Those of you looking for insights on atomically-precise manufacturing may want to check out the Society of Manufacturing Engineers conference August 23-24, 2006 in Oak Ridge, TN: The Next Industrial Revolution: Nanotechnology & Manufacturing. In addition to plenty of coverage on near-term “top-down” nanomanufacturing, this meeting includes “bottom-up” assembly topics. Some speakers familiar to Foresight [...]

The U.S. National Science Foundation funded a report on nanomanufacturing, carried out by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. Though an email announcement to participants stated that the full report is available free for download, all I can find is the 12-page abstract (PDF). [UPDATE: here's the 75-page 1.9 MB pdf full report.] Two excerpts: [...]

Of course most Nanodot readers will want to study this 76-page report (PDF) in great detail, but for the few who don’t quite get around to this task, here are some of the more ambitious parts: In the section on 2006 and 2007 Activities by Agency, NIST says they will continue to “devise ways to [...]

In an essay on KurzweilAI.net reprinted from New Scientist, Bill Joy — whose Wired essay titled Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us touched off a big controversy — suggests insurance as a mechanism to reduce risk from powerful technologies including nanotech: We could use the very strong force of markets. Rather than regulate things, we [...]

The highly prolific Robert Freitas and colleagues have gathered their work on diamond mechanosynthesis onto one website titled the Nanofactory Collaboration. Enjoy! Includes an introduction to the topic, participant list, publications list, and a description of the technical challenges. Most impressive to me is the publications list. How does he do it? Does he not [...]

Edward Iwata of USA Today reports that Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia has ambitious plans for India: The most ambitious project may be “Nano City,” a $10 billion, environmentally sustainable development unveiled in April by entrepreneur Bhatia and the Haryana state government in northern India. Modeled after Silicon Valley, Nano City will feature R&D and educational [...]

UNESCO’s Division of Ethics of Science and Technology has taken a shot at writing about The Ethics and Politics of Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology Now has a brief critique. David Berube has a longer one. To do a thorough critique here of these kinds of documents would take too long—I’d be blogging all day, every day. Instead [...]

John Faith brings our attention to an item at PhysicsWeb on how to overcome friction in nanosized mechanical devices: Friction is a big problem in nanosized devices because they have huge surface-to-volume ratios, which means that their surfaces quickly wear out and seize up. Traditional lubricants are useless in such machines because they become thick [...]

Nanotech Briefs has announced its annual Nano 50 Awards: the top 50 products, technologies, and innovators. (Disclosure: I was on the judging committee — but only one of many judges, so if you disagree with the list, it’s not my fault!). One concern you may have, with which I would have to agree, is that [...]

John Brandon at PC Magazine does a close-up on the NanoRobotics Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon: Tiny robots will someday crawl up your spine—literally. These microscopic critters, currently in a development phase at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, are biomimetic (that is, based on biological principles), have bacteria motors attached to their near-invisible bodies, and can [...]

The term “bottom-up” was originally used to refer to molecule-by-molecule assembly of atomically-precise products. But more recently we’ve seen the term used to describe processes that produce products which are not atomically precise. The following Azonano item is an example of this usage. However, it seems likely that this kind of research — which does [...]

The July/August 2006 issue of Small Times is now available (also as a 6 MB pdf), and includes statistics on nanotech venture capital in the various states of the U.S. The top ten (on page 38): 1. California 100.0 2. Massachusetts 29.1 3. Texas 8.1 4. Missouri 7.5 5. Michigan 6.6 6. North Carolina 6.4 [...]

A new service from Google, named Google Trends, graphs the number and source of searches on whatever term you wish. The results for nanotechnology: Top ten countries 1. India 2. Iran 3. Singapore 4. Malaysia 5. South Korea 6. Thailand 7. United States 8. Australia 9. Canada 10. Taiwan Top ten cities 1. Hyderabad, India [...]

From Azonano.com, news from Canada: Forget the phrase, “sharp as a tack.” Now, thanks to new University of Alberta research the popular expression might become, “sharp as a single atom tip formed by chemically assisted spatially controlled field evaporation.” Maybe it doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily, but considering the researchers have created the [...]

Foresight and other nanotech NGOs and companies have requested the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, to allocate US$1 million for an EHS (environmental, health and safety) roadmap, to be prepared by the National Academy of Sciences. Organizations and companies participating in the call were: Air Products & Chemicals, Inc., Altair [...]

A message from Cate Alexander, Communications Director of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, about the May 2006 workshop on public participation which included Foresight: We have posted materials from the Public Participation in Nanotechnology workshop at http://www.nano.gov/html/society/home_society.html A few presentations are being converted from Mac to PC format and will be added to the [...]

Here at Foresight we’ve been doing “public participation” in nanotechnology since long before any national nanotech initiatives were started. So of course we are strongly in favor of nanoliteracy. The more the public understands nanotechnologies and the nanosciences on which they are based, the better, both for the economy and public policy. So it may [...]

Alexander Grigorovich-Barsky has designed a large nanotechnology poster (1.2 MB pdf) which attempts to give an overview of the whole topic, from history to today’s work to tomorrow’s atomically-precise manufacturing. An ambitious goal, but he has prudently asked for your help. I already gave him some feedback and, amazingly, the poster has now been re-designed [...]

In a release titled First nanotechnology journal from a major publisher to offer open access, Springer announced its new journal “Nanoscale Research Letters (NRL), which will be the first nanotechnology journal from a major commercial publisher to publish articles with open access. The new journal provides an interdisciplinary forum for the open communication of scientific [...]

It had to happen: Royal BodyCare Inc., just renamed RBC Life Sciences Inc., has now enabled all of us to go into the business of selling nanotech directly to the public: About the company: “We are the first company in network marketing to incorporate Nanotechnology into our product line.” About NanoCeuticals™: “RBC Life Sciences®, utilizing [...]