Study Says U.S. Has Lead in Nanotechnology
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The report cautioned that the potential risks of manipulating matter on such a small scale deserved more study.
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The US government will spend a whopping 144.3 million dollars to apply nanotechnology to the fight against cancer, the National Cancer Institute announced.
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Nanotechnology is coming to a clothing store near you.
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The U.S. National Cancer Institute  announced a new five-year plan on Monday to develop the use of  tiny tools to fight cancer, saying nanotechnology just might  provide the edge needed to defeat the disease.
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The genetic building blocks that form the basis for life may also be used to build the tiny machines of nanotechnology, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
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A U.S. scientist said researchers should be using green chemistry to reduce future risks of nanotechnology.  Around the world, there is a growing urgency about nanotechnology and its possible health and environmental impacts, said University of Oregon Professor James Hutchison.
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The nanomaterials company might -- finally -- be the next big thing.
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(InfoWorld) - Discrimination against women and minorities is putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in technology innovation, according to the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. Robert Birgeneau said of the top 50 university computer science department jobs in the U.S., not one is held by a woman of color. "How embarrassing," he said. "It's an astounding waste of talent in an increasingly competitive world." Birgeneau was the keynote speaker at a workshop on women in technology as part of the Emerging Technologies Conference being held at MIT this week. He said that while the number of women and men enrolling in undergraduate and post graduate technology programs has evened out somewhat, women are far behind their male counterparts when it comes to academic positions. Birgeneau cited a study released last fall by The National Academies titled "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering." The study said that at the top research institutions, only 15.4 percent of the full professors in the social and behavioral sciences and 14.8 percent in the life sciences are women, "and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits." The study also showed that women will likely face discrimination in every field of science and engineering. "We're at a drastic disadvantage in the United States, which is outsourcing to other countries like India and China, who are working madly to compete with us and who are investing deeply in education," he said. Karen Vogel, founder of The Women's Congress, a women's business-to-business conference, said one factor contributing to the lack of advancement for women in technology jobs and faculty positions is that women often don't support other women when it comes to workplace advancement. Not everyone agreed. Ilene Lang, president of Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit corporate research and advisory organization, said during a conference session on workplace culture that preliminary data from an online survey of U.S.-based corporate women found barriers to advancement mostly include a lack of role models, too few corporate leaders who would champion women, and little access to business networks that could plug them into corporate decision-makers. The survey included two groups of women: Those working in nontechnical roles in high-tech companies and those working in technology positions in companies other than high-tech. Lang said that the same barriers come up year after year in Catalyst's surveys. "One of the key problems women raise is that they do not get direct feedback on how they can improve. Feedback is always indirect and dances around the edges," she said. She said there weren't major differences in the results between the two groups of women that made up the 471 respondents in the survey, "except women in technology roles said they intended to stay in their roles longer." The detailed survey results are due out some time next spring, Lang said. Some women at the conference spoke about their personal experiences with discrimination, including a lack of women in high-level managerial and executive positions. Ying Li, general manager of applied research and data mining at Microsoft, said during a panel discussion that there are few women who are senior technical leaders at her company. Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, who was the first woman professor of computer science at the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil, said she was able to advance in her career because she never thought of herself as a woman when it came to her job. "If you start thinking of yourself as a minority, then you start getting a complex about it," she said Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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A tiny picture of Cambridge University's crest demonstrates the emerging power of nanotechnology.
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Photovoltaics made of nanowires could power small devices and lead to cheaper solar panels.
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One nanotechnology researcher said supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away."If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years," said Michael Zaiser, a professor and researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics. "The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close -- 10 years, maybe 15."Zaiser's research into nanowires should help move that timeline along.For the last five years, he has been studying how tiny wires -- 1,000 times thinner than a human hair -- behave when manipulated. He explained that each such miniscule wire tends to behave differently when put under the same amount of pressure. Therefore, it has been impossible to line them up close to each other in tiny microprocessors in a production atmosphere.Zaiser said he's now figured out how to make the wires behave uniformly. He separates the interior material of the wire into distinct groups so the wire can't react as a whole. That makes it much easier to control. "It's like crowd control," he added. "If they can all go one way, you have a big mess."These nanowires will go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, cell phones, or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be.Shrinking down the microprocessors is a big step toward shrinking down computers.Zaiser was quick to point out that his nanowire discovery won't immediately lead to the development of supercomputers that can fit in the palm of a hand or even shrink down to the size of a book of matches. In addition to smaller microprocessors, engineers will need to deal with thermal fluctuations that erupt at that size.But he does humbly admit that taming nanowires is a big step toward the goal of small supercomputers."This will enable chips to become much smaller," he said. "Think 10 years back. You could hold [a cell phone] the size of a telephone receiver and it didn't work so well. Today, you can fit what is a powerful computer onto a small device."Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif., said that with advances like nanowire technology continuing to come along, Zaiser's predictions for tiny supercomputers may not be so far off. And that will be a huge step for the industry, considering that not so long ago supercomputers filled up enormous rooms or even entire buildings."Actually, what he's saying is not crazy," said King. "The wire problem was an important one. Solving that particular issue, one so fundamental, needed to be done. If he can solve that, a lot of people, a lot of companies, will appreciate that. The industry is aligning in a direction where we're going to be seeing continuing improvements and developments."Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz., said he definitely can see palm-size supercomputers coming out within 10 to 15 years, but he thinks they'll be based on the basic silicon technology used today. He added that the next generation of tiny supercomputers -- made with carbon nanotubes and nanowires -- may be as far off as another 30 to 40 years, though."You know, everybody says we'll get to a physical limit but every time we think we're going to hit it, we overcome it," said McGregor. "They end up being speed bumps instead of road blocks."King added that over the last 10 or 20 years, technology advancements have put smaller and more powerful computers into the hands of children and researchers alike. That leads him to believe that the shrinking of supercomputers is just ahead of us."We're at the beginning of some very exciting times in supercomputing," he said.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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The ability to manipulate matter on a tiny scale could lead to environmental breakthroughs. Billions of dollars are being spent, but the most exciting green nanoproducts are still on the drawing boards.
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China has surpassed Japan to become the world's No.2 spender on research and development, behind the US.
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Big opportunities await patient investors in nanotech, cleantech, and robotics.
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The move parallels similar actions in Korea and China, and has some American scientists concerned that the United States is losing its lead in biomedical research.
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The use of subatomic materials as microscopic building blocks for thousands of consumer products has turned into a big business so quickly that few are monitoring the so-called nanotechnology's effects on health and the environment.
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Nanowires put more power in smaller packages, researcher reports.