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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

Foresight members and others would like to find ways to use nanotechnology to help those who need help the most. It’s a challenge, as described more generally by Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik, and Arvind Subramanian, writing in Foreign Affairs. They suggest a solution, which ought to work for nanotech as well as medical [...]