Science and Enterprise

Month: May 2012

  • National Lab, Investment Fund to Support Battery Companies

    Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CalCEF, a not-for-profit group in San Francisco supporting clean energy technologies, unveiled a program called CalCharge to help new energy storage companies. CalCEF has two divisions, the California Clean Energy Fund and CalCEF Innovations that designs business models, financial products, and public policies to foster clean energy. CalCharge aims to…

  • Ensemble Therapeutics, Genentech Partner on Drug Discovery

    Ensemble Therapeutics, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Genentech, a subsidiary of the global pharmaceutical company Roche in South San Francisco, California have agreed to collaborate on the development of new drug candidates based on Ensemble’s technology. The financial value of the deal was not disclosed. Ensemble says it has developed a drug discovery…

  • $2.25M Challenge Seeks Health Care Sensing Technologies

    Nokia Corporation, a developer of mobile systems in Espoo, Finland, is sponsoring a challenge to generate innovative ideas for sensing technologies to improve the conduct of health care. The Nokia Sensing X Challenge is conducted with the X-Prize Foundation and has a total prize fund of $2.25 million. The competition seeks ideas for real-time collection…

  • SpaceX Dragon Capsule Docks at Space Station [Updated]

    Update: 31 May 2012 NASA reports that the SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 11:42 a.m. EDT a few hundred miles west of Baja California, Mexico, marking the completion of the first mission by a commercial company to resupply the International Space Station. The capsule earlier began a 9-minute, 50-second deorbit…

  • Process Developed to Determine Tomato Flavor Chemistry

    Researchers from University of Florida and Ohio State University have developed a method to reveal the chemical composition of tasty tomatoes that the researchers say can lead to better-tasting tomatoes in the supermarket. Their findings appear online in the journal Current Biology (paid subscription required). The interdisciplinary team led by Florida horticultural sciences professor Harry…

  • Chip Set Developed for High Speed Wireless Data Transfers

    Computer scientists at Nanyang Technological University and Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore have developed a microchip that can transmit large volumes of data at speeds of 2 gigabits per second, or 1,000 times faster than current Bluetooth technology. At that speed, a 2-hour, 8-gigabyte movie could be transferred in about half a minute,…

  • Jet Injector Alternative to Hypodermic Needles Developed

    Engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an alternative to hypodermic needles to deliver medications, but one that gives more control than most commercial jet injector devices. A description of the technology appears online in the journal Medical Engineering & Physics (paid subscription required). The new device sends a tiny, high-pressure jet of medicine…

  • Consortium Developing Synthetic Biology Technology Platform

    The Flowers Consortium, a group of five universities in the U.K., is developing a common platform technology for synthetic biology. Development of the platform — a basic set of standard technologies, from which specific applications can be designed — is being funded by a grant of some £5 million ($US 7.8 million) from the Engineering…

  • Nanotech Fabrication Process Developed for Smaller Chips

    Engineers at Stanford University and two Silicon Valley companies in California have devised a method of creating contact hole patterns for semiconductors that can reduce the size of logic and memory chips, while maintaining their fabrication accuracy. The findings of the team led by Stanford engineering professor H.-S. Philip Wong (pictured left) appear online in the…

  • Venture Fund Raises $50M for Cleantech, Materials Start-Ups

    Pangaea Ventures Ltd. in Vancouver, British Columbia has raised $US 50 million for its Pangaea Ventures Fund III that aims to invest in early-stage cleantech companies using advanced materials technologies. Pangaea says the new investment fund expects to eventually raise $100 million. The limited partners in the fund are corporate and private-equity venture investors including…