We’ve written here before about the Environmental Defense/DuPont effort to create a framework to deal with nanotechnology environmental, health, and safety (EHS) risks. Now NRDC has issued its own report and framework. An excerpt from the report: The current approach to chemical regulation cannot be relied upon to prevent harm from ...

We mentioned earlier a request for comment on a proposed Nano Risk Framework for approaching nanotechnology materials safety organized by Environmental Defense and DuPont. Now a different group of organizations has come out against that framework. Their statement is titled “Civil Society-Labor Coalition Rejects Fundamentally Flawed ...

If you’re a Foresight member, you’re already helping improve nanotechnology policy, but here’s another way: apply to participate in the upcoming online course Debating Science and The Nanotechnology Debate. In the syllabus (pdf), the actual course name appears to be “Debating Science: Practical Reasoning and ...

We at Foresight are often asked for advice on nanotechnology investing, which we are not qualified to give, so we refer folks elsewhere. Most sources of nanotech investing advice are boosters, so it’s also useful to hear from those taking another view. Over at Nanotechnology Now we get some unusually blunt comments from [...]

We should assume that those participating the ETC Group’s nanotechnology hazard symbol contest are all trying to be helpful, and such a symbol may someday be of some use. However, of the three top symbols named as winners, the first one — by far the most vivid — has a real problem. First, see the [...]

On the plane back from last week’s U.S. National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office-sponsored workshop on ethics and nanotechnology, I dug into the report “Health and Nanotechnology: Economic, Societal, and Institutional Impact” (not on web, as far as I can tell). This was the result of a meeting sponsored by the U.S. ...

The U.S. National Academy of Engineering is requesting your input on Grand Challenges for Engineering over the next 100 years. This being Nanodot, we hope you’ll nominate nanotechnology. It’s a serious effort funded by $500,000 from NSF. From the MSNBC coverage: The comments will be winnowed down, then reviewed by an 18-member ...

Switzerland’s Centre for Technology Assessment has issued its report Public Reactions to Nanotechnology in Switzerland (428 KB pdf), and — not surprisingly — it’s relatively balanced. From page 33 (page 35 of pdf file): “There’s a good and a bad side to everything” — This saying sums up quite well the way that the ...

Nanotechnology will soon be taught in Mexico’s public schools, but Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post explains that it’s a different story in the U.S.: Scientist Robert P.H. Chang of Northwestern University had no trouble persuading education officials in Mexico to introduce the burgeoning field of nanotechnology to schools ...

Red Herring reports that the city of Berkeley, California, has voted to approve its own nanoparticle regulations: On Tuesday night the Berkeley, California City Council passed an ordinance to regulate the use of manufactured nanoparticles, tiny subatomic [sic] materials that can be 100,000 times smaller than the width of human hair… Now ...