When we give a nanotechnology prize here at Foresight, we like to track what happens to the winner as his/her career unfolds. We’ve been doing this with Dr. Anita Goel — now President, Scientific Director and CEO of Nanobiosym Labs/ Nanobiosym Diagnostics, Inc. — who won our Distinguish Student Award back in 1999. Most recently [...]

An EU nanotechnology initiative aims to capture power plant emissions using nanotech. From the Nanoglowa website: About one third of the European CO2 emissions is coming from fossil fired power plants. Every year Europe blows more then 1 gigaton CO2 into the atmosphere, contributing to increasing temperatures around the globe. It is possible to store [...]

Can we pick ‘em or what? All of us at Foresight Nanotech are pleased as punch to see that the co-winner of *both* 2006 Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology (Theory and Experiment) has just won a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a genius grant. From the MacArthur website: Paul Rothemund California Institute of Technology Pasadena, [...]

Like me, perhaps you normally prefer more traditional art: oil paintings, perhaps. But new art can have an important societal purpose beyond its aesthetic value, and artist Nina Waisman has taken on a key nanotech issue to raise in her work: the relation between nanotechnology, sensing, and privacy. From SignOnSanDiego: If airport security were run [...]

The Heritage Foundation portrays itself as a conservative think tank, and by gosh, they are! Specifically, they are conservative on the longer term prospects for nanotechnology: In the more distant future, combining nanocomputers, sensors, and nanomechanical architectures into one system would make possible autonomously targeted and guided projectiles, such as bullets and rockets. Nanotechnology could [...]

The company Nanoscience Instruments in its Scanline newsletter (PDF, Vol. 2, Issue. 2) lets us know that one of their nanotechnology products, the Nanosurf atomic force microscope, is on its way to Mars. Excerpts: Onboard the Phoenix lander is a suite of sophisticated scientific instrumentation including a weather station, an optical microscope, and a high-resolution [...]

Alan Shalleck of NanoClarity writes over at Nanotechnology Now on how the U.S. should go about planning its future federal funding of nanotech. Excerpts: It is time to explore what the next three to five year national nanotechnology funding allocation will look like. We have already benefited from two multiple-year, multibillion-dollar Presidentially-endorsed Federal programs and [...]

Forbes.com did a poll to find out what human body enhancements their readers would most like. The poll seems to be gone, but nanotechnology commentator Gregor Wolbring quotes it in his own column: Smarter brain (403 votes – 29 %) Wings (230 votes – 17 %) Breathe underwater (147 votes – 11 %) Stylish, furry [...]

For your nanotech weekend viewing enjoyment, we bring to your attention a free webcast posted by Institute of Nanotechnology (UK) of a lecture by Sir Fraser Stoddart entitled Chemistry and Molecular Nanotechnology for Tomorrow’s World. The IoN webcast system gives you video, audio, and his slides all together at one time. It worked pretty well [...]

In case you are not on Foresight’s nanotechnology email list, be aware that Monday is the last day to save a great deal of money — $300 — on the 14th Foresight Conference on advanced nanotech: the Productive Nanosystems Conference, held jointly with SME this year. By registering on or before this Monday, Sept. 17, [...]

Our friends over at Nanowerk have put together a light-hearted little nanotechnology IQ test which nanotech trackers might enjoy. Some questions are fun: Question 12: Which of these well-known phrases from Star Trek depends on the (fictional) use of nanotechnology? Some not so much: Question 19: A silver coin with a diameter of 4 cm [...]

Caltech nanotechnology researchers have come up with a new way to fuel synthetic molecular motors for nanotech, as described by Physorg.com: “This study provides a proof of principle that DNA hybridization can be used to power autonomous molecular locomotion,” said Pierce. “Researchers at the NSF Center for Molecular Cybernetics, of which our team is a [...]

Babak Parviz of University of Washington, named by Technology Review as one of this year’s outstanding innovators under the age of 35, writes in the Sept/Oct issue (free reg req’d) about self-assembly: In nature, components “self-assemble” to yield complex functional systems. Inspired in part by this observation, a number of research groups are working to [...]

For those of you with an interest in the longer-term, more visionary projections for nanotech and the human body, Gina Miller brings to our attention a new collaboration between herself and Robert Freitas, a 2007 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology finalist. From Gina, Foresight Senior Associate (you can be one too): Some of you may recall [...]

Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology Finalists Announced Top Nanotechnology Researchers to be Honored at Productive Nanosystems Conference, October 9-10 Palo Alto, CA — September 5, 2007 – Foresight Nanotech Institute, a leading think tank and public interest organization focused on nanotechnology, announced the finalists for the 2007 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes. These prestigious prizes, named in [...]

Researcher Alexander Wissner-Gross let us know of his and advisor Efthimios Kaxiras’s work at Harvard on modeling how to enable stable, very thin ice layers at body temperature. They modeled ice sitting on a layer of sodium attached to diamond, and sure enough, it’s doesn’t melt. It’s speculated that such an ice layer might make [...]