I was lucky to have been involved in the set up of several of the centres, and while there is some great work going on, one has to agree with the opinion that most of them are simply too small to do anything useful, but the problem was always one of politics rather than one of science.

Unlike France,where a decision was made to create an innovation cluster in Grenoble, the UK nanotech strategy was always at the mercy of the various regional development agencies (RDAs), so instead of  three or four large and well funded facilities, which is what you would expect in the country the size of the UK, we ended up with a patchwork of poorly funded centres, under capitalised with no clear vision other than to put a tick in a box for a RDA official. That’s why the UK plastic electronics centre is in a former pit village in County Durham rather than the outskirts of Cambridge.

As such the strategy was always doomed to failure, and we made this quite clear at the time, but it gives me no pleasure to have been proved right.

But its not all bad news. Some centres, such as the one at Cambridge was very successful in leveraging industrial funding from companies such as Nokia, while some in the North East have had strong regional support and made it to critical mass.

For many of the other centres, closure will be no huge loss to the UK economy, or to British science. One which shall remain nameless still has only half a dozen mainly administrative staff, no clear agenda and no prospect of future funding.

In the end, successful nanotech centres will be able to attract additional funding, those simply relying on government hand outs won’t. It’s time that the UK Government admitted that it got the strategy horribly wrong, and ensure that the lessons of the UK nanotech debacle are learnt.

"This nanotech industry is dead" - No it's not, it's just resting!

The best barometer of the health of the economy is often taxi drivers, but if you want to know the health of the UK Nanotechnology ‘Industry’ an event in London this month probably tells you all you need to know.

This exciting FREE one-day event is targeted at senior representatives from: companies involved in nanotechnology; or looking to develop new high tech products; regulators and other interested parties. This seminar will help you understand the challenges facing commercialisation. The day will cover all aspects of commercialisation from innovation, to regulation and other requirements for success of nanotechnology in the UK.

The problem is that the conference program has plenty of finger wagging about challenges, REACH, health and safety, insurance and consumer resistance but the organisers seem to have failed to find that elusive success story, or indeed anything innovative at all.

The best they could come up with is a ‘speaker tbc’ from Intrinsiq (formerly QinetiQ) Materials who have spent the last ten years valiantly trying to commercialise nanomaterials long beyond the point where any sane company would have given it up as a bad job.

One often suspects that there are more people paid to worry about nanotechnology in the UK than there are actually doing it.

An MEP attempts to inhale some carbon nanotubes

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are an odd and under worked bunch. In order to fill their time they built a second parliament building in Brussels and spend every fourth week shuttling between Brussels and Strasbourg while submitting expense claims.

The Devil makes work for idle hands, and according to Chemistry World the latest scheme from Brussels is to require labelling of any electronic device containing nanomaterials (all of them!). Oh, and while they are at it, how about banning nanosilver and multiwall nanotubes “in electrical and electronic products” for good measure?

It’s a bizarre and badly thought out proposal, and as Chemistry World points out

It remains unclear precisely what the MEPs deem to be nanomaterials. If they follow the definition used in the Novel Foods directive, then it would mean any material engineered or manufactured to be of the order of 100nm in at least one dimension. This, however, would lead to every electronic product requiring labelling…The sense behind banning long multiwalled carbon nanotubes is more apparent; for example, there is some evidence that they may behave like asbestos when inhaled. But even then, the nanotubes have to be free for inhalation, which would not be the case if they were bound up in an electrical product.

But who knows how MEPs think. Do they think that computers work as a result of large crystal bowls filled with carbon nanotubes being left in draughty places, or is inhaling finely ground iPhones through a rolled up €500 note all the rage in the toilets of the European Parliament?

It seems to be a clear case of make laws first, worry about the facts later.

1. No one involved in it could explain why they were doing it or explain
2. why the EU taxpayers were being billed to try to put other EU taxpayers who were trying to make a living from European nanotech information out of business) and
3. a project officer admitted it was pointless rubbish but refused to kill it and
4. I simply couldn’t stomach the idea of producing meaningless irrelevant drivel and having my name associated with it.

That aside, it does raise the issue of the barrage of documentation where roadmap after roadmap is produced with no reference to the preceding version and with no attempt to measure progress, something a number of people have been grumbling about. As Berger notes:

In case of the EC, if this roadmap fails (which would require to have someone check in a few years time how it has done) nobody will be blamed or even fired. A new group, or the same group, of bureaucrats will then spend a few million euros in taxpayer money to conduct surveys and workshops and seminars and just write a new one.

It’s not just an European Commission problem,  the UK has got so good at this that one speaker from a government department at a conference last week boasted that the UK is a world leader in talking about health and safety aspects of nanotechnologies.

Talking about risk and communication is obviously less hazardous than doing anything, but blowing the entire budget on paperwork is not a particularly brilliant long term plan!

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.

The scientific basis seems to be “that test animals used for research in his institute on carbon nanotubes got pleural cancer, a disease many workers exposed to asbestos also caught.” The report doesn’t go into any more details, such as whether they were short or long nanotubes or what dose of nanotubes was administered to the animals so we are firmly in Daily Mail territory here.

No one is suggesting that nanomaterials should be squirted around willy-nilly, but putting out this sort of story seems designed to scare rather than inform. Some of the reports that claim to ‘prove’ the dangers of nanotubes have used such huge doses that the animals would have suffocated anyway, and I once met a US scientist who claimed to have data that nanotubes (once more of uncertain type) made rats live for up to 50% longer.

As with all toxicology we are gradually building up a body of knowledge which can be used to reduce risks, but as I often find myself explaining, nanotechnology is rather different to asbestos or even plastics.  It’s a set of technologies that was developed when we had both the tools to see what what we were producing, and a huge amount of data about the safety (or otherwise) of materials produced in the twentieth century.

Here’s the difference between nanotubes and asbestos. Pay attention now, it is important.

When the first nanotubes were examined under an electron microscope, researchers wondered if they could cause similar health problems to asbestos fibres. When asbestos was first being used we didn’t have electron microscopes and people thought that radiation and cigarettes were good for you. As a result asbestos was used everywhere, whereas carbon nanotubes are tightly monitored.

The ash cloud heads south east....

While the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland is bad news for some people, it is actually quite interesting from an emerging technologies point of view, and bordering on fascinating if, like me, you somehow managed to shoehorn a big chunk of geology and geomorphology into you education (It’s a frightening thought, but I could have ended up as a geographer!) as well as spending time working at the European Space Agency.

One of the more frequently proposed geoengineering solutions to climate change is to eject large amounts of aerosols into the upper atmosphere which then cut down the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo and the twenty million tons of sulphur dioxide it blasted into the stratosphere was thought to have caused a global cooling of half a degree centigrade, more than offsetting human induced climate change.

One of the key arguments against geoengineering is that we don’t know what the effects would be – and it is also a good idea to know how much the earth is warming by and what is causing it before you start to try to reverse it – but in this case we are learning fast, and collecting huge amounts of data from dozens of earth observation satellites, many of which were launched in response to concerns about climate change and designed specifically to measure it.  So this particular eruption may be the one which helps us make that (hopefully) rational and evidence backed decision to use geoengineering should if ever become necessary.

While Eyjafjallajokull is estimated to be spewing ten thousand times less sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere than Pinatubo, the highly sophisticated earth observation satellites launched since Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption means that we are far better placed to study the effects of the eruption, both on the planet as a whole, and as a result of the particular composition of material ejected.

Ash sweeps across Europe, as seen from Envisat

This animation from the European Space Agency shows both the spread of the cloud, and its concentrations of sulphur dioxide, and ESA already has a project named Globvolcano which will “define, implement and validate information services to support volcanological observatories in their daily work by integration of Earth Observation data, with emphasis on observation and early warning.”

The other interesting bit of science we can do this week is investigate the effect of aircraft vapour trails. The water vapour emitted by jet engines has a similar effect to high altitude cud, reducing the amount if radiation reaching the earth during the day and acting as an insulating layer during the night. Work carried outwhen all aircraft were grounded in the US after the September 11th attacks concluded that “Sept. 11-14, 2001, had the biggest diurnal temperature range of any three-day period in the past 30 years.” As with all science, taking a single data point doesn’t prove anything, so having another crack at it might help us understand the effect of aircraft on the climate.

All in all, it’s pretty exciting stuff, and armed with half a dozen earth observation satellites like Envisat bristling with spectrometers there is the opportunity to do some great science.

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.

"En Route To The Nanotech Debate"

It’s always odd how nanotechnology gets blamed for a lot of the world’s ills

A common accusation is that nanotech will lead to a loss of privacy, although this is surely more due to the proliferation of databases and processing power to enable facial or car number plate recognition. It is ironic that some of the most vocal protesters use Facebook & Twitter.

Chemistry World has been reporting on the protests at French nanotechnology debates, which seem to have degenerated into attempts to disrupt any public engagement. Perhaps they are mindful of the UK engagement exercises, which usually ended up with the general public being generally in favour of nanotechnology, or perhaps just carrying on an old French tradition of angry mobs of peasants/farmers/students smashing things up. But it raises wider questions about the understanding of the consequences of technology, both good and bad.

GMO’s are a case in point, and a perfect example of how, despite having the technology to address some of the worlds major problems with food production and nutrition, the fear of someone making any money out of just one aspect of the technology has condemned millions to a rather more dismal existence then they may have had. While opposition to GMOs has been softening of late, many other emerging technologies from geoengineering to synthetic biology are facing similar hype driven backlashes.

The nightmare scenario is that we have the ability to address, solve or mitigate a major problem, but that a decision has already been made not to use that technology. Synthetic biology may, for instance, be able to provide some shortcuts to the production of sustainable fuels and vaccines for H1N1 and other flu variants, but what if it winds up like GMOs and is unable to be used?

Can anything be done about it? Perhaps. Information and education are the key. Pitchfork wielding mobs descending on universities, or its modern French equivalent doesn’t get us very far, and as usual it comes down to information , as Mark Twain noted in 1869

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

The same is true for most single issue groups, whether anti capitalist, environmental or even pro business!

All technologies have pros and cons, but the trick is to manage them in such a way that you encourage the positive aspects while keeping tight rein over any potential downside. There is nothing new here, we have been doing it with drugs for decades.

I have to question why we go through this process again and again and again, with each report calling for the same things and nothing ever changing. We need to establish a few ground rules if UK nanotechnology is ever going to break out of it’s post Oxonica rut:

1. Stop calling for more government money to be spent on stuff, it is as effective as wring a letter to Santa Claus. Unless you have been living in a cave (or an ivory tower) for the past year you will know that the UK government doesn’t have any, and the little it has left will go on ring fencing politically significant projects such as the National Health Service.  Forking over huge sums to an ‘industry’ that has been characterised by hype followed by spectacular crashes simply isn’t going to happen, no matter how many reports get written.
2. Stop calling for The Government to do something – in this case “assisting the banking and insurance companies in understanding nanotechnology to enable sound investments to be made.” The Government won’t exist after May, and until then no one will have much interest in nanotechnology compared to saving their careers. If you want the Government to do something useful, ask them to make sure that a business and innovation friendly climate exists.
3. Stop expecting anyone to do take any action as a result of educating and informing people about nanotechnology. No banker or investor is interested in being educated about nanotechnology, but we all love good business ideas.
4. Get out of the ghetto. The UK nanotechnology industry only exists in the mind of people who produce reports like this. Creating an artificial entity just so that targets can be set and measured is pointless and there are far more effective ways of measuring the impact of a technology on an economy.
5. Make the best use of existing resources – we have a variety of nanotech facilities already up and running (although I’m still not quite sure Nanoforce is supposed to do, something with the creative industries?) so it should be possible to  leverage entrepreneurial expertise and external cash to make sure that these can create the economic impact that was undoubtedly promised in their initial funding applications.

Anyway, here’s their version….

POLICY AND REGULATION

1. Nanotechnology innovation and exploitation is business driven.The department responsible for leading and coordinating nanotechnology activities across Government should be the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to ensure investment provides added value for the UK.

2. TheTechnology Strategy Board must implement its NanoscaleTechnologies Strategy with specific funded calls to deliver commercialisation of value adding nanotechnology based products.

3. Government should address the need for responsible development of all emerging technologies, including nanotechnologies, by putting in place a framework through which product risk assessments can be carried out alongside industry’s need to focus on innovation.

4. Defra, other Government Departments, relevant KTNs and trade associations should engage with industry to ensure the effective operation of a simplified Voluntary Reporting Scheme in the UK for nanomaterials and to work with EU regulators to ensure ongoing REACh regulations take account of nanotechnology fully and effectively.

SKILLS

1. Develop world class professional education programmes at all levels covering all aspects of nanotechnology.

2. Improve and promote vocational training in nanotechnology from technician level to develop individuals with the skills and expertise to support commercialisation of nanotechnology in the UK.

FUNDING

1. Provide more accessible and commercially focussed funding for SMEs as well as larger companies engaged in the development of nanotechnology based products to support innovation in the UK.

2. Invest in key establishments and organisations to build world class capability in nanotechnology product development.

3. Provide funding for cross-sectoral initiatives to apply developments achieved in one sector to other sectors and applications.

4. Continue to invest in standardisation activities to maintain UK leadership in creating international standards for nanotechnology and National Measurement System facilities.

5. Continue to support knowledge transfer activities to deliver innovation in nanotechnology and pull through academic research into commercial applications.

ENGAGEMENT

1. Ensure that the general public is informed of product developments based on nanotechnology.

2. Industry and Government should engage in an evidence based dialogue with the Unions and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs).

3. Provide support for two-way international collaboration to gather and share information on nanotechnology.

4. Government and industry should assist banking and insurance companies in understanding nanotechnology to enable sound investments to be made.

“The success of nanotechnology should be industry-led, and we are proposing that BIS takes responsibility for co-ordinating nanotech in other government departments, academia and industry,” Barry Park, Nanotechnology KTN manager for manufacturing and processing, said at an event in London on Thursday.

I can’t tell whether this is calling for industry or Government to lead things. Is the KTN confused or just the reporter? The report also claims that

the sector is highly fragmented, with few large companies and many SMEs. In addition, there is supply chain complexity, and it is difficult to transfer intellectual property from academia to industry.

As I noted yesterday, I think they may be barking up the wrong tree.

The report found that UK investment in nanotechnology was low. Per capita public funding was $1.96 (£1.20) in 2008, compared with $5.06 for the US and $6.07 for Germany.

As we all know, getting reliable funding numbers is very tricky, and the recent devaluation of the pound against the Euro will have distorted numbers by 20-30%, but it does seem from this that the UK is losing its way in nanotechnology.

Perhaps a more reliable indicator of progress would be the number of new companies turning up, but unfortunately every UK Nanotech event seems to draw the same crowd. Some of them are great companies and good friends, but it does seem to qualitatively indicate a degree of stagnation, at least among what would be classed as ‘nanotech companies.’

This mirrors, to a large extent, the picture worldwide. The last few years have seen a shift from nanotechnology being used as a reason to found a company to it becoming just another piece of the toolkit. As a result the number of companies calling themselves ‘nano’ has not really increased even as the penetration of the technology has.

Getting rid of the obsession with a ‘nanotechnology industry’ would help get a real sense of the impact of nanotechnologies.

Reports from some of the folks interviewed  suggest that the committee wasn’t the stereotypical bunch of old buffers put out to grass and that there was some real knowledge involved. You can see the evidence given here, and a bit about how the UK Government views nanotechnology and food here.

While the format may have changed, the mission hasn’t, and we still hope that we provide not just a source of information but also an enjoyable read.

Happy New Year!

TNT Weekly

Week 2, 2001.

The Trends in Nanotechnology (TNT) newsletter provides links and introductions to articles and press releases that have appeared on the web in the last week on the subject of nanotechnology.  It is widely believed that in the near future nanotechnology will spawn a variety of world-changing industries, leveraging developments in a broad range of scientific disciplines, from the biological sciences, through chemistry and classical and quantum physics.

The editorial team that compiles this newsletter consists of leaders from the scientific & business communities. A key advantage of our editorial team is the ability to cut through the nanotechnology hype. As such, we will occasionally bring you some of that hype (and our critique) to assist in the learning process for those who need it.

Our mission is twofold:

- to inform researchers in all disciplines relevant to nanotechnology, a field where, like no other in history, multidisciplinary collaborations will bear the greatest fruit

- to provide lay and business readers with access to the latest and most relevant information on research and existing and upcoming businesses poised to capitalise on the vast potential of nanotechnology

Given the diversity of these two groups, our focus is on providing a concise, readable, first-stop resource for busy people that will enable them to home in quickly on the latest news of interest to them. There may be dozens of (highly-technical) nanotechnology-related papers published each week in the various subscription-only academic journals. We do not attempt to comprehensively review these, looking instead for freely-available, not-too-technical reviews that will be accessible to the bulk of our readers. The more technical reader can always follow through to the original publication. We will make exceptions to this rule at times, where an article or an issue of a journal warrants, and hope to extend this service in the future.

Our brief commentary on links is intended to help the reader’s selection process (once they have come to trust our judgement). We hope it will also raise the occasional smile or two, and that you come to look forward to receiving our newsletter as not just a source of information but as an enjoyable read.

——————————————————————————————–

KEEPING MOORE’S LAW ALIVE

Berkeley Labs’ Science Beat brings us a report (http://enews.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/maskless-chips.html) of a project at that institution to develop commercially-applicable nanolithographic techniques using ion beams. Certainly the ability to dispense with the masks, resists and etching used with prevailing lithographic techniques seems appealing.

For the broader picture on miniaturisation in semiconductor technology using more traditional techniques, see the rather ponderous article in EETimes on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (http://www.eetimes.com/story/technology/OEG20001222S0013), or, also from EETimes (http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010105S0023), a comparison of progress in ultraviolet and electron beam lithographic approaches, that also includes some skepticism about the potential of maskless techniques.

Better, though, and covering the areas of both the EETimes links and more, is a fine article from Red Herring (http://www.redherring.com/insider/2000/1220/tech-mag-88-litho122000.html). This article has broad coverage, clear non-technical explanations of difficult issues and injects some humour too. It stops short of looking into the more exotic possibilities for going beyond the limits of lithographic techniques, e.g. using nanowires (as mentioned below), nanotubes (such as in the latest edition of Science; abstract at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/291/5501/97), or self-assembling molecular electronics (also mentioned below), but that would be a whole new article. Red Herring at its best.

Beyond lithographic techniques, there may be nanowires. The Financial Times briefly reports on a letter in the current issue of Nature on the assembly of doped nanowires into a variety of basic electronic elements (http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=010104001278). Several other recent papers on the production and manipulation of nanowires have pointed to the advantages of such over carbon nanotubes for basic nanoelectronics (but nanotubes have other interesting properties, such as high tensile strength or the ability to act as rheostats when rotated, that offer other possibilities). The summary of the letter in Nature is at http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v409/n6816/abs/409066a0_fs.html&filetype=&_UserReference=C0A804EE46B40E658A9C06C0A0653A57DC36.

A STEAK IN THE FUTURE?

The UK’s Guardian newspaper brings us a year-end look at the future of nanotechnology (courtesy of the Financial Times site – http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=001231000969) that offers just a few possibilities and ends with some of the wilder predictions of the potential of self-replicating nanomachines, this time not the dreaded grey goo but the even more implausible vision of nanobots picking vegetable matter apart atom by atom and rebuilding it into juicy steaks. Harrumph.

Part of the same Guardian ‘Science 2001′ special section is an article (http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=001231000968) that hardly mentions nanotechnology (and badly when it does) but we felt worth including because it’s tremendous fun, and because it does cover well the other of the great fears of Sun co-founder Bill Joy (nanotechnology being the first), as expressed in his now infamous Wired article. This other fear is hyper-intelligent computers taking over the world, which we actually find far more plausible than nanobot-assembled best brisket.

EVENTS

A two-day event to present Swiss micro- and nanotechnology research to UK companies is announced at http://www.itp.org.uk/swissbiomst/info.htm.

Announcement of a prestigious-looking event, The Mitsubishi International Fullerene Workshop 2001, can be found at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010104/az_fic.html.

LOOKING BACK AT Y2K

One we missed last week (no-one’s perfect), a review of 2000 in Chemical and Engineering News online (http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/7851/7851sci1.html). This sumptuous piece, with some nice pics (unfortunately not synchronised with the text in this web version), contains many items touching on the nanoworld. On the self-assembly front, check out the bit in the ‘Materials’ section on membranes containing actin (one of the two proteins that makes up the ratchet mechanism behind muscle contraction) and in the ‘Molecular Electronics’ section, on self-assembling microelectronic systems. There is also a ‘Nanomaterials’ section, predominantly on nanotubes, and a ‘Chemistry-physics Interface’ section that includes one of many uses of silicon cantilevers that have appeared in the last year. Rich pickings.

TROUBLES OUT EAST

The Yomiuri Shimbun/Daily Yomiuri seems fond of making recommendations on science and technology in Japan, and their article on the Kansai region’s declining economy (at the Financial Times site – http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=010104001721) is no exception. The region is home to prominent nanotechnology research groups.

The Evolution Of Control

Here’s a slide that anyone who has seen one of my presentations recently will be familiar with – illustrating the shift we are undergoing from using things that we find to producing the things that we need, something beautifully illustrated by the recent slough of news items about the ‘invention” of artificial arteries using nanotechnology.

Professor George Hamilton from the Royal Free Hospital in North-West London said, “The new graft pulses rhythmically to match the beat of the heart. The graft material is strong, flexible, resistant to blood clotting and doesn’t break down, which is a major breakthrough.”

The real breakthrough of course, is that we have been able to create something that works as well as the material that nature has been using for arteries!

Ten years ago nanotechnology was thought to be a technology that would enable us to cure all kinds of disease by creating tiny robots, or replacing natures creations with our own. In fact a great deal of time and effort went into producing large tomes fantasising about how we could replace our nervous and circulatory systems with various things that may be one day created if the laws of physics and chemistry could somehow be bent in a way that would allow them (as well as warp speed travel, teleportation, holodecks etc – you get the idea).

Fortunately the rest of the scientific community was focused on more practical issues, and the most exciting thing about nanotechnology is it’s ability to give us the precise control over the properties of materials that we have lacked for so long. For the past twenty thousand years we have been using things that we found int he environment, a rock and a stick for example as tools. We got a little more sophisticated when we realised that certain types of rock contained ores of metals, and developed bronze, iron and finally steel tools, but we were still adapting things that we happened to find.

Adding functionality to a bit of PTFE through control over the properties of materials

Synthetic chemistry and polymers moved us a few steps away from depending directly on things we stumbled upon in the natural world, but they have always been crude when compared to the creations of nature – bone is a favourite example of nature coming up with the prefect solution, something that is rigid without being brittle, and self repairing to a large extent.

But where we are heading now is that our combined knowledge of biology, chemistry, and physics is being applied at the nanoscale to create materials and devices that essentially mimic what nature has already created, but with the added element of control.As The Med Guru reports, the artificial artery is far from being just a bit of tubing, and our control over the nanoscale properties of the material, and our ability to reproduce this over larger areas, has enabled to device to have a number of different functions and it these in combination that makes this kind of breakthrough so important.

Study of controlling matter on an atomic and molecular scale coupled with use of nanotechnology enables the spikes to magnetize stem cells or ‘master cells’ from the blood.

“Once the stem cells are attracted to it, they cover the whole inside of it and turn into endothelial cells,” informs Professor Alexander Seifalian

That is the real technology revolution, the ability to specify the properties of an ideal material, and then create it.