Some pictures from Taiwan Nano 2011 – including the now inevitable nanotech toilet!

My delight at seeing a sensible piece about “nanotechnology in everyday life” by Colin Stuart (@skyponderer) published in the Guardian Newspaper turned to puzzlement when I noticed that the article was “Paid for by NanoChannels.”

As the unfortunately named Nanochannels is a project funded by the European Union (i.e. taxpayers), albeit run from Israel, it seems a bit odd that the only way that it can disseminate information is by paying The Guardian to publish it. The project seems to have been roundly criticised from all sides, not bad for something only a few months old, and doesn’t even have a project web site. The objectives are laudable

• informs and communicates with stakeholders and the European lay public using a mix of media, web, and live channels about innovations and controversial issues associated with nanotechnologies;
• facilitates and encourages stakeholders and the public to participate in dialogues and debates concerning innovations, applications, risks and ethical, legal and societal aspects of NT;
• brings the European public a step further towards the negotiation of a responsible consensus and building social trust concerning NT issues.

but the execution seems to consist of a multilingual survey and commissioning a  few newspaper articles. Quite bizarre.

The New Year begins with some good news, that Nanosight has sold its 250th instrument and become profitable, which also illustrates how hard it is to get a company profitable outside the small world of social networking.

Getting the Nanosight instrument to  market required balancing the competing interests of the scientists, the engineers and the management, which is not always an easy task in the early stages of any company. Nanosight were fortunate in having a top flight scientist, Bob Carr on board, and we had a vastly experienced Chairman, John Knowles, who navigated various minefields of intellectual property and investors with aplomb.

As the product was nearing completion, a great CEO, Jeremy Warren, found us, and it was that combination of science, vision and execution that got the instrument to market and the company to profitability. As with all great companies, success is more about the people than the technology.

To get to grips with nanotechnology, you need to start with this!

I always count myself lucky that I have never had a standard job. From my first job with VG Ionex testing and tweaking a wide variety of ion guns (but try getting one through an airport without saying ‘gun!’) to my current bipolar technology/fashion enterprises I’ve rarely done the same thing two days in a row. So far this week I’ve been sorting through fashion photographs as a result of a recent fashion shoot, had an email conversation with a scientist/entrepreneur so well known and respected that even I felt humbled, and spent a morning discussing issues facing aviation and mass tourism with a senior figure from a FTSE 100 quoted travel firm.

What has this got to do with nanotechnology and other emerging technologies? Quite a lot as it turns out.

A key part of what we have done at Cientifica over the past ten years has been to make accurate predictions bout the direction technology will take, and between myself and ‘The Nanoclast‘ we’ve done a pretty good job or predicting the future while avoiding the worst of the pitfalls.One of the reasons for this is that we haven’t limited ourselves to technology, but spend a huge amount of time getting to grips with the issues facing a wide range of industries, as well as global macroeconomic trends, all of which help us make better decisions on what technologies our clients should back, or steer well clear of.

A typical example of how technology predictions can be totally wrong is in the aerospace industry. For almost ten years a variety of pundits have been claiming that the use of nanotube based composites can make aircraft lighter and more fuel efficient, but it just hasn’t happened. The reason is (at least) twofold, driven by two different factors, the supply chain and regulation.

A problem faced by a a number of emerging technologies is the lack of supply chain maturity. For a material to be considered usable most industries a prerequisite would be to have three or four financially stable producers with decent quality control in place so that the same material is guaranteed every time, whether a few grammes or tonnes. A cluster of start ups and students working part time won’t impress Airbus Industrie or Boeing.

Qualification of materials to comply with regulation is something I spent years on at the European Space Agency. The problem is that you can’t just slap any old material into a satellite or airframe and hope it works – the consequences of failure are far too high to consider risking. So all new materials have to go through extensive testing before they can be flown, and this takes time and money. Boeings switch to composites for the 787 is already years behind schedule, and compared with the kind of materials becoming available now the 787 construction is not particularly advanced. The best data recorder for satellites was magnetic tape well into the 90′s for the same reason, a stray proton flipping a call in a solid state memory could wipe out an entire mission, but even tape jams could be fixed with a bit of jiggling about.

So, if you want to really understand nanotechnology, and do something useful with it, you have to spend as much time hanging around coffee houses and hotel bars as you do in the lab, and get through the Economist, Spectator and visit a gallery or museum every week just to put it all in context.

Variety may be the spice of life, but its just as important to nanotechnology.

I spent some time in the ever fascinating city of Geneva this week for some meetings with the World Economic Forum where, as always, we are trying to figure out what to do about the world right now while trying to understand how the future will look – hopefully better than the present is the short answer!

One of the problems with predicting the future is that it is very easy to be horribly wrong. Predictions tend to fall into two camps, the incremental and the disruptive. The incremental view is that everything will continue along the current path while getting marginally better.  Following this path mobile phones were predicted to gradually shrink in size until they could be worn as wristwatches, but no one foresaw either the iPod/iPhone or text messaging.

On the disruptive side predictions involve huge shifts and changes, with for example manufacturing being replaced with nanotech and biotech, or, as every investor gets told by every entrepreneur, new products emerge which blow away all competition and disrupt the entire market.

While the first approach shows a lack of imagination, the second perhaps indicates a rather over active imagination, and the true path of the future lies somewhere in between – but not, I should caution, at some midway point.

This becomes important when I work with organisations on corporate technology strategies – how to keep an eye on the future and an option on potential disruptive technologies while maintaining growth in the current business and of course being able to respond to emerging opportunities? For many corporate people, the constraints of their organisation means that while they really do understand their business and markets inside out, they often end up either overspecialised, or over sensitive to internal business drivers that cause the bigger picture, and with it sometimes the bigger opportunities to be missed.

This became apparent when discussing the issues facing the chemical industry. Many resources are in increasingly short supply, and this may be political, such as rare earths, or structural, such as most metal ores where all the high quality ore has long been mined out. While there is a lot of discussion about how to manage resources, one of my major themes recently has been whether we can replace them?

This becomes crucial when you look at our dependence on resources. Lithium, for example, is a very abundant element, but only in a few areas such as Bolivia and Chile does it occur in sufficiently high concentrations to make the mining and processing of it for the lithium ion batteries that power the world economic. It only takes a bit of political instability or an earthquake to bring the world to a very sudden halt, as we saw with oil process in the 1970’s.

Nanotechnology and industrial biotechnology both have huge potential for replacing scarce resources, in the case of biofuels by moving to a second generation where the feedstock doesn’t require the replacement of food crops (or rainforest) with fuel crops, and in nanotechnology by creating entirely new materials. But in both cases, this is something we have to start doing now, rather than waiting for a crisis and expecting to be able to respond quickly enough.

So why were we discussing issues like this with the World Economic Forum? Simple, we’re in a bit of a mess at the moment, and with an extra 3 billion people on the way, all requiring food, land, houses, cars, healthcare, phones, laptops, energy and jobs we have a good idea what the problems will be. What we have to do now is start to imagine how we can stave off the worst effects of this huge and mounting pressure on resources without triggering waves of migration and war.

While the World Economic Forum is trying to create a Global Risk Response Mechanism, I argue that we need to create a system that will allow is to be proactive about risks. While technology cannot mitigate the effects of another banking crisis, and may indeed have contributed to it, we can make some large steps forward in addressing resources, health and climate change.

While accurately predicting the future is difficult, one of the biggest risks that we face, and one with implications far larger than the credit crunch, is not being ready for the future. In an increasing number of businesses and organisations that I work with are getting that message, but the real question is whether governments and policy makers will listen?

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.

One of the biggest problems facing nanoscience is moving from pottering around in a lab doing something fascinating to translational research, i.e. taking that process or material and moving it in the direction of something that may be of use to someone for reasons other than writing publications. In the early days of nanotech, with investors fired up be the ‘new industrial revolution’ and mixing up nanoscience with the more far flung ideas about nanobots and terrforming Mars, starting up companies to cash in on the coming boom was relatively easy.

In 2010, given the current economic climate, it is much harder to raise any funding, and almost impossible to winkle scientists out of a lab job into the risky world of start up companies. As a result, much of the potential of nanotech risks either going unexploited for a while, or getting transferred only into large well funded companies, which is a shame.

There are ways around this, and Taiwan’s ITRI has just launched a Global Nano Innovation Contest to try to

• Develop nanotechnology prototyping capability for practical applications with universal appeal.
• Emphasize higher, system-level integration of prototypes, to spur the creation of a wider diversity of high-value nanotechnology applications.
• Establish an international platform promoting collaboration on nanotechnology.

The top prize is US$15,000, and full details are here.

One word of caution, I’m one of the judges!

What's In Your Underwear?

I bet you were expecting these to be stain resistant too, but the key application of nanotech underwear is medical sensing according to Business Week.

The tight elastic waistband of underwear “has tight contact and direct exposure with the skin and it allows for direct sweat monitoring via the chemical-sensing electrodes. And it seems elastic is a hardy textile. Engineers at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering discovered that even after aggressive testing by stretching, folding and pulling, the chemical sensors printed on the elastic still retained their sensing ability and could detect hydrogen peroxide and NADH — two compounds that sensors in “smart’ systems will need to recognize.”

According to Professor Joseph Wang, from the Department of NanoEngineering at the University of California,

If, for example, an injured soldier went into shock, enzymes on the electrode would sense rising levels of the biomarkers lactate, glucose and norepinephrine. This would cause the concentrations of products generated by the enzymes to change — higher hydrogen peroxide, lower norepi-quinone, higher NADH and lower NAD+. This would cause the built-in logic structure to output the signal “1,0,1,0″ which indicates shock and could trigger a pre-determined treatment response.

The obvious problem seems to be how to transmit the data back to base without constantly bathing ones reproductive parts in microwave radiation, and of course keeping any medical supplies fresh in what is a notoriously warm and humid part of the anatomy.

Still, it should make an interesting and amusing change after sitting though years of conference speakers demonstrating the stain resistant properties of nanotech textiles using a glass of red wine (and sometimes ruining a carpet in the process).

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.

As I head towards Doha where through the World Economic Forum I will be continuing the battle to encourage governments and policy makers to be proactive about technology rather than reactive, Andrew Maynard’s excellent posting on the kerfuffle over using ‘nano’ dispersants to clear up oil is more grist to the mill.

I often despair when policy on environment and health issues seems to be made without any recourse to science, whether on MMR vaccines, GMO’s or the Louisiana clean up. For a background on the alleged dangerous nanotech you can take a look at Andrews blog. But the big issue here is a ridiculous system which often results in us to be unable to make use of technology.

Making wise choices on the dispersants used in the Gulf of Mexico is vitally important, and bad choices could have lasting consequences.  And it is right and proper that questions should be asked over the use of one product over another.  But if the spill is to be dealt with effectively, these choices must be science-informed – otherwise no-ones interests are served in the long run.

The real question I’ll be looking at in Doha is much longer are we going to have to wade through obfuscation from all sides while the planet dies?

Gold for Good

I first came across the World Gold Council back in 2002 at a nanotechnology conference in Ireland. While most gold goes into jewellery, and doesn’t require too much marketing, a growing amount goes into high technology applications, everything from microelectronics to drug delivery.

Today we can publish the fruits of our recent collaboration with the World Gold Council, a white paper called “Gold for Good” which looks at the history of gold and nanotechnology.

One of the most fascinating parts of working on this publication was the realisation that gold nanoparticles have been used for several millennia, from the Romans to Michael Faraday, but it is only recently that we have been able to understand why they have the properties that they do, which has led to a host of other applications.

While the World Gold Council is often seen as a marketing organisation, they do actually invest in companies making use of gold – for example Nanostellar who use gold nanoparticles in catalysts to reduce diesel emissions.

Good for Gold!

The UK’s House of Lords is to publish its long awaited report on “Nanotechnologies and Food” this week, but it’s all top secret until a minute past midnight on Friday. We’re curious to see whether the report contains some of oft quoted but wildly inaccurate numbers and/or calls for the usual ‘further public consultation’ or indeed whether there are any actionable conclusions at all, something sadly lacking in UK government science and technology publications of late.

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.

Luna's Trimetaspheres

Arrowhead Research announced today that it had sold off the IP of one of its subsidiaries, Tego, to Luna Innovations in exchange for $430,000 less legal and transaction fees in exchange for a cut of any proceeds. Luna of course have been looking at buckyballs for improved MRI contrast agents – careful here! it’s a tricky subject –  for quite a while using the wonderfully named trimetaspheres.

The basic idea is great. You can take a nasty toxic substance such as gadolinium that happens to show up very well in MRI scans, and encase it in a fullerene cage so that all the patients body sees is carbon. However as with much to do with fullerenes, producing anything that works at a cost that is even vaguely competitive tends to be far tougher that originally envisaged.

So what we are seeing is an ongoing migration of various bits of nanotech IP towards companies that can turn them into a useful application. This particular bit of IP came from Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc whose plans for global domination included hoovering up every bit of carbon related IP they could fund and worrying what to do with it later.

The European Union is to make the labelling of nanomaterials in cosmetics mandatory according to Chemistry World.

The cosmetic regulation states that all ingredients present in the product in the form of nanomaterials should be clearly indicated in the list of ingredients, by inserting the word ‘nano’ in brackets after the ingredient listing. The ruling defines nanomaterial as ‘an insoluble or biopersistant and intentionally manufactured material with one or more external dimensions, or an internal structure, on the scale from 1 to 100 nm’.

As always, the devil is in the details and the detail in question is the definition. While one of the advantages of nanotechnology is that it allows you to control very tightly the size range of the particles that you are creating, top down technologies such as milling and grinding tend to produce particles with a wide range of different sizes, and while the mean size may be above 100nm, that does not mean that there will not be any sub 100 nm particles present. I suppose the definition of ‘intentionally manufactured’ is also open to question.

I have seen a number of ads recently for ‘chemical free’ cosmetics – which once again depends on whether you class tea tree oil and water as chemicals or not, and nanoparticle free cosmetics are a similar oxymoron. Depending on the production method used, the mean particle size could have to be as large as gravel in order to be even 99% nanoparticle free.

Germany has adopted the EU proposals with the caveat that

the general mention on labels of nano-scale materials in cosmetic products using the term “nano” might be misunderstood by consumers as a warning.’

While labelling may assuage some of the regulatory concerns, will the average consumer would be any more concerned with labelling the nanoparticle containing ingredients than they are with currently permissible constituents. Grabbing a bottle at random from my wife’s dresser I find a long list of ingredients such as Methyl Glucech-20, PEG-12 Dimethicone, and Polyquaternium-4, and I can’t really see that putting Hydroxyethyl cellulose dimethyl diallylammonium chloride copolymer (nano), or (C₈H₁₆N)_x^.xCl^.(C₂H₆O₂)_x (nano) would make much difference compared with the power of the cosmetic company’s marketing machine.

And that’s before I get into another debate with a polymer chemist about whether or not polymers are nanotech!

I almost found myself agreeing with our neighbours (across the road from Foxbat) at the Ecologist, which gave me a bit of a shock.

The article in question concerned antimicrobials, and nanosilver in particular, and I have to admit that I’m more likely to be encouraging my kids to eat earthworms than to spraying them with antibacterial agents. As the old adage goes, you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die, and with good reason.

But we also have to ask, yet again: why have we become so frightened of ‘germs’ that we feel the need to go to ever more extreme measures to vanquish them? Are there really people out there so terrified of their washing machine becoming a festering mass of life threatening germs that they feel the need to invest in a nanosilver coated machine? And if there are, wouldn’t an investment in cognitive behavioral therapy be money better spent?

Well said, but then the article is spoiled at the last by the usual mindless invocation of the precautionary principle – which for some reason applies to nanotechnology but doesn’t apply to more obviously foolhardy and downright suicidal activities such as cycling to work in Spitalfields.