Engineering News tells of a study by Frost & Sullivan on how nanotechnology can make a difference in addressing the issue of climate change: The report looked at five areas where nanotechnology could be helpful, which included the areas of fuel additives, solar cells, the hydrogen economy, batteries and supercapacitors, and insulation. In ...

Foresight, Battelle, and Working Group members have been working away on our Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems since late 2005. Now the Society of Manufacturing Engineers is pitching in on co-sponsoring the launch conference. Below is the press release; we hope to see you at the conference! —Christine Technology Roadmap for ...

In The Examiner, An Army of Davids author Prof. Glenn Reynolds makes nanotechnology one of his four technologies that deserve speeding up: Nanotechnology — a technology for making and engineering things on the molecular scale — is already a force in many areas, but at the moment it’s mostly a source of high strength materials, sensors, [...]

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the nanotechnology classic book Engines of Creation is out in a new, free e-book version (5.4 MB pdf) from WOWIO. Material added since the original edition includes a Letter from the Author, Feynman’s 1959 talk, Advice to Aspiring Nanotechnologists (very similar to the author’s Foresight Briefing 1: ...

The Harvard Business Review has named its top 20 Breakthrough Ideas for 2007, and home-based, atomically-precise manufacturing makes the list. Business in the Nanocosm, by UC Berkeley business prof Rashi Glazer, does a good job of conveying the future of home-based nanomanufacturing. Excerpts: Conventional manufacturing carves or distills a ...

Alert reader Ron Zilm brings our attention to a nanotechnology research achievement at UC Riverside in California by Ludwig Bartels, originally a physicist in Germany but now in the UCR chemistry department: Walking Molecule Now Carries Packages Molecule walks in a straight line and carries a tiny shopping bag in each hand A research team, led ...

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, ...

Earlier we expressed enthusiasm for the UK Software Control of Matter project, and sure enough, they have already made progress toward setting themselves an ambitious, visionary goal which is expected to be funded: We propose to create a molecular machine that will build new materials under software control. The output of the machine will be ...

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 ...

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 ...