Christine Peterson passes along this item from a recent (September 25, 2008) NanoBusiness Alliance Newsletter: Insurer Excludes Nanotechnology from Policies Beginning November 15, the Continental Western Insurance Group will no longer insure against bodily injury, property damage, or personal and advertising injury related to the actual, alleged, or threatened presence of or exposure to nanotubes [...]

An announcement of an open position from the Cornell Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility: Successful candidates will have a Ph.D. in communication, science and technology studies, or closely aligned social scientific field. Research experience and knowledge of social and ethical issues of science, preferably nanotechnology, is preferred. For the complete announcement:

A nanotech method using quantum dots provides greatly increased sensitivity in the detection of methylated DNA, and may therefore aid in cancer diagnosis and in monitoring the effect of cancer therapies.

The Convergence08 conference (www.convergence08.org) on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 2008 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event will use an innovative “unconference” format to enable participants to customize the event in a highly interactive way. Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster with over two [...]

Chemically modified graphene has found in manganese oxide nanoflower/carbon nanotube array a rival nanotech material to improve energy storage using ultracapacitors.

Can Open source methodology, with its promise of spreading benefits through new varieties of intellectual property, and which has played a major role in software development, also play a role in nanotech development? At least one MIT researcher, Stephen Steiner, thinks so. He is working on a web site for “open source nanotech”. Among other [...]

A new nanotechnology journal titled Nano Research published by Tsinghua/Springer is now available at http://www.thenanoresearch.com/. The journal is published monthly, and will be open-access in 2008 and 2009. The Editors-in-Chief are Hongjie Dai, Stanford University, USA, and Qikun Xue, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. A glance at the Editorial Board reveals many researchers frequently cited in [...]

The Society of Manufacturing Engineers is offering a free webinar on “Today’s Pioneering Nanotechnology Companies: The Race for a Trillion Dollar Market“, presented by Foresight Senior Associate Tihamer “Tee” Toth-Fejel. Today’s Pioneering Nanotechnology Companies: The Race for a Trillion Dollar Market A popular feature of SME’s annual NanoManufacturing Conference, now brought to you as a [...]

Planning to attend the National Nano Engineering Conference 2008, America’s premier nano engineering conference, November 12-13, 2008, at The Colonnade Hotel, Boston, MA? Nanodot readers can save $100 using discount code: VIP (Discount not applicable to one-day passes) when registering at http://nasatech.com/nano/register.html. The National Nano Engineering Conference 2008 (NNEC) is the premier event focused on [...]

On the Editor’s Page at Medical DeviceLinkCom, Shana Leonard writes about the crucial need for design and modeling techniques to guide nanosystems development toward fabrication, and cites the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. From “A Different Kind of Intelligent Design” Drawing from numerous workshops held from 2005 to 2007, Battelle (Columbus, OH) and the Foresight [...]

Dynamic Transmission Electron Microscope (DTEM) combines nanometer scale spatial resolution with 15 nanosecond temporal resolution.

Chemically modified graphene (CMG) may lead to ultracapacitors that can store about twice as much electrical charge as is possible with current commercially available materials.

Researchers have developed a nanoparticle that is stable enough inside an animal to deliver molecules to image a tumor in multiple ways and to deliver drugs to kill the tumor.

An increasingly serious research effort is being mounted to ensure the safe development and commercialization of nanotechnology (see, for example, this news from a couple weeks ago). The recent formation of an international alliance to establish the methods used to test the safety of nanotech materials is not only encouraging for the development of nanotechnology [...]

A new method called amplitude spectroscopy may facilitate a nanotech pathway to quantum computing by making it easier to characterize the energy levels of artificial atoms.

A very powerful electron microscope capable of resolving single gold atoms has revealed why some gold nanoparticles work and some don’t.

Nanoparticles that simultaneously deliver water-soluble and water-insoluble drugs might offer an advantage in killing cancer cells that develop resistance to one drug.

Foresight Nanotech Institute is partnering with the Singularity Institute and other organizations for The Singularity Summit 2008, to be held October 25, Montgomery Theater, San Jose, CA. The speakers include names that will be familiar to most Nanodot readers. A separate Emerging Tech Workshop may also interest many Nanodot readers. A few excerpts from The [...]

Nanotech contributions to the development of medical science now include devices that can decipher the chemical communications among individual cells. A new microfluidic device called a multi-trap nanophysiometer promises to be particularly useful in elucidating the communications among individual cells of the immune system, and perhaps eventually revealing what goes wrong during the immune system’s [...]

News from RIA Novosti of a promising nanotech partnership between Russia and Israel