R & D articles from June 2003

R & D archives from June 2003

Contagion and communication. .(role of media in dealing with biological events)(Editorial)
June 1, 2003... A number of new biological threats have appeared on the scene in just the past two years that reinforce the need for continued vigilance, research, and strategic planning. Consider the combination of the anthrax attacks following 9/11 (which...

Novel sensors illuminate minute circuit defects. (Microscopy).(magnetic-sensing microscope)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... While the advent of micro/nano technology has allowed for quantum leaps in a variety of fields, the ability to accurately survey devices at sub-microscopic levels has remained a challenge. Indeed, "looking" for hairline defects in fiber optic...

New spectrophotometer introduced for protein analysis. (Analytical Instruments).(ProteomeLab DU 800 Protein Characterization System)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Recently, Beckman Coulter, Fullerton, Calif., developed a novel UV/Vis spectrophotometer system to coincide with their ProteomeLab product line. The ProteomeLab DU 800 Protein Characterization System includes a variety of accessories and...

What's in a name? (Bulletin).(Idaho National Engineering Environmental Laboratory)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... A proverbial question has become a reality for the Idaho National Engineering Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). As a response to incorrect media reports, the DOE has stated that the facility will not undergo a name change until October 1,2004....

Ultrafast lasers add one to their number. (Lasers & Optics).(Vanguard 2000-HM 532)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Spectra Physics, Mountain View, Calif., has introduced a new green laser able to generate 2W of ultrafast output at 532 nm. The new Vanguard 2000-HM 532 is a mode-locked frequency-doubled Nd:YVO4 laser. The short pulse (12 psec) duration and...

ACS comes to New York. (Upcoming Conferences & Events).(American Chemical Society)(Brief Article)(Calendar)
June 1, 2003... The 226th national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) will be held during September 7-11 in New York, N.Y. This meeting will include invited speakers, poster sessions and advanced lectures on a variety of subject matter. For more...

Sandia security assessment tool awarded. (Laboratory Equipment).(Sandia National Laboratories)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... The Federal Laboratory Consortium for TechnologyTransfer (FLC) has awarded Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., with a 2003 Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer. The award was given as recognition for a group of security...

21st century labs. (Laboratory Design).(Labs 21 Design Symposium)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Dept. of Energy (DOE), Labs 21 offers researchers, lab planners and administrators answers to the most challenging questions in laboratory design and management: Who is designing the...

Lariat RNA synthesized. (Life Science).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... A group from the Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have created lariat RNA employing artificial deoxyribozymes (DNA) enzymes. This development may yield promising new results in gene therapy due to the importance of lariat RNAs in splicing....

A recipe for home-cooked Bose-Einstein condensate. (Vacuum & Thin Films).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Most scientists and researchers first hear of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) in an undergraduate modern physics or thermodynamics course. Now, researchers from JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology...

HIV drug approved for European use. (Pharmaceutical).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Roche, Basel, Switzerland, and Trimeris, Durham, N.C., announced that the European Commission has approved the anti-HIV drug Fuzeon for use in the European Union. Fuzeon is the first in a new class of anti-HIV medications, known as 'fusion...

"Nano bone" administered to patients. (Micro/Nano Technology).(artificial bone implants)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Nanotechnology has become a formidable technology in a variety of disciplines, with medicine being one of the many fields to benefit from its innovations. Local doctors in China have recently treated 18 bone disease patients by implanting a new...

NI ELVIS has entered the campus. (Test & Measurement).(National Instruments Educational Laboratory Instrumentation Suite)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Students and their professors know that software can be a expensive component of research. Leading research companies often have to budget thousands of dollars for the appropriate software version(s) and licensing agreements. Academic...

Nano-scale wires made with AFM. (Materials).(atomic force microscope)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Researchers at the Univ. of Louisville, Ky., headed by Robert Cohn, director of the university's ElectroOptics Research Institute and Nanotechnology Center, have fabricated freestanding micron-diameter wires and bridges in minutes using an...

Microfoam gets tested. (Materials).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... A new foam material has surfaced in, well, one of the nicest of places--the new BMW M3. Based upon BASF's Ultrason E resin, AC.S and Jacob Composite, Wilhelmsdorf, Nurnberg, Germany, have developed and manufactured the first production part...

Chemogenomics software cuts clinical trials' cost. (Data Management & Analysis).(DecisionSite Advantage Chemogenomics solution)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Scientists are turning to parallel drug discovery techniques to reduce the time, expense, and risks involved in bringing new medications to the public. In the developing market of parallel drug design, an increasingly significant element is...

Grub crawls the Net. (Data Management & Analysis).(LookSmart introduces Internet searching technology)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... A novel technology capable of enhancing Internet searches and gathering the world's first complete registry of websites has been released by LookSmart, San Francisco, Calif. Named distributed crawling or Grub, it is based on the technology of...

DATs rally. (Data Management & Analysis).(design automation tools sales rebound)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
June 1, 2003... Design automation tools (DATs) were one of the hardest hit product categories in 2002 in the overall depressed embedded software market. DATs, which consist of tools used for software modeling and dynamic systems design, diminished by more than...

MEMS-based optical networks forge ahead. (Data Management & Analysis).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... While spending for telecom components has continued to decrease, suppliers of MEMS-based solutions to the optical networking industry experienced a strong market in 2002. This was due to the compliance of many of these tools to Telcordia...

Statistics used to track patient diets. (Data Management & Analysis).
June 1, 2003... Researchers at the Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark, have tackled the sensitive problem of monitoring the nutritional care of hospital patients in a two-year clinical test. To facilitate this study the researchers utilized a statistical...

Deforming meshes adapt to modeling motions. (Data Management & Analysis).
June 1, 2003... The accuracy of the results in structural finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling studies depend heavily upon how well the geometrical meshes that simulate the physical bodies and fluids are constructed....

Delivery system's design controls CMP slurry: the components of delivery systems can easily lead to agglomeration and other disturbances in slurries in copper CMP. To ensure a smooth flow, CFD modeling with different flow variables is performed.(chemical mechanical planarization; computational fluid dynamics )
June 1, 2003... Chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) for copper interconnects is placing new demands on slurry delivery systems in the semiconductor industry. The slurries employed in copper CMP--distinctly different from those employed with aluminum...

A new method for dynamic MEMS metrology: though the popularity of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) has soared, manufacturers are still confronted with the need to determine how their products will perform once they are pressed into service. A novel metrology method may yield promising new results.
June 1, 2003... Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) purveyors rely on metrology to control their processes and to verify how their products will perform once they are in service. Since the introduction of the first MEMS accelerometers and sensors,...

Strained silicon: next step in boosting semiconductor performance: the continuing demand for smaller feature sizes and increasing device densities are driving development of advanced semiconductor fabrication technologies that continue the downward size spiral, while reducing power consumption and heat buildup. .(Cover Story)
June 1, 2003... While photolithography has been the primary driver over the past 40 years toward driving down feature size and increasing device densities in semiconductor devices, a number of basic materials technologies have been instrumental and, indeed...

Will RGAs replace ion gauges? Pressure measurement in high vacuum can be important, but is an ion gauge good enough, or do you need a residual gas analyzer?
June 1, 2003... The requirement to measure the pressure within a vacuum system is one of the important parameters that is common to all vacuum systems. There are myriad techniques and instruments to fulfill this universal need that spread across the entire...

Protein expression systems accelerate drug discovery: target selection and validation remain bottlenecks in the drug discovery process. To expedite these steps, technologies that streamline parallel processing are offered.
June 1, 2003... Less than 5% of potential drug targets that go into the early drug discovery research process are successful. With the wealth of data from cellular expression profiling experiments, drug discovery scientists have identified many potential...

300-mm wafer systems take on leadership role: automated systems for the handling and processing of 300-mm semiconductor wafers now produce more devices than their 200-mm predecessor systems, and the trend is continuing. (Automation & Robotics).
June 1, 2003... During the late-1990s, the creation of 300-mm silicon semiconductor wafer processing tools was an on-again, off-again proposition as 200-mm versus 300-mm wafer handling economies were measured against the huge capital equipment investments that...

Automated probe system becomes nanoscale tester: development of a transducer so small it could replace the cantilever on an SPM resulted in the development of testing systems capable of sub-nanometer physical measurements that operate faster was thought possible. (Automation & Robotics).(nanoindentation)
June 1, 2003... A few years ago, the development of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) was limited by the lack of adequate and sufficient data on the physical characteristics of the thin films used to develop and fabricate the MEMS devices. Information on...

Multiplexed microarrays support high-throughput protein evaluations: instead of analyzing one protein at a time, a unique microarray and reader system has been shown to provide more than a thousand results from a single 96-well microplate, all in less than five minutes. (Automation & Robotics).
June 1, 2003... Parallel DNA microarray technologies have been used successfully for several years to interrogate the expression of genes and attempt to determine their functions. Much of this work involves the spotting of hundreds or thousands of cloned DNA...

European energy crunch. (Regulatory Update).(Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research report)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Our need for energy steadily increases while the means for effective energy production lags behind. A new report by the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI entitled 'Energy Consumption of Information and Communication...

IEEE clears new testing standard for communication devices. (Regulatory Update).(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Standards Association)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... A critical part of power stations is the ability to have effective communication lines with those inside and outside the facility. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Standards Association (IEEE SA), Piscataway, N.J., has...

OSHA's new plastics website. (Regulatory Update).(Occupational Safety and Health Administration)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... More than 1.5 million workers in the US plastics industry stand to benefit from a new web page unveiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which was developed as a product of OSHA's alliance with the Society of the...

Paint companies moved to label products. (Regulatory Update).(exposure to lead paint during renovations)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Most of us have heard of the dangers of lead paint and the risks associated with it. Though legislation stopped lead paint production (manufacturers haven't made house paint with lead since 1978), older homes and apartments are still...

Portable THz nanotech surfaces. (Academic Emerging Technologies).(terahertz electromagnetic waves)
June 1, 2003... Exploiting the power of THz frequencies in a portable apparatus has been achieved by a group of researchers headed by James Kolodzey at the Univ. of Delaware, Newark. Acknowledged as the final frontier in the study of electromagnetic waves, THz...

Fishy homeland security. (Academic Emerging Technologies).(autonomous underwater vehicle)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Fetch2, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), could assist in keeping US shores safe. The novel technology it uses, called neural network-driven fish-recognition software, was developed for the original Fetch. This earlier AUV was created at...

Light beams away. (Academic Emerging Technologies).(optical scanner probes internal organ surfaces)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... A tiny optical scanner that can be introduced into the body has resulted from an alliance between scientists at Duke Univ., Durham, N.C., and The George Washington Univ., D.C. Named an "electrostatic micromachine scanning mirror for optical...

Reviving the ultimate antibiotic. (Academic Emerging Technologies).(Vancomycin)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Vancomycin, the antibiotic administered when all others fail, has proven ineffective against recent bacteria strains. To revitalize it, a team of researchers at Rice Univ., Houston, Texas, is developing a buckyball-vancomycin conjugate. This...

The microgel beads shuttle. (Industrial Emerging Technologies).(delivering proteins to cells)
June 1, 2003... Vaccines are a vehicle to stimulate the immune system to attack a cancer or virus. The simplest existing method inactivates a virus with heat or chemicals. Other techniques encapsulate cancer or viral antigen proteins in materials, such as...

Acoustic SOC. (Industrial Emerging Technologies).(system-on-chip)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Akustica, Pittsburgh, Pa., has produced the market's first acoustic system-on-chip. Based on MEMS technology, the system incorporates the functionality of numerous microphones with software and microelectronics onto a single, standard...

Resilient Paint Protection Film. (Industrial Emerging Technologies).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Cars, trucks and and boats may never lose their untarnished appearance when the Paint Protection Film from 3M, St. Paul, Minn., is applied. This transparent film is composed of conformable, strong thermoplastic urethane and held in place by a...

Wasted clean energy. (Industrial Emerging Technologies).
June 1, 2003... The first successful application of thermal technology to transform organic waste into clean energy has been achieved by Changing World Technologies of West Hempstead, N.Y. Low-value waste by-products, including plastics, tires and municipal...

Preying on composite materials. (Eureka Emerging Technologies).
June 1, 2003... Today's weapon systems, such as missiles and aircraft, are increasingly using composite materials. Usually consisting of layers of plastics, metal alloys, ceramics, and fabrics, all joined in a resin matrix, these materials offer the advantage...

Resistant ceramic coating. (Eureka Emerging Technologies).
June 1, 2003... A license has been granted by Alberta Research Council (ARC) to International Polymers Canada (IPC), both of Edmonton, giving it exclusive worldwide rights to market, produce, and sell a breakthrough composite ceramic coating technology....

Lighting up lives. (Eureka Emerging Technologies).
June 1, 2003... A novel technology by the Univ. of Calgary, Alberta, which provides inexpensive, low-power lighting has been awarded the Third Saatchi & Saatchi Innovation in Communication Award. The innovative system gathers white light emitting diodes into a...

Tiniest light emitter. (Eureka Emerging Technologies).
June 1, 2003... Researchers at IBM, Yorktown Heights, N.Y., have developed the world's smallest electrically controlled, single-molecule light emitter. It is composed of a single nanotube, 1.4 nm dia, set up in a three-terminal transistor. The ambipolar...

Orbit digital shakers. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... Labnet International introduces the Orbit line of digital laboratory shakers. Labnet's line of analog shakers has been "digitally remastered" to include digital set and display of time and speed. The shaking speed is adjustable over a broad...

IMH Screened Orifice. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... The Lee Company's IMH Screened Orifice is a miniature restrictor that is more accurate than orifices specified by hole tolerances. Designed for medical applications, the restrictor is preinstalled in a male to female luer adaptor and features...

Pipetting wokstation. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... The Sias Xantus is a modular robotic pipetting system, combining flexible liquid handling with robotic manipulation. The modular design allows the hardware to be configured and upgraded to suit a wide range of applications. Multi-level...

Membrane accelerates filtration. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... Millipore Express Plus PES (polyethersulfone) membrane is ideal for use in many medical applications. This asymmetric membrane provides high flow and high throughput and ensures sterilizing grade retention. The Millipore Express Plus membrane...

New disposable tip fiber optic probe. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... Versaprobe from C Technologies, Inc. is a new patent pending fiber optic probe that uses a disposable sleeve to eliminate the need for cleaning between measurements and the possibility of any carryover. The quartz disposable tip can be used in...

Pressure transducer. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... Setra Systems introduces its new Model 227 pressure transducer with a space saving 1.125" down-mount "C" seal interfacing base. The Model 227 is designed for installation on modular gas delivery systems or panels for monitoring of specialty gas...

"Hangs on" pipettor and multitube holders. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... These durable stainless steel holders were specially designed to "hang on" the Insulated Ice Buckets and Ice Pans from Magic Touch Icewares. The two holders provide a portable workstation that can be used in special locations, such as biohazard...

Bar Code software. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... TALtech announces the addition of RSS-14 (reduced space symbology) bar code symbology to its B-Coder Professional bar code generating and printing software, which is designed to generate film-quality bar code graphics. B-Coder Pro produces bar...

High-perfomance camera. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... Redlake's MotionXtra HG-100K camera features a 1.7 megapixel CMOS sensor capable of recording 1000 frames/sec at full resolution, and up to 100,000 fps at reduced resolutions. The camera is built around a 1504 x 1128 sensor for razor sharp,...

Formtracer measuring systems. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... Formtracer CS-Series measuring systems from Mitutoyo America Corporation generate both Contour and Surface Roughness analyses from a single workpiece trace in one measurement. Both contour and roughness are analyzed and printed out in one...

Steri-Cult C[O.sub.2] incubators. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... Thermo Electron Corp.'s Steri-Cult C[O.sub.2] Incubators include an external humidification system, Class 100 HEPA filtration, on-demand heat sterilization, low velocity laminar airflow, and other unique improvements focused on ease of use and...

Field Emission Electron. (New Products).
June 1, 2003... JEOL USA, Inc. introduces its Field Emission Electron, the new JEM-2100F. It simplifies atomic-level structural analyses in biology, medicine, and materials sciences as well, as the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries. Features include...