Good question!

Technology Review, besides being a great magazine edited by Jason Pontin, who I have known since the heyday of Red Herring, also puts on some great conferences. So I was excited and honoured to be invited to EmTech Spain, a two day conference in Malaga focussing on emerging technologies.

Along with my World Economic Forum colleague Javier García Martínez of Rive Technology and the University of Alicante,  we were discussing what nanotechnology is, how to build a business out of it, and where it will take us.

Normally at these kind of conferences, discussing everything from the future of cities to social media, nanotech is one of the most futuristic and least understood technologies on the agenda – making me feel like a cuckoo in the nest when most peoples idea of emerging technology is something that they can have on their iPhone next week. However the “imagine a world where…” speech was given by Richard Kivel this time, discussing regenerative medicine, while Javier and I discussed existing and future applications of nanotechnologies.

So what use is nanotechnology? Simple, I think is makes a key contribution to addressing issues such as energy and health, allowing us to support today’s 7 billion and tomorrow’s 10 billion people in an increasingly sustainable manner. You can read my thoughts in the original Spanish, or as a rougher and less polished Q&A in English below.

Sometimes it’s good to take a step back and re evaluate what we are doing and why, something my good friend Doug Mather of the Creation Company has been urging people to do for years. It is very easy, whether in science or in business to develop myopia or tunnel vision, concentrating so hard on one particular task or goal that the rest of the world slips by almost unnoticed.

I find my release from the pressures of keeping up with science and running a number of businesses by hill walking – getting blown around on the top of Pen-y-Ghent or picking my way through the granite pillars of the Sierra de Guadarrama allows me to switch off from email and phone calls for long enough to ponder the big issues rather than picking through the daily list of to do’s.

Part of this big picture thinking led to the publication by the World Economic Forum yesterday of a new paper I authored with Andrew Maynard where we set out how we see the Role of Technology Innovation in an Increasingly Interdependent, Complex and Resource-constrained World.

You can download the full paper here, but in summary we are asking a very simple question – How can technology be best used to improve the lives of everyone on the planet?

While there have been some recent backlashes against technologies recently, and at many meetings of NGOs I attend there is some deep suspicion that technology is the result of  a sinister conspiracy by governments and businesses, technology has almost always been a force for good.

Obvious examples are the harnessing of fire, and the invention of agriculture, which started the transition of humans from hunter-gatherers to philosophers and Internet addicts. But perhaps the most startling transformation over the past fifty years has been in medicine, with many diseases that were killers being irradiated or, in the case of an increasing number, becoming chronic conditions.  One hundred years ago few people who went into an operating theatre came out alive, now it’s the vast majority.

But that is all in the past, and while we often think that technology is chugging along quite nicely as we browse Facebook on our iPads, we have to take that steep back and wonder whether technology is capable of addressing the big issues? Can an iPad help with meeting the energy demands of an increasingly wealthy world, or help avert wars over scarce resources such as water?

The vision that we set out in the paper is one where we take a longer term view of emerging technologies and their uses. To enable the increasing range of emerging technologies to be harnessed for good of everyone requires some new thinking about why and how we develop technologies, as we explain over at the World Economic Forum’s blog.

Through the work of the World Economic Forums Global Agenda Councils, we are developing and deepening inter linkages between emerging technologies and groups looking at other global issues, from climate change to innovation.  In the scientific community we are preaching to the converted, but it is now time to take the message to the politicians and business leaders, the people who make the real decisions.

Anyone hoping that China’s near monopoly over Lanthanides will be broken may be disappointed to see that the recent news about artificial palladium being created in a Japanese lab is a long way from being much use. It doesn’t stop magazines like Fast Company (whom I thought folded years ago along with Red Herring) getting a little over excited and digging out some pictures of carbon to illustrate the story.

The basic technique seems to be to mix nano particles of the two elements on either side on the periodic table to the one of interest, in this case Rhodium and Silver which have 47 and 45 electrons respectively.  Prof Kitagawa who came up with the technique explains that “the orbits of the electrons in the rhodium and silver atoms probably got jumbled up and formed the same orbits as those of palladium.”

While silver is relatively cheap, Rhodium trades at around three times the price of Palladium, and given the uncertainties surrounding the technique and its potential yield, it’s economic benefits look to be marginal for the foreseeable future compared with digging up more Palladium.

His team created a solution containing equal quantities of rhodium and silver, turned the solution into a mist and mixed it little by little with heated alcohol to produce particles of the new alloy. Each particle is 10 nanometres in diameter and atoms of the two metals are equally mixed.

It’s a good bit of nanoscience, nonetheless, but in order to move towards a more sustainable future, the thinking has to get away from merely replacing parts of the system, and think about whole new systems.

I’ll leave the professional report readers such as 2020Science to wade through the Friends of the Earth’s latest broadside against nanotechnology which claims that it “isn’t green enough.”

This brief report in “The Australian” neatly sums up the argument, which is that although nanotechnology has been spoken of as a solution to some aspects of climate change, it is is less green than other alternative approaches such as sitting still and waiting for the world to end, and therefore it shouldn’t be funded.

Some of the arguments are clearly rather silly and selective. Claiming for example that “the energy conversion efficiency of nano solar panels was 10 per cent less than conventional silicon panels” is rather unfair given the stage of the development of the technology and ignores the amount of R&D going into areas such as organic photovoltaics. Similarly claims that “processing may also involve the use toxic chemicals and solvents, and the release greenhouse gases such as methane” could be applied to almost every area of human activity, or indeed inactivity.

Technology always needs to be seen over time, and the fact that Stephenson’s Rocket wasn’t as fast as a galloping horse in its first trial probably led to similar calls for the technology to be abandoned.

Perhaps the most depressing thing is that in order to make the argument that nanotech isn’t green enough, Friends of the Earth has to waste its (and our) time shooting down some of the wilder claims about nanotechnologies, while ignoring much of the rational scientific work that going on.

What I’d love to hear from an environmental group is a rational argument about nanotechnology. How do we encourage applications that could limit climate change and protect the environment while monitoring and averting any unintended risks and consequences? Carping from the sidelines may create a few sound bites, but it won’t change government policy and nor will it stymie human creativity when it comes to applying technology.

To have a real impact, environmental groups need to make themselves part of the debate rather than sitting in the corner sulking with their backs to the everyone.

At last weeks Nanotechnology for High performance Motorsport meeting, one of the participants, from a Formula One team, commented that he thought the current FIA regulations precluded the use of nanomaterials.

A bit of digging around in the current regulations (thanks to Chris Walker for unearthing this) only finds the following prohibition on using carbon nanotubes incorporated within carbon fibres, although given the difficulty of making an accurate distinction between nanotubes, nanofibres and carbon fibre it would be interesting to know which definition the is FIA using.

Carbon fibres manufactured from polyacrylonitrile (PAN) precursor which have :

-            a tensile modulus ? 550GPa ;

-            a density ? 1.92 g/cm3 ;

-            unidirectional or planar reinforcement within their pre-impregnated form, not including three dimensional weaves or stitched fabrics (but fibre reinforcement using Z-pinning technology is permitted) ;

-            no carbon nanotubes incorporated within the fibre or its matrix ;

-            a permitted matrix, not including a carbon matrix.

As far as I know, nanotechnology was used in the 2009 season, with McLarens KERS system using A123s nano phosphate lithium ion batteries as a result of their combination of weight and charge/discharge capacity. It certainly seems that other than the specific regulation above, there are no limits to what can be applied, and the ingenuity of motorsport engineers is second to none.

Of course were anyone except Ferrari to gain a substantial technical advantage from nanotechnology we may see the regulations being tweaked, but in general this is done to close loopholes that the use of novel materials may allow engineers to exploit, rather than to ban a whole technology.

Nanomaterials Producers React To Criticism Of Their Business Models

I don’t like nanomaterials companies very much. In fact they are usually nothing but trouble. If they are not squandering huge amounts of investors money chasing non existent markets then they are having messy legal spats with competitors and suppliers, or even prancing around bringing hugely expensive but ultimately pointless libel suits against anyone who questions their business model. Anyway, not to worry, most of them have either gone bust or found something more useful to do with their nanotech expertise than trying to put carts before horses and good riddance.

I’ll be doing my best to avoid a lynching at tomorrow’s Nanomaterials 2010 conference where I will be talking about “Trends and opportunities in the nanomaterials marketplace” – something I’m pretty sure that I will be able to manage without jumping up and down yelling “nanomaterials are the new gold so give me all your money” (actually as we and the World Gold Council proved a while ago, Gold is the new Gold).

However we do need to make use of nanomaterials to address a number of pressing issues caused by rising populations and declining resources unless we all want to go back to the Dark Ages, and this is where I think the opportunities lie, and perhaps this time it won’t be just large chemical producers who can take advantage.

If we look at most of our current crop of ‘sustainable’ technologies, from hybrid vehicles to wind turbines and solar arrays they are rubbish. There is absolutely no comparison with the elegance of nature’s solutions, almost all of which are built from the bottom up and which I often refer to as ‘materials by design’, a subject of eternal debate with my nanoclastic colleague Dexter Johnson. We need to start thinking seriously about how we can use our new found control over the properties of materials to address resource issues, create clean water and of course double food production in the next forty years, not producing tons of stuff that no one will ever want just because we can.

Prophets, priests, scientists and environmentalists have been gleefully predicting the end of the world for several millennia but it wont happen. One of the reasons that the human species has been so successful has been our ability to adapt to changing environments, enabling us, like viruses, to colonise almost every part of the planet, and make use of every available resource.

But there is a problem – we have made use of every available resource, and while some, like silicon make up 25.7% of the Earth’s crust by weight and are to all intents and purposes inexhaustible, many others such as indium are not. The problem is compounded by many of the scarcer elements being a small cog in a large wheel, so while materials such as aluminium, steel and many plastics can and are recycled, recovering the small amounts of indium from broken touch screens is neither feasible or cost effective.

So what can we do with increasingly scarce resources? The problems with elements, as opposed to compounds, is that as fundamental building blocks we cannot create more material, and nor is there an abundant source of material containing the elements in question. If we need hydrogen or oxygen they can be simply made from water, but there are few abundant compounds containing rare earths. As a result we need to find a new solution, and quickly.

Download Sustainable Technologies For The Next Decade (1.5Mb)

According to JP Morgan, flying to 21186 miles to Melbourne and back for a clean tech conference generated 5.63 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but unlike most conferences on this subject the hot air emissions were negligible.

The Sir Mark Oliphant Cleantech: Mainstream and at the Edge conference was refreshing for the positive outlook on cleantech rather than the self flagellation that usually goes along with this kind of event. While there were a few graphs showing frightening population statistics, with dire predictions of resource and energy use, they were mostly used to illustrate how a combination of human ingenuity and technology could be used to solve problems. None of the speakers even suggested smashing the corrupt capitalist system as happens so often at green events.

Megatrends

From my perspective, as hopefully a purveyor or at least enabler of technology based sustainability, the advantage of this kind of event is to see what the real drivers are, the market for the technology, and then try to find the science and engineering to solve the problem. This probably explains my rapt attention to talks like Stefan Hajkowicz’s excellent overview of Megatrends (the full report is available here), which looked at the “trends, patterns of economic, social or environmental activity that will change the way people live and the science and technology products they demand.”

I wasn’t too happy about the use of data from a rather flawed WEF risk report which identified nanotechnology as a risk on a par with an asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, oil and gas price spikes, extreme climate change related weather, pandemic, biodiversity loss and terrorism. We seem to keep finding echoes of the grey goo fears of ten years ago in these kind of documents, something for the science communication experts to ponder.

Also fascinating was Ellen Sandell’s talk on her work with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, a mobilisation of 50,000 young people who just couldn’t wait for Copenhagen, Davos or Canberra to reach an agreement, or for the Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace to stop politicking and decided to get things moving themselves.

So given that we know what to expect, and we have no lack of youthful enthusiasm to push us along, there’s no real excuse not to act.  We should be demanding of our politicians that we develop new technologies not new taxes, and that we use our scientific knowledge of the natural world to make it a better place.

The news gets even better, as many of the speakers mentioned, in that you can make the world a better place and make money.

No worries!

The Sir Mark Olifant Cleantech conference has been a lot of fun so far, from Eric Isaac’s opening overview of the the issues (and solutions) to Stefan Hajkowicz’s analysis of megatrends that will shape our future technology development.

I’m still struck by how much cleantech seems to be focused in a few rather obvious areas, something which effectively prices a lot of technologies out of the market, and the excessive valuations thus generated tend to make it almost impossible to get a return for most investors. Sometimes meeting the problem head on isn’t the best strategy, and it is better to wait until a problem has been cracked and then capitalise on the myriad opportunities that spin out – as with mobile phones you don’t have to invent the device to make money from it.

My focus is more on how nanotechnology, by its nature is more akin to what nature does. As Eric Isaacs mentioned this morning, we are almost at the stage where we can create materials by design, or in his his words ‘we can almost taste it’ – something that opens up a whole new world of sustainable everything.

A preview of my presentation is available here – with the caveat that it works better if you hear me tell the story behind it!

I have always been sceptical about investing in solar companies on the basis that the market is artificially distorted by government subsidises which can work with you, or against you.

Germany’s Sunfilm which manufactures amorphous silicon modules (a-Si), has today filed for insolvency claiming its business plans have been crippled by Germany’s plans to sharply reduce its solar feed-in tariff by July 1st.

A golden rule is to treat government subsidises as a bonus rather than an income stream, then you can keep the doors open when they evaporate.

Regular readers will know all about the saga of Oxonica, the small university spin out that managed an IPO and then spent the following few years bogged down in legal battles while losing 95% of its value before finally delisting and scattering its executives to the four winds – presumably before they were ripped limb from limb by irate shareholders.

Yesterdays announcement that the only bit of the company that ever looked like making any money – before a dispute about royalties erupted – has been sold to the company that they spent two years and several million pounds fighting is particularly ironic.

There’s a tale of hubris, greed and huge egos behind this, and one that will no doubt emerge in time.

The company that most have pointed to as the UKs leading nanotechnology company, Oxonica, finds itself in the news again this week after losing the second round of its court battle with Neuftec, and becomes the latest company to find itself in difficulties after being saddled with a  huge legal bill.

Well, companies go bust all the time, and it is usually confined to the courts and the financial press, so it was surprising to se how personal this fight had become, with the dispute migrating from the Court of Appeal to the Daily Mail!

Where do we go from here, to the House of Lords and the News of the World?

Our old friends Oxonica are looking for a new CEO and are making a number of other redundancies as well.

Having developed product offerings in all of its businesses, Oxonica is now focusing on partnering the Group’s businesses to secure profitable platforms for growth. In 2008, Oxonica’s Diagnostics business was partnered with BD and the Company is currently in partnering discussions for its remaining three businesses. The structure and value of the resulting partnerships will be announced on completion of the negotiations.

An interesting statement which could be read as the code for flogging off all remaining assets and hoping to get a few quid from licence fees and royalties but not attempting any further business development, something the company describes as a “sustainable, relatively low?-?risk business model”

The New York Times seems to be going to town with Geoengineering with an article Pressing the Case for Geoengineering yesterday and a column on Building a Better Biosphere? today.

Yesterdays article illustrates the worries that the eco lobby have over engineering solutions for climate change, and I recently heard the same line from Greenpeace.

Francelino Grando, a senior government official from Brazil, worried that geoengineering might be seen as a solution instead of a stop-gap. “It may give people the impression that we don’t have to worry about climate change because we can solve it through engineering,” he said. “But the only real answer is that we have to fundamentally change the pattern of energy use.”

Oliver Morton’s column today takes a slightly different look at the issue, looking at methods of engineering the biosphere to capture carbon or alter energy flows. The rationale is as follows:

Humans have had great success in increasing the amount of food plants can yield, the amount of fiber than can be spun from them and the number of pretty colors in which they can flower, but so far have not really turned their minds to the problem of simply making them eat and store as much carbon as possible. If that effort were made, significant improvements might result.

Cue horror from the Green lobby. Not only is there a suggestion that we can carry on as normal but also that we can use geoengineering, biotechnology and synthetic biology to clean up the mess afterwards.

Of course it is hard to get this past the green lobby in most governments and despite the US Chief Science advisor raising the subject “Mr. Holdren later clarified that the White House was not strongly considering pursuing geoengineering as a policy.”

So if we accept that getting Geoengineering on the agenda in the US and Europe may be tricky, the idea seems much more attractive from a Chinese perspective, and that is the problem. If the technology can be shown to work, it will be deployed, perhaps locally at first, and then globally.

China has already been experimenting with cloud seeding for a long time, and if Western governments refuse to even look at the issue then they risk losing control over it.

A number of people asked about the possibility of re-recording the podcast of the talk I gave at Green Futures at the weekend as the quality is a bit patchy. It’s something I have been meaning to do for some time, as I can talk several orders of magnitude faster than I can type. I should also point out that this was a talk given to an audience with no knowledge of (or prior interest in) nanotechnologies so the more sophisticated among you may already know most of this.

Here’s my first attempt, not word for word but using the same notes so it may be the same thing in a slightly different order, so now you can do something more useful while listening to my mellifluous tones with a bit of added hiss. If I do this again I promise to buy a proper microphone!