Tag Archives: PICMET

Canada’s nano article numbers (part 2) plus memristor and L’Oreal updates

Now for part 2 about M. Fatih Yegul’s (he’s at the University of Waterloo) paper which is to be presented in South Africa at PICMET ’08, July 27-31 (www.picmet.org or go here). PICMET will publish Yegul’s study in their proceedings if you want to check out his data.)

Yegul points out that nanotechnology or nanoscience didn’t actually exist as categories until after people started publishing and applying for patents which makes searching and analyzing data a little bit of a challenge. (I was really surprised to find out that the US Patent and Trademark Office took until 2004 before establishing nanotechnology as a category.)

As per Canadian publication output, we seem to bob around in the rankings between 8th and 13th worldwide, depending on the time period being examined and what the study was measuring.  Some of the studies are expressed in whole numbers while others provide percentages. Interestingly, we seem to range from 1% to roughly 4% when the studies express results in percentages.

A few countries,  the US, China, Japan, Germany, and South Korea dominate the numbers in some more recent studies.  (The 2008 Nature Nanotechnology publication analysis aggregated the European countries’ numbers which resulted in a high ranking overall but makes the study a little hard to compare to anything else. It’s a problem that I imagine Yegul confronted any number of times while producing his paper. )

I’ll look at the patents tomorrow in part 3 (I just can’t fit it all in today).

Now a few things I’d like to clarify…I’m a bit of a dullard and didn’t realize until two days ago that I’d gotten some responses to earlier postings…I hope both individuals will accept my apologies and since those comments were made weeks ago I thought it only fair to highlight them…first from Scott Jordan at Carpe Nano and in response to some confusion about memristors on my part:

  • “Thanks for the link to my blog, http://CarpeNano.blogspot.com. Think of the memristor as being like a resistor whose value changes with the current it has experienced flowing through it, and that its value “sticks” when no current goes through (that is, power off), and that the process is reversible. That’s not quite accurate, but the sticky behavior is the important part. It’s a way of storing information, and not just with the 0-or-1 states of conventional digital memory, though that’s one possible implementation. It can store intermediate values, too. That means one memristor can store multiple bit-states… in principle, one memristor could do the job of a whole conga-line of RAM elements. Fascinating stuff!”

Thank you, the explanation helped a lot.

Next, a comment from Andrew Maynard, Science Advisor for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) about their event “Small is Beautiful” which would have had Maynard and a L’Oreal scientist talking about nanotechnology safety and cosmetics from the European perspective. The talk which was to take place June 5, 2008 was postponed within a week of two studies (one about carbon nanotubes and the other about fullerenes) being released that occasioned a lot of online discussion about nanotechnology safety. (Maynard was one of the authors for the carbon nanotube study.) Here’s his comment:

  • “No hidden agenda here – our speaker from L’Oreal couldn’t make it for personal reasons. We are intending to reschedule as soon as possible – stay tuned!”

Thank you and I checked again this morning and unfortunately, they haven’t rescheduled yet.