The winners of this year’s Lego engineering contest were inspired by nanotechnology concepts to design a robot to clean plastic from the ocean: For the competition, the students had to prepare a presentation on this year’s theme — nanotechnology, or molecular-size machines. They looked for a nanotech application that could ...

A recent issue of the useful journal Nanotechnology Law & Business includes a review (pdf) by Daniel Moore of J. Storrs Hall’s book Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology. The conclusion: Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology will be of interest to those looking for an introduction to the concepts of nanotechnology and ...

Those of you who have tracked nanotechnology for a long time know that Sun Microsystems was one of the first corporations to take an interest in the field, e.g., sponsoring the Foresight Conferences over the years, and more recently helping to fund the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. Now that foresight, combined with their [...]

In addition to the experimental project described here yesterday, there are now two more posted on the U.K. Software Control of Matter Ideas Factory blog which are very likely to be funded — the first experimental, the second theoretical: Directed Reconfigurable Nanomachines We propose a scheme to revolutionise the synthesis of nanodevices, ...

Christian Joachim, winner of Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology for both experiment and theory, continues his exciting molecular machine systems work with a recent publication authored by a German/French team in Nature Materials titled “A rack-and-pinion device at the molecular scale“. From the summary and conclusion: In this work, we ...

David Leigh, Richard Jones, and other alert readers report that Fraser Stoddart has been knighted for “services to chemistry and molecular nanotechnology.” From the UCLA press release: UCLA professor Fraser Stoddart, director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), who holds UCLA’s Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems ...

Forbes announces its top five nanotechnology breakthroughs for 2006, and we’re not surprised to see the winner of this year’s Foresight Institute Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology listed as #1: 1. DNA origami, at Caltech 2. Nanomagnets to clean up drinking water, at Rice 3. Arrays connect nanowire transistors with neurons, at ...

The Future of Things, an online magazine based in Israel, has a nanotechnology article/interview with the clearest explanation I’ve seen of the two generations of nanocars built at Rice University. We’ve discussed this before, but a more comprehensible exposition is always welcome. See especially the Flash movie of how the latest ...

Will Ware, whom you may remember from NanoCAD, has done the most accurate simulation and animation of a molecular bearing design to date. He explains: Using NanoEngineer-1 (see http://www.nanoengineer-1.com) and other open-source software, I have created an animated simulation of the molecular bearing design on page 298 of Nanosystems by Eric ...

Philanthropist Fred Kavli has extended his nanotech research giving to found the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology at Harvard. From the Harvard press release: The Kavli Foundation and Harvard University have agreed to establish the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology (KIBST). The endowment from the Kavli ...