Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Current way in which disciplines acquire prestige depends on their utility in real world (their practical application). This has produced, among other issues, hierarchic epistemic systems that generate, at least, a relative exclusion of world visions. Therefore, such marginalization tends to be an aspect that characterizes current way of innovating and commercializing goods and services (or the mechanism in which those technological advances are socialized). Even if there has been important contributions on the study and analysis of the logic, stimulus, uncertainty and societal, ethical and environmental implications of scientific and technological development, the exclusion of certain visions and values is a feature still anchored within the decision making process, at the political and other levels. Considering the above, it is proposed the need of promoting and reinventing (social) dialogue as key instrument for confronting uncertainty and the increasing technoscientific complexity, but also for opening more robust interdisciplinary paths for strengthening the exercise of evaluating technoscience’s purposes. As science and technology advances and becomes more complex —as it happens in the case of converging technologies at the nanoscale—, all within a context in which social basic needs are still unsolved for most of world population, we conclude that it is necessary to bet on a social and responsible management of science and technology based on a wide and genuine social dialogue and consensus.

Human health is constantly the subject of new threats, demanding for efficient and fastacting drugs. Nowadays, new ways for delivering and dosing drugs are under investigation, and nanomaterials have become a major research field. Several materials have been studied for drug transportation and dosage: polymer nanoparticles, conjugated polymers, liposomes, micelles, dendrites, carbon nanotubes, gold nanoparticles or nanocages of different elements. However, in many cases, these materials have not been as efficient as expected. In this work we make evident the need for developing new materials with specific properties, such as the MOFs (metal organic frameworks). The MOF are a group of materials with properties that can be tailored to suit specific applications. MOF design involves a metal center and an organic ligand, which provide the required physicochemical properties, depending on the drug to be encapsulated, for latter release, in the organism. MOF synthesis can be simple and low-cost; desired properties can be introduced during the synthesis procedure, or after it, by functionalization. Because of these advantages, MOF may work better than other materials.

The study of blue light emitting semiconductor devices has been a topic of transcendental importance since the point of view of science as well as technology. In the present paper special attention is paid to the scientific and technological development of light emitting diodes and laser diodes based on the gallium nitride technology. The principal properties of gallium nitride and two of its alloys, indium-gallium nitride and aluminum-gallium nitride are qualitatively presented. An introduction to the new sources of light based on the light emitting semiconductor devices allows a brief historical review of the researches, the developments and the innovations carried out by Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura. Such scientific and technological works gave as results the design, fabrication and commercialization of blue light emitting diodes and blue laser diodes. Finally, an analysis of the economical, social and environmental importance of the blue emitting devices based on gallium nitride technology is done.

Manipulating the synthesis conditions allows for rational control of nanoparticles size and morphology and provides a means to tailor materials properties in specific applications. In this work the main synthesis methods of nanomaterials are described. For the “top-down” approach, involving mainly physical methods, the thermal evaporation, the synthesis of gaseous clusters, the ion implantation, the chemical vapor deposition and the mechanical activation or mecanosyntesis are described. On the other hand for the “bottom-up” approach, involving mainly chemical methods, the following methods are described: the colloidal method, the photochemical and radiation-chemical reduction, the microwave irradiation, reactions in dendrimers, the solvothermal synthesis and the sol-gel method. Moreover some methods for the deposition of nanoparticles on supports (mainly on oxides) are described: impregnation, ionic adsorption, deposition precipitation, deposition of colloids and photochemical deposition.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the problematic relationship between science, technology and politics on the stage of complex societies, such as critical support to give account of the implications of science and technology in the overall context of reflexive modernity. In particular, the paper contributes to the understanding of the contradictory relationship, tense and ambivalent expressed contemporaneously between democracy and techno, to generate a high degree of social complexity, uncertainty and risk. It is considered as a central problem, if there can be a democratic way to plan, evaluate and regulate techno-scientific development or to take politically relevant as a fact, that technology is inherently undemocratic.