Science and Enterprise

Category: Joint ventures/collaborations

  • Maryland Utility to Purchase Solar Contest Winning House

    The electric utility company Pepco says it will purchase the WaterShed house that won the 2011 Solar Decathlon contest in October. The house was built by faculty and students at the University of Maryland in College Park, its current location. The 2011 Solar Decathlon pitted 20 teams representing institutions in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and…

  • Pharmas, Foundations, Agencies Partner on Tropical Diseases

    In London yesterday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 13 pharmaceutical companies, three governments, the World Bank and global health agencies announced a new plan to eliminate or control 10 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) by 2020. The effort announced at an event at the Royal College of Physicians is aimed at 1.4 billion people living…

  • VC Company, Harvard Start Seed-Stage Fund

    The Experiment Fund, a joint venture of Harvard University’s engineering school and venture capital company New Enterprise Associates (NEA), opened today in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The fund plans to support technology-based student start-ups in Cambridge and companies begun elsewhere by former students. The venture expects to support companies working in information technologies, health care, and energy.…

  • Columbia Joins Coulter Biomedical Engineering Partnership

    Columbia University in New York and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation in Miami will establish the Columbia-Coulter Translational Research Partnership, part of a network of biomedical engineering and translational research institutions in the U.S. The program is expected devote $5 million in funding over five years, with two-thirds of the funds from the Coulter Foundation,…

  • NSF Supporting Research to Reduce Fertilizer Use in Maize

    Researchers at three universities, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and USDA’s Agricultural Research Service have received a $1.3 million grant from National Science Foundation for research on reducing the amount of fertilizer to grow maize. The three-year project is led by the ARS’s Ivan Baxter, who also serves on the Danforth Center’s faculty in…

  • Grant to Develop Virtual Reality Job Service for Disabled

    The University of Hawaii in Manoa was awarded a $425,000 grant by the Kessler Foundation to develop a virtual reality (VR) employment orientation and support center using Second Life as a platform for people with disabilities and employers. The university’s College of Education Center on Disability Studies (CDS) will receive a Kessler Signature Employment Grant…

  • Soap Developed with Magnetic Properties

    Researchers at University of Bristol in the U.K. and Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France have developed a soap with iron salts that can be controlled by magnets. The discovery is expected to lead to products useful in cleaning up oil spills at sea, which can be better captured and removed after use than currently available…

  • Process IDs Rice Traits to Help Tsunami-Hit Rice Growers

    A collaboration between scientists in Japan and the U.K. is developing methods to identify genetic markers that can help cut the time needed to breed salt-tolerant and shorter rice to help Japanese growers recover from the tsunami in March 2011. The new process, called MutMap, is described online in the journal Nature Biotechnology (paid subscription…

  • Industrial Robotics Software Repository Established

    Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio has set up a repository of software routines for industrial automation that work under the Robot Operating System. The software collection of tools, libraries, and drivers is publicly accessible and licensed under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. The Robot Operating System (ROS) provides functions and routines…

  • Consortium Develops Virtual Mouse for Lab Testing

    Simcyp Ltd. in Sheffield, U.K., a consortium of pharmaceutical and biotech companies and research universities, has created a virtual lab mouse for use in cancer and toxicological research. Simcyp is a spin-off enterprise from Sheffield University that develops modeling and simulation tools for lab testing. Lab mice are used frequently in the development of new drugs…