Is nano material really safe?

I am sure you have heard of lots of interesting and promising nanotechnology products - shirt that repels water; minute particles that detect cancer cells or deliver drug to the cancer cells and not harming the surrounding normal cells. I too, believe that this field will be 'big'. However I can't help but feeling rather 'insecure' with the 'super small particle'. Is it really safe to human being? Would it one day 'back-fire' us? then I saw this article : Carbon nanotubes: the new asbestos? - report on nanotubes cause precancerous growths in mice. My heart sank.
Even though there is no conclusive finding but it is possible. I guess may be it is a good thing that they found out now than later. Hopefully the experts in the field will design a better way in making a safe nanotube and also to have regulation to ensure that it will not turn into another 'asbestos'.

Science 2.0

yes... I am sure you have heard about Web 2.0 but what about Science 2.0? It is about sharing raw information or finding or discovery with the rest of the world; discovering and accessing services that are open and available; presenting information in a more interative mode and more... More importantly, it means you will know what works and what doesn't work (without you going through the experiment again) - that is, of course, if you trust the information.
I think this is a good thing because I have come across so many articles or information that are interesting but because of the subscription issue, I cannot access the finding. Besides that people tend to put only the positive findings and not the negative ones on the research papers and hence we spent a lot of our time repeating the mistakes (but of course, we also learnt a lot from them).
Now...as promising as it is, I guess I will take it with a pinch of salt but nothing beats a good idea.

Biofuel... a friend or foe?

I kept coming across articles on biofuel recently. While it 'presented' itself as 'green', sometimes I wonder if it is really helping the environment. Nature news reported that 'biofuels might create more emissions than they save'. I believe there are some good things in biofuel but maybe we should seriously consider other modes -making use of the waste or readily available materials to create fuel than converting native land to agriculture for biofuel. No human can 'rebuild' the native land. Once it is lost, it is gone.

Structural DNA Nanotechnology

Few weeks ago, I posted an entry on DNA origami. I thought the idea was neat and creative but little did I know there are already a lot of other stuffs going on in the world.
The field - Structural DNA Nanotechnology (SDN). The person - Paul Rathemund. He has two beautiful smiley faces on his website. Quoted from his Nature paper, "an obvious application of patterned DNA origami would be the creation of a 'nanobreadboard', to which diverse components could be added. The attachment of proteins, for example, might allow novel biological experiments.."
Just few days ago, I come across this exciting news - a group of scientists at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have developed the world's first gene detection platform made up entirely from self-assembled DNA nanostructures. This 'breakthrough' make possible a water soluble nanoarray which can help to build a more sensitive DNA probes.

ants and cockroaches : swarm theory and decision making behavoir

I am always fascinated by the insert kingdoms... not that I will keep them as pets, in fact, I am scared of most of them =P. However I always find them rather intelligent.

Recently I came across this article from National Geographic and I couldn't help wondering what else have we not discovered from this tiny sized kingdom to make our world more efficient.

Quoted:
"Ants aren't smart, ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. A individual, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Hmmm... sounded very similar to social computing and all the Web 2.0 'technologies' (well, not exactly the same but hey, that's how del.icio.us works!). Just a note, ants have been doing so for 140 million years.

Another interesting one... from Science - a theoretical biologist, Halloy, has successfully created robot cockroaches to mingle with the real 'peers' and even persuaded many of their insect 'peers' to hide in an unconventional place. With this, scientists speculate that this can be developed into a 'powerful' pest control. Well, as I have said from the beginning, the insert kingdoms are intelligent so we will see if it became reality. Whichever the case, it is interesting to know how inserts think...