Nanotechnology

"Nanotechnology comprises technological developments on the nanometer scale, usually 0.1 to 100 nm. (One nanometer equals one thousandth of a micrometre or one millionth of a millimeter.)" (Source: Wikipedia)

Visit the links below for some exciting developments in the field of Nanotechnology.

  1. The Foresight Institute :: "Foresight is the leading think tank and public interest institute on nanotechnology. Founded in 1986, Foresight was the first organization to educate society about the benefits and risks of nanotechnology. At that time, nanotechnology was a little-known concept."
  2. Nanotechnology Now :: "NN was created to serve the information needs of business, government, academic, and public communities. And with the intention of becoming the most informative and current free collection of "nano" reference material. We will cover: related future sciences, issues, news, events, and general information, and make this a place to come for information, stimulating debate, and research info."
  3. Nano Science & Technology Institute :: The Nano Science and Technology Institute (NSTI) was created in 1997 and chartered with the promotion and integration of small technologies through education, technology and business development.
  4. Nanoforum :: The European Nanotechnology Gateway. "Nanoforum is a pan-European nanotechnology network funded by the European Union under the Fifth Framework Programme (FP5) to provide information on European nanotechnology efforts and support to the European nanotechnology community."
  5. Yahoo Groups Nanotechnology :: "This mailing list revolves around the emerging science of nanotechnology. Discussions include application, futurism, idea exchange, design, social implications, economic issues, policy and legislation and other relevent group sub-topics. Questions of impact and strategic implications are encouraged as well as exchanges of information."

the Foresight Institute
examining transformative technology

Nanotech and climate change
Eric Drexler is apparently at the Renaissance Weekend with the intent to speak to the assembled interesting people about how “advanced nanotechnology can address the climate change problem providing low-cost solar energy and by removing accumluated CO2 from the atmosphere.”  In the same spirit, for the rest of us, here’s how I think we should [...]
Medical nanorobot control
Robert A. Freitas Jr., author of the Nanomedicine series of books, has just published a major new theory paper on aspects of medical nanorobot control, providing an early glimpse of future discussions of this topic that are planned to appear in Chapter 12 (Nanorobot Control) of Nanomedicine, Vol. IIB: Systems and Operations, the third volume [...]
Robo-ethics paper and Open-Texture Risk
There’s a paper on roboethics by Yueh-Hsuan Weng of Taiwan’s Conscription Agency in the International Journal of Social Robotics that has gotten a write-up on Physorg (h/t to Accelerating Future). Here’s the abstract: Technocrats from many developed countries, especially Japan and South Korea, are preparing for the human-robot co-existence society that they believe will emerge by 2030. [...]
Super-dense magnetic memory
There’s a post on Technology Review’s blog about a paper on arXiv about a theoretical result in magnetic memories. Current-day magnetic memory is already “nanotechnology” under the loose definition, involving 5-nanometer particles of cobalt (having about 50,000 atoms). The authors have shown that a single molecule consisting of a cobalt dimer sitting on top of [...]
Feynman Prize nominations: last chance
The nominations for Foresight’s 2009 Feynman Prize will be closing soon, so if you know someone who has done outstanding work to advance the goal of molecular nanotechnology, please visit the Instructions Page to nominate them. Research areas considered relevant to MNT (e.g., productive nanosystems and molecular machine systems) include but are not limited to: artificial molecular [...]
Moore?s Law and Robotics
One thing I was at some pains during my recent visit to Willow Garage was the likely impact of Moore’s Law on the course of robotics development in the next few years. This is of great interest to a futurist because if computation is a bottleneck, it will be loosened in a well-understood way [...]
Moral Railroads
Over at the Moral Machines blog, there’s a pointer to an AP story about the recent DC train crash: Investigators looking into the deadly crash of two Metro transit trains focused Tuesday on why a computerized system failed to halt an oncoming train, and why the train failed to stop even though the emergency brake was [...]
Willow Garage Robotics
After hearing an excellent talk by Willow Garage president Steven Cousins at PARC last Thursday, I wangled a visit to the company Monday and talked to a few more people. Willow Garage is a research robotics company in Silicon Valley which has a unique mission for a start-up. They are oriented to making [...]
Regulation of millitechnology
Suppose there were a class of technologies called millitech: science and engineering that could be measured in millimeters, from say about a tenth of a millimeter to 100 millimeters — in any dimension. That includes hairs, paper, pebbles, marbles, anything you can hold in the palm of your hand, anything less than 4 inches [...]
Attitudes to nanotech regulation
An article this past weekend on Nanowerk reports on a study about attitudes toward regulation of nanotechnology among nanoscientists and the general public: As reported in the online version of the Journal of Nanoparticle Research today (June 19), Scheufele and Corley found that the public tends to focus on the benefits ? rather than potential environmental [...]

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