Concrete jungle

I covered the Society of Automotive Engineers conference last week in Detroit's Cobo Hall. I'll write more about it later, since I did attend one nanotech session. Biodegradable nanoplastics. Cool stuff, and of course it reflects the true environmental benefits to nanotechnology, despite what some interest groups would like you to believe.

Anyway, I arrived early in the morning on Tuesday and parked in the Joe Louis Arena parking garage next door. More than a little creepy. I felt like I was in one of those "day after the nuclear holocaust" movies. Not a soul around. Just miles and miles of concrete. That's my Detroit.

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Uplifting nanotech news

Sorry for the break. Full nano blogging will return soon. Meanwhile, rest assured, I am staying abreast of all current nano news, including this swell piece:

Silver wouldn't reveal too much about her idea, for which she's pursuing a design patent. But she did say that her concept uses encapsulation, meaning the bra would incorporate a separate container for each breast.

She plans to use nontraditional hardware and fabrics (including nanotechnology-enhanced materials) to make the bras stronger and more comfortable. One part she needs is no longer in production. She's been working with New England Castings in Hiram to develop a production model.

The bra will be tested at USM's ASET center, which is set up to put various products through repeated tests. She's developed an "all-around" bra as a baseline for all sports. More here

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Silver Performance Gear

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'Nano enhancement' comes in pairs

Customers Googled while newspapers burned

Where are news advertisers going? Follow the money. My latest Michigan Business Review column can be found here. Or you can read the original "writer's cut." Here's an excerpt from the full version.

So, while advertisers are flocking to Google, Yahoo and other local search providers like yellowpages.com, most newspapers still relegate "online" to some curious little tech trend that they really should learn more about, eventually. It amazes me, at times, how an industry that is supposed to be writing the "first rough draft of history" is today still clinging possessively to their buggy whips while their customers zoom past them on horseless carriages. And when it's time to shed employees, a nebulous concept like "the economy" is blamed. No. That's not it at all. Follow the money. The ad dollars are being shifted to where advertisers can reach their customers at a cheaper price. More here

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Steve Jurvetson on revolution within and without

Visionary venture capitalist and, of course, NanoBot reader Steve Jurvetson took a few seconds out of his normal routine of firing off really cool model rockets and helping to fund the technological revolution to drop me a quick note here to tell me that he posted a reply here to my comments about revolution from the outside vs. the inside here, which promoted my blog post and column about Tesla Motors, electric vehicles and an ethanol economy, which teased to my Q&A interview with Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard -- excerpt here, full transcript here. Oh, what a tangled World Wide Web we Weave.