Tag Archives: NASA Game Changing Development program office

Royal Institution, science, and nanotechnology 101 and #RE_IMAGINE at the London College of Fashion

I’m featuring two upcoming events in London (UK).

Nanotechnology 101: The biggest thing you’ve never seen

 Gold Nanowire Array Credit: lacomj via Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/40137058@N07/3790862760

Gold Nanowire Array
Credit: lacomj via Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/40137058@N07/3790862760 [downloaded from http://www.rigb.org/whats-on/events-2015/october/public-nanotechnology-101-the-biggest-thing-you]

Already sold out, this event is scheduled for Oct. 20, 2015. Here’s why you might want to put yourself on a waiting list, from the Royal Institution’s Nanotechnology 101 event page,

How could nanotechnology be used to create smart and extremely resilient materials? Or to boil water three times faster? Join former NASA Nanotechnology Project Manager Michael Meador to learn about the fundamentals of nanotechnology—what it is and why it’s unique—and how this emerging, disruptive technology will change the world. From invisibility cloaks to lightweight fuel-efficient vehicles and a cure for cancer, nanotechnology might just be the biggest thing you can’t see.

About the speaker

Michael Meador is currently Director of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, on secondment from NASA where he had been managing the Nanotechnology Project in the Game Changing Technology Program, working to mature nanotechnologies with high potential for impact on NASA missions. One part of his current job is to communicate nanotechnology research to policy-makers and the public.

Here’s some logistical information from the event page,

7.00pm to 8.30pm, Tuesday 20 October
The Theatre

Standard £12
Concession £8
Associate £6
Free to Members, Faraday Members and Fellows

For anyone who may not know offhand where the Royal Institution and its theatre is located,

The Royal Institution of Great Britain
21 Albemarle Street
London
W1S 4BS

+44 (0) 20 7409 2992
(9.00am – 6.00pm Mon – Fri)

Here’s a description of the Royal Institution from its Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

The Royal Institution of Great Britain (often abbreviated as the Royal Institution or RI) is an organisation devoted to scientific education and research, based in London.

The Royal Institution was founded in 1799 by the leading British scientists of the age, including Henry Cavendish and its first president, George Finch, the 9th Earl of Winchilsea,[1] for

diffusing the knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction, of useful mechanical inventions and improvements; and for teaching, by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of science to the common purposes of life.
— [2]

Much of its initial funding and the initial proposal for its founding were given by the Society for Bettering the Conditions and Improving the Comforts of the Poor, under the guidance of philanthropist Sir Thomas Bernard and American-born British scientist Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. Since its founding it has been based at 21 Albemarle Street in Mayfair. Its Royal Charter was granted in 1800. The Institution announced in January 2013 that it was considering sale of its Mayfair headquarters to meet its mounting debts.[3]

#RE_IMAGINE

While this isn’t a nanotechnology event, it does touch on topics discussed here many times: wearable technology, futuristic fashion, and the integration of technology into the body. The Digital Anthropology Lab (of the  London College of Fashion, which is part of the University of the Arts London) is being officially launched with a special event on Oct. 16, 2015. Before describing the event, here’s more about the Digital Anthropology Lab from its homepage,

Crafting fashion experience digitally

The Digital Anthropology Lab, launching in Autumn 2015, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London is a research studio bringing industry and academia together to develop a new way of making smarter with technology.

The Digital Anthropology Lab, London College of Fashion, experiments with artefacts, communities, consumption and making in the digital space, using 3D printing, body scanning, code and electronics. We focus on an experimental approach to digital anthropology, allowing us to practically examine future ways in which digital collides with the human experience. We connect commercial partners to leading research academics and graduate students, exploring seed ideas for fashion tech.

Now

WEARABLES
We radically re-imagine this emerging fashion- tech space, exploring both the beautification of technology for wearables and critically explore the ‘why.’

Near

IoT BIG DATA
Join us to experiment with, ‘The Internet of Fashion Things.’ Where the Internet of Things, invisible big data technologies, virtual fit and meta-data collide.

Future

DESIGN FICTIONS
With the luxury of the imagination, we aim to re- wire our digital ambitions and think again about designing future digital fashion experiences for generation 2050.

Here’s information I received from the Sept. 30, 2015 announcement I received via email,

The Digital Anthropology Lab at London College of Fashion, UAL invites you to #RE_IMAGINE: A forum exploring the now, near and future of fashion technology.

#RE_IMAGINE, the Digital Anthropology Lab’s launch event, will present a fantastically diverse range of digital speakers and ask them to respond to the question – ‘Where are our digital selves heading?’

Join us to hear from pioneers, risk takers, entrepreneurs, designers and inventors including Ian Livingston CBE, Luke Robert Mason from New Bionics, Katie Baron from Stylus, J. Meejin Yoon from MIT among others. Also come to see what happened when we made fashion collide with the Internet of Things, they are wearable but not as you know it…

#RE_IMAGINE aims to be an informative, networked and enlightening brainstorm of a day. To book your place please follow this link.

To coincide with the exhibition Digital Disturbances, Fashion Space Gallery presents a late night opening event. Alongside a curator tour will be a series of interactive demonstrations and displays which bring together practitioners working across design, science and technology to investigate possible human and material futures. We’d encourage you to stay and enjoy this networking opportunity.

Friday 16th October 2015

9.30am – 5pm – Forum event 

5pm – 8.30pm – Digital Disturbances networking event

London College of Fashion

20 John Princes Street
London
W1G 0BJ 

Ticket prices are £75.00 for a standard ticket and £35.00 for concession tickets (more details here).

For more #RE_IMAGINE specifics, there’s the event’s Agenda page. As for Digital Disturbances, here’s more from the Fashion Space Gallery’s Exhibition homepage,

Digital Disturbances

11th September – 12th December 2015

Digital Disturbances examines the influence of digital concepts and tools on fashion. It provides a lens onto the often strange effects that emerge from interactions across material and virtual platforms – information both lost and gained in the process of translation. It presents the work of seven designers and creative teams whose work documents these interactions and effects, both in the design and representation of fashion. They can be traced across the surfaces of garments, through the realisation of new silhouettes, in the remixing of images and bodies in photography and film, and into the nuances of identity projected into social and commercial spaces.

Designers include: ANREALAGE, Bart Hess, POSTmatter, Simone C. Niquille and Alexander Porter, Flora Miranda, Texturall and Tigran Avetisyan.

Digital Disturbances is curated by Leanne Wierzba.

Two events—two peeks into the future.

The US National Aeronautics and Aerospace Administration’s outreach: an introductory nanotechnology video and a talk in Washington, DC

The US National Aeronautics and Aerospace Administration or NASA, as it’s popularly known, has released a Nanotechnology video as part of its NASA Edge series of videos. As it runs for approximately 29 mins. 31 secs. (I won’t be embedding it here where I usually draw the line at approximately 5 mins. running time.)

It is a good introductory video aimed at people who are interested in space exploration and nanotechnology but not inclined to listen to much scientific detail. There is a transcript if you want to get a sense of how much information is needed to watch this program with enjoyment,

CHRIS: Welcome to NASA EDGE

FRANKLIN:  An inside and outside look…

BLAIR:  …at all things NASA.

CHRIS: On today’s show we’re going to be talking about nanotechnology.

BLAIR:  Which is technology that’s really small or as I like to say, co-host sized technology.

FRANKLIN: I think it’s a little bit smaller than cohost.  Maybe like the G.I. Joe with kung fu grip or maybe Antman size small.

BLAIR:  Alright, Antman I’ll buy but it’s probably even smaller than that, probably deeply embedded in wearables for Antman.

CHRIS: On today’s show, we going to look at nano sensors, nano wires, nano tubes, and composite over wrapped [sic] pressure vessels.

FRANKLIN: Or COPV’s

BLAIR: Which is really what’s interesting to me about the technology, it’s not a single technology with a single use.  It’s a technology that’s being applied all across industry in a lot of different areas and even across NASA.

FRANKLIN: And speaking of COPV’s, we are going to have Mia Siochi on the show today and she’s going to talk to us about how NASA is using nanotechnology in some upcoming tests.

CHRIS: But first up, I had a chance to talk with Steve Gaddis, who is going to give us the broad picture of nanotechnology.

CHRIS: We are here with Steve Gaddis the manager for the Game Changing Development program office. Steve, how are you doing?

STEVE: Doing good.

CHRIS: Steve, we had this whole technology campaign where the theme is Technology Drives Exploration.

STEVE: Absolutely, and I believe it.

CHRIS: What’s that mean Technology Drives Exploration?

STEVE: It means if you want to do these cool things that we haven’t done before, we have to develop the technologies to go do them. We can’t simply just keep doing what we’ve already done in the past, right? We have done some cool things but we want new missions. We want to go farther than we’ve been. We want to drill down. We want to bring things back. So, we need these new technologies.

CHRIS: Now with Game Changing you’re sort of a subset of the Space Technology Mission directorate at NASA headquarters.

STEVE: Right.

CHRIS:  What’s the focus on Game Changing as opposed to other technology subprograms?

STEVE:  We’re the disruptive program, we’re the DARPA like program at out of the nine.  However, all the programs, they’re looking for revolutionary and incremental developments in technology.  Our associate administrator really wants us to take some risk. He expects a certain amount of failure in the activities that were pursuing; the high pay off, high-risk type activities.  So he’d like to see the risk take place with us instead of maybe some of our sister programs where we’re demonstrating on orbit or we’re demonstrating on the International Space Station or we’re demonstrating on a ride with another government agency or the commercial crew type folks.

MEYYA: Nano sensors are a product of nanoscience and nanotechnology. When materials go to that small scale their properties are fundamentally different from bulk materials. So scientists all around the world have been working very hard trying to take advantage of this difference in properties between the bulk scale and the nano scale. And trying to make useful things, which are devices, systems, architectures, and materials for a wide variety of applications; touching upon every economic sector, which is electronics, computing, materials manufacturing, health, medicine, national security, transportation, energy storage, and I don’t want to leave out space exploration.

BLAIR: That’s a lot of stuff anyway. You mentioned space exploration, so I’m wondering; how are nanosensors being used by NASA?

MEYYA: The nanosensors are being developed to replace bulky instruments NASA has been using. No matter what you want to measure, whether you want to measure a composition of gas or vapor or if you want to measure radiation, historically we have always taken bulky instruments. Remember every pound of anything that we lift to near earth orbit it costs us about $10,000 a pound. The same 1-pound of anything would cost roughly about $100,000 a pound for Mars or other missions. So we have an incentive actually to miniaturize the size of the payload. So that’s why we want to move from bulky instruments to sensors. That’s one reason. The second reason is no matter where we go, okay, we don’t have utility companies sitting there waiting for us.  We have to generate our own power and we have to be very wise how we use that power.  The sensors not only are they small in size but they also consume very low power. That’s why over the last decade or so we’ve been working on developing nano-based chemical sensors, biosensors and radiation sensors.

CHRIS: When you are looking at these biosensors, are we looking primarily for crew health safety? What would they be used for?

JESSICA: What are the applications? We’ve developed them for crew health and diagnostic purposes. That’s our most recent project that we worked with the Game Changing Technology office on.  For that project, we developed this sensor to look at a variety of different protein biomarkers for cardiac health. When you’re in microgravity, there’s a lot of strain that’s placed on the heart, so, to monitor the health of the heart for our astronaut crew is critical.  That is the most recent technology we developed for them. We’ve also worked on this sensor looking at microbial contaminants in the water supply.  This is an environmental application for NASA to make sure that the water that the astronauts are drinking is actually safe to drink.

The scientists featured on the video podcast are:

Featuring:

Game Changing Nanotechnology
– Steve Gaddis
– Meyya Meyyappan
– Jim Gaier
– Azlin Biaggi​
– Tiffany Williams
– John Thesken
– Mia Siochi

Enjoy!

The second outreach project is billed as a NASA event but it’s more of a science event being hosted by the Wilson Center (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) Science and Technology Innovation Program. From the July 1, 2015 Wilson Center announcement,

NASA’s New Horizons: Innovation, Collaboration and Accomplishment in Science and Technology

With the NASA New Horizons spacecraft on its final approach to its primary target – the icy dwarf planet Pluto – now is the perfect time to reflect on some of the knowledge we’ve already gained from the mission, and to anticipate the new discoveries that are waiting to be made!

We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to a series of short talks inspired by the mission. These talks will cover a number of topics including:

NASA’s and New Horizon’s impact within the world of research

How the Mendeley product suite aims to make life easier for researchers

The importance of open science and the impact it has on major scientific achievements

How a culture of ‘hacking’ can help to foster innovation and creativity

The benefits of making data available for public usage and its societal impact

Mendeley loves science. We help researchers to manage their reference materials, collaborate with their colleagues and discover new research. We’re excited about the possibilities that our work can help to unlock and we want to talk to other people who are excited about the same things.

Logistics are two tiered, first there are the talks and then are the refreshments,

Wednesday, July 15th, 2015
4:00pm – 6:00pm

6th Floor Board Room

Wilson Center
Ronald Reagan Building and
International Trade Center
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
1300 Pennsylvania, Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20004

Phone: 202.691.4000

Followed by drinks and conversation at The Laughing Man Tavern, 1306 G St NW, Washington, DC 20005 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

Complimentary drinks will be served from 6:30 until 7:30. Each ticket holder will also receive drinks tickets for later use. This event is on a first come, first served basis. All guests must be 21 years of age or older.

You can find more information about the event here and you can register here.  As for Mendeley, free reference manager and academic social network, it seems to be a sponsor for this event and you can find out more about the company here.