As a UK parliamentary enquiry into fake news gets underway, members of parliament could take a few lessons from the history of nanotechnology. It isn’t just democracy under threat from made up stuff, it’s science too. Even more discomforting is the realization that scientists have been doing this for decades, and nobody really cares. Despite the off high profile case …
From Lead Poisoning in Flint to Landfill Reclamation, It’s All About The Cost of Treating Water
The lead poisoning scandal in Flint, Michigan, highlighted that access to safe drinking water is not just an issue in the developing world. And as Reuters reports, “while poverty remains a potent predictor of lead poisoning, the victims span the American spectrum – poor and rich, rural and urban, black and white. An examination of lead testing results across the …
Technology Commercialisation – More Light than Heat?
An interesting snapshot on the commercialisation of graphene emerges from some recent evidence submitted to the UK’s Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee. Policy makers and academics have much in common, especially the ability to make extravagant promises and then conveniently forget them when it comes to delivery. In short the University of Manchester has been signing NDA’s and furiously patenting graphene …
The N8 Northern Universities Seem To Prefer Stotties To Spin Outs
The recent N8 report “The Power of 8” by a group of 8 northern English Universities (Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York) is wonderfully bombastic but also illustrates what is wrong with university technology transfer and how little they understand about the real world. Despite all the big numbers – the 8 Universities have calculated that they …
Dull, Unimaginative Wearables from Apple and Samsung
Keeping half an eye on the latest set of Apple product announcements, especially the wearables, I wondered “Has Apple Run Out Of Innovation?” Perhaps not totally, the innovative wireless headphones and Waterproof iPhone indicate that there is at least some incremental innovation happening, but it looks increasingly like an effort to extract ever more value from existing technologies than to …
Disrupting Water Treatment Technology – Equal Parts Economics and Technology
I’ve seen lots of water treatment technologies over the last fifteen years consisting of almost every conceivable variant of nanotechnology, from electrospun nanofibers to graphene. Some of them are great, but many won’t succeed, for a simple reason that is obvious to anyone outside the science community. Hardly a week goes by without some new form of graphene being promoted as …
The Killer App For Graphene – Cocktails
It is impossible to get office space in Manchester at the moment as the place is choked with graphene spin outs from the university. There is even a new restaurant opening in the city, Grafene which is “inspired by the world’s first 2D material Graphene, first isolated at Manchester University and the focus of global scientific and research investment.” I’m …
Why Academics Don’t Innovate
The recent parliamentary inquiry into graphene highlighted that the University of Manchester did not fully appreciate the significance of the work on graphene that subsequently won a Nobel Prize, but is the academic publishing system to blame? A recent study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research , “Bias against Novelty in Science: A Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometrics Indicators,” reports that …
2D Materials at the Tipping Point in 2016 – World Economic Forum
WEF Top 10 Emerging Technologies The World Economic Forum (WEF) released its list of the Top Ten Emerging Technologies for 2016 today. One of the criteria was the likelihood that 2016 represents a tipping point in the deployment of each technology. So the list includes some technologies that have been known for a number of years, but are only now …
How Much Science Hype is Acceptable?
Discussing the subject of hype on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Nanotechnology a valid question was raised. Is technology hype justified and how much is acceptable? The tech industry is great at hype. There is always plenty of hype surrounding the latest improvements from Siri to Apple Maps to the latest version of Microsoft Word, and it could be argued that …