You may recall this nanotech debate held at University of Nottingham. Organizer Philip Moriarty reports that “The debate video footage is currently being put together by the team from Sheffield who filmed the event. As soon as the video stream is available, I’ll let you know. Moreover, the debate will be transcribed for a journal [...]

Foresight Participating Member Mark Sims of Nanorex brings our attention to this NSF solicitation on Active Nanostuctures and Nanosystems, with proposals due November 29, so get going on this now (emphasis added): “Examples of active nanostructures are nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), nanomachines, self-healing materials, nanobiodevices, transistors, amplifiers, targeted drugs and chemicals, actuators, molecular machines, light-driven molecular [...]

From Medical News Today, a report on work by Foresight Feynman Prize winner Charles Lieber of Harvard: “Harvard University researchers have found that molecular markers indicating the presence of cancer in the body are readily detected in blood scanned by special arrays of silicon nanowires — even when these cancer markers constitute only one hundred-billionth [...]

The leading small tech industry publication Smalltimes interviews Foresight president Scott Mize on new directions at our organization. An excerpt: “The other thing that I think is a significant cornerstone of our new direction is the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. This is our effort to connect the dots between the near term and longer [...]

[Welcome Instapundit readers -- subscribe at "Free Registration" in the right-hand column to get nanotech email news deliveries. --CP] From Mark Sims of Nanorex we heard about these seven nanomachine simulations, all on one web page and operating successfully despite the jiggling of thermal noise. The eighth graphic is a cutaway showing the internals of [...]

As reported on the Investment & Pensions Europe website, Innovest has launched a new Nanotechnology Index that addresses risk and risk perception: “The index is designed to identify companies that are contributing to a better understanding of the risks, but committed to delivering benefits from nanotechnology in medicine, clean water and energy, says Innovest… “Innovest [...]

Thanks to the Nanotechnology Foundation of Texas, you can enjoy 12 nanotech research lectures from the comfort of your personal computer (unless you use the Safari browser, but never mind). These were recorded at their July conference at the Texas Medical Center. See the abstracts and agenda, and then check out the list of presentations [...]

In only six years, Harvard/MIT’s Anita Goel has gone from winning the 1999 Foresight Institute Distinguished Student Award for her work in nanotech, to founding Nanobiosym and being named one of world’s top 35 Young Scientific Innovators by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine. Can we pick ‘em or what? Come to this year’s Feynman Prize Banquet [...]

The fast ramp-up of work in nanobio has led to the formation of another journal: the new Journal of Nanobiotechnology: “Potential topics include molecular bioprobes, nanoparticles and nanobiosystems, nanobiomaterials, biomolecular assemblies and supra-biomolecules, nanobiosensors and nanobiochips, BioNEMS and nano-biofluidics, nanobiophotonics, single-molecule detection and manipulation and molecular motors.” Says Editor-in-Chief Tuan Vo-Dinh of Oak Ridge National [...]

From JoongAng Daily in Korea: “In the next five to 10 years, mobile phone users will be able to detect changes in the facial expressions and even in the smell of the person they are talking to, according to Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, the research arm of the U.S. firm Lucent Technololgies. “As [...]

Richard Jones asks: “Why does the molecular manufacturing community seem to have many fewer members in the UK than it does in the USA? I don’t think it’s fair to say that the dramatic vision of molecular manufacturing is pursued in a contextual vacuum – I think there is quite a well-developed world view that [...]

Tired of garbled news articles on nanoparticle safety? I certainly am. Now, the International Council on Nanotechnology (which I serve as an Advisor) has published the first public database of peer-reviewed journal articles examining environmental, health, and safety issues arising from both engineered and incidental nanoparticles (press release in PDF). You can help improve it [...]

See the report by Ottilia Saxl, founder and CEO of the Institute of Nanotechnology, UK, for the European Commission Expert Group on Key Technologies for Europe. Titled Nanotechnology – a Key Technology for the Future of Europe (PDF), it includes on pages 26-28 a scenario of the role of nanotech in 2025. The technology will [...]

On Athenaweb (free registration req’d), a new site brought to you by the European Commission, is a five-minute video called The Principle of Nanotechnology with enjoyable nano graphics, worth viewing. That the audio is in German is not a problem, since those of us who are language-challenged can simply enjoy the video portion. If you’re [...]

From the ever-diligent Charles Q. Choi, on work by physicist Shubhra Gangopadhyay at the University of Missouri at Columbia: “The researchers [have] coated devices made of glass with a mixture of nanoparticle fuel such as aluminum and oxidizer such as iron oxide. The nanoparticle quality of the fuel and oxidizer provides far greater surface area [...]

From PhysicsWeb: “Physicists in Germany have created a material that is harder than diamond. Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues at the University of Bayreuth made the new material by subjecting carbon-60 molecules to immense pressures. The new form of carbon, which is known as aggregated diamond nanorods, is expected to have many industrial applications (App. Phys. [...]

Chemist Derek Lowe describes some amazing-sounding work at Caltech: “They’re taking electron microscope snapshots, one trillionth of a second at a time. And what is this technique good for? Well, electron microscopy has long been used for imaging all sorts of materials and biological samples. Fast freezing of the samples has revealed an extraordinary amount [...]

To tell what’s really going on, read the abstract, but here’s the BBC version: Professor David Leigh, of the University of Edinburgh, said the demonstration was one of the first examples to show molecular machines integrating successfully with the macroscopic world… The tiny machines that coat the surface are essentially rod-like structures with rings that, [...]

Jenny Hogan blogs for Nature.com: “The historic city of Edinburgh in Scotland is this week hosting hundreds of scientists and politicians discussing “Nanotechnology and the Health of the EU Citizen in 2020” [pdf] at the aptly named EuroNanoForum 2005 meeting… “[Using iron oxide nanoparticles to treat cancer], we are told, is the first anti-cancer therapy [...]

In the popular blog Instapundit, Foresight director Glenn Reynolds interviews Foresight advisor Ray Kurzweil on the topic of his new book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Some excerpts: “Achieving the hardware requirement was controversial when my last book on this topic, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out in 1999, but is [...]