Jessie Paul, CMO of Wipro came up with a brilliant idea of dimming the corporate websites for an hour on Saturday in support of the climate change program ‘Earth Hour” started by WWF.

And, here’s my 3 bits of solidarity in saving the planet from Global warming.  On Saturday I am not taking a shower(conserving water), if I feel thirsty will reach out for beer instead of water, will save on fuel and take a bicycle, or walk to commute, better still, will stay home daydreaming of a holiday in the Arctic with polar bears in the background!!!! Yes, I have heard that the bears are going to be extinct and the WWF is doing everything to prevent that.

But then, there are also those who believe that the polar bears will be just fine. Like the brilliant scientist out there who knows exactly how many trees it would take to remove all carbon from the atmosphere.

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Online collaboration has come of age and the new scientist is a geek from anywhere; Japan, India, Russia, or Toronto. No visas, no entry fees, all you need is a digital network, and if you can solve a problem, you get rich instantly, thanks to InnoCentive. 

Driven by the wisdom of the crowd, the online lab InnoCentive is an opensource innovation marketplace where engineers, scientists, geeks and problem solvers of the world hangout for some innovative fun, passion, real life puzzle, and some cash. Yeah, I suppose you could call this the Las Vegas of the Geeks, except it is your ideas that are at stake here.

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What’s the Dance of Shiva got to do with nanotechnologies? Intrigued? Tim Harper of Cientifica speculates about creative destruction and credit crunch in his white paper Nanotechnologies 2009.

Check it out for the bit about academic funding, its lack of mechanism to spend a potential of $22.5Bn revenue, and for other insights into investments in nanosolar, cleantech and nanomaterials.

Welcome to nanoblogging. If Twitter lets you blog with a 140 word limit, here is Adocu, which lets you post only one word. Your post would look something like this: whatnextonesyllablepost?

And folks were worried about English language going to dogs, now it’s gone cuckoo with all that tweeting and chirping. Looks like there’s going to be a lot of bird talk in the future of the blogosphere.

Nanotechnology has finally arrived in classrooms and we are not merely talking theory here. In India, nanoscience education is seen as an option only in the graduate and post graduate levels. And only the creme de la creme have the opportunity to work on nanoscience projects. Take for instance, the IIT students of Kanpur planning to build a nano satellite in association with Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

In the west, nanoscience is introduced much earlier in schools. High school grads get to attend nanoscience workshops where they process silicon wafers using photolithography to transfer a pattern of their school logo into a 500 nm aluminum film.  Talk about educational gaps in society.