Although it’s somewhat unusual to see the words “good idea” and “Dept of Homeland Security” in the same sentence, it actually appears to have happened last week.

Since NIN is a bi-weekly service in an immediate-response digital world, it seems a bit silly for me to wait until the next issue to give you the scoop from the MIT Emerging Technology Conference (http://www.technologyreview.com/emtech/08/) I’m heading to tomorrow.

This is very much the story of James Bond’s scientist buddy, Q, going public and selling his services to the highest bidder.

I was reading through some e-mails and journals recently, sorting through some of the scientific happenings in the nanotech world, and something started to resonate with me that played out fully when I was at the SPIE Photonics and Optics Conference in San Diego a couple weeks ago. Although there’s great interest from the investor side in nanotech, US industry isn’t moving very quickly into this space.

After a couple days at the San Francisco Money Show, where I did a Webcast event on nanotech investing, including my favorite hot stocks, I’m in lovely San Diego for the next few days attending a SPIE Photonic and Optics Conference. Sunday was the first day and here are my initial impressions. I’ll be blogging on At These Levels while I’m here if you want to read the day-to-day goings on.

Last issue I was fawning over HP’s potential release of the Fourth Passive Circuit technology, the memristor, for computers by next year. This issue isn’t exactly as directly beneficial to consumers as the memristor advance, but it’s equally revolutionary and significant in its own geeky kind of way.

There are inductors, resistors and capacitors. These are the three passive circuits that all electronics have been built upon since the advent of electronic devices. Everything from a radio to a parallel processing supercomputer to the space shuttle uses the same junk.

This is what I continually harp on: Nanotech isn’t just one thing; it’s an enabling technology that has the ability to change the way we do almost everything, from the mundane to the esoteric.

Although most penny stocks are best avoided, there’s one I’ve been following for some time—Industrial Nanotech. I really think it has a unique product and a good business plan.

The major press was all over a study that came out a couple weeks ago observing carbon nanotubes and C60 buckyballs (or fullerenes) to have potential carcinogenic pathologies.