Foresight Feynman Prize winner Robert Freitas brings to our attention the first published theoretical study of DMS (diamond mechanosynthesis) tool-workpiece operating envelopes and optimal tooltip trajectories for a complete positionally controlled reaction sequence, which he did with colleagues in Russia. He writes, “This paper represents the first extensive DMS tooltip trajectory analysis, examining a wide [...]

Bill McDonald brings to our attention the U.S. Congressional campaign of Mike Stopa, a Harvard nanotechnologist and physicist. This is probably the first time that a nanotechnologist has run for Congress. However, his profession may not get much attention, as his campaign is focusing on other issues. It will be interesting to see whether, as [...]

Kevin Bullis reports in Technology Review: Now Paul Rothemund, a computer scientist at Caltech, with a background in biology, has developed a relatively inexpensive way to quickly design and build arbitrary shapes and patterns using DNA — and, he says, it’s simple enough for high-school students to use… It’s really spectacular work. I’m extremely excited about [...]

John Faith brings to our attention a writeup by Annalee Newitz over at io9.com which colorfully describes a new achievement by Foresight Feynman prizewinner Nadrian Seeman and team at NYU and Nanjing U.: Today in Nature, a group of researchers announced they’d successfully operated the first assembly line populated entirely by nanobots. The bots in question [...]

For many of us, it’s our desire to preserve and restore the environment that brought us into the work of pursuing molecular nanotechnology in the first place.  How do we keep going over the decades that this goal is taking to accomplish? One way is to restore our enthusiasm for the goal through films such [...]

The Mark, “Canada’s daily online forum for news, commentary, and debate,” has published a commentary that primarily takes a negative view of the use of nanotech (or any tech) for life extension: Extreme life extension raises other interesting, yet troubling questions. Significant life extension could have serious implications for individual identity; what if we change [...]

I’ll be speaking at the following event. If you miss the early registration rate, you can get 20% off regular registration with the discount code ‘Foresight’: Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0 July 29-31 International House Berkeley http://opensciencesummit.com Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for [...]

Here we present a special report from Dave Conz of ASU on Josh Hall’s talk and subsequent panel discussion at the SME nanotech conference.  An excerpt: Technoscientific development is difficult to direct and nearly impossible to predict.  Because of this – not in spite of it – panel discussions like “How Do We Get There [...]