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Innovation and Entrepreneurship Council to Hold First Meeting (Updated)
Xconomy is reporting that the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship will hold its first meeting today in Washington, DC. The group, formed in July, will advise the executive branch on new policies “that foster entrepreneurship and identifying new ways to take great ideas from the lab to the marketplace to drive economic growth…
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New iPhone / Smartphone Theme Installed
We installed a new plug-in that formats our site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod Touch, Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones. It offers a better visual presentation, as well as Twitter, e-mail, and social network integration that was missing before. If you can’t get…
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Contract Awarded for Acute Radiation Therapy
Cellerant Therapeutics Inc., a biotechnology company in San Carlos, California, received a five-year contract from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), in the Department of Health and Human Services to develop CLT-008, the company’s cellular therapy for the treatment of acute radiation syndrome. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says acute radiation…
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Making Corn-based Plastics More Heat Tolerant
Petroleum is not only the main source of transportation fuel but also a key raw material in making plastics. A team from Lapol LLC, of Santa Barbara, California and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of USDA are working on a solution to make corn-based plastics a better alternative than plastics made from oil. An important…
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Sensors Developed to Measure Flood Damage to Bridges
Floods have caused more than 60 percent of all bridge failures in the U.S. in the past 30 years, more than all other causes combined. Yet up to now, there have been no systematic ways of measuring the damage caused by floods on the bridge supports at the river bottom. Xiong “Bill” Yu, assistant professor…
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Health Informatics Group to Build International Presence
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) in Bethesda, Maryland, has started a subsidiary called the Global Health Informatics Partnership (GHIP) to encourage collaborative initiatives on health informatics. GHIP aims to form grassroots networks of health informatics advocates and professionals to build health informatics capacity in low-resource settings, primarily in South America, Africa, and Asia. According…
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Prostate Cancer Patients Treated with Robotic Ultrasound
InSightec Ltd., an Israeli developer of magnetic resonance-guided ultrasound technology, says that its ExAblate system has been used for the first time for the treatment of prostate cancer patients. Seven patients with localized low-risk prostate cancer were treated so far at the N.N. Petrov Research Institute of Oncology in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and at the…
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Trial Shows Drug Reduces Lactic Acid in Trauma Patients
Results from a proof-of-concept clinical trial of the drug MP4OX in severely injured trauma patients with hemorrhagic shock showed that MP4OX, when given in addition to standard of care, was effective at decreasing lactate levels in treated patients. MP4OX is an oxygen therapeutic agent that is designed to provide rapid oxygen delivery to tissues with…
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Nanoscale Silicon Oxide Circuits Break Memory Barrier
Rice University scientists in Houston, Texas have created the first two-terminal memory silicon chips that can be manufactured with nanoelectronic techniques and promise to extend the limits of miniaturization subject to Moore’s Law, which states the number of devices on a circuit doubles every 18 to 24 months. Professor James Tour initially showed how electrical…
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Contract Awarded for Bioterror Antibiotic
The U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) awarded a contract to Achaogen Inc. of San Francisco, California to develop an antibiotic against two types of bioterrorism as well as common infections that are becoming resistant to antibiotics. The contract pays Achaogen $27 million in the first two years, but can be extended annually…