‘You caught me off guard’: Probing the futures of complex engineered nanomaterials

This paper applies principles and methods from the framework of anticipatory governance to the case of what the National Research Council calls “complex engineered nanomaterials” (CENM). This framework does not aim to generate crystal ball visions or definitive answers, but rather provides guidance for uncovering, understanding, and addressing social, ethical, environmental, and policy issues that stem from emerging technologies. Thus, in anticipation of increased CENM research, CENM products, and their different governance challenges, we aim to lay the groundwork for the anticipatory governance of CENMs by mapping out what—according to the engineers and scientists, we interviewed who are working at the research level of these CENMs—will be the main issues and themes that we need to pay attention to in the near future. The structured interviews focused on three groups of questions: (1) potential and/or actual applications and/or products from the participant’s research; (2) environmental health and safety issues pertaining to both the participant’s research and CENMs generally; and (3) the future of CENMs. Without a foundational understanding to build on, social scientists, policymakers, and regulatory agencies will be at a loss about how to govern CENMs before they are widely implemented in society.     

Fabrication high-purity Fe nanochains with near theoretical limit value of saturation magnetization of bulk Fe

High-yield purity chain-like one-dimensional nanostructures consisting of single crystal Fe nanoparticles have been produced by using solution dispersion approach. Room temperature magnetic measurement shows that the as-fabricated Fe nanochains are ferromagnetic with a high saturation magnetization (203 emu/g) whereas the nanoparticles are single magnetic domains, which indicate that the as-synthesized products have superparamagnetism behavior with the saturation magnetization of about 28 emu/g. Maybe this results from the directional alignment of the nanoparticles. The excellent characteristic may have led to the potential applications in spin filtering, high density magnetic recording, and nanosensors.