Dec 10, 2006
Buying Nano This Holiday
According to the Nanotech Project, more than twenty years of research, has begun to yield the first commercial applications for nanotechnology in consumer products. They explain that nanoscale materials can now be found in electronics, cosmetics, automotive parts, and medical products. Apparently, there are about 350 such products.
But, while the British media is running scared at the idea of nanotechnology turning the world to grey goo (and we’re not talking Second Life here), The Register reports on a Nature Nanotechnology paper that claims almost three quarters of Americans have heard little or nothing about nanotechnology. Nano, of course, refers only to the scale of any particular particle or component of any technology.
Nano, meaning nothing more than a billionth, so a nanometre is a billionth of a metre. Funnily enough, most of the so-called nanoscale products actually have dimensions of several hundred nanometres, so in truth such objects could be called microscale (or in more familiar parlance microscopic). Micro meaning a millionth. A micrometre is therefore a millionth of a metre. Something that’s 500 nanometres might just as readily be described as half a micrometre.
The author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper warns that public ignorance in the US of nanotechnology means that legislation may be passed without informed debate. Fair point, but it can be pushed to the opposite extreme with precautionary attitudes predominating and stifling research and development that might benefit us all, as has happened in the UK with respect to genetically modified organisms (GMOs and GM food).
Do you agree?
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Roddy MacLeod said,
December 10, 2006 at 10:55 pm
Inderscience has just announced a new journal related to this general area:
International Journal of Nanomanufacturing (IJNM)
http://www.inderscience.com/ijnm
This title is the second to be published in Inderscience’s major new portfolio of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology journals. Several more new titles in this area will be forthcoming. Details at: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/subjects.php?subjectID=41
Andrew Sun said,
December 11, 2006 at 6:10 pm
From the Telegraph article I knew that Prince Charles was scared by some predictions of the environmentalists. I have contacted and visited some NGOs such as Greenpeace (China) not long ago. I found that, although apparently professional, they actually lack a board of scientists for consultancy of the scientific validity of their movements. They start their champaign by some hearsay, by which they are (or appear to be) so convinced that the public are then convinced effectively, without concerning the basis of the whole thing. Although the inevitable balancing powers or voices in a society, these NGOs are limited to more positive activities if they are not scientifically well-based.