Tag Archives: It’s not exactly rocket science

The Canadian federal government invests $3.5M in Alberta nanotechnology sector

Rona Ambrose, theĀ  (Canada) Minister of Labour, announced $3.5M for Alberta’s Centre for Advanced Microsystems and Nanotechnology Products (ACAMP) yesterday, May 20, 2009. She made the announcement on behalf of Lynne Yelich, Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification (WD). (Under the liberals, the WD portfolio was held by Stephen Owens.)

Under the project, ACAMP will acquire the first low temperature ceramic packaging equipment in Canada that is able to support sensing and monitoring systems in oil and gas, bio-medical, environmental, agricultural and forestry applications. Equipment such as this will allow ACAMP to promote technology commercialization in promising areas within micro and nano technology and assist companies in getting products to markets.

There’s more about the nanotechnology commercialization that’s to take place in Alberta here.

The issue of commercializing scientific discoveries is a hot topic and I will be writing more about this soon.

Meanwhile and following on yesterday’s post, I’ve found a couple of ananlogies to describe the same thing. Here’s the title of the article, ‘DNA sculpture and origami – a meeting of art and nanotechnology‘. It’s an interesting article which has a good description of the process and can be found here on,’Not Exactly Rocket Science; science for everyone‘. The process the author is decribing reminds me of a project at Simon Fraser University (Canada), where sculptor and publisher, Robert Chaplin, created the smallest book in the world (at the time) with a focused gallion ion beam. The book is called ‘Teeny Ted in Turnip Town‘ and was produced in a laboratory run by scientist Karen Kavanagh. They were working with silicon tablets and not DNA still, there are similarities as both projects require that material be cut away in order create (or reveal as sculptors like to think) another structure. There’s more here about Teeny Ted.