R & D articles from February 2007

R & D archives from February 2007

Putting technology in context.(Editorial)
February 1, 2007... I often refer to a chart created by futurist Ray Kurzweil nearly eight years ago that was published in his seminal work, The Age of Spiritual Machines. The chart illustrates how low-cost computer systems will exponentially evolve over the next...

AstraZeneca bolsters R&D efforts.(PHARMACEUTICAL)(research and development)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... In late January, pharma giant, AstraZeneca, London, UK, announced a $100 million research investment/expansion at its R&D center in Waltham, Mass., (R&D's 2001 Lab of the Year.) The facility, which currently focuses on infectious diseases...

Chip heavyweights partner up.(SEMICONDUCTOR)(Tokyo Electron Limited and Sematech)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL) and SEMATECH will join forces in a multi-year joint development program aimed at improving the prospects for using 3-D interconnect technologies and high-mobility channel materials in advanced semiconductor...

Freescale and IBM join hands.(BULLETIN)
February 1, 2007... A mega partnership has emerged with the announcement that Freescale Semiconductor, Austin, Texas, has joined IBM's, Armonk, N.Y., technology alliance for joint semiconductor R&D. Freescale will now work with IBM and its partners on advancing...

ISS slated for increased activity.(SPACE)(International Space Station)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Situated nearly 360 km from the Earth's surface, the International Space Station (ISS) continues to demonstrate its value to scientific research, and for that matter, daily life. With that, plans are now in the works to ramp up its scale and...

U.S. launches Aeronautics Policy.(AVIATION)(National Aeronautics Research and Development Policy)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... A watershed event for U.S aeronautics research took place in late-December with the formal establishment of the nation's first aeronautics R&D policy. The new National Aeronautics Research and Development policy establishes guidelines for...

Inspiring the next generation.(ROBOTICS)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... More than 32, 500 high school students on 1,300 teams from the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, and the U.K., will participate in this year's FIRST Robotics Competition. Created in 1989 by Dean Kamen, R&D Magazine's 2006...

Get the blur out.(MICROSCOPY)(optical microscopy )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Researchers at the Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), have offered up a new weapon in the battle to clean up images in optical microscopy routines. The novel technique, dubbed ISAM or Interferometric...

Greener concrete through nanotech.(NANOTECHNOLOGY)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Investigations into the underlying structure of cement by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, may prove to be useful in the creation of "greener" concrete. Currently, the production of cement, the main...

Introducing GEMBE.(ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS)(Gradient Elution Moving Boundary Electrophoresis)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The realm of separation science is rich with techniques and instrumentation that allows its researchers to break down complex mixtures/solutions into their basic constituents. Among the most popular has been electrophoresis. Typically, a...

Creating hydrogen out of thin air.(ENERGY)
February 1, 2007... A unique venture in energy production is up and running at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) National Wind Technology Center, Golden, Colo. Along with industry partner, Xcel Energy, Minneapolis, Minn., NREL has opened a facility...

Modeling quantum biology.(R&D INFORMATICS)(Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y., and the Wadsworth Center, N.Y.)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, N.Y., and the Wadsworth Center, N.Y., of the State Dept. of Health, Albany, have used computer models to reveal the mechanism behind an important...

INCITE into supercomputing.(R&D INFORMATICS)(Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... As part of its 2007 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, the U.S. Dept. of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science, Washington, D.C., awarded 95 million hours on some of the world's most powerful...

Closing the GWA gap.(R&D INFORMATICS)( Genome Wide Association )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., has introduced dbGaP, a database of Genotypes and Phenotypes. This new resource is designed to archive and distribute data from genome wide...

Korea-Japan-China tech pact.(R&D ASIA)(technology)(First Trilateral Korea-Japan-China Ministerial Meeting on Science and Technology )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The First Trilateral Korea-Japan-China Ministerial Meeting on Science and Technology (S&T) Cooperation was held in Seoul, South Korea, in mid-January. Attending me meeting were Kim Woo-Sik, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of S&T for the...

Strong Asian growth seen by global CEOs.(R&D ASIA)(chief executive officers)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The 2007 CEO Briefing sponsored by the UK Trade & Investment organization and created by The Economist Intelligence Unit of the London-based The Economist publication reveals that most industrial CEOs continue to see China and India as both...

More CAS research labs.(R&D ASIA)(Chinese Academy of Sciences)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology has approved the establishment of another 10 national laboratories in 2007, with three of them at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The three CAS labs will include the National Laboratory of...

Baxter fighting bird flu.(R&D ASIA)(axter International Inc. (Deerfield, Illinois))(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Baxter International, a medical manufacturer based in Deerfield, Ill., has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government of Indonesia to help fight the bird flu there. Baxter has been working with the World Health Organization (WHO)...

Leukemia gene identified.(R&D ASIA)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Researchers at the Institute of Health Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Mass., Rockefeller Univ., New York, N.Y., the Univ. of Chicago, Ill., and Stanford Univ., Calif., have collaborated to...

Globalization and market shifts: drive analytical instrument changes: despite restructuring in big pharma, the overall outlook for analytical instruments is positive for the next four years with 5% to 6% real growth forecast for traditional systems.(Table)
February 1, 2007... The R&D environment is flail of market-affecting changes, from a pharmaceutical industry that is undergoing a strategic reassessment of its drug development procedures to a burgeoning Asian marketplace that is making major inroads into the...

Innovations in column oven design enhance GC performance: novel oven designs for gas chromatographs enable more efficient chromatography.(ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS)(gas chromatograph)
February 1, 2007... A number of essential functional features combine to provide a truly high performance column oven for a gas chromatograph (GC). These features include fast heating, fast cooling, the ability operate over a wide temperature range from...

Mahr unveils MMQ 400 Formtester.(Tools of the Trade)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Mahr has created an entirely new, fully-automated system for the measurement of form and position. The Mar-Form MMQ 400 Formtester is a ground-up design which is more robust, less sensitive to environmental influences, faster, more flexible and...

Disease detectives: biochips have the potential to quickly and reliably identify infectious diseases.(ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS)
February 1, 2007... Recent advances in microarray technology and the emerging technology of biologically based sensors have increased the speed and sensitivity with which viral infections can be detected. Biochips combine these technologies with microelectronics...

Microfluidics--the birth of an industry: as microfluidics matures as a technology, scientists are beginning to understand the fundamental principles that govern system behavior.(MATERIALS SCIENCE)
February 1, 2007... Microfluidics is the study of interactions between flowing fluids and microscale structures. Though the field of microfluidics is still in its infancy, microfluidic devices are already widely used in aerospace, computer, automotive, and...

Conquering Z-axis challenges: keeping life in focus isn't easy for researchers studying living cells, and the greatest part of the problem isn't that the cells are moving.(MICROSCOPY)
February 1, 2007... Whether capturing images over time or trying to record events in multiple locations in rapid succession, maintaining a sharp focus is one of the investigator's most thorny challenges. Axial fluctuation over minutes, hours, or days is called...

Nanotech enables faster, more powerful MRI: molecular nanomagnets have been shown to improve the contrast between healthy and diseased tissues in magnetic resonance imaging.(PHOTONICS)
February 1, 2007... Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boulder, Colo.; Florida State Univ. (FSU), Tallahassee; the Univ. of Colorado (UC), Boulder; and The Children's Hospital (TCH), Denver, Colo., have shown that nanoscale...

Smart instruments keep up with changing R&D needs: new classes of 'smart' instruments are helping researchers on the leading edge of technology reduce their cost of test while accelerating product development.(TEST & MEASUREMENT)
February 1, 2007... Semiconductor and passive component industries are continuously pushing their development processes to higher levels of integration and complexity to keep pace with consumer electronic needs. As the complexity of electronic devices grows, and...

P-type nanowires prove promising.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: academic)
February 1, 2007... For years, researchers have been making electron-abundant n-type zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowire crystals. Missing oxygen atoms within the natural ZnO crystal structure create relative overabundances of zinc atoms and give the semiconductors their...

Nanocoax carries visible light.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: academic)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Physicists at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass., have defied a key principle which holds that light cannot pass through a hole much smaller than its wavelength. The researchers forced visible light, with a wavelength between 380-750 nm, to...

Aligning polar crystals.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: academic)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Researchers at the Univ. of Missouri-Columbia have found a way to organize molecules in a crystal so that the poles align in the same direction. In addition, the scientists also discovered that when an infrared laser is focused at a parallel...

Hydrides fuel solid rockets.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: academic)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Researchers at Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, Md., and Virginia Commonwealth Univ., Richmond, have synthesized a new class of aluminum-hydrogen compounds that could lead to the development of more powerful solid rocket fuel and may also, in...

New polymers exploit magnetism.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: eureka)
February 1, 2007... A new approach for making magnetic polymers that are held together with very strong hydrogen bonds may enable the development of faster and more versatile computer chips, among other applications. Developed by researchers at Argonne National...

Gold stabilizes electrocatalysts.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: eureka)(Brookhaven National Laboratory)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Although platinum is the most efficient electrocatalyst for accelerating chemical reactions in fuel cells for electric vehicles, it dissolves during reactions during stop-and-go driving, which reduces its efficiency as a catalyst. Now, however,...

Capacity record shattered.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: eureka)(Hitachi Global Storage Technologies)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, San Jose, Calif., has shattered the record for hard drive capacity by introducing the industry's first terabyte (TB) hard drive. Hitachi is also releasing a 1 TB hard drive that is optimized specifically for...

To catch an intermediate.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: eureka)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Short-lived but critical "intermediate" compounds help carry chemical reactions from their starting point to the final product. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Calif., have developed a new technique to trap and hold these...

Carbon & Hydrogen/Moisture Determinator.(ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The RC612 Multiphase Carbon and Hydrogen/Moisture Determinator quantifies carbon and hydrogen present in various organic and inorganic samples and identifies the source of several types of carbon content. Features...

Automated cell counter.(ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS)(Cellometer Model Auto T4)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... The Cellometer Model Auto T4 cell counter automates cell counting, a traditionally manual process that is time-consuming, tedious, and susceptible to operator judgment. Typical cell line counting time is less than 30 sec. The Auto T4 has a...

Shim power supply offers versatility and stability.(ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS)(MTECH Lab)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... MTECH Labs' shim power supply controllers are ultra-stable current sources which can be used in a variety of NMR/MRI applications where stable fields are required. The model B1-1S is a basic single-channel power controller stable to 10 ppm...

TracePro 4.0 makes its debut.(ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] TracePro 4.0 delivers fluorescence modeling for life sciences, photorealistic rendering for accurate visualization of illumination designs, and enhanced modeling of 3-D surface textures utilized in the design of LCD...

XFlash 4010 Silicon Drift Detector is now available.(ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTS)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Bruker AXS now offers a new high resolution Silicon Drift Detector (SDD). The LN2 free XFlash 4010 features 125 eV energy resolution at more than 100,000 counts/sec, making it the highest resolution spectroscopy and microanalysis detector...

New HVT-Z high voltage termination system.(MATERIALS SCIENCE)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Tyco Electronics introduces the HVT-Z high voltage termination system. The system features a new, co-extruded one-piece termination which includes a non-tracking tube and a co-extruded stress control grading layer. The stress control grading...

Advancing alloy identification.(MATERIALS SCIENCE)(Oxford Instruments)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Oxford Instruments has launched a new fast, lightweight, hand-held x-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analyzer-the X MET3000TX+ for faster than ever color-coded alloy identification and assay analysis. The X MET3000TX+ is configured for producing...

RUO monoclonal antibody.(MATERIALS SCIENCE)(IOTest Anti-p75/AIRM1-PE)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Beckman Coulter, Inc. introduces the IOTest Anti-p75/AIRM1 (adhesion inhibitory receptor molecule 1)-PE conjugated antibody, featuring an exclusive clone, Z176. The new reagent is the only commercially available...

Filling the Gap.(MATERIALS SCIENCE)(THERM-A-GAP 569 and 579)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Chomerics, a division of Parker Hannifin Corp.,Woburn, Mass., announces the introduction of THERM-A-GAP 569 and 579 ultra-soft thermal gap filler materials. 569 and 579 have the same high thermal performance as the 570 and 580 lines of gap...

Injection-molded polymers available for industry.(MATERIALS SCIENCE)(Goodfellow Corp.)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Certain polymers have traditionally been extruded and available only in large minimum order quantities. However, Good-fellow is now able to supply small quantities of the following polymers as injection-molded plaques (sheets) in sizes ranging...

New family of Techspec Mechanics.(MICROSCOPY)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This new kinematic series of optical mounts and mounting table platforms offer precision adjustment and unparalleled repeatability. More than 25 options are available, adaptable to a wide variety of different...

View image with a mouse click.(MICROSCOPY)(Nikon's new COOLSCOPE LOW-MAG standalone digital microscope system )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Nikon's new COOLSCOPE LOW-MAG standalone digital microscope system design requires only a computer mouse, monitor/projector, and a power cord to begin exploring specimen slides. It offers 2X and 4X low magnifications for wider fields of view...

Digital cameras designed for photo-micrography.(MICROSCOPY)(Carl Zeiss Microimaging Inc.; AxioCam ICc)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Offering respective resolutions of 1,392 x 1,040 and 2,028 x 1,540 pixels, 1.4 megapixel AxioCam ICcl and 3.3 megapixel AxioCam ICc3 are suited for users who work with laboratory and routine microscopes or simple...

Automated imaging.(MICROSCOPY)(LabSmith, Inc.; SVM340 Synchronized Video Microscope)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... LabSmith, Inc. announces the release of its SVM340 Synchronized Video Microscope for microfluidics and microbiology research. Designed and priced for use by individual researchers, this inverted fluorescence/ dark-field microscope captures,...

PELCO BioWave Pro.(MICROSCOPY)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Microwave tissue processing technology, pioneered by Ted Pella, Inc. over the last decade, has evolved into the new BioWave Pro system. True variable wattage control and the unique PELCO ColdSpot are now complemented by a touch screen control...

3DLM launches WireFinder.(PHOTONICS)(3D Laser Mapping)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... 3D Laser Mapping has launched a new high accuracy, high-speed laser scanning system specifically designed for the rapid mapping of telecoms networks in 3-D. The system uses a Riegl 3-D laser scanner, controlled by software which easily extracts...

New integrated industrial scanning system.(PHOTONICS)(IPG Photonics Corp. and Reliant Technologies, Inc.)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... IPG Photonics Corp. and Reliant Technologies, Inc. are introducing a revolutionary new industrial scanning system for high speed spot welding and drilling that can increase manufacturing throughput and end product performance. This new scanning...

Rev micro fiber optic polisher.(PHOTONICS)(Rev Field Polisher)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Krell Technologies has recently introduced its Rev Field processing optical fibers and connectors. The Rev Field Polisher polishes connectors and optical components to singlemode performance in a compact and economical package. UPC and angled...

Wireless temperature measurement.(TEST & MEASUREMENT)
February 1, 2007... Measurement Computing Corp. announces the release of two wireless temperature input devices modeled after the USB-TC and the USB-TEMP. The new products, the WLS-TC and the WLS-TEMP, are essentially identical to their USB predecessors but with...

New power MOSFETs.(TEST & MEASUREMENT)(IXYS' Isoplus)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... A new line of high current power MOSFETs has been released by IXYS Corp. in versions ranging from 55V to 100V, utilizing IXYS' unique MOSFET non-planar technology to provide high efficiency in power management circuits with ultra-low Rds and...

IEEE symposium on broadcasting.(Calendar)
February 1, 2007... The IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting 2007 will be held on March 28 and 29 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla. This symposium, the second in the series, is an industry-oriented...

Renewable energy soars.(compound annual growth rate (CAGR) )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The total global market for advanced materials and devices for renewable energy systems was worth almost $2.4 billion by the end of 2006. Growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.8 %, the market is...

Mobile enterprise market grows.(mobile enterprise application)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The mobile employee is calling for more solutions to answer a broader set of needs, spurring the strong growth of the worldwide mobile enterprise application (MEA) market. The MEA market, which reached $1.2 billion...