The Nano Autos' "pull back and go action" works quite economically, which is very important with today's fuel prices. Plus, put a coin in the back slot and it pops wheelies.
This may not involve actual nanotechnology, but it's more real than, say, Draper Fisher Jurvetson's NanoCar or this rather creative piece of fiction.
This baby, of course, can slip into the parking space
beside the NanoTruck just
outside the NanoHouse.
Act now, and this little racer could be master of her own domain.
Nano might be today's "cyber," but today's cyber has finally become yesterday's "cyber."
Backgrounder
Nanotech insider information
Irresponsible NanoHype
'Crain's-ing' my neck to see the hype
NanoSight, NanoScheme and NanoHype
Well, it's been a long, strange trip, but I have a new job that might surprise a few folks. It's an end to the most difficult, most humbling, most humiliating year of my life and the beginning of a promising new chapter. My new role in the nano world comes just in time for the arrival of my new baby next month. Can't give you a hint yet (I've learned my lesson the hard way about blogger/employer relations), but expect an announcement soon.
Backgrounder
Flirtin' with Freelance Disaster
NanoBot needs you
Escape from my own private Pennsylvania
What Can Nano Learn from Bio? Lessons from the Debate over Agrifood Biotechnology and GMOs (Society of Environmental Journalists)
Backgrounder
Nano's 'No GMO' Mantra
Are nanoparticle studies 'one decade late'?
Creating a monster
OK. OK. Everybody's having so much fun writing headlines for this story about pee-pee powered batteries, I just had to yank my blog out of its temporary slumber to add my contribution to the ... um ... pot. Here's my best shot after thinking about it for about five minutes:
Urine the money, Singapore
Piss and chips
Catheter to cathode
I dunno. Best I can do for now.
In a convergence of coincidences that can only be described as quantum kabbalistic, I found myself on a surprise flight to Los Angeles on Friday (more on that later).
Seated next to me on my return trip to Detroit was a person I will only call a "Hollywood insider" (I've always wanted to write that!) I told him I would go to jail rather than reveal him as my source, so you'll have to trust me that this is a true insider who would know the answer to the following question:
Is there or is there not a movie version of Michael Crichton's nano nightmare book "Prey"
The answer is "no."
So, as I've written before (scroll to the end here), everybody in the nano business can just calm down for a while and let's give the "movie version of 'Prey' is coming soon" stuff a rest.
In fact, said my extra-super-double-secret Hollywood insider source, Crichton is quite a cranky character who was not at all pleased with the film treatment of "Timeline."
Even during summer blogging recess, your NanoBot is still working for you. Stay tuned for more news.
Backgrounder
What, Prey tell, are you talking about?
'Swarm,' 'Prey,' whatever ...
Antediluvian NanoBots
NPR can't tell Crichton from cosmetics
Michigan Marine continues family’s military service tradition (Marine Corp. News)
Lovy, the supply noncommissioned officer in the logistics department of Marine Wing Support Group 27, picked a different service, but he’s keeping the tradition alive.
A graduate of Holly High School in his native Holly, Mich., Lovy joined the Corps in September 2002. “After high school I worked odd jobs until I realized I needed a change and went full blast into it,” he said. “I decided to go for the real deal and join the Marine Corps.”
...
“I joined the Marine Corps to make my family proud,” he said. “I wanted my life to go in a different positive direction and I knew the Marine Corps was the most extreme change I could do for the better.”
According to Lovy, out of his parents’ seven offspring he is the youngest and only to join the military. He said that his father, who left the Army’s 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) as a captain after serving in Vietnam, is proud of him regardless of having joined a different service. More here
Wired News ran my profile of Dr. James Baker, a leading nanomedicine researcher at the University of Michigan. The editor I worked with on this was great, and very patient as I juggled this story with a string of job interviews, the duties of daddyhood and an increasingly pregnant wife.
But Wired pays by the word, so some of my story had to be cut. I understand. I've been on the other side of that editor/freelancer relationship before and I've had to strictly enforce word-count limits.
So, I'll briefly interrupt my blogging sabbatical to give you some passages that did not make the final cut.
What sets Baker apart from many academic researchers is he is not too concerned with whether his solutions defy conventional wisdom. And, as the proud papa of two spinoff companies, and a third about to be hatched, he's not just doing research for research's sake. If you understand Baker's decade-and-a-half journey you can get a pretty good idea of how nanotech, itself, has traveled from sci-fi fantasy to FDA trials.Yet the 52-year-old former immunologist with the gentle voice does not come across as a guy who collects accolades. Baker is simply a researcher who has made it a point to cut through barriers … relentlessly … until problems are solved.
The first Gulf War is what did it. Like many returning veterans of any era, Baker came home with the conviction that life is precious, so let's not waste any time. "I decided that if I ever got back here … I was just going to do things that I felt were important and the hell with it," Baker says. "I'm not going to worry about, 'will this get me this grant' or whatever."
Baker spent about 15 years chipping away at the two main barriers to success in bringing nanobiotech out of the lab. We'll call them "shrinkage" and "linkage."
Shrinkage
Nanotech is not only about size, but also the ability to engineer the nanoparticle to do what you want it to do and when you want it done.
...
Linkage
U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative officials often talk about "converging technologies," that is, connecting all the sciences – physics, chemistry, biology, information technology – and making connections as all these disciplines converge at the nanoscale.
That's the thinking behind the University of Michigan's new Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and the Biological Sciences, which Baker will head. "I think any university that doesn't develop collaborative centers like this is going to be frozen out," he says.
Hopefully, Baker says, that will solve the problem of engineers, for example, pushing one of their innovations as a cancer therapy without ever really checking with the biologists. "Because if the people who made the material put it into biological models, they were simplistic ones that really don't have relevance to therapeutics."
...
"Celebrex, Vioxx, all of these drugs that popped up here recently with problems, are whole-body administered. They go everywhere," (nanotech pioneer Donald) Tomalia says.
And these scandals are part of the reason nanotech entrepreneur/researchers like Tomalia and Baker are finally coming in from the cold. Or, Tomalia puts it, "there's a lot more sunshine up here in our life lately. And I think it's because our time is finally coming where the world has gone through all of these other options and they're looking at what is available out there in the nano field as nano building blocks. And their aren't any, in my opinion, that have the versatility and the systematic control that dendrimers have to offer."
Tomalia, of course, is not an objective observer. He's banking on the success of the nanobabies he's nursed for two decades through his company, Dendritic NanoTechnologies Inc.
The full story is here.
Backgrounder
Dendrimers could have cancer in their clutches
Living on nano time
The Tao of Dow
The Tale of Tomalia
I'm going to use this top space now to emphasize the first two words in this blog's title. Here's a partial list of positions I've applied for so far. I'll update it from time to time. I figure I have a few thousand references out there in my regular blog readers, so if you happen to be affiliated with any of the organizations listed below, please bother the hell out of your recruitment office until they agree to take a look at my resume. Your incentive? My eternal gratitude (I never forget my friends), I can get back to writing my NanoBot book and a possible return of this NanoBot blog -- that is, if my new employers are OK with my blogging on the side.
No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
-- Richard Feynman, from a Caltech commencement address given in 1974
-- "The Uncertainty of Values" (in the collection "The Meaning of it All")
Backgrounder
Feynman on the uncertainty principle
Feynman was not for first-timers
Driving under the influence of Feynman
Feynman's missing pieces
Miguel De Cervantes, in "Don Quixote"
The Foresight Nanotech Institute -- a pioneering nanotech think tank -- takes another step toward relevance in the world of today, rather than a vague "when molecular manufacturing is reality," in partnering with Battelle on its roadmap to "productive nanosystems." The map, to put it simply, is a plan to get us from here to there and there to here (I guess that's the Dr. Seuss version)
Foresight has been correctly criticized in the past for failing to draw up what exactly will take us from nanopants to nanobots, except a vague idea that a scientific miracle will happen and the nano age will begin.
Last December, I asked the question: "Will they engage in the political and public process or will they continue to lick their wounds while remaining completely oblivious to the relevant opportunities that surround them?"
Sounds like they've answered, although I doubt my criticism was the sole reason. Earlier, in May, the institute adopted some core challenges it plans on addressing, challenges that get at the heart of the hopes and fears that surround nanotech both in the short term and long term. Addressing issues surrounding energy, the environment, human life, information and space travel, the institute planted itself firmly into ground being covered today while also leaving room for its long-term vision.
I asked Foresight founder and vice president Christine Peterson whether molecular manufacturing would be de-emphasized, or whether long-term vision would still a part of the group's mission.
"Yes, definitely," she answered. "Rather than a de-emphasis of that topic per se, I would put it another way -- that our mission has broadened to include the near-term and mid-term, including applications in those timeframes and the policy issues involved."
Yes, yes, I know. I'll get to it. Full disclosures: I'm the recipient of the 2004 Foresight Institute Prize in Communication, and I'm to do some work for the institute later this year.
pSivida is one company I'm going to continue to keep an eye on over the years. I've spoken to Roger Aston, director of research and commercialisation (or commercialization, for those of you who do not speak Australian), a couple of times, and each time I grow more impressed with the company.
I'm not only talking about its biodegradable drug delivery technology, which appears to avoid the toxicity problems associated with its nanoscale cousins, buckyballs, dendrimers et al. For the longer term, this company also appears to have a clear plan to travel around the world to our shores, infiltrate our cancer wards, prolong some lives, and then slowly start to scare the living daylights out of us.
Is the United States ready for implantable microchips that your doctor can set to deliver drugs, monitor, control and disintegrate from the comfort of his golf cart? I don't know, but it will be interesting to follow.
(Incidentally, I'm not an investor in this company. Hell, I don't have any spare change to gamble on any company.)
PSivida Reports Findings In Phase IIa Cancer Drug Trials (Dow Jones)
According to a press release contained in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the global nanotechnology company said the report confirms that the primary endpoint of the trial was achieved in its key first indication in that BrachySil (32-P BioSilicon) was found to be both safe and well tolerated.
BrachySil is a micron-sized nanostructured silicon particle in which radioactive 32-phosphorus (32-P) is immobilized. It is administered as a liquid suspension through a fine-gauge needle directly into tumors, the filing said. The procedure takes place under local anaesthetic and without the need for shielded rooms or robotic injectors, and patients can be discharged the next day." More here
Backgrounder
pSivida's biosilicon does its job, then goes away
Bigger bucks for better metaphors
Pint-size pushers
Scott Rickert: Founder, president and CEO, Nanofilm Ltd. (Crain's Cleveland Business)
Nanofilm Ltd. founder Scott Rickert, 51, says there are two ways to develop a nanotechnology company - the Cleveland way and everyone else's way.
The Cleveland way, or more appropriately, the "Northeast Ohio way," Mr. Rickert says, is to develop a product immediately to produce cash flow and make a company viable in the marketplace.
The other way is to rely on grants, he said.
"There are very few periods of time in Nanofilm's history that we have lost money," Mr. Rickert said proudly. He is Nanofilm' s president and CEO. More here
Gap StressFree Poplin Shirt With Nano-Tex (Wired Gadget Lab)
You could say I wear my food well. I've stained shirts with everything from chocolate to wine to pasta sauce -- if it's delicious, I'll somehow ruin an expensive outfit with it. Thankfully, nanotechnology is here to help klutzes like me stay splotch free. Nano-Tex's science-meets-style fabric treatment is designed to repel liquids and messy edibles. In the laboratory (a k a the WIRED kitchen), I slopped coffee and soy sauce on my dapper blue-and-white striped button-up (available in other colors and styles). I let the splashes set for 10 minutes, then used a moist rag to easily whisk away the muck. More here
Former NanoBusiness Alliance leader Mark Modzelewski was recently named VP of Strategic Opportunities for NanoDynamics.
Some of you might remember that Mark and I have had a few very public disagreements over the past few years -- each of us playing our respective roles very well, I think. (For background, go here, here and here.) A journalist's job is to question and challenge, and a business representative's job is to defend his interests. From the perspective of time, I think that too many people took these roles too much to heart -- with consequences that reverberate today.
I'm very proud of what I wrote then, and still stand by every word. However, Mark and I have been communicating over the past year or so, and have discussed some issues as two professionals. I asked Keith Blakely, NanoDynamics CEO, to give me some insight into why he chose Mark for this job. Here's what he said:
"As you know, I have spent over a quarter century on the 'business' or 'corporate' side of advanced materials and technologies. My contacts, experience, insights, and skills lie there. Mark, on the other hand, has spent considerable time on the government, financial, and academic side. Both of us, as you know, believe strongly in the power of nanotechnology but have reached that conclusion from entirely different backgrounds and experience. It should come as no surprise then that after bumping into each other at various nanotechnology meetings and functions, we were intrigued by the potential synergy of joining forces.
"Mark is an exceptionally bright, independent thinker and brings NanoDynamics one more way of looking at opportunities and creating high impact with our nanotechnology-enabled products."
I cannot argue with that. Congratulations, Mark. From one independent thinker to another, I wish you well.
Those responsible boys at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology are fired up over accusations of nanobot hype-mongering and are blasting back at the U.S. government's nanotech program. The best part is that Chris Phoenix and Mike Treder do not even need to write any commentary around it. Using U.S. science policy leaders' own words, they reveal exactly where the hype is coming from. Read the intro, Part 1 and Part 2.
I found the passage below particularly amazing:
What molecular manufacturing nutcase is making those irresponsible claims? U.S. Commerce Undersecretary Phil Bond, the same Phil Bond who, just a month before making those comments last year, told me that it's time to "aggressively" counter nanotech misinformation.
Sounds like the patriots at CRN are carrying out the undersecretary's orders.
Backgrounder
'Crain's-ing' my neck to see the hype
Commerce's call to nano arms
Blogging responsibly
But I suspect that it's just a case of premature gesticulation among ethicists when they begin arguing over a planned "uploading" of all the brain's electrical patterns.
My dad's a shrink, but I'm not crazy enough to pretend I know all there is about the brain (hell, I don't even know much about my own). However, isn't there something more that we're not getting? Leave no molecule behind, get all the 1's and 0's ticking away correctly, and I'm still not convinced you have the equivalent of human consciousness.
As I discussed here, life is analog, not digital. I'm not so certain science has the vaguest idea how to re-create "nurture" -- the way synapses are created and killed in response to experience or can improvise to fit specific situations; nor even the "nature" part of the equation -- genetic predispositions toward specific thought processes.
Beyond the idea of neural networks, how much is really known about why and how the brain recognizes and reacts to patterns, not to mention how to re-create that digitally?
Nahh, I think there's still a long road ahead before our "consciousness" is truly understood. Just in case, though, maybe I should create another Gmail account to hold my brain digits. Perhaps after I'm gone, some basic brain functions can be stored on my computer -- like catching up on e-mail or blogging.
Those who are getting themselves all hot and aroused by Blue Brain might be a bit premature. But, you know, "it happens to everyone."
Pssst ... Hey you. Yeah, you. Ya wanna hot nano tip? Forget about nanotechnology "trade shows," stock-chart Bollinger Bands or the price of coal in China. Pay attention to where the real deals are being made between companies that produce nanotechnology products and processes, and the companies that can use them. The item below is just one example. Most of the rest of the stuff you read about nanotech "products" about to change the world is a dog-and-pony show. Simple.
Does Your Organization Need Help Using Nanoparticles in Product Development and Formulation? (NineSigma)
Today, the dog was annoying and my phone line was being repaired, so I escaped to my local coffee shop to "work" with the other unemplo ... I mean, "freelancers."
Medical and nursing students study here, too, and I overheard a pickup line that stuck with me because I cannot decide whether it's clever, sleazy or both.
A scraggly-bearded man walks up to two female nursing students and asks: "So what part of the anatomy are you working on today?"
You wanna make an easy 150 G's? All you need to do is come up with a workable nanotechnology business idea. The International and North Coast Nanotechnology Business Idea Competitions are accepting applications now. Who knows? You win, you could find yourself in Cleveland (a city that, unlike my hometown Detroit, proved that the Rust Belt never sleeps) to accept the award as part of NANO Week, October 17-21. More information can be found here.
I do not normally run press releases on this blog, but Chris Thompson of Edward Howard & Co buttered me up with insincere flattery, writing: "Several web sites have picked up this story, but since your blog remains the most entertaining read on all things nano, I hope you'll make a mention of it in the near future."
Take note, PR/marketing professionals. Say nice things about me, and maybe I'll run your announcement. Now, Chris, about those VIP passes to the Rock Hall ...
Backgrounder
Prizes, Prizes, Prizes
Here's the plain deal on biomedical nanobots
