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University, Resorts Partner on Sun Safety Campaign
Researchers at San Diego State University are partnering with vacation resorts in the U.S. and Canada to encourage their guests to practice smart sun protection. The San Diego team is headed by health communications professor Peter Andersen and funded by National Institutes of Health. “More than two million new cases of skin cancer are reported…
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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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Thermo Scientific Acquires Sequencing Technology Developer
Thermo Fisher Scientific, a maker of laboratory instruments and technologies in Waltham, Massachusetts acquired the genomic sequencing systems developer Life Technologies in Carlsbad, California for $13.6 billion in cash and debt assumption. In the deal, Thermo Fisher Scientific will pay $76.00 per share and assume Life Technologies’ net outstanding debt, valued at $2.2 billion. Life…
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Biotech Wins Fox Grant for Parkinson’s Drug Delivery Test
Intec Pharma, a biotechnology company in Jerusalem, Israel, received a $705,000 grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for a clinical trial of its system to deliver the drug combination carbidopa and levodopa to treat Parkinson’s disease. The company expects to complete the test in the first quarter of 2014. Intec Pharma developed an oral…
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GlaxoSmithKline Crowdsourcing Bioelectronic Research Ideas
The pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is seeking research ideas from the global scientific community to better understand the body’s neural signaling mechanisms to discover therapies that harness these mechanisms. The company is also mounting a separate competition through InnoCentive to identify a specific disease to serve as a proof-of-principle test for potential neural signaling solutions.…
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Modern Methods Examined for Beer from Victorian Barley
Researchers at the John Innes Center, a plant science research institute in Norwich, U.K., are investigating the commercial potential of brewing beer from Chevallier, a classic variety of barley grown during Britain’s Victorian era in the second half of the 19th century. A grant of £250,000 ($US 384,000) from the U.K.’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences…
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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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Agriculture Biotech Secures $14.5M in Early-Stage Financing
AgBiome LLC, an agricultural biotechnology company in Durham, North Carolina, gained $14.5 million in series A venture funding, the first round of financing after initial start-up. Polaris Partners, a venture capital company in Boston specializing in health care and technology startups, led the round, joined by ARCH Venture Partners, Harris & Harris Group, Innotech Advisers,…
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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…