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.

Or rather everyone involved in nanotech is beating a path to Russia and their new high tech cluster at Skolkovo.

Not letting the grass grow under feet after splashing out a billion dollars on deals for Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) from Crocus Technology and $700 million on organic electronics with Plastic Logic,  to coincide with the St Petersburg International Economic Forum RusNano have been having a busy few days.

Announced so far this month are

• $15m into SiTime for MEMS based timing chips
• An investment in the $100 million Asia Pacific Nanotechnology Fund along with the Singaporean Economic Development Board (EDB) and Singapore-based investment group 360ip, the South Korean Economy Ministry’s Institute for the Advancement of Technology (KIAT), the St. Petersburg municipality and South Korea’s Samho Green Investment Venture Capital
• A joint venture with Alcoa for a pilot manufacturing line for nanocoatings and production of advanced cables designed to address the issue of icing and breakage of power transmission lines because of bad weather conditions
• An investment in South Korean ultracapacitor maker Nesscap Energy
• An investment in Polar Quartz to create “a vertically integrated production complex for quartz micro- and nanopowder and ultrapure quartz concentrate” although some think the project is doomed
• Another in Terwingo who produce high tensile strength sawing wire for solar and microelectronics applications
• Yet another in Lafarge, a Russian cement company for “the development of innovative and sustainable construction materials”
• A project to crreate an RFID driven “store of the future”
• And even an online shop for nanotech solutions

Lots of risky stuff in there. but all with the long term aim of developing Russian high tech industry. Perhaps the only way to replicate the Silicon Valley model is to wave lost of cash around? Maybe that is why this happens in Russia while Britain can just about afford a roundabout.

Now, just wait until you see what the Chinese are planning!

The first part of any legal document is concerned with defining the terms used, what do terms such as ‘the company’ or  ’the client’ refer to for example. Most of these issues are fairly straightforward, but when you get to the level of international legislation defining terms becomes rather more complex, as the European Commission is just finding out.

After many years  of the slow but inexorable march towards the regulation of nanomaterials, the European Commission is now trying to understand what a nanomaterial actually is, and has launched a consultation process ”to collect stakeholders’ views on the envisaged definition.” According to the Commission

The definition of the term “nanomaterial” should be based on available scientific knowledge and should be used for regulatory purposes. The definition should determine when a material should be considered as a nanomaterial for legislative and policy purposes in the European Union.

The problem comes from the previous standard definition of a nanomaterial having particles in the size range 1-100nm. Anyone who has worked with nanomaterials will know that in many cases there is a wide range of particle sizes present, some of which may be above 100nm or even below 1nm and the situation becomes even more complex when you start working with compounds and agglomerations.  The EU seems to be moving towards a definition involving both size distribution and surface area:

The opinion “Scientific basis for the definition of the term ‘Nanomaterial’” was adopted for public consultation on 6 July 20106. SCENIHR concluded that size is universally applicable to nanomaterials and is a key element to a definition. A defined size range would facilitate a uniform interpretation. The lower limit was proposed at 1 nm. An upper limit of 100 nm is commonly used by general consensus but there is no scientific evidence to qualify the appropriateness of this value. The use of a single upper limit value might be too limiting for the classification of nanomaterials and a differentiated approach might be more appropriate. For regulatory purposes, the number size distribution should also be considered using the mean size and its standard deviation to refine the definition. In addition the SCENIHR identifies certain specific cases where the application of the definition can be facilitated by using the volume specific surface area as proxy for the internal or surface structure.

Defining a nanomaterial at this stage may seem rather silly to some, after all they have been around for 15 years in their man made form, but when you consider the implications of regulation, whether restricting the use of nanomaterials, or requiring labelling for cosmetics, the stakes are high and an accurate definition is needed to remove another layer of uncertainty surrounding their use.

Reading reports of government plans for the regulation of nanotechnology sometimes feels like being on death row. The outcome is inevitable, and all you can do is hope that it will be short and painless. The European Commission has been debating regulations for the best part of a decade,and now apparently has been given a deadline of 2011 by the European Parliament to “properly regulate nanotechnology.”

Plastics & Rubber Weekly reports that the Belgian Environment Minister, Paul Magnette proposed five elements that should be included in nanotechnology legislation, including

• A register of nanomaterials used within the EU is established, so regulators can trace the origin of any nanoparticles to their source if they cause health or environmental problems.
• Manufacturers and retailers inform consumers of the presence of nanomaterials in their products
• Regulations provide for risk evaluation and management of nanomaterials at an EU level
• Member states also draft integrated national strategies for nanotechnology risk management, information dissemination and monitoring
• Claims made on labels of products containing nanomaterials are controlled

As with any legislation the devil will be in the detail, and that will determine whether the result is to shift all production of basic nanomaterials out of the EU or simply create a lot of meaningless labels that consumers won’t understand. Unfortunately, that plays into the hands of pressure groups who managed to influence public opinion against all forms of GMOs based on some rather dodgy science, and leaves companies using nanomaterials between a rock and hard place. Do they add a (nano) suffix to ingredients and risk a consumer backlash, or do they simply fudge the definition – many commonly used materials contain quite a range of particle sizes, and so adjusting to the mean size to 100.001nm could easily sidestep any EU legislation.

But the bottom line is that anyone involved in nanomaterials would like the politicians to make their minds up about regulation. Many companies are unwilling to spend large sums on developing technologies and products they may be outlawed or perceived differently by consumers as a result of pending legislation. The sooner that rules are in place the easier it will be to justify developing nanomaterial based products.

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.

Something was troubling me as I drove home from yesterdays Nanotechnology Innovations for High Performance Motorsport 2010 meeting, and it took me until this morning to put my finger on the niggle.

While we often criticise those who over hype nanotechnology, trillion dollar markets, space elevators, curing cancer etc, many scientists are perhaps guilty of being over pragmatic about nanotech, and provide a similar, if rather smaller disservice to the field. OK, I know that is impossible to find the right balance, ever, and we wouldn’t expect organisations like the National Physical Laboratory to over hype anything,but I wondered how many of the motorsport industry delegates, just having had their first encounter with nanotechnology, went home feeling that it wasn’t an area which they needed to look at again.

Perhaps it is just the nature of any emerging technology to be both over and undersold by various communities, but for any group encountering a technology for the first time, we have to find a bit of sizzle to keep the their interest.

Today’s announcement by the UK Science Minister David Willets that it is  “most unlikely” that the UKs 24 nanotech centres would still be open in 18 months comes as no surprise to anyone who has visited them.

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.

Michael Berger at Nanowerk has a look at the the new EU Communication Roadmap and wonders what is is for. I had a similar issue when we were involved with the Nanoforum project years ago, and pulled out when

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.

Some poor science (or at least poor science reporting) from Denmark where Otto Melchior Poulsen of the National Research Centre for the Working Environment (NFA) claims that “We can, on a scientific basis, draw a parallel between the nano boom and the asbestos scandal.”

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.

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.