R & D articles from September 2004

R & D archives from September 2004

Innovation and productivity links.(Editorial)(Editorial)
September 1, 2004... This issue of R&D Magazine highlights the winners of the 42nd Annual R&D 100 Awards. Recognition of these technical achievements is a source of reflection on the value innovation has in improving the overall human condition. But, innovation is...

RNA serves as nano carriers.(Life Science)(work of research team at Purdue Univ.)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... With high costs, long R&D periods, and untried manufacturing techniques, the nanotechnology commercialization effort continues to be beset with more questions than answers. One of the more intriguing solutions to come about in recent years has...

Magnet sets record-breaking performance.(Analytical Instruments)
September 1, 2004... Teams at the National High Field Magnetic Laboratory (NHFML), Tallahassee, Fla., have recorded the highest field strength for a 105-mm bore nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) magnet, with a field strength of 21.1 Tesla. The product of this 13-yr...

Blinking quantum dots.(Lasers & Optics)(Univ. of Chicago researching Quantum optics)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Researchers from the Univ. of Chicago, Ill., have been working on a more efficient method of determining the light-emitting properties of semiconductor-based quantum dots. "A quantum dot might blink for just a millionth of a second or it might...

Govt. targets funds at supercomputing.(Bulletin)
September 1, 2004... The Bush administration has recently placed supercomputing and cyberinfrastructure among its highest priorities for future R&D efforts in FY 2006. Although networking and IT R&D program areas are still important, according to an executive memo,...

Thermo captures lab automation bid.(Laboratory Equipment)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Analytical instrument giant, Thermo Electron Corp., Waltham, Mass., has recently forged a new agreement with Novartis' emerging Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBRI), Cambridge, Mass. The deal calls for Thermo to supply the NIBRI with...

Latest progress in vacuum tech.(Conferences & Events)(Calendar)
September 1, 2004... Surface science experts, representatives from the semiconductor community, and MEMS enthusiasts will be a few of the groups represented at this year's 51st annual American Vacuum Society (AVS) symposium in Anaheim, Calif., Nov. 14-19. 15...

GE ramps up research center.(Laboratory Design)(General Electric)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... An additional $25 million investment is being made toward facility improvements at General Electric's (GE) Global Research Center, headquartered in Niskayuna, N.Y. Already in the midst of completing a planned $100 million upgrade set forth two...

Pharma recognizes industry leaders.(Pharmaceutical)
September 1, 2004... Pharmaceutical administrators and researchers were honored in late August in the Third Annual Pharmaceutical Achievement Awards in Boston, Mass, hosted by IBC Life Science and T&F Informa. Below is a partial list of the award winners: ...

Solar sails take flight.(Vacuum & Thin Films)
September 1, 2004... Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), a division of Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency, has succeeded in deploying the first, large scale thin-film solar sails. The ISAS agency launched a small rocket from the Uchinoura...

The dream moves forward.(Materials)(Boeing Co.)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... With orders now up to 62, Boeing, Chicago, Ill., is continuing production efforts on its highly touted 7E7 Dreamliner. The new craft, which is scheduled to roll off the production line in 2008, promises to deliver a more user-friendly...

Zeroing in on sticky patches.(Software)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... As biomolecules such as DNA and RNA (see pg. 12) demonstrate their utility in providing a foundation for the self-assembly of nanoscale devices, they have also ignited a number of groups to question the mechanism behind naturally occurring...

Nanotube recipe highlights strength.(Micro/Nano Technology)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Notable electrical qualities and incredible tensile strength are two of the properties driving researchers to investigate the potential of carbon nanotubes for scientific and commercial applications. Just one year ago, a collaboration at the...

Preserving audio.(Test & Measurement)(scans records using a precision optical metrology system)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... If you're worried that your prized record collection is losing its sound quality with age, particle physicists Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Calif., might have the solution. The team has...

Data mining customizes healthcare.(Data Management & Analysis)(alliance between IBM and Mayo Clinic)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The relationship between physicians and patients stands to be transformed thanks to an alliance between IBM, Armonk, N.Y., and the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. Using the algorithms of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer, the two organizations will...

Software designs eco-friendly products.(Data Management & Analysis)
September 1, 2004... As societies become more eco-conscious, corporations are forced to contend with stricter environmental policies. Helping companies meet such regulations is the CES Materials ECOSELECTOR, which was developed by Cambridge, UK-based research...

Biochip market evolves.(Data Management & Analysis)
September 1, 2004... The market for both the planar and bead-array protein biochip field is expected to exceed $500 million in 2008, rising from $122 million in 2002. Driving this increase is a shift in focus of proteomic researchers from technological ideas to...

Scanner's demand rises.(Data Management & Analysis)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The overall demand for handheld barcode scanners is forecast to grow at an 8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), reaching $974 million by the end of 2008. This demand will result in a CAGR rise of 11% and 20.8% for linear and 2-D imagers,...

Consider I-optimal designs for DOE.(Data Management & Analysis)
September 1, 2004... Most introductory courses in design of experiments (DOE) teach central composite and Box-Behnken designs as the response surface designs. These approaches were developed in the 1950s for situations where the experimental region is regular and...

From speakers to suspensions: researchers at Bose Corp. have spent 24 years developing an electromagnetic automotive suspension system that creates a ride smoother than a luxury sedan.(Company Profile)
September 1, 2004... As we stood in the warm cordoned-off parking lot (with security guards everywhere) earlier this summer, all of us technology editors were quite astonished as a Lexus sedan traveling at about 50 km/hr bore down on a 2" x 6" board standing on...

Alternative materials create options for integrated optics: the dominance of Si[O.sub.2]-based integrated optics is being challenged by new materials that offer higher integration density and improved sensitivity in sensing applications.
September 1, 2004... Integrated optics circuits are typically made using doped Si[O.sub.2] for both core and cladding material to attain low attenuation per centimeter (0.05 dB/cm or better). To achieve low attenuation, Si[O.sub.2] surface waveguides typically have...

R&D 100 Awards honor innovation at its best: protein spectrometers, smart windows, software modeling systems, x-ray cargo inspection systems, aircraft deicers, and many, many more are included in this year's technology elite from the most innovative and brilliant minds in research.(42nd Anniversary)
September 1, 2004... The editors of R&D Magazine are proud to announce the winners of the 42nd Annual R&D 100 Awards--products and technologies brought to the marketplace over the past year that are recognized for their technological significance. This year's...

On-the-spot inspection.(Exclusive)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... While security at U.S. airports have benefited from an infusion of new and advanced technologies, U.S. seaports and border crossings continue to lag behind, leaving virtual holes in our nation's security. This can be particularly distressing...

No more pencils, no more books.(Exclusive)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Combine old-fashioned paperwork with information systems and the result is the D-Pen: Digital Pen Solution, developed by a team from Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Anoto AB, Lund, Sweden, and Eiichi Hadano at Hitachi Computer Peripherals Co., Ltd.,...

Welcome to the fashion revolution.(Exclusive)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... A customized fit is the basis behind a new technology, which aims to revolutionize the fashion industry and make those five venerable words--"It just doesn't fit right!"--to disappear. The Intellifit System: Millimeter Wave Holographic Body...

Small dots have large impact.(Exclusive)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... A number of bio-imaging tools, such as fluorescent organic dyes, for looking inside living cells have been available for years. However, these dyes have a limited timeframe in which they can be used--generally a few minutes or seconds and are...

3-D vision reaches molecular spectroscopy.(Analytical Instruments)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... In an age where technological advances are occurring as a result of research at the molecular level, spectroscopic instruments for molecular structure determination are more crucial than ever. To the list of existing instrumentation, the...

Breaching the THz frontier.(Analytical Instruments)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The terahertz (THz) gap is the last unexplored region of the electromagnetic spectrum. To access this region, The TPI-spectra1000 was developed by Phil Taday at TeraView Ltd, Cambridge, UK, and a team of scientists at Bruker Optics Inc.,...

Hybridization unites spectrometers.(Analytical Instruments)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Bottom-up or top-down proteomic analyses, metabolomics, and all other applications where high resolution and accurate mass determinations are required stand to be impacted by the Finnigan LTQ FT created by Bremen, Germany-, and San Jose,...

Microfluidic control yields nano-flow rates.(Analytical Instruments)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The majority of the world's current drugs act by blocking the effects of proteins that are part of a disease pathway. To identify which proteins play a role in diseases, researchers are increasingly turning to the power of liquid...

Imaging exploits remote sensing.(Analytical Instruments)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Hyperspectral imaging applications that require high spectral/spatial resolution, such as in the detection of cancer cells at sub-micron levels, are enabled by the Hyperspec VS. Within a small footprint, this imaging spectrograph developed by...

Giving dimension to molecular structures.(Analytical Instruments)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The fervor of activity within drug discovery and development and proteomic research has spawned the creation of a host of advanced methodologies and instrumentation to better serve the need of researchers in resolving protein structures. The...

Streamlining superconductor analysis.(Analytical Instruments)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Researchers at SuperPower, Inc., Schenectady, N.Y., XOS (X-Ray Optical Systems) Inc., East Greenbush, N.Y., and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), Albany, have come together to create the EXCELL: Tabletop...

Sniffing out terrorists' tools.(Analytical Instruments)
September 1, 2004... Plastic explosives pose an ever-present terrorist threat because of their easy availability and ability to be shaped for concealment. Despite the urgency of the war on terrorism, human injury and loss of life continue due to the lack of...

Chips like to rub elbows.(Electronics / Communications)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The semiconductor and electronic device industry will benefit from a new approach in integrated circuit (IC) design focusing on ease-of-use and streamlining operations. Ivan Sutherland and Robert Drost at Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View,...

Pushing the envelope--at your desk.(Electronics / Communications)
September 1, 2004... The skyrocketing popularity of online downloads continues to emphasize the need for faster connectivity levels. The 10-Gigabit Ethernet Adapter developed by researchers at Intel Corp., Austin, Texas, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M.,...

Scalable solution for businesses.(Electronics / Communications)
September 1, 2004... Businesses looking to fill a void in acquiring flexible, cost-effective platforms that are capable of multiplexing and transporting high-speed data, storage, voice, and video applications need look no further: the ADVA FSP 2000 is a dense...

Introducing the Morrison Motor.(Electronics / Communications)
September 1, 2004... Of the many applications wing for an R&D 100 award, few are submitted by individuals and even less bear the inventor's name. The Morrison Motor, invented by Carlos Morrison, a physicist/aerospace engineer at NASA Glenn Research Center,...

Portable, pliable photovoltaics.(Energy)
September 1, 2004... Campers, soldiers, and homeowners are the benefactors of the lightweight, flexible, thin-film Copper Indium Gallium diSelenide (CIGS) photovoltaic (PV) modules, developed by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden,...

Fire up!(Energy)
September 1, 2004... While it may seem straightforward, there indeed exists a need for precise and efficient heating strategies in current R&D programs. Most of the challenges within industrial heating applications have centered around two main issues--power...

Smart windows.(Energy)
September 1, 2004... Booming energy costs and stricter regulatory policies have incited a movement toward environmentally friendly building designs, even stirring the creation of programs solely devoted to the subject matter such as the U.S. Green Building Council...

Let the sun shine in--or not.(Energy)
September 1, 2004... SAGE Electrochomics, Inc., Faribault, Minn., has developed a "switchable," absorbing electrochromic window. The SageGlass Smart Window Glazing is an all solid-state, ceramic materials technology in which the electrochromic films are adhered to...

Safe and affordable energy from coal.(Environmental)
September 1, 2004... By 2015, U.S. energy consumption levels are expected to increase at least 25% above 2003 levels, driving the need for safe, alternative energy sources. This leaves researchers with the problem of finding a more efficient means of utilizing...

Making lettuce perchlorate free.(Environmental)
September 1, 2004... The lower Colorado River supplies water to millions of people and is the main source of hydration for lettuce grown in the region. In 2002, high levels of the dangerous chemical perchlorate, which is a component of solid rocket fuel, were...

Fighting bioterrorism--in about an hour.(Environmental)
September 1, 2004... The effects of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and subsequent Anthrax scares have made bioterrorism one of the chief issues faced by the U.S. today. Early detection of biological agents in places like subway systems, stadiums, places of business,...

Eliminating threats to groundwater reserves.(Environmental)
September 1, 2004... There are over 300,000 waste disposal sites across the nation, causing mounting concern over adequate and safe water supplies. Unfortunately, it has only recently been realized that the transport of contaminants from buried waste through the...

2004 R&D 100 Awards Judging Panel.(Judges)
September 1, 2004... The editors of R&D Magazine are grateful for the numerous hours this year's R&D 100 Judging Panel spent in evaluating the 2004 R&D 100 entries. Entries in the R&D 100 Awards competition are separated into functional categories and distributed...

Weigh pan gets out of the way.(Laboratory Equipment)
September 1, 2004... Just as other analytical instruments have improved with electronic interfaces, precision-enhancing design features, and automated systems, so also have analytical balances. The conventional top loading XS Laboratory Balance developed by a team...

This flowmeter is a good listener.(Laboratory Equipment)
September 1, 2004... A research group led by Daniel Gysling and Doug Loose of the Wallington, Conn. based CiDRA Corp. have created the next step in industrial flowmeter technology. The SONARtrac Process Monitoring System's "sonar" flow technology uses array...

Simplified fiber optics.(Lasers / Electro-Optics)
September 1, 2004... Anyone who has had to connect a fiber connector knows how messy and laborious the process can be. Two connections done manually back to back could exhibit differing transmission epoxy bond securing the fiber in place. In a joint effort,...

The oil hunt.(Lasers / Electro-Optics)
September 1, 2004... Research conducted by the Dept. of Energy states that nearly two-thirds of the oil discovered in the U.S. remains unharvested even after numerous recovery operations. This scenario is exacerbated by the lack of detailed information regarding...

Better blue diodes.(Lasers / Electro-Optics)
September 1, 2004... Blue diode lasers offer superb beam quality in a compact package and are revolutionizing applications from microscopy to display technology. However, a notable problem area has been the difficulty in obtaining the large power outputs as those...

Obliterating land mines.(Lasers / Electro-Optics)
September 1, 2004... There are an estimated 100 million land mines worldwide, causing injury or death to an average of 2,000 people each month. Lasers are promising methods employed to destroy these weapons from a great standoff distance, but until now, were...

Enhancing Fizeau.(Lasers / Electro-Optics)
September 1, 2004... Interferometry requires precise control of lenses and movable mirrors to achieve high quality images. One approach commonly employed is the inclusion of Fizeau-type interferometers, which have shown to be very useful in measuring height...

Show me the light.(Lasers / Electro-Optics)
September 1, 2004... It involved a lot of effort for investigators to figure out that a piece of debris hitting Columbia's wing during takeoff was the cause of the tragedy that occurred on February 1, 2003. Countless hours of rigorous testing on silica tiles...

Scanning the whole genome.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... The ability to create high-density microarrays for studying life science reactions and interactions is only made practical if a device exists that reliably, efficiently, and quickly images those events. A research team led by Nathan Weiner at...

Microsensors for microsurgery.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Minimally invasive surgery is an emerging medical specialty expected to grow significantly over the next decade. While 90% of procedures are currently performed with open incisions, that rate will decline as these techniques become commonplace....

Simplifying proteomics.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Research in protein therapeutics, vaccine development, diagnostics, and structural genomics requires production of large amounts of many different proteins. The current methods for producing these proteins are complex and costly, requiring...

Imaging the small heart.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... The detection of fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is difficult at best and ECGs cannot be used to visualize electrophysiological phenomena in the heart, especially in babies where the high resistance of the fetal skin produces a large...

First bioluminescent enzyme assay.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... For nearly 30 years, CYP450-based metabolism has been studied by conventional fluorescent and non-fluorescent methods. CYP450s are a family of enzymes present in human and other species that oxidize hydrophobic chemicals. For most therapeutic...

Replacing the Petri dish.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Growing living cells in small flat Petri dishes has been the most accepted culturing technique for life science laboratories since Julius Petri published the technique in 1887. Biologists, however, are starting to discover that culturing these...

Finding the correct antibody.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Michael Feldhaus, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, Wash., led a research team to develop the Single Chain Antibody Library. This library is a collection of more than one billion human antibody fragments...

Rehabilitating stroke patients.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... The leading cause of adult disability in the U.S. is the more than 750,000 strokes occurring each year and with the aging population, this number is likely to increase. Research has shown that continued recovery of functional skills in these...

More than a vacation site.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... The dairy, food, beverage, pulp and paper, and textile industries have significant waste treatment issues that affect the numerous process steps for these industrial giants. Many of these use hydrogen peroxide (HP) as a powerful oxidizing and...

Proteomics by inkjet.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... One of the most common laboratory processes in the study of proteomics is the generation of protein arrays of samples using 2-D polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. This sample-intensive process, however, limits the amount of sample available...

Better biofuels.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Americans are huge consumers of energy, much of it imported, while at the same time a huge producer of biomass, much of which is exported. While a limited amount of biomass is converted to energy uses, the efficiency of the processes used to...

Microwaving proteins.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... The complexity and length of the amino acids, or peptide chains, within proteins have contributed greatly to the difficulties within protein synthesis. To help solve this problem a research team headed by Jonathan Collins, a developmental...

Speed is a BLAST.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Since its introduction in 1990, BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Sequence Tool) has become the ubiquitous sequence database-search tool for molecular biologists. However, its widespread use does not necessarily imply that it is an efficient...

Enhancing RNAi research.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Gene silencing using RNA interference (RNAi) is a relatively new technique that can turn off any gene, without any other effects. SiHybrid-Mediated Gene Silencing, a novel technology developed by Allen Christian, a senior biomedical scientist...

Automated Pap Tests.(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Early diagnosis and intervention of cervical cancer is critical to a positive outcome. A research team at Cytyc Corp., Boxborough, Mass., and Battelle, Columbus, Ohio, has created a system, the ThinPrep Imaging System (TIS), that is the first...

Liquid handler says "no touching".(Life Science)
September 1, 2004... Maximizing efficiency and reducing cost within drug discovery routines is at the core of many of today's lab automation and equipment strategies. A liquid-handling product from Labcyte, Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., enables the routine use of...

Improving turbine performance.(Materials)
September 1, 2004... Gas turbine engines are the most common forms of propulsion for civilian and military aircraft. Turbine and compressor disks used in advanced gas turbine engines, however, repeatedly suffer and degrade over time in the harsh environmental...

Advanced alloys.(Materials)
September 1, 2004... Heat-resistance and durability are the primers for many of today's alloy formulations. To that end, researchers at Special Metals Corp., Huntington, W. Va., have created INCONEL alley 740, a ultra supercritical coal fired boiler tube alloy...

Insta-house.(Materials)
September 1, 2004... While it may leave some contractors out in the dust, the Grancrete Spray-On Structural Cement and Rapid Construction Process for Low-Cost Housing, developed by Arun Wagh at Argonne National Laboratory, III., and Jim Paul at Casa Grande Intl.,...

New nanoscale coatings.(Materials)
September 1, 2004... Recent technological developments have pushed the coating industry towards exploiting the interactions of different materials on the nanoscale. Nanocmnposite coatings can protect and prolong the life of many parts and tools for a variety of...

Battle-worthy membrane.(Materials)
September 1, 2004... Popularized within the automotive industry, fuel cell technology continues to make strides as a viable energy source for a variety of applications. At the heart of each cell lies the electrolyte material--typically a polymer layer responsible...

Move over steel.(Materials)
September 1, 2004... Traditional fabrication materials such as steel, aluminum, and plastic may have to contend with the promise that the CFOAM (carbon foam), developed by researchers at Touchstone Research Laboratory, Triadelphia, W. Va., aims on delivering. ...

A quick change.(Mechanical Systems)
September 1, 2004... The Agile Machining Fixture was developed by researchers at General Motors (GM) R&D Center. Warren, Mich., mainly as a machining fixture that can be easily reconfigured to generate multiple product designs in a matter of minutes versus several...

Cool dressing.(Mechanical Systems)
September 1, 2004... The emergence of new, small-scale technologies has created an application need for non-conventional, thermal management strategies. This problem extends into the microelectronics realm, where numerous electrical components demand compressor and...

Say goodbye to parallel parking.(Mechanical Systems)
September 1, 2004... High school students rejoice--parallel parking no longer has to doom your driving exam. Engineers from Toyota Motor Corp., Susono, Japan, and Yuu Tanaka at Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd., Kariya, Japan, have saved the day with the Intelligent Parking...

Not a whole lot of shaking going on.(Mechanical Systems)
September 1, 2004... Conventional vibrating screens consume large amounts of energy and require frequent motor and bearing maintenance as they shake thousands of pounds of steel to separate particles by size for future use in industrial applications. This...

Line up for this ruler.(Mechanical Systems)
September 1, 2004... While it may sound like a measuring device for Lilliputians, the Nanoruler is actually a tool used for patterning large gratings with very high accuracy. Created by a team led by Mark Schattenburg at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,...

Take this tiny motor for a spin.(Mechanical Systems)
September 1, 2004... Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is the current buzzword when it comes to small machines. But while MEMS motors can fit on the head of a pin, NEMS (nanoelectromechanical systems) motors can fit on a virus. The overall size of this...

Magnets give train a rise.(Mechanical Systems)
September 1, 2004... Conceived by physicist Richard Post at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Calif., the Inductrack Magnetic Levitation System uses a new type of maglev technology to create its levitating fields. Under development by General Atomics,...