BASEL, Switzerland, Feb. 20, 2006 -- The International Conference on Nanoscience and Technology (ICN&T), to be held in Basel July 30-Aug. 4, will commemorate the invention and development of scanning probe microscopy instruments by marking 25 years of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and 20 years of atomic force microscopy (AFM). Conference participants will discuss the scientific impact of STM and AFM while also talking about nanoscience and its potential impact on technology. Traditionally, two conferences have been held in alternate years over the last two decades to discuss these areas separately: the series of STM conferences that began in 1986 and Nano1 through Nano8, held since 1990. To determine whether there should be a common future, the organizers have combined STM06 and Nano9 into ICN&T 2006 under the auspices of the two respective steering committees and the NCCR (National Center of Competence in Research) Nanoscale Science, located at the University of Basel. According to professor Christoph Gerber, director of scientific communication at the University of Basel's National Center of Competence for Nanoscience, Institute of Physics, "We believe that this conference will have significant impact not only on the scientific community, but also with far-reaching new developments to follow in emerging technologies. In addition, the conference is focused on the expansion of nanoscience in general and its potential to unleash future technologies." Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig, winners of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention of STM technology, are an important part of the conference's scientific/technical committee. More than 100 scientific speakers are scheduled to present and conference organizers currently expect up to 1000 participants. Invited speakers at the event include members of the scientific communities at universities in Switzerland, France, Germany, Canada, Japan, the UK, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Austalia, as well as from US universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Rice, Columbia and Cornell. Areas for discussion are nanobiology and nanomedicine (biological motors, optical tweezers, nanoimplants and biosensors); nanosystems, nanomechanics and nano-optics (single-atom and single-molecule manipulation, nanoelectromechanical systems and nearfield optical spectroscopy); molecular electronics (nanowires, molecules on metals, semiconductors and novel circuit architecture); quantum computing and spintronics (spins and quantum bits in quantum dots, spin detection, superconducting quantum bits, spin-optoelectronics, spin Hall effect and magnetic semiconductors); scanning probe microscopy instrumentation (spin-sensitive probing, noncontact force microscopy and inelastic tunneling spectroscopy) and materials (clusters and nanoparticles, nanotubes, magnetic structures and superconductors). For more information about the conference, visit: www.icnt2006.ch