Standards

Over the weekend, Pres. Barack Obama made official what many space watchers had expected for months by nominating Charles Bolden to lead NASA. The 62-year-old Bolden is a retired U.S. Marine Corps brigadier general who graduated from the United States Naval Academy (with a degree in electrical engineering) in 1968 and rose through the ranks from fighter pilot to test pilot to astronaut over a 35-year military career. …26 May 2009

Last week in a column published by Nanotech Now Alan B. Shalleck chronicled the many business woes of nanotech companies in the current economic environment. While it seems I have been going on and on about how talk of nanotechâ''s â''gold rushâ'' is clearly misinformed and the problem is not some rush to commercialization but rather the shocking lack of commercialization thus far, I am heartened that there are some like Shalleck who recognize that the commercialization of nanotechnology is struggling. Shalleck provides the evidence of this faltering business situation and offers a solution: the $787 billion …26 May 2009

It seems that the documents and presentations you have stored on your memory stick could possibly be maintained for a billion years without degrading, according to initial reports of soon to be published research. Prof. Alex Zettl in the Department of Physics at U.C. Berkeley and in the Materials Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory conducted the research. The research describes the use of an iron nanoparticle contained within a carbon nanotube in which when in the presence of electricity the nanoparticle slides back and forth along the nanotube. This serves as a memory device that can store digital …21 May 2009