Nanoclast

This month’s Spectrum Magazine has an article available online written by Edward H. Sargent that discusses his work at the University of Toronto in applying quantum dots to the field of optoelectronics. Specifically Sargent discusses the work his group has done in using quantum dots for photovoltaics, infrared sensors and infrared modulators.

While the application of photovoltaics for quantum dots leads off the article, it is in terms of chronology likely to be the last of these three that will see commercial development.

Sargent rightfully bemoans the current state of photovoltaics in which we either have high efficiency and a high price or low efficiency and a low price.As far as which way to go, cheap or efficient, I like one of the comments on this blog that suggested we follow the McDonald’s model: “Make 'em cheap, make 'em fast, make 'em consistent, and have 'em ready when I'm hungry.” (Thank you, David Alexander).

And that is more or less what Sargent offers us with his painted on quantum dots for making photovoltaics. Now, I don’t want to argue with someone like Professor Sargent on this issue, but when he ventures out into the economics of such devices he is depending on the information provided by others.

They have warned him that organic polymer photovoltaic cells will need to achieve at least a 10-percent efficiency if they are ever to take off commercially. This may be correct. Even this blog has trotted out various per kilowatt numbers as thresholds for commercial acceptance, but I’m beginning to feel a little tug in the back of my mind that it may not be about the numbers.

At any rate, I hope that Sargent is correct and the fundamental science research is at the point where we can start looking at the engineering for some of these optolectronic devices because the persistent refrain of “…in five to 10 years” will soon lead us into the time frame suggested by George Crabtree and Nathan Lewis for crystalline materials meeting the requirements of efficiency and cost for photovoltaics.

The Internet has been buzzing this week with the story of researchers in France developing a “hybrid nanoparticle-organic transistor that can mimic the main functionalities of a synapse.”

You may have seen a number of different versions of this story this week, but I recommend Nanowerk’s coverage of it, which I quoted above. Nanowerk manages to bring some context to the research and how nanotechnologies have been used to try and duplicate some of the functions of the human brain and apply them to computer science, most notably DARPA’s SyNAPSE project. 

In addition, Nanowerk has an interview with the lead researcher, Dominique Vuillaume, a research director at CNRS and head of the Molecular Nanostructures & Devices group at the Institute for Electronics Microelectronics and Nanotechnology (IEMN) that reveals it as a far more significant piece of research that I had originally thought when I read the first news accounts.

The researchers have dubbed their device NOMFET (Nanoparticle Organic Memory Field-Effect Transistor), and as the name indicates it is an organic transistor, based on pentacene and gold nanoparticles.

The details of how the transistor work as described in the Nanowerk article explains the ingenious way that the researchers were able to mimic the “short-term plasticity” of a synapse.

While this is a remarkable development it would not be quite as significant to the development of neuron-inspired computer systems if it were not for its big improvement on silicon-based CMOS chips in duplicating neural networks.

As quoted in the article, Vuillaume says “…even if silicon CMOS chips have been designed and fabricated to emulate the brain behaviors, this approach is limited because it takes several – at least seven – silicon transistors to build an electronic synapse. Here, we did the same job with a single device."

When one considers that there are 10,000 synapses for every neuron in the human brain, reducing size becomes increasingly important if your aim is duplicating the architecture of the human brain.

The quote in the above headline comes from a banner used by protestors recently in Marseilles, France. Apparently the protestors have been disrupting public engagement meetings throughout France over the last couple of months.

Once again the fears that lead to these types of outbursts have little to nothing to do with nanotechnology and instead revolve around distrust of big business and the supposedly complicit governments that support the immoral aims of business.

In coming to the defense of the protestors, the Friends of the Earth, who in the past have boycotted public engagement meetings on the assertion that the “primary purpose ((in this case) of the Australian Office of Nanotechnology) in this area is to promote uncritical public acceptance of nanotechnology,” have offered some new reasons to hate public engagement on the subject of nanotechnology.

This time the Friends of the Earth have claimed that the public dialogues are ignoring nanoparticle toxicity. Well, that’s surely problematic. I haven’t seen the agendas for these meetings but if that issue isn’t addressed, it certainly should be. But the next two issues really get to the heart of their concerns and the banner slogans. You see, nanotechnologies encroach on our private life and nanotechnology is somehow tied up with war.

This is not the first time I have noted this line of thinking, which to some extent has been fostered by organizations that may not have been entirely aware what the fallout might be from their musings.

But hold on a minute, nanotechnology has not compromised our privacy IT and telecommunication technologies have already taken most of it away already.

And war? Really? I can only guess that the Friends of the Earth’s concerns are informed by websites such as this. 

These protests and their justifications from the NGOs really do indicate how necessary these public engagements are because neither of them can distinguish between nanotechnology and science fiction, and as a result they link nanotechnology to their worst fears.

A recent story  on how Saudi Arabia plans to use solar energy to power its water desalination plants is short on details and just plain confusing in some places with sentences such as: “The new nanotechnology for using solar energy to operate desalination plants was developed by KACST in association with IBM.”

I suspect what is meant by the above sentence is that they intend to use photovoltaics somehow enabled by nanotechnology to power their desalination plants. Despite the rather awkward syntax, it is clear that Saudi Arabia is intent on using nanotechnology to both help them meet their energy needs and provide their fresh water.

Two of the most critical shortages mankind faces today are water and energy. Nano-enabled processes have demonstrated some promise in easing the water issue and nanotechnology and energy seems to be the proverbial carrot to relieve our dependence on fossil fuels. However, only a handful of companies have had any success in bringing these solutions to market.

With the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sitting on top of the largest easily accessible oil reserves in the world, it has been one of the only countries that could actually afford the enormous cost of water desalination, which ranges between $0.5 to $0.85 per cubic meter. So it is with some irony that this blogger notes that the Kingdom appears to be one of the few countries to seriously approach the use of solar energy to address their water shortage.

With the Ogallala Aquifer continuing its headlong course towards depletion maybe water shortages, and even resulting food shortages, will be another impetus in addition to expensive energy costs for applying the technologies out there, including nanotechnology, that sit unused and undeveloped as the status quo is meticulously maintained.

Andrew Maynard is in Davos this week meeting with the World Economic Forum folks who depend on plugging the term “technology” into their cure-alls for the world. Maybe while he’s there trying to get these folks to understand that technological innovation can’t be plucked from a tree he can add that maybe someone should actually try using the technology we already have. It seems as though Saudi Arabia is doing it.

Since I at times play the role of a channel surfing, football watching male, I am curious to know more about anything that proposes a way to keep beer cold. So when I saw the quote, "We've managed to cool six cans of beer"  on Twitter, I had to investigate.

Indeed two researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney, Professor Geoff Smith and Dr Angus Gentle, have reported in this month’s online edition of Nano Letters on a nanocoating that not only manages to keep beers cold but presents an ingenious way of ensuring that heat is emitted on a wavelength that allows it to escape the earth’s atmosphere.

By using a mixture of silicon carbide and silicon dioxide nanoparticles they discovered that they could get heat to emanate at wavelengths of between 7.9 and 13 micrometers allowing the heat to escape the earth’s atmosphere.

Smith is quoted in the story above as believing that the nanocoating could be used as a sort of “reverse solar collector” in which air or water could pass below a plate coated with the nanonparticles and be cooled. The water or air could then be circulated through a building and serve as a type of air conditioning.

The coating appears to be a remarkably simple way to cut on energy costs and maybe even find a way to reduce global warming. But the true genius, as I think we can all agree, was testing it on cans of beer. Well done. 

I imagine like most other governments intent on figuring out how to make the most out of the promise of nanotechnology, the UK government requests a number of reports to research how it and business can position itself to best exploit the so-called “nanotechnology industry”.

A couple of the latest of these UK reports have come under scrutiny by nano-focused blogs. In one, our old friend TNT Log, highlighted in yesterday’s post, takes a critical look at a study entitled: Nanotechnology: a UK Industry View.

In the other, a new blog that focuses on nanotechnology called 10minus9 takes on another report that appears on the UK government’s Science: So What? website that presents what the future jobs might be.

While TNT Log takes apart the thread-worn recommendations trotted out for seemingly the millionth time of the UK Industry Review report, at least that report was based on the underlying science of nanotechnology. The report under 10minus9’s scrutiny doesn’t appear to burden itself with picky details like science.

The jobs-of-the-future report was produced by consultants at Fast Future Research and comes up with one job in the future called a nano-medic that may have excited the noted intellectual Stephen Fry to exclaim that this was the job he would like to have, but unfortunately had a rather strange description that included “creating sub-atomic devices”. 

The 10minus9 blog does a good job of simply explaining how we are not likely to be making sub-atomic devices soon, or ever, and that the consultants apparently based their sloppy work on a rather slim foundation.

But after all the hullabaloo that this report seemed to have generated, including favorable reviews from Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Science Minister Lord Drayson, you have to wonder, as does 10minus9, if anyone bothers actually to read these reports.

As evidenced by the blog links to the right of this post two of my favorite blogs that deal with nanotechnology are TNT Log and 20/20 Science. The two authors behind these blogs share some commonalities. They are both scientists, are both handy with the written word and are both from merry ole England.

It is the latter trait that appears to have led to them to be involved in an odd coincidence: both of them within a week of each other trying to deconstruct the science reporting of your typical British tabloid. For 20/20 Science the object of its attention is the Daily Mail  and for TNT Log it’s the same rag.

I mainly know the British tabloids by reputation, which is that of sensationalistic headlines and stories that don’t always burden themselves with facts. So, we could expect that the two science-trained scribes would make pretty short work of the publication in question.

Well, TNT Log takes the example of a piece written not by a trained journalist but by a representative of the Soil Association, which two years ago decided to not certify any products as “organic” that used nanotechnology additives even while they admitted the ban would impact zero products. Can you say “Grandstanding”? Needless to say, the half-truths and the impulse to extrapolate into fictions are quickly dismissed.

However, 20/20 Science started out to write a critical piece on the Daily Mail’s science reporting but ended up finding some value in it for at least providing some useful information despite the sensational headline.

The Daily Mail comes under pretty regular criticism for its coverage of science-related stories and for good cause.

But I was a little curious as to why they had set their sites on nanotech of late, and I think the answer is in the frequency of the criticism from blogs like Bad Science.

One of the fears of your common tabloid reader is that science is doing some terrible thing to them without them even knowing about it. It could be just about any scientific discipline, it just so happens nanotech is a pretty attractive target at the moment with its colorful doomsday terms like “grey goo’. 

I am sure we will see one day in one of the tabloids all the ways nanotech causes cancer and the next all the ways it cures cancer and not even a nod to the irony.

When Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were busily creating the IT revolution was there some annual report that announced that educated people knew something about computers and those with little education knew quite a bit less? I don’t seem to recall them if they came out. But I could have missed them if they did because what would be the point of them, right?

But nanotechnology manages to get just such a report at least once a year. Previously they came from the Project on Emerging Technologies. These reports always struck me as simply stating the obvious without giving us much in the way of analysis as to why this ‘knowledge gap’ might be important. Something to do with consumer backlash, I suppose.

Now we have a new source telling us the same thing, and the far ranging study covering years back to 2004 has been published in none other than the highly regarded journal Science.

One of the study’s co-authors, Dietram Scheufele, John E. Ross Professor in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at UW-Madison, is the same fellow who told us that the faith-based US populace compared to other industrialized countries gave nanotechnology a pretty low rating for its morality . Interesting, so people who might be inclined to have a dim view of science in the first place and those who are so poorly educated that they can’t get themselves to go to a museum think nanotechnology is immoral or don’t even know that it exists, respectively.

I could have told you this, maybe without percentages and numbers but you would have gotten the gist of it. And how would you have been enlightened by this piece of knowledge? What could you do that you couldn’t have done before? I couldn’t tell you. 

But apparently we have to make efforts to inform those who are so resistant to learning complicated things that they would rather ignore them or propose some alternate universe where they don’t really exist.

I have to hand it to IEEE Spectrum. Its new website format has allowed me to easily follow all the coverage from the CES 2010 show this year by just clicking on the subchannel “Consumer Electronics” and finding everything in one place.

But to find how nanotechnology might be enabling any of these gizmos one has to dig a little deeper, so it wasn’t clear what kind of role nanotech was playing at the CES show this year.

And then I found this article in which Nanosys, once touted as the IP king of nanotech with its 500 patents, was sending its CEO to CES show to demonstrate how their nanomaterials can give LED lights a more vivid color with the same amount of energy.

Unfortunately from the article it didn’t appear as though Nanosys was demonstrating any LED device enabled by the nanomaterial; instead they just demonstrated the nanomaterial. It would seem Nanosys plans to sell the material to companies that make LED devices following the business model of being a material supplier rather than a device manufacturer.

With this in mind, the article goes on to predict that we should see some devices equipped with nano-enabled LEDs some time this year. Question is, will the nanomaterials actually be from Nanosys?

The stodgy Wall Street Journal has published Adam Keiper’s latest exhortation to pursue the promise of molecular nanotechnology (MNT) the way we were supposed to before it was sidetracked by a shift in government funding policies towards mere advanced material science.

The unscrupulous back-room politics implied in both Keiper’s piece and Eric Drexler’s support of it on his Metamodern blog could indeed all be true, and, frankly, of little surprise.

However, are we really to believe that the lack of real experimental science into the feasibility of MNT is due to a lack of funding?

Key to both Keiper and Drexler’s arguments is that in the National Research Council’s (NRC) 2006 review of the NNI (National Nanotechnology Initiative) there are recommendations for conducting research into the feasibility of molecular manufacturing.

As Drexler condenses the NRC’s recommendations: “…in the committee’s view, theoretical calculations are insufficient: Only experimental research can reliably answer the critical questions and move the technology toward implementation.”

Since that 2006 report, some of the key scientists pursuing MNT, such as Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas, have continued publishing huge tomes on theoretical calculations of MNT. However, experimental research, such as Philip Moriarty’s work in the UK, has remained largely lacking.

The reason we are told for this state of affairs is a lack of funding, presumably because those unscrupulous back-room deals 10 years ago are still blocking the financing. Meanwhile Google and NASA (last I understood was a US-government-funded operation) are funding the Singularity University.

If MNT is the cornerstone of the coming Singularity, surely experiments to determine MNT’s feasibility could find funding while universities established to teach of its possible results manage to do it with apparent ease during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

I am nonplussed. Are we to believe that Prof. Moriarty is one of only a handful of scientists capable of securing funding for his experiments into molecular nanotechnology? Why is it that a Singularity University gets funding but funding for MNT’s research gets locked out? Or is it that the only the kind of funding that the MNT proponents really want is the type of funding the NNI has received over the last decade? 

If the grand-scale funding mechanism is the missing piece that MNT needs to move forward, a possible solution is to follow the model of Prof. Moriarty and secure your own funding, do the research and build up some experimental results that will surely impress the holders of the purse strings in government.