From The Chosun Ilbo we learn of a new collaborative effort on nanotechnology between South Korea and…North Korea: South and North Korean scholars are holding a conference on nanotechnology in the North’s Mt. Kumgang resort. For three days from Monday, participants will exchange results of their research and discuss ways to cooperate in improving education [...]

Last time I checked, and it wasn’t long ago, I couldn’t find a website for the American Academy of Nanomedicine, but now they are up and running, and you can join. In fact, despite the premature use of the past tense on the meeting website, there’s still time to attend their Second Annual Scientific Meeting [...]

Nanostart Investments based in Germany has an interview with Eric Drexler in Issue 3 of their NanoStart! magazine (PDF). One topic addressed is how nations compare and how they can succeed as nanotech goes forward. In Q&A format, here’s an excerpt: Are there any major differences between continents and single countries with regard to progress [...]

John Etkind at allAfrica.com writes about the Continent’s Nano Revolution. Excerpts: According to Bethual Sehlapelo, deputy director-general of the South African department of science and technology’s Frontier Science Programme, “Nano is going to be the next technological revolution”… Although sub-Saharan Africa is a late entrant in this new technological race, an African materials forum held [...]

Many Foresight members join partly in order to make a move toward a nanotech career. It’s not always an easy transition to make. But I just got an email from Lux Research — which bills itself as “the world’s leading nanotechnology research and advisory firm” — looking for Senior Analysts, about which they state: The [...]

Although the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative’s previous definition of nanotechnology was confusing, at least they were trying to make it more relevant than the usual “anything 1-100 nm” nanotech definition used by so many. Sadly, they’ve given up and are now using this: “Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter at dimensions of roughly [...]

Great news in the August 2006 issue of Nano Today in an opinion piece by two UCLA researchers, Guodong Sui and Hsian-Rong Tseng, titled “Reactions in hand: Digitally controlled microreactors are providing chemists with a new playground for discovery.” First, some background. As an MIT undergrad in chemistry, I tried to make reactions work in [...]

Our friends at Nanorex have done it again. You really should click through to see this new nanotech design in action. Click on the design to make it move: This worm drive assembly designed by K. Eric Drexler, Josh Hall, Ninad Sathaye and Mark Sims includes 11 components totalling 25,374 atoms. The animations below have [...]

We don’t usually like to link to subscription sites, but as an editorial advisory board member, I’ll make an exception for Nanotech Briefs (you can download a free sample). The August issue has the usual hard-core technical news: SiGe transistor operates at frequencies above 500 GHz, Method creates hollow nanocrystals, nanopore technique sequences DNA [note: [...]

We’ll end the week on an upbeat note: It’s good to see the American Associate for the Advancement of Science — AAAS, publisher of the journal Science — covering long-term nanotechnology prospects on their EurekAlert website. An updated essay by Eric Drexler looks at “Revolutionizing the Future of Technology“. Excerpts: Why focus on productive nanosystems [...]

For those interested in nanobiology and nanoscale medicine, the site Nanomedicine and Nanobiology Research is worth exploring. The book section includes various books you’ll recognize (and quite a few you may not), there’s a nanomedicine-specific Medline search, and there are rankings for labs, researchers, and even science writers. Most interesting to me are the “Early [...]

Bill Joy, we at Foresight, and others have called for the use of insurance as a tool to help reduce the potential risks of nanotechnology. This assumes that the insurance industry is willing to take on the task. So it’s reassuring to see a new report, “Nanotechnology: The Plastics of the 21st Century?”, by Guy [...]

Nanotech Takes on Homeland Terror is the title of a piece by Josh Wolfe and Dan van den Bergh over at Forbes.com. It describes current and near-term applications for nanotech in detecting biowarfare agents and in protecting soldiers: The DOD believed in nano long before the term was mainstream…Current detection tools using nanotechnology allow high-speed [...]

As has been pointed out repeatedly here, the term nanotechnology is very broadly defined, and the various “nanotechnology indexes” that try to track nanotech stocks have a tough job, to put it mildly. To complicate matters, nanotech watchers distinguish at least four, and maybe five, different generations of nano, from passive materials to highly advanced [...]

High school students in the COSMOS program were treated to an early version of the NanoEngineer-1 modeling software for atomically-precise nanotechnology. Foresight Director of Education Miguel Aznar reported to Nanorex president Mark Sims on the nanotech course results: Success! NanoEngineer-1 greatly enhanced my nanotechnology class. My students were excited to manipulate and simulate the world [...]

The U.S. NSF has a program in Nanoscale Informal Science Education, awarding $20 million over five years to a network of science museums and related institutions. This is the largest single award NSF has ever given to science museums. One of the main three museums getting the award is the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and [...]

Dietram Scheufele writes of an event at the U.K.’s Dana Centre — whose website says “The Dana Centre is sexing up science for the masses” — using a nanotechnology-based card game to get the general public thinking about nanotechnology. Dietram concludes: “Using a card game that defines clear rules for all players and forces them [...]

Attendees at this year’s Lux Executive Summit (pdf) will get to tour Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems. As an alumna of the rival school down the street (MIT), I suggest that while you’re there, you help tweak their website, which has one of the least impressive nano definitions I’ve seen: The term nanoscale refers to [...]

Rocky Rawstern of Nanotechnology Now brings our attention to an article in The Scotsman on the views of Dr. Donald Bruce, head of the Church of Scotland’s Society, Religion and Technology Project. While there is much that we would agree with in Dr. Bruce’s position — for example, a concern about nanotechnology possibly leading to [...]

The International Risk Governance Council held a meeting on nanotechnology in Zurich on July 6-7, 2006, to review and critique their white paper on Nanotechnology Risk Governance (PDF). Normally such events are just about the risks of near-term nanomaterials, but not this one. The IRGC is looking at all sides: both near- and long-term nanotechnology [...]