NanoBlog

The Independent Inventors Conference at the USPTO provided a wealth of information on organizations that provide support to independent inventors. Some of these organizations include:

• Inventors Digest provides a publications dedicated to inventors needs.
• The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation provides education to entrepreneurs.
• United Inventors Association one of the largest independent inventors organizations in the country.
• USA Innovation Market Place provides a market place for companies and inventors to find each other (sponsored by NIST).
• New Vantage Group provides early stage angel funding to inventors.

US Patent and Trademark Office held their 15th Annual Independent Inventors Conference in Alexandria, Va last week. It was an informative and interesting 2+ days of talks and breakout sessions. I was able to sign up for a one-on-one with a patent examiner to discuss some specifics of my ideas that may be patentable. Overall, I learned that patenting an invention is way more complex that I imagined but the USPTO will take every effort to help independent inventors through the patent process. Your patent description plus claims still has to be proper and legally correct which shouldn't be a surprise. I recommend attending next years conference if you have any interest in patents or meeting fellow inventors. Now to begin that search for prior art and begin that market study.

Nova will be showing a four part mini-series on Making Stuff starting January 19, 2011. Nova has a Preview of the show that looks very interesting. I did not expect the adventure and exploration aspect of the show but like the idea. It reminds me of Scientific American Frontiers shows with Woody Flowers and Alan Alda. The series was produced in cooperation with the Materials Research Society (MRS). I recall the announcement of the series at the 2009 Fall MRS meeting and expected it in the fall of this year. I'm eager to see it.

The workshop on the Electronic Properties of Graphene held at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Sciences last last weekend was just amazing. Some of the world's renown experts gave deep theoretical talks on the properties of graphene for single layer and bilayer configurations. All the talks addressed the edge of our understanding of how electrons behave in graphene under various conditions. My thanks to all to the organizers and to those who patiently answered my oh so basic questions. For more details on the talks, please see my wiki page summary on the Graphene Workshop. Also check out my other blog on building an evaluation board mock-up for packing and testing a graphene FET.

The website has been upgraded to the latest version. The upgrade went very smoothly and I've noticed that the calendar works better now. You can hover over the hyperlinks to see more info about an event.

Check out our handy units and constants Wiki page for a quick reference to common units and constants used in nanodevice design.

Wikipedia has a extensive list of physical chemistry and solid state physics software. The list show the solution technique the package uses and the type license agreement for 60 or so packages. It would be helpful if the page would list compatible operating systems distributions too.

So here I was thinking that the p-brane RSS feeds was extensive with 13 RSS feeds presently until I ran across ChemFeeds. This bad boy has 50 or more feeds from RCS, Nature, and Wiley. Nice work.

Did you miss the Agilent webinar last Tuesday as I did. You can see Growing Nanowires, Miniaturizing Columns as an archive now. The webinar had two speakers:

• Gregory Doerk from Berkeley who described his research on growing Si nanowires horizontally and epitaxially using block copolymers in an aqious environoment.
• Lawrence P Murry from Agilent who described their new low voltage Field-Emission (FE) Scanning Electron Microscope.

For a copy of the slides, contact Rita Willis at ritawillis at verizon.net.

For the latest nanotech news and research, check out our wiki page on selected Nano RSS Feeds. RSS feeds from the following publications are included (in the order the publications were added):

• Graphene Times
• Nature Nanotechnology
• Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science & Technology
• Nanoscale
• Journal of Nanobiotechnology
• Small
• Nano Today
• ACS Nano
• IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology
• IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience
• Journal of Nanophotonics
• ArXiv Cornell University Library
• Materials
• ASME Journal of Nanotechnology in Engineering and Medicine