Category: New products
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Biofuels Developer to Build North Carolina Refinery
Maverick Biofuels in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said today it plans to build a pilot scale biorefinery to produce mixed-alcohol biofuels from biomass and municipal solid waste. The pilot scale biorefinery, says the company, is the next step towards design and construction of a large-scale commercial facility. Maverick says it is raising its first round…
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Research Improves Canola Yields, Adds Benefits for Farmers
Canola, a flowering plant known for its low saturated-fat cooking oil, can also help winter wheat farmers in the Pacific Northwest control weeds, as well as convert into biodiesel, and produce cattle feed supplements. Those are the results and impacts of research conducted by Frank Young, an agronomist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) office…
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Clinical Trial of Stem Cell Therapy Underway
Geron Corporation in Menlo Park, California said today the first patient has enrolled in the clinical trial of its drug GRNOPC1, that contains oligodendrocyte progenitor cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESC). The objective of this Phase 1 study is to assess the safety and tolerability of GRNOPC1 in patients with complete American Spinal…
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Private Spaceship Makes First Glide, Landing Tests
Virgin Galactic in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a company developing the world’s first commercial manned space flight system and tourism business, completed yesterday the first piloted free flight of its craft, the VSS Enterprise. The company says its two main goals of the flight were a clean release of the test craft from its mothership…
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Chemists Streamline Cooking Oil Conversion to Biodiesel
As the U.S. seeks to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, the country continues to discard large quantities of waste vegetable oil — consider the quantity of oil used to cook one order of french fries, for example — that could be converted into bio-based fuels. But this process presents problems, notably the time and…
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City to Test Bio-Based Asphalt from University, Startup
A lab at Iowa State University in Ames has developed a potential green replacement for asphalt derived from petroleum, which will be put to a test in Iowa’s sometimes extreme winters and summers. The lab, in the Institute for Transportation’s Asphalt Materials and Pavements Program at Iowa State, developed the asphalt substitute, which will be…
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Bacteria Monitors Can Measure State of Oil Fields
A doctoral dissertation published at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands suggests that monitoring bacteria levels in an oil field can provide useful indicators on the state of that oil field. Geert van der Kraan, who conducted the research, received his doctorate degree this week. For his dissertation research, van der Kraan investigated…
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Novartis to Develop Flu Vaccines with Synthetic Genomics
Novartis, a global pharmaceutical company based in Basel, Switzerland, says today it will join with Synthetic Genomics Vaccines Inc. (SGVI), in La Jolla, California to apply a combination of synthetic biology and genomics to accelerate production of influenza seed strains required for vaccine manufacturing. Seed strains are starter cultures of a virus, and the base…
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Paper Test Strips Developed for Bioactivity
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in Espoo has developed a method of using printing technology to produce simple tests with treated paper to indicate the presence of bioactivity. VTT has demonstrated the feasibility of this method by printing a hemoglobin test paper that reveals whether a given sample contains hemoglobin (pictured right). VTT says…
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Anxiety/Depression Drug Trials Approved in France
Bionomics Limited, a drug development company in Adelaide, Australia, says the French national medical agency and ethics committee for Strasburg Hospital have approved the company’s request to conduct clinical trials for BNC210, Bionomics’ treatment of anxiety and depression now in development. The first clinical study will examine whether BNC210 reduces panic and anxiety symptoms induced…