Trust is hard won and even harder to understand. Expecting honesty and good science to win the day may hinder communication efforts and with issues such as vaccination have global implications.

“Smart dust” — tiny digital sensors worldwide that gather all sorts of information and communicate it to powerful computer networks that monitor, measure and understand the physical world in new ways. Some ambitious sensor research projects provide a glimpse of where things are headed.

SAFENANO provides a summary of key nano health and safety developments from 2009, and considers how these are likely to shape nano in 2010.

A European consortium has just published a review of the health and safety of engineered nanomaterials.

Eminent researchers predict where the future lies ten years from now for their areas of expertise.

A House of Lords report is critical of the food industry’s lack of transparency with its research into the uses of nanotechnologies.

In a few decades human and machine will merge, illness will be eradicated, and human beings will live to 150. Take a journey into the imaginations of scientists and futurists pondering ways to use nanotechnologies, and discussions about how society should or could use them.

It may not be the nano-sized autonomous bots roaming your body fixing dodgy parts and eliminating disease, but this article in New Scientist reveals what nanotechnologies are or soon will be helping achieve in the field of robotic medicine.

Your pocket guide to the emerging industry of nanotechnology: Contains Australian research and overseas research, covering nanotech in consumer products, health and food, water and the environment, energy development and nanosafety and regulation.

A US research engineer says nanotechnology can place us on the path to freedom and happiness for all – or mostly all. Will society choose to take this path, however?