe is bringing up the rear.
• "Gun-shy European VC firms want revenue plans, not hype", by Kyle James, 20 June 2002:
  "People don't buy technology, they buy products. So concentrate on the products." That was the gospel preached at Nanotech Planet in Munich, a two-day conference devoted to nanotechnology business in Europe. The engineers and venture capitalists hammering that message home seemed intent on converting scientists into businesspeople ñ or at least instilling in them the fact that any nanobusiness has to focus on the business part of the equation as much as on the science.

Gina Miller writes "IBM reported using MEMS/NEMS technology to achieve a data storage density of a trillion bits per square inch. The research project, code-named "Millipede," uses an array of 1024 (32 x 32) silicon cantilever AFM tips in a 3-mm square to make indentations 10 nm in diameter in a thin polymer film. Bits are written by heating the cantilever to 400 C, which softens the polymer film, and read at 300 C, where the polymer is not soft. Data is erased by using the tip to surround the data pit with a series of overlapping pits that fill in the old pit. The authors achieved more than 100,000 write/overwrite cycles to demonstrate this capability. They are currently using electronics that achieve kilobit-per-second data rates with individual tips, but expect to do much better with better electronics. A technical report on the Millipede project published in the June 2002 inaugural issue of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology can be downloaded from the IBM page. Soooo, the big question for nanodot readers, could this AFM array be useful for molecular manufacturing?"

Gina Miller writes "The EE Times reports that a research team in Denmark and France used a large, table-shaped organic molecule (C₉₀H₉₈) as a template to induce a copper surface to form a wire of copper atoms. At room temperature the organic molecules will bind to the edges of one atom-thick terraces on the copper surface. At lower temperatures, where the copper atoms stay put, an STM tip can be used to nudge the organic molecule away from the edge. Since the copper atoms had lined up under the table molecule at higher temperatures, there is now a small segment of a wire on the surface: one copper atom thick, two copper atoms wide, and 8 copper atoms long. Could these molecular templates be used to make wires to link components on a copper surface together into circuits? The research was originally published in the April 12, 2002 issue of Science."