NanoSecure: NanoSecure is an FP6 Integrated Project for small and medium enterprises (IP-SME) harnessing nanotechnologies in sensing and catalytic materials to provide instantaneous and integrated detoxification<br />
of airborne substances.
J. P. Appruzese and his colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory noted in their presentation at ICOPS that several experiments with pinching machines had achieved ion energies above 10-20 keV, with the highest being the 200 keV previously reported from the big Z-machine at Sandia National Laboratory. Appruzese also mentioned LPP’s results with the DPF as a further example. He pointed out that such high ion energies could be used for fusion with advanced fuels—in his example, D-He3.
Appruzese suggested that these high ion energies might be caused by turbulent heating. Such heating of the ions occurs when frictional forces within plasmas get large enough to disrupt the smooth flow of the plasma, leading to energy dissipation and heating, just as turbulence in ordinary fluids heat them up.
LPP’s initial analysis of this suggestion seems to indicate that it does not explain our higher-than-expected ion energies with deuterium gas. Turbulent heating increase rapidly with increasing atomic charge on the nucleus, so may be significant for pB11, but does not seem to be quite enough for deuterium, which has only a single charge on its nucleus. However, the idea is an interesting one and this process should be included in our future analyses.
Our assessment, from discussions with other researches at ICOPS, is that the reporting of high ion energies in other experiments has given considerable credibility to our own results.
In addition to these specific results, we had extensive talks with many other researchers in the DPF field. We strengthened our ties with the team working on the Polish DPF, PF-1000, still the world’s most powerful DPF. A young researcher at Imperial College offered to analyze some of our neutron data with his new algorithm that can provide more information about ion energy distribution. We also had some preliminary talks with researchers from Voss Scientific about a possible joint grant application to the National Science Foundation for work on DPF simulation techniques. Overall, we felt that our participation at ICOPS, which included our whole research team as well as our visitors from Kansas Sate University, greatly benefited our Focus Fusion project. We can’t overstate the importance of collaboration within the world-wide DPF community to the success of our efforts.
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics recently presented the results of their latest dense plasma focus experiments at the International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS).
The results include ion temperatures of 20-70 keV, record high fusion yield for a given current, and good agreement of the experiments with theory.
The theoretical model predicts that, in the range of peak currents explored so far by FF-1, ion temperatures will increase linearly with current, plasmoid density will scale as the square of current and plasmoid lifetime will scale linearly with current. Since fusion reaction rates go up as the square of the density and approximately the square of the temperature—in this temperature range—the model implies yield scales as current to the seventh power. That is exactly the scaling observed so far, and the absolute number of fusion reactions is just as predicted.
However, not all the results fit theory completely. For three of the four shots where the data is best, the ion energies were well above the predicted value—50-70 keV instead of the predicted value around 20 keV. On the other hand, the value of n^2V—the density squared times the volume—was about ten times less than predicted. So these plasmoids are hotter and either less dense or smaller than predicted. It is expected that newly functioning instruments will help sort this question out in the near future.
Another promising development is that other researchers at ICOPS reported high ion temperatures with pinch-type machines and this has added credibility to LPP’s claims. The highest being 200 keV previously reported from the big Z-machine at Sandia National Laboratory.
The predictions and the bet is for the uranium production of the country of Kazakhstan.
So not just Kazatomprom, although that is most of the production.
Again we use the World Nuclear Association numbers of uranium production when reported.
Brian Wang Dittmar Midpoint
2010 16500 tons 15000 tons 15750 tons
2011 18000 t or more 17,999.9 tons or less 18000 tons
Nanowerk describes a recent advance toward the “e-nose” by an international team of researchers. Team member Andrei Kolmakov explains:
Our approach demonstrates the potential of combining bottom-up nanowire fabrication protocols with state-of-the art microfabrication methods to design prospective simple sensing arrays which, in principle, might be scaled down to the size of few micrometers and thus become the smallest analytical instrument…
Time for open source sensing! I’ll be speaking on this Friday at the Open Science Summit which starts tomorrow. Attend in person or watch the webcast. Hope to see you there. (Image: Dr. Kolmakov, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale) —Christine Peterson
We’ve received an update on work by our friend Anirban Bandyopadhyay at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan. Here’s the abstract of his recent Nature Physics paper:
Modern computers operate at enormous speeds—capable of executing in excess of 1013 instructions per second—but their sequential approach to processing, by which logical operations are performed one after another, has remained unchanged since the 1950s. In contrast, although individual neurons of the human brain fire at around just 103times per second, the simultaneous collective action of millions of neurons enables them to complete certain tasks more efficiently than even the fastest supercomputer. Here we demonstrate an assembly of molecular switches that simultaneously interact to perform a variety of computational tasks including conventional digital logic, calculating Voronoi diagrams, and simulating natural phenomena such as heat diffusion and cancer growth. As well as representing a conceptual shift from serial-processing with static architectures, our parallel, dynamically reconfigurable approach could provide a means to solve otherwise intractable computational problems.
He explains:
…we have realized 700 bits parallel processing using cellular automaton for the first time in the world. This is a significant advancement from our 16 bit parallel processing which you highlighted in your website (http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=2687)…This invention may be in coherence with the Feynman’s vision…We can solve some problems which computers will take more than the age of this universe. We did it in 6-10 minutes (in the Nature Physics paper).
Some coverage:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36788441/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/
http://www.natureasia.com/asia-materials/highlight.php?id=708&utm_source=NPG+Asia+Materials&utm_content=Research+Highlights
Anirban writes, “Hope you may like this.” We do indeed! —Christine Peterson
The UK’s Minister for Science and Higher Education, David Willetts, made his first official speech about science at the RI on 9 July 2010. What everyone is desperate to know is how big a cut the science budget will take. Willetts can’t answer this yet, but the background position isn’t good. We know that the budget of his department – Business, Innovation and Skills – will be cut by somewhere between 25%-33%. Science accounts for about 15% of this budget, with Universities accounting for another 29% (not counting the cost of student loans and grants, which accounts for another 27%). So, there’s not going to be a lot of room to protect spending on science and on research in Universities.
Having said this, this is a very interesting speech, in that Willetts takes some very clear positions on a number of issues related to science and innovation and their relationship to society, some of which are rather different from views in government before. I met Willetts earlier in the year, and then he said a couple of things then that struck me. He said that there was nothing in science policy that couldn’t be illuminated by looking at history. He mentioned in particular “The Shock of the Old”, by David Edgerton (which I’ve previously discussed here), and I noticed that at the RS meeting after the election he referred very approvingly to David Landes’s book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations”. More personally, he referred with pride to his own family origins as Birmingham craftsmen, and he clearly knows the story of the Lunar Society well. His own academic background is as a social scientist, so it would be to be expected that he’d have some well-developed views about science and society. Here’s how I gloss the relevant parts of his speech.
More broadly, as society becomes more diverse and cultural traditions increasingly fractured, I see the scientific way of thinking – empiricism – becoming more and more important for binding us together. Increasingly, we have to abide by John Rawls’s standard for public reason – justifying a particular position by arguments that people from different moral or political backgrounds can accept. And coalition, I believe, is good for government and for science, given the premium now attached to reason and evidence.
The American political philosopher John Rawls was very concerned about how, in a pluralistic society, one could agree on a common set of moral norms. He rejected the idea that you could construct morality on entirely scientific grounds, as consequentialist ethical systems like utilitarianism try to, instead looking for a principles based morality; but he recognised that this was problematic in a society where Catholics, Methodists, Atheists and Muslims all had their different sets of principles. Hence the idea of trying to find moral principles that everyone in society can agree on, even though the grounds on which they approve of these principles may differ from group to group. In a coalition uniting parties including people as different as Evan Harris and Philippa Stroud one can see why Willetts might want to call in Rawls for help.
The connection to science is an interesting one, that draws on a particular reading of the development of the empirical tradition. According, for example, to Schaffer and Shapin (in their book “Leviathan and the Air Pump”) one of the main aims of the Royal Society in its early days was to develop a way of talking about philosophy – based on experiment and empiricism, rather than doctrine – that didn’t evoke the clashing religious ideologies that had been the cause of the bloody religious wars of the seventeenth century. According to this view (championed by Robert Boyle), in experimental philosophy one should refrain entirely from talking about contentious issues like religion, restricting oneself entirely to discussion of what one measures in experiments that are open to be observed and reproduced by anyone.
You might say that science is doing so well in the public sphere that the greatest risks it faces are complacency and arrogance. Crude reductionism puts people off.
I wonder if he’s thinking of the current breed of scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins?
Scientists can morph from admired public luminaries into public enemies, as debates over nuclear power and GM made clear. And yet I remain optimistic here too. The UK Research Councils had the foresight to hold a public dialogue about ramifications of synthetic biology ahead of Craig Venter developing the first cell controlled by synthetic DNA. This dialogue showed that there is conditional public support for synthetic biology. There is great enthusiasm for the possibilities associated with this field, but also fears about controlling it and the potential for misuse; there are concerns about impacts on health and the environment. We would do well to remember this comment from a participant: “Why do they want to do it? … Is it because they will be the first person to do it? Is it because they just can’t wait? What are they going to gain from it? … [T]he fact that you can take something that’s natural and produce fuel, great – but what is the bad side of it? What else is it going to do?” Synthetic biology must not go the way of GM. It must retain public trust. That means understanding that fellow citizens have their worries and concerns which cannot just be dismissed.
This is a significant passage which seems to accept two important features of some current thinking about public engagement with science. Firstly, that it should be “upstream” – addressing areas of science, like synthetic biology, for which concrete applications have yet to emerge, and indeed in advance of signficant scientific breakthroughs like Venter’s “synthetic cell”. Secondly, it accepts that the engagement should be two-way, that the concerns of the public may well be legitimate and should be taken seriously, and that these concerns go beyond simple calculations of risk.
The other significant aspect of Willetts’s speech was a wholesale rejection of the “linear model” of science and innovation, but this needs another post to discuss in detail.
I’ve taken part in panel discussions at two events with a strong Science and Technology Studies flavour in the last couple of months. “Democratising Futures” was a meeting under the auspices of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, at Cambridge on 27 May 2010. The Science and Democracy Network’s meeting was held in association with the Royal Society at the Kavli Centre on the 29 June 2010. What follows is a composite of the sorts of things I said at the two meetings.
“There is no alternative” is a phrase with a particular resonance in British politics, but it also expresses a way of thinking about the progress of science and technology. To many people, science and technology represent an autonomous force, driven forward by its own internal logic. In this view, the progress of science and technology cannot effectively steered, much less restrained. I think this view is both wrong and pernicious.
The reality is that there are very many places in which decisions and choices are made about the directions of science and technology. These include the implicit decisions made by the (international) scientific community, as a result of which the fashionable and timely topics of the day acquire momentum, much more explicit choices made by funding agencies in what areas they attach funding priority to, as well as preferences expressed by a variety of actors in the private sector, whether those are the beliefs that inform investment decisions by venture capitalists or the strategic decisions made by multinational companies. It’s obvious that these decisions are not always informed by perfect information and rationality – they will blend informed but necessarily fallible judgements about how the future might unfold with sectional interests, and will be underpinned by ideology.
To take an example which I don’t think is untypical, in the funding body I know best, the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), priorities are set by a mixture of top-down and bottom-up pressures. The bottom-up aspect comes from the proposals the council receives, from individual scientists, to pursue those lines of research that they think are interesting. From the top, though, comes increasing pressure from government to prioritise research in line with their broad strategies.
In setting a strategic framework, EPSRC distinguishes between the technical opportunities that the current state of science offers, and the demands of “users” of research in industry and research. Advice on the former typically comes from practising scientists, who alone have the expertise to know what is possible. This advice won’t be completely objective, of course – it will be subject to the whims of academic fashion and a certain incumbency bias in favour of established, well-developed fields. The industrial scientists who provide advice will of course have a direct interest in science that benefits their own industries and their own companies. Policy demands supporting science that can be translated into the marketplace, but this needs to be balanced against a reluctance to subsidise the private sector directly. Even accepting the desirability of supporting science that can be taken to market quickly, there is also an incumbency bias here too. Given that this advice necessarily comes from people representing established concerns, who is going to promote the truly disruptive industries?
So, given these routes by which scientists and industry representatives have explicit mechanisms for influencing the agenda and priorities for publicly funded science, the big outstanding question is how the rest of the population can have some influence. Of course, research councils are aware of the broader societal contexts that surround the research they fund; and the scientists and industry people providing advice will be asked to incorporate these broader issues in their thinking. The danger is that these people are not well equipped to make some judgements. In a phrase of Arie Rip, it’s likely that they will be using “folk social science” – a set of preconceptions and prejudices, unsupported by evidence, about what the wider population thinks about science and technology (one very common example of this in the UK is the proposition that one can gauge probable public reactions to science by reading the Daily Mail).
It might be argued that the proper way for wider societal and ethical issues to be incorporated in scientific priority setting is through the usual apparatus of representative democracy – in the UK system, through Ministers who are responsible to Parliament. This fails in practise for both institutional and practical reasons. There is a formal principle in the UK known as the Haldane principle (like much else in the UK this is probably an invented tradition), which states that science should be governed at one remove from government, with decisions being left to scientists. The funding bodies – the research councils – are not direct subsidiaries of their parent government department, but are free-standing agencies. This doesn’t stop them from being given a strong strategic steer, both through informal and formal routes, but they generally resist taking direct orders from the Minister. But there are more general reasons why science resists democratic oversight through traditional mechanisms – it is at once too big and too little an issue. The long timescales of science and the convoluted routes by which it impacts on everyday life; the poor understanding of science on the part of elected politicians; the lack of immediate feedback from the electorate in the politicians’ postbags – all these factors contribute to science not having a high political profile, despite the deep and fundamental impacts it has on the way people live.
Here, then, is the potential role of public engagement – it should form a key input into identifying what potential goals of science and technology might have broad societal support. It was in recognition of these sorts of issues that EPSRC introduced a Societal Issues Panel into its advisory structure – this a high-level strategic advice panel on a par with the Technical Opportunities Panel and the User Panel.
Another development in the way people are thinking about scientific priority setting makes these issues even more pointed – this is the growing popularity across the world of the idea of the “Grand Challenge” as a way of organising science. Here, we have an explicit link being made between scientific priorities and societal goals – which leads directly to the question “whose goals?”
Grand Challenges provide a way of contextualising research that goes beyond a rather sterile dichotomy between “applied” and “blue sky” research – it supports work that has some goal in mind, but a goal that is more distant than the typical object of applied research, and is often on a larger scale. The “challenge” or context is typically based on some larger societal goal, rather than on a question arising from a scientific discipline. This might be a global problem, such as the need to develop a low carbon energy infrastructure or ensure food security for a growing population, or something that is more local to a particular country or group of countries, such as the problems of ageing populations in the UK and other developed countries. The definition in terms of a societal goal necessarily implies that the work needs to be cross-disciplinary in character, and there is growing recognition in principle of the importance of social sciences.
An example of the way in which public engagement could help steer such a grand challenge programme was given by the EPSRC’s recent Grand Challenge in Nanotechnology for Medicine and Healthcare. Here, a public engagement exercise was designed with the explicit intention of using what emerged as an input, together with expert advice from academic scientists, clinicians and industry representatives, into a decision about how to shape the priorities of the programme.
I’ve written in more detail about this process elsewhere. Here, it’s worth stressing what made this programme particularly suitable for this approach. The proposed research was framed explicitly as a search for technological responses to societal issues, so it was easy to argue that public attitudes and priorities were an important factor to consider. The area is also strongly interdisciplinary; this makes the traditional approaches of relying solely on expert advice less effective. Very few, if any, individual scientists have expertise that crosses the range of disciplines that is necessary to operate in the field of nanomedicine, so technical advice needs to integrate the contributions of people expert in areas as different as colloid chemistry and neuroscience, for example.
The outcome of the public engagement provided rich insights that in some cases surprised the expert advisors. These insights included both specific commentaries on the proposed areas of research that were being considered (such as the use of nanotechnology enabled surfaces to control pathogens) and a more general filter – the idea that a key issue in deciding people’s response to a proposed technology was the degree to which it gave or took away control and empowerment from the individual. Of course, people were concerned about issues of risk and regulation, but the form of the engagement was such that much broader questions than the simple question “is it safe” were discussed.
I believe that this public engagement was very successful, because it concerned a rather concrete and tightly defined technology area, it was explicitly linked to a pending funding decision, and there was complete clarity about how it would contribute, together with more conventional consultations, to that decision – that is, what kind of applications of nanotechnology to medicine and healthcare a forthcoming funding call would prioritise. Of course, there are still many open questions about using public engagement more widely in this sort of priority setting.
The first issue is the question of scope – at what level does one ask the question? For example, in the area of energy research, one could ask, should we have a programme of energy research, and if so how big? Or, taking the answer to that question as given, one could ask whether research in biofuels should form a part of the energy programme? Or one could ask what kind of biofuel should we prioritise. My experience from a variety of public engagement exercises in the area of nanotechnology is that the more specific the question, the easier it is for people to engage with the process. But the criticism of focusing public engagement down in this way is that one can be accused, by focusing on the details, of taking the answers to the big questions as read.
But the big questions are fundamentally questions of politics in its proper sense. They are questions about what sort of world we want to live in and what kinds of lives we want to lead. The inescapable conclusion, for me, is that the explicit linkage of science and this kind of politics – the politics of big questions about society’s future – is both inevitable and desirable.
Many scientists will instinctively recoil from this this enmeshing of science and politics. I think this is a mistake. It is less controversial to say we need more science in politics – since so many of the big issues we face have a scientific dimension, most people agree that decisions on these issues need to be informed by science. But we also need to recognise that we need more explicit recognition of the political dimensions of science – because the science we do has such potential to shape the way our society will change, we need positive visions of those changes to steer the way science develops. So, we need more science in politics, and more politics in science. And, when it comes to it, we probably need more politics in politics too.
In addition to these more fundamental questions, there are some very practical linked issues related to the scale of the engagement exercises one does, their methodological robustness, and their cost. Social scientists can contribute a great deal to understanding how to make them as reliable as possible, but I believe that a certain pragmatism is called for when one considers their inevitable methodological shortcomings – they need to be seen as one input into a decision making process that already falls short of perfection. This is inevitable; it is expensive in money and time to do these exercises properly. The UK research councils seem to have settled down to an informal understanding that they will do one or two of these exercises a year on topics that seem to the be most potentially controversial. Following the nanomedicine dialogue, there have been recently completed exercises on synthetic biology and geo-engineering. But we will see how strong the will is to continue in this way in an environment with much less money around.
In addition to practical difficulties, there are people who oppose in principle any use of public engagement in setting scientific priorities. One can identify perhaps three classes of objections. The first will come from those scientists who oppose any infringement of the sovereignty of the “independent republic of science”. The second can be heard from some politicians, who regard the use of direct public engagement as an infringement of the principles of representative democracy. The third will come from free market purists, who will insist that the market provides the route by which informal, non-scientific knowledge is incorporated in decisions about how technology is developed. I don’t think any of these objections is tenable, but that’s the subject for a much longer discussion.
Based on their analyses, the authors conclude"product name, company, product category, country of origin, availability (is the product available for purchase), countries where the product may be available, what elemental type of nanotechnology was employed or constituted in the product (e. g., carbon, gold, silver, iron, etc.), distribution channel, whether the source link was functional (source link is a term used by the CPI to indicate reference and it was often redundant with the product website), whether the product website was functional, whether it utilized nanotechnology (determined against claims from the website or source site), and if it was included on EC21 ..., a business to business (B2B) product listing website."
Click here for a PDF of the full article.
"that the CPI is not wholly reliable, and does not have sufficient validity to justify its prominence as evidence for claims associated with the pervasiveness of nanotechnology on the U.S. and global markets. In addition, we caution researchers to approach the CPI with care and due consideration because using the CPI as a rhetorical flourish to amplify concerns about market intrusions seems unjustified."
And there may be more of a fertile ground for Mooney's recommendations than he implies in his last point. While the AAAS/Pew survey cited in Mooney's piece suggests that scientists are weary of getting caught up in the often heated public discourse surrounding scientific controversies, more systematic survey data from Europe, Asia and the U.S. show that this is not true for many of the leading scientists in fields, such as nanotechnology or stem cell research. A number of colleagues and I detailed these findings in a piece in The Scientist last year:"Experts aren't wrong in thinking that Americans don't know much about science, but given how little they themselves often know about the public, they should be careful not to throw stones. Rather than simply crusading against ignorance, the defenders of science should also work closely with social scientists and specialists in public opinion to determine how to defuse controversies by addressing their fundamental causes.
They might, in the process, find a few pleasant surprises. For one thing, the public doesn't seem to disdain scientists, as scientists often suppose. A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that Americans tend to have positive views of the scientific community; it's scientists who are wary of the media and the public."
"What looks like a widespread anti-media sentiment [in the AAAS data] may also have been triggered, at least in part, by question wording. The AAAS survey did not ask respondents if they agreed or disagreed that news media oversimplified findings but, rather, how much of a problem respondents thought it was that they did. Our surveys of biomedical and nanotechnology experts instead asked scientists to express their agreement or disagreement with various statements about the quality of media coverage of their scientific field.
When asked in this more balanced way, 54% of the nano scientists disagreed "somewhat" or "strongly" that media coverage was "hostile toward science." In fact, when asked about the scientific accuracy of coverage, nano scientists were split, with 27% believing that it was inaccurate, 28% believing it was accurate, and about 45% falling in the neutral middle category. Similarly, 49%of biomedical researchers disagreed that media coverage was "hostile toward science," while only 12% agreed. Their assessments of accuracy were similarly split: 33% believed that coverage of their field was inaccurate, 35% believed it was accurate and 32% were undecided."
The "education" campaign also dusts off FoE's 2007 Consumer Guide for Avoiding Sun Screens and various other reports from a few years back.“What many beachgoers and others enjoying the summer sun don’t know is that the sunscreens they’re using contain manufactured nanoparticles that pose health risks,” said Friends of the Earth’s health and environment campaigner, Ian Illuminato. “What more and more studies are showing is that manufactured nanoparticles may be able to damage cells and have harmful health repurcussions. They also pose risks to workers and the environment, and there’s no evidence that they make sunscreens more effective at blocking the sun’s harmful rays.”
"New technologies are changing our world fast, as is obvious to anyone using the latest smart phone, wearing the latest nano-fiber fabric, or filling a prescription for the latest biotech-derived medicine. Now the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) wants to hear from you about how the Federal government can best use its resources so three of the newest and most promising technologies provide the greatest economic benefits to society.
This information-gathering process is being coordinated by the President’s Innovation and Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), part of the PCAST. Through PCAST, PITAC advises the President on matters involving science, technology, and innovation policy. As part of its advisory activities, PITAC is soliciting information and ideas from stakeholders—including the research community, the private sector, universities, national laboratories, State and local governments, foundations, and nonprofit organizations—regarding a technological congruence that we have been calling the “Golden Triangle.”Each side of the Golden Triangle represents one of three areas of research that together are transforming the technology landscape today: information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Information technology (IT) encompasses all technologies used to create, exchange, store, mine, analyze, and evaluate data in its multiple forms. Biotechnology uses the basic components of life (such as cells and DNA) to create new products and new manufacturing methods. Nanotechnology is the science of manipulating and characterizing matter at the atomic and molecular levels. Each of these research fields has the potential to enable a wealth of innovative advances in medicine, energy production, national security, agriculture, aerospace, manufacturing, and sustainable environments—advances that can in turn help create jobs, increase the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), and enhance quality of life. In combination, through what some have called the nano-bio-info convergence, the potential for these fields to transform society is even greater.
PITAC is interested in gaining a better understanding of how the Federal government can enhance this potential, and would like to gather public information and input as to how to best do so. It is posing the following question:What are the critical infrastructures that only government can help provide that are needed to enable creation of new biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology products and innovations that will lead to new jobs and greater GDP?We’d like to hear your thoughts regarding unique opportunities at the intersections of these fields; where the basic research is taking us and what knowledge gaps remain; impediments to commercialization and broad use of these technologies; infrastructure required to properly test, prototype, scale, and manufacture breakthrough technologies; where the Federal government should invest and focus; and what Federal policies or programs relating to these technologies are in need of review and whether new programs or policies may be needed in light of recent and anticipated advances in these fields.
There are two ways you can share your thoughts on this topic. First, you can go to the OpenPCAST website, where you can contribute your ideas on this and a few related questions. Second, you can be part of a live Webcast discussion scheduled to take place on Tuesday, June 22 from 10 am to 2:30 pm. You can watch the Webcast on the PCAST website and submit your comments via Facebook or Twitter. See the PCAST site for more details.
The information we gather from these activities will guide PCAST/PITAC as we recommend policies and programs relevant to the Golden Triangle of technologies, and as we continue our work to propose ways to implement the President’s “Strategy for American Innovation.” It will also help us identify studies that might be conducted as part of PCAST/PITAC’s “Creating New Jobs through Science, Technology, and Innovation” initiative.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Shirley Ann Jackson and Eric Schmidt are members of PCAST"
A new anti-reflective coating developed by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute could help to overcome two major hurdles blocking the progress and wider use of solar power. The nanoengineered coating boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels and allows those panels to absorb the entire spectrum of sunlight from any angle, regardless of the sun's position in the sky.
An untreated silicon solar cell only absorbs 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable.
After a silicon surface was treated with Lin's new nanoengineered reflective coating, however, the material absorbed 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested. This huge gain in absorption was consistent across the entire spectrum of sunlight, from UV to visible light and infrared, and moves solar power a significant step forward toward economic viability.
Planet Nanotechnology is here to provide the latest ideas on nanotechnology subjects. Whatever you want to find out, it is here, as we collect the daily summaries of different weblogs that are specialized on this topic. Read our content today and whenever you come back to our site, you will be pleasantly surprised to find out new things and new blogs! The authors are all experienced and very interested in nanotechnology subjects, so finding the info that you need is simple and fast!
Updated on July 29, 2010 03:09 PM UTC. Entries are normalised to UTC time.
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