NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE:

Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotechnology think tank and public interest organization, and Battelle, a leading global research and development organization, have launched a Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems through an initial grant of $250,000 from The Waitt Family Foundation. The group is assembling a world-class steering committee to guide this groundbreaking project, and has garnered the support of several important industry organizations as roadmap partners.

Productive Nanosystems are molecular-scale systems that make other useful materials and devices that are nanostructured. The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems will provide a common framework for understanding the pathways for developing such systems, the challenges that must be overcome in their development and the applications that they can address. The Roadmap will also serve as a basis for formulating research and commercialization agendas for achieving these capabilities. Productive Nanosystems will drive research and applications in a host of areas, providing new atomically-precise nanoscale building blocks, devices and systems. The intended audiences for the Roadmap include governments, corporations, research institutions, investors, economic development organizations, public policy professionals, educators and the media.

This report from CNET has much more:

So far, the road map organizers have gathered many of the early proponents of nanotechnology in North America. Steering committee members include Jim Roberto, chief research officer at Oak Ridge National Laboratories; Clayton Teague, director of the National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office; Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading nanotech venture capital firm; and John Randall, CTO at Zyvex.

The project is also endorsed by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Biotechnology Industry Organization. The project will initially be funded by a $250,000 grant from the Waitt Family Foundation, established by Gateway founder and nanotech investor Ted Waitt. . . . Richard Smalley, the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the buckyball molecule, said he believes that nanotechnology will play an important role in weaning civilization off of fossil fuels and in purifying water.

I think that this is going to be quite important. (For those who’ve forgotten or didn’t know, I’m on the Foresight Institute’s Board of Directors, so I guess it’s natural that I’d think that). On the ethical, as opposed to technical front, see also the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology and this article from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.

UPDATE: Read this post on “irresponsible nanohype,” too, and follow the links!

THE REAL STORY OF THE IRANIAN ELECTIONS: Nobody showed up, because people knew they were bogus. Publius has the photos.

E.F.F.: “Rumor is afoot that Hollywood is taking another crack at the Broadcast Flag on Capitol Hill, this time by sneaking a Flag provision into an appropriations bill before the Senate.”

I don’t know why they’re bothering, when they’re having so much success with Plan B: Making movies that nobody would want to watch anyway . . . .

GERHARD SCHROEDER will be in America on June 27. Medienkritik is planning a protest against his anti-Americanism. (Via co-sponsor No Pasaran!).

TAKE BACK THE MEMORIAL: Jeff Jarvis has the latest on the 9/11 memorial controversy.

A CHANCE TO CUT IS A CHANCE TO CURE: This week’s medical blog carnival, Grand Rounds, is up. And so is this week’s Carnival of Music.

UPDATE: And don’t miss The Carnival of the Liberated!

ERNEST MILLER HAS AN L.A. TIMES WIKITORIAL POST-MORTEM: “Reporting that the wiki has been shut down is the easy part. Letting people know whether the experiment was otherwise successful is the hard part, and no one in the traditional press seems eager to confront it.”

ANYSOLDIER.COM is a cool support-the-troops site. But as Susanna Cornett notes, the items posted by soldiers are kind of, well, blog-like, and very interesting.

AUSTIN BAY’S LATEST COLUMN is from Baghdad:

I served here as a soldier, and returning as a writer in part explains the change in perspective. This trip my job is assessment and analysis, not action. Even with a fast-paced itinerary that takes us to Fallujah, Tal Afar and Kirkuk, there is more time to reflect.

Today, the summer heat is just as hard as it was a year ago, the sand haze in the air just as thick. But the Baghdad of June 2005 is not the Baghdad I left in September 2004.

Read the whole thing.

UNCLEAR ON THE WHOLE LESBIAN CONCEPT:

Glass: Was there any kind of limit to your gayness?

Guest: The limit was that I really couldn’t bring myself to sleep with women.

Glass: So that seems like that would be kind of a problem.

Indeed.

UPDATE: It seems that there ought to be a connection to this discussion somehow.

I COOK, THEREFORE I AM HUMAN.

POPULAR MECHANICS CONTRIBUTING EDITOR LESLIE SABBAGH is touring medical facilities in Iraq. And PM has her blogging while she’s there.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Austin Bay is now blogging from Afghanistan.

J.D. LASICA reports that a top Intel guy managed to violate the DMCA without knowing it.

THIS IS COOL:

In an effort to promote space exploration, a private group plans today to launch the first spacecraft to sail in Earth orbit on the solar wind.

If successful, the mission will provide scientific proof for a concept that has captivated science fiction for decades – that ships can travel great distances across the heavens under the power of giant solar sails nudged by the faint energy of light itself.

The “today” in this story is actually tomorrow, Tuesday. Let’s hope it works!

A CLASSIC UNDERSTATEMENT: “I find the idea that American academics at large are too afraid to criticize the Bush Administration to be quite laughable.” Quite.

HOWARD LOVY has some rather cool nano-imagery.

A “PERSONAL LOCKBOX” FOR SOCIAL SECURITY? I’d like one.

BRING IT ON: “Faster, please.”

WHITEWASHING THE KLAN?

CHINESE BLOGGER SLAMS MICROSOFT:

SHANGHAI, China — Twenty-eight floors above the traffic-choked streets of China’s most wired city, blogger and tech entrepreneur Isaac Mao sums up his opinion of Microsoft and its treatment of the Chinese bloggers with one word. “Evil,” says Mao. “Internet users know what’s evil and what’s not evil, and MSN Spaces is an evil thing to Chinese bloggers.” . . .

The Chinese version of MSN Spaces is linked to the new MSN China portal, launched last month in partnership with Shanghai Alliance Investment, a company funded by the city government here. Last week that partnership plunged Microsoft into the long-standing controversy surrounding the Chinese government’s internet censorship policies, after Asian blogs and news reports revealed that MSN Spaces blocks Chinese bloggers from putting politically sensitive language in the names of their blogs, or in the titles of individual blog entries.

The words and phrases blocked by Microsoft include “Taiwan independence,” “Dalai Lama,” “human rights,” “freedom” and “democracy.”

Read the whole thing.

KAUS LOOKS AT THE PLUSES AND MINUSES of the Mazda 3. My brother has a Mazda 6 and loves it, but (1) 6 is twice as much as 3, so it’s probably twice as good! and (2) My brother, who used to race cars, is one of those “very good drivers (who drift and brake at the last minute)” that Mickey says love the car.

DOES DAVID CORN DESERVE MORE CREDIT? I link, you decide.

TOM MAGUIRE SAYS THE NEW YORK TIMES is cold-shouldering Howard Dean. Or maybe “quarantining” is a better term:

What is their congressman going on about, Times readers must be wondering? Like Howard Dean, NYC congressman Jerry Nadler has denounced the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic comments made at a recent Democratic event hosted by John Conyers.

NY Sun readers are being kept abreast of developments; however, although NY Times readers were apprised of Conyer’s event, the Times has sheltered them from news of the anti-semitic comments, as well as any news of either Dean’s or Nadler’s denunciation.

In fact, Howard Dean seems to have disappeared from Timesworld since he was spanked by Capitol Hill Dems in the June 10 edition.

Fortunately, people don’t have to rely on the NYT for all their news these days.

INTERESTING OVERVIEW OF THE WAR ON TERROR from Oxford Analytica, at Forbes.com. Excerpt:

The arrests on June 9 of two Pakistani citizens in California on charges of planning terrorist acts in the U.S. comes at a time when the Bush Administration and the U.S. public believe that the “war on terror” has successfully reduced direct threats to the homeland. Despite the fact that the country remains vulnerable to major terrorist incidents, there have been no such attacks since September 2001.

As a result, the focus of attention in Washington, D.C. remains on the offensive portions of the national strategy for countering terrorism. This is believed to have partially broken up the al Qaeda network, sharply reducing its global reach. With these perceptions in mind, the Administration is moving toward a new phase in its anti-terror campaign. It is likely to embark on developing a new Presidential Decision Directive.

Via ATC, which has some further thoughts. And Dean Esmay is looking at the Iraq theater.

CONDI RICE IS PUSHING DEMOCRACY IN EGYPT: As usual, Gateway Pundit has the scoop, and video.