Thursday, The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Nanotechnology Research and Development Act that was also passed by the Senate on Tuesday, and was backed by the NanoBusiness Alliance since its initial development over three years ago. The bill will go to President George W. Bush for signing.

The bill puts the President's National Nanotechnology Initiative into law and authorizes US$3.7 billion over the next four years for the creation of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office and the funding of federal government nanotechnology programs. The bill also requires the creation of research centers, education and training efforts, research into the societal and ethical consequences of nanotechnology, and efforts to transfer technology into the marketplace. Finally, the bill includes a series of coordination offices, advisory committees and regular program reviews to oversee spending.

(Article information from New York Times, Reuters, Los Angeles Times)

Dependence on foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States soared in the 1990s, raising questions about how the country will sustain its technology-driven economy as competition for brainpower increases worldwide, the National Science Board has said.

To compound the problem, the number of US-born graduates choosing science, engineering or technology careers is shrinking, the board said.

While saying it was not necessarily alarming to have foreign-born scientists working in the country, the board was concerned because the US no longer dominated the global marketplace for technical talent as it once did.

The board, a federal advisory body established by Congress, said it had found a large drop in the number of successful visa applications from foreign scientists.

From 1990 to 2000, the board reported, the percentage of foreign-born workers in science and engineering with doctoral degrees in the US leapt from 24 to 38 per cent.

Compiled by the National Science Foundation, which the board oversees, the statistics beyond 2000 are not yet available.

But by analyzing figures provided by the Office of Immigration Statistics, the board found that from 2001 to last year, the number of temporary-worker visas issued for jobs in science and technology plummeted by 55 per cent, from 166,000 to 74,000.

Since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, successful visa applications in all categories had fallen from 10 million in the 2001 fiscal year to 6.5 million in the 2003 fiscal year, said Mr Stuart Patt, a spokesman for the State Department's consular affairs bureau.

Heightened security fears and marketing efforts by other countries for international tourist dollars may have contributed to the drop, he said.

Many American scientists have complained that it has been harder for their foreign colleagues to come to the US since the Sept 11 attacks as foreign scientists and engineers have come under greater scrutiny.

The drop in worker visas had occurred because there had been fewer applicants, not because substantially greater numbers had been rejected.

Whatever the reason, said Diana Natalicio, president of the University of Texas at El Paso and vice-chairman of the science board, the numbers show the US may soon face a shortage of talent in critical science and technology areas.

The US, she said, was not educating enough of its own students in those areas to satisfy the technology-hungry marketplace.

Miller said a national investment in 'human capital and capabilities' must be made to spur domestic growth in science and technical fields.

Particularly worrisome, Natalicio said, was the low interest in scientific careers among one of the fastest-growing demographic sectors of the population in the US - the Hispanic-Americans.

The board recommended improvements in equipment and financing for science programs from kindergarten to undergraduate levels and making more financial assistance available to students.

Engineers at Princeton University and Hewlett-Packard have invented a combination of materials that could lead to cheap and super-compact electronic memory devices for archiving digital images or other data.

The invention could result in a single-use memory card that permanently stores data and is faster and easier to use than a compact disk. The device could be very small because it would not involve moving parts such as the laser and motor drive required by CDs.

The researchers, who published a description of the device in the Nov. 13 issue of Nature, achieved the result by discovering a previously unrecognized property of a commonly used conductive polymer plastic coating. Their memory device combines this polymer, which is inexpensive and easy to produce, with very thin-film, silicon-based electronics.

"We are hybridizing," said Princeton professor of electrical engineering Stephen Forrest, who led the research group. "We are making a device that is organic (the plastic polymer) and inorganic (the thin-film silicon) at the same time."

As a result, the device would be like a CD in that writing data onto it makes permanent physical changes in the plastic and can be done only once. But it also would be like a conventional electronic memory chip because it would plug directly into an electronic circuit and would have no moving parts.

The research was done in Forrest's lab by former postdoctoral researcher Sven Möller, who is now at HP in Corvallis, Ore. Craig Perlov, Warren Jackson and Carl Taussig, scientists at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., are also co-authors of the Nature paper.

Möller made the basic discovery behind the device by experimenting with polymer material called PEDOT, which is clear and conducts electricity. It has been used for years as an antistatic coating on photographic film, and more recently as an electrical contact on video displays that require light to pass through the circuitry. Möller found that PEDOT conducts electricity at low voltages, but permanently loses its conductivity when exposed to higher voltages (and thus higher currents), making it act like a fuse or circuit breaker.

This finding led the researchers to use PEDOT as a way of storing digital information. Digital images and all computerized data are stored as numbers that are written as long strings of ones and zeroes. A PEDOT-based memory device would have a grid of circuits in which all the connections contain a PEDOT fuse. A high voltage could be applied to any of the contact points, blowing that particular fuse and leaving a mix of working and non-working circuits. These open or closed connections would represent zeros and ones and would become permanently encoded in the device. A blown fuse would block current and be read as a zero, while an unblown one would let current pass and act as a one.

This grid of memory circuits could be made so small that, based on the test junctions the researchers made, 1 million bits of information could fit in a square millimeter of paper-thin material. If formed as a block, the device could store more than one gigabyte of information, or about 1,000 high-quality images, in one cubic centimeter, which is about the size of a fingertip.

Developing the invention into a commercially viable product would require additional work on creating a large-scale manufacturing process and ensuring compatibility with existing electronic hardware, a process that might take as little as five years, Forrest said.

Research that combines expertise on both "hard" and "soft" materials, such as the silicon and polymer materials in Forrest's memory device, represents a major strength at Princeton and is the focus of the newly established Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials. The institute includes scientists and engineers from a wide range of disciplines and seeks to combine basic science and commercial partnerships.

Funding for Forrest's research came in part from HP as well as from the National Science Foundation through a long-term grant that funds a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Princeton. Princeton University has filed for a patent on the invention. HP has an option to license rights to the technology.

(Article information from BBC Online)

Cambridge University has conceded its controversial primate laboratory may never be built because of high costs.

The UK Government approved plans for the £30m neuroscience centre on Friday, to the dismay of animal rights groups who say the lab's work will be cruel.

But Cambridge Pro-Vice-Chancellor Tony Minson said a £7m shortfall in funding would mean construction work next year would be delayed - and may never begin.

The lab, earmarked for university land on the northern outskirts of the city, will conduct brain experiments on marmosets and macaques, to advance the understanding and treatment of neurological disorders, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.
Local planners had previously thrown out the university's request to build the lab after police raised fears about public safety at the site, on a main road and close to a motorway intersection.

But after the direct intervention of Tony Blair and his chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, in support of the lab, a public inquiry was held late last year and its final decision called into Whitehall for approval.

Cambridge University said it was pleased the research center had been given the go-ahead, but accepted increased costs had put a big question mark against the lab's future.

Minson said it was the expected running costs of £1.5m a year that were proving particularly problematic.

Animal rights groups condemned Friday's decision. They said the science was flawed because the monkey and human brains differed in vital respects, making many experiments worthless.

They also questioned the university's record on animal welfare, arguing recent undercover work had revealed poor practice in the university's other labs.

Wendy Higgins, from the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (Buav), said the decision was no surprise, coming "just at the time that Cambridge University itself is throwing doubt over the project due to rising costs.

Primates represent a very small part of the animal experimentation program in Britain. The vast majority of 2.7 million annual procedures are done on rodents.

Fewer than 3,500 experiments are carried out on monkeys, and fewer still involve a highly invasive practice such as cutting into the brain.

Professor Chris Higgins, director of the Medical Research Council's Clinical Services Centre, said: "Our work on basic brain function couldn't be applied to human disease without some sort of research being done on animals - and in some cases, these animals have to be primates.

"The human brain is clearly more complex than a mouse's, so problems such as memory degeneration have to be studied in the brain of an animal that has the same level of memory functions as a human being."

The decision was also welcomed by the Parkinson's Disease Society.

Representatives of IBM announced that a computer roughly the size of a 30-inch television has been ranked as the 73rd most powerful supercomputer in the world.

Next week the Top500 Supercomputer project will announce its latest ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers, as measured by an industry-standard benchmark. With a peak speed of 2 teraflops (2 trillion mathematical operations per second), an initial small-scale prototype of IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer has been rated as a world-leader, even though it occupies a mere half-rack of space, about one cubic meter.

The full Blue Gene/L machine, which is being built for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, will be 128 times larger, occupying 64 full racks. When completed in 2005, IBM expects Blue Gene/L to lead the Top500 supercomputer list. Compared with today's fastest supercomputers, it will be six times faster, consume 1/15th the power per computation and be 10 times more compact than today's fastest supercomputers.

The Blue Gene/L prototype machine is roughly 1/20th the physical size of machines of comparable compute power that exist today -- such as Linux clusters. By comparison, today's 2 teraflop supercomputers fill up entire rooms, often with more than a dozen racks. By making dramatic reductions in power consumption, cost and space requirements, IBM researchers are helping to turn massively parallel computing into an affordable, practical and accessible tool for science and industry.

The first machine in the family, Blue Gene/L, is expected to operate at a peak performance of about 360 teraflops (360 trillion operations per second), and occupy 64 racks -- taking up only about the same space as half of a tennis court. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) plan to use Blue Gene/L to simulate physical phenomena that require computational capability much greater than presently available. LLNL researchers hope to use Blue Gene/L to investigate areas such as cosmology and the behavior of stellar binary pairs, laser-plasma interactions, and the behavior and aging of high explosives.

The architecture is also proving to be readily adaptable to a range of applications, and will be more affordable than current supercomputing resources due to its smaller physical size and power efficiency.

Blue Gene/L is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)'s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program. LLNL is operated for the NNSA by the University of California. The Top 500 list is compiled by a group of computer science academics from around the world.