SAFENANO Community

  Over the weekend, I stumbled across Nano Tube, an online compendium of useful, funny and plain weird short films based around nanotechnology. It’s a competition being run by ACSnanonation, which invites entrants to capture what nano is, how its best visualised or where its heading in under 3 minutes, in exchange for the chance to win $500 ...

From 2020science.org:So, you have a cool new science that could make a major impact on global challenges like energy, disease and pollution and you want to make sure it reaches its full potential.  What do you do?  At some point, having a heart to heart with “the public” might be a good idea.  Especially if your “cool new ...

Read Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” or Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”, and you get a glimpse into how the hacker culture that emerged at the tail end of the twentieth century revolutionized the digital world.  Will a confluence of emerging technologies—including information tech, biotech, and nanotech—lead to a similar revolution ...

(Added Oct 24 2008: This article is also available at 2020science.org) If you want proof that nano is mainstream, just pick up the U.S. May edition of fashion magazine “Elle.”   Sharing cover-space with Madonna is the latest article on nanotech and the beauty business.Elle might not be your first choice of reading for cutting edge ...

The small American town of Sunnyville is a town in crisis.  Against a backdrop of job losses that have decimated the local community, citizens are struggling to decide whether to welcome two major nanotech-enabled industries into the town, or whether to reject them because the new technology might create more problems than it solves.  As ...

On March 18th, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died in his home in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.  A master developer and assembler of ideas, Clarke will be remembered fondly by many for igniting their enthusiasm for science, and how it might be used to better our lives.  His passing leaves a hole in the ranks of science heroes ...

Can current approaches to doing science sustain us over the next one hundred years?  An increasing reliance on technological fixes to global challenges — including nanotechnology — demands a radical rethink of how we use science in the service of society.Over the next century we will perhaps be facing the greatest challenge in the history of ...

What determines your view of nanotechnology—the message, or the messenger?  Most of us would like to think it is the message that governs our internal risk-benefit analysis.  But research published this week suggests other factors may be at work.Dan Kahan at Yale Law School and his colleagues are shaking up our ideas on effective ...

It’s been a long slog, but the end of 2007 is in sight.  A year of endless meetings, papers by the bunch, and more frequent flyer miles than any sane person should rack up (got to get that Carbon footprint under control). But did this all add up to progress on the safe nano front?  Here’s my personal and admittedly subjective round-up of ...

When it comes to addressing the potential risks of engineered nanomaterials, no-one can accuse the UK Government of not having a plan. Today’s publication of the report “Characterizing the potential risks posed by engineered nanoparticles.  A second UK Government research report” demonstrates a commitment to identifying and addressing key ...