Innovation Pipeline

The road to commercialization is riddled with danger, risks and failed companies. In venture capital circles, people like to quote the ratio of successful startups to failures as roughly one in 10. But news is worse if you count spinoffs just coming into formation. And finding capital for very early-stage companies is increasingly difficult.
For those [...]

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There are a lot of big ideas in the field of alternative power, from massive solar arrays to fields of wind turbines stretching toward the horizon. And then there are microbes.
Scientists are hoping that some sophisticated bioengineering on their part can leverage billions of years of bacterial evolution to combat our growing energy crisis.
Single-celled bacteria [...]

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Case Western University researchers have developed an ultralight sponge material that’s able to draw oil out of contaminated water. Composed of clay and plastic, it was originally invented by Ph.D. student Matt Gawryla as a new kitty litter.
University scientists first make an aerogel by mixing clay with a polymer and water in a blender. Once [...]

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Harvesting and storing energy is a big challenge for a supercharged tech society on the run. From cellphones and laptops to a growing number of portable music and camera devices, electricity and battery life has become essential for much of today’s business activities.
The trouble is that batteries still cannot deliver the kind of longevity needed [...]

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When listing nature’s wonders, you’d have to put spiderwebs somewhere near the top. Strands of biomaterial with the tensile strength of steel formed into complex shapes that withstand wind, heat and sunlight. They’re so impressive that scientists still don’t entirely understand them.
But recently researchers at the University of Wyoming have deciphered the glue that cements [...]

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A group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working on a new type of sodium-ion battery that could prove to be a practical option for storing power from wind and solar farms, says Jay Whitacre, a professor of materials science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon. Whitacre’s startup, 44 Tech, based in Pittsburgh, will receive [...]

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The efficiency and elegance of materials occurring in nature have always been an inspiration to researchers. Trying to achieve similar results via nanoengineering, scientists are now working on nanoscale particles that automatically orient themselves into unique materials with powerful properties.
It makes sense, this self-assembly approach, because it’s simply too difficult to manipulate nanoparticles with lab [...]

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The old saying is that oil and water don’t mix. But in fact separating oil from water is no easy task.
Research engineers at the University of Utah http://www.unews.utah.edu/p/?r=111209-1 have come up with an inexpensive way to remove oil from on water. It’s accomplished by applying pressurizing and depressurizing cycles of ozone gas in a containment [...]

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When it comes to the merits of counting carbon as a remedy to improve the health of our planet, there’s plenty of room for debate and dissension. It’s also quickly becoming a major obsession and perhaps a real distraction from important policy work that needs to get done.
A recent paper in Science, “Fixing a Critical [...]

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New thinking about how to design and build batteries is generating some novel research well outside the box of mainstream electronics. A group of scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Yale University recently revealed in a research paper in Advanced Materials how certain real cells generate electric voltages and hence act [...]

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