Tag: physical sciences
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Venture Funding Declines in Q1, Health Companies Buck Trend
Venture capital funding in the U.S. declined in the first quarter of 2013, continuing a trend begun in 2011, but companies in the health care sector, particularly those based on scientific discovery, played a prominent role in the quarter’s venture transactions. VentureSource, a service of financial publishers Dow Jones, released the first quarter data today.…
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Researcher Studies, Commercializes Nanoscale Drug Delivery
A researcher at University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada developed a process of delivering drugs to targeted locations in the body with nanoscale polymer capsules, and has received a patent for that process. Afsaneh Lavasanifar, a professor in Alberta’s pharmacy school, also started a company in 2010 to take her process to market. Lavasanifar devised…
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Technique Calculates X-Rays for Minimally Invasive Surgery
Engineers and computer scientists from North Carolina State University in Raleigh and University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill devised a technique for determining the X-rays to track surgical tools in minimally-invasive procedures. NC State engineering professor Edgar Lobaton is the lead author on a paper describing this technique to be presented next month at…
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System Being Tested to Move Old E-Car Battery Power to Grid
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, General Motors, and ABB Group in Cary, North Carolina are testing an operational platform to harness the electricity in spent electric vehicle batteries for the power grid. The project is funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, although the amount of the funding…
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Trial Shows Smartphone App Effective for Weight Loss
Food scientists at University of Leeds in the U.K. found a smartphone app helped participants in a clinical trial better manage their food intake and lose weight compared to a food diary on a Web site or on paper. The findings of the team led by Leeds’s epidemiology professor Janet Cade, appear online in today’s…
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Optical Circuits Developed with Semiconductor Diamonds
Engineers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and colleagues in Germany developed an economical method to harness polycrystalline diamonds for optical circuits. The team led by nanotechnology lab director Wolfram Pernice published its findings earlier this week in the journal Nature Communications (paid subscription required). Optical circuits work like integrated electronic circuits, but instead of transmiting…
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Injectable LEDs Developed to Study Brain Functions
Biomedical engineers at University of Illinois in Champaign, with colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis, and other institutions in the U.S., Korea, and China developed tiny light-emitting diode (LED) devices that can be injected deep in the brain to study neural functions. The team led by Illinois’s John Rogers published its findings in this…
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Non-Battery Power Supply for Aircraft Sensors Flight Tested
Engineers from Vienna University of Technology in Austria and the commercial aircraft manufacturer EADS are collaborating on a new type of power supply for sensors to monitor a fuselage’s structural integrity. The team reports the first successful flight tests of the devices on an Airbus aircraft. These energy harvesting modules, as they’re called, are the…
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UConn, Pratt & Whitney Open Additive Manufacturing Lab
Aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney and University of Connecticut are collaborating on a laboratory to research 3-D printing as a manufacturing technique at the university’s Storrs campus. The company, a division of United Technologies, is expected to spend $8 million over the next five years on the university’s Pratt & Whitney Additive Manufacturing Center.…
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Gallium Arsenide Nanowires Boost Solar Cell Efficiency
University and industrial researchers in Switzerland and Denmark developed a new type of solar cell that in lab tests captures more light and generates more power than traditional silicon cells. The team from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, Neils Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen, and the Danish spin-off company SunFlake A/S…