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Research institutions that went into overdrive to get a piece of the government’s unprecedented, $787 billion stimulus package are now grappling with onerous reporting requirements they must comply with or risk losing the funds. “There are about 99 different data elements that you have to report on each quarter for every award,” explains Lynne Chronister, assistant vice provost for research and director of sponsored programs at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. The task is a particularly tall order for UW, which had received 331 awards, totaling more than $140 million by the time the first quarterly reports were due on October 10. Further complicating matters, a flurry of final-hour clarifications handed down by administrators of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) caught many universities off guard. “They changed the rules on us right before the reporting, so we had to scramble to make a few alterations,” says Chronister.

Consider, for example, the change ARRA made to the reporting required on project impact. “[This information] was supposed to be no longer than 4,000 characters, and we’d gotten that all together from the faculty by September 24. But then they decided they didn’t have the bandwidth for that and reduced it to no more than 2,000 characters, so we had to have our faculty go back and rewrite,” she says. Despite such complications, UW was supremely prepared for the reporting challenge, having built an infrastructure of committees and teams to manage what the school correctly anticipated would be a windfall in ARRA-funded projects. One of the teams, for example, fashioned a reporting tool or datamart which automatically pulls data from four different information systems operating on campus: human resources, finance, purchasing, and sponsored projects. “The reporting team worked very closely with the team developing our [IT] system. They practically lived together for three months to make sure we had everything in our reporting tool that was required,” says Chronister. “We also have a team of seven people that we are calling ‘team ARRA.’ They field questions from campus, and make sure all the fields are filled in and everything is complete.” A detailed article on ARRA compliance requirements and strategies for meeting them appears in the November issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. For subscription information, CLICK HERE.

Entrepreneurship students at Ball State University in Muncie, IN, will help develop commercial applications for U.S. military projects through Military 2 Market (M2M), a partnership among BSU’s Entrepreneurship Center, the Department of Defense, and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane), which operates a research-centered facility near Indianapolis. Students will be given access to government patents and IP and challenged to find commercial opportunities for the technologies, explains Michael Goldsby, Stoops distinguished professor of entrepreneurship and executive director of the Entrepreneurship Center in BSU’s Miller College of Business. “This partnership provides students the opportunity to work with some of the best scientists and engineers in the world,” Goldsby says. “Students will develop business ideas around existing applications that are currently being patented. Bridging military technology with entrepreneurship education creates a unique learning experience for our students.”

Next spring, junior entrepreneurship students will write commercialization studies for potential businesses based on the military applications they study. In their senior year, the students will be expected to integrate the technologies into business plans for presentations at national competitions and during E-Day (Evaluation Day) as part of the New Venture Creation course. A key feature of E-Day is a final pass-fail review that requires seniors to put their degrees on the line when their business plans are analyzed by a group of top business leaders just days before graduation. Navy TTOs, laboratory scientists, and entrepreneurship faculty will coach students who participate in the M2M program.

Source: Inside Indiana Business

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed an environmentally friendly method to prevent biofilm that uses heterocyclic compounds to disrupt cell-to-cell communication, interfering with biofilm formation. Unlike the use of antibiotics, which often induce formation of resistant strains, the compounds do not need to kill the microorganisms that cause the biofilms. “Just a few weeks ago, a study published by researchers from the University of Colorado showed that showerheads may be dangerous for our health due to contamination with biofilms — or aggregates of bacteria or fungi,” says Yaacov Michlin, CEO of Yissum Research Development Company, the university’s TTO. “This invention is exactly the solution for such problems as well as many other problems related to home and industrial use that affect us daily.”

Biofilm-related problems cost industry tens of billions of dollars annually by corroding pipes, reducing heat transfer or hydraulic pressure in industrial cooling systems, plugging water injection jets, and clogging water filter and pipes. The compounds developed by Doron Steinberg, a professor in the Faculty of Dental Medicine, and Morris Srebnik, a professor in the Institute of Drug Research, and colleagues will be used to coat pipes, filters, membranes, air conditioning ducts, and other surfaces in contact with water that are prone to biofilm formation. The coating is environmentally friendly and effective against both fungal and bacterial biofilms. The technology can be used for industrial water treatment, prevention of biofilm formation on filtration membranes, paints and coatings, irrigation pipelines, and swimming pools — applications where it’s expected to lower costs of desalination and water recycling processes by reducing energy consumption due to corroded or clogged pipes. The technology also can be used in simple household cleaners.

Source: Earth Times

A new Software-as-a-Service tool that in less than 20 minutes provides crucial information needed for determining the FDA classification and regulatory pathway for medical device technology has just been released by e-Zassi, and is being offered with an introductory discount in partnership with 2Market Information Inc., the parent company of Tech Transfer E-News.

Within minutes, the US FDA Regulatory Calculator provides users with a potential FDA predicate, regulation product code, and the classification and regulatory pathway associated with a medical technology. With this new tool, you’ll save hours in initial research and eliminate the need for outside experts early in the process. Understanding the classification and regulatory pathway of new medical device technologies is critical to early business planning, market assessment, and understanding of FDA requirements. Typically, this takes in-house staff or outside consultants many research hours, can delay product development, and eats up additional time and money. The new tool puts regulatory pathway information at your fingertips early in the device development process, minimizing the potential for miscalculations with due diligence and helping to guide your commercialization and clinical trial strategy. For complete details, and to receive a $125 discount (E-News readers pay only $375), CLICK HERE.

Research conducted at the University of Warwick, U.K., could accelerate the commercial development of technology that uses waste carbon for “green” domestic heating products and automobile air conditioning systems. Adsorption technology, which uses heat from a gas flame or engine waste to power a closed system that contains only active carbon and refrigerant, has long been considered a more efficient way to drive heat pumps or air conditioning. The process alternately heats or cools the carbon, either extracting heat from the outside air and forcing it into radiators or hot water tanks or extracting the heat from inside a car to cool the air. Until now, the big problem with the technology has been its size. An automobile air conditioner requires roughly 300 liters of volume to operate, and domestic heat pumps must be even larger. University of Warwick researchers miniaturized the technology, creating adsorption-based equipment that is up to 20 times smaller than previously possible. Bob Critoph, professor of engineering and lead researcher on the project, says the technology will create heat pumps that will reduce domestic fuel bills and CO2 emissions by more than 30%, compared to the best condensing boiler. In auto air conditioning systems, the technology is expected to reduce both fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by nearly 5%. The researchers have entered a technical partnership with Centro Richerche Fiat (Fiat Central Research) to develop the technology. A spinoff company, Sorption Energy Ltd, also is being established by Warwick Ventures, the university’s TTO, and H2O Venture Partners. Critoph expects to have an automobile air conditioning system that uses the technology ready for market in less than three years, with a gas heat pump to follow.

Source: GreenWise

Small amounts of oil leave a fluorescent sheen on polluted water that’s hard to remove — even when the water is aerated with ozone or filtered through sand. Now, a University of Utah engineer has developed an inexpensive new method to remove oil sheen by repeatedly pressurizing and depressurizing ozone gas, creating microscopic bubbles that attack the oil so it can be removed by sand filters. “We are not trying to treat the entire hydrocarbon [oil] content in the water — to turn it into carbon dioxide and water — but we are converting it into a form that can be retained by sand filtration, which is a conventional and economical process,” says Andy Hong, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. In laboratory experiments reported in Chemosphere, Hong demonstrated that “pressure-assisted ozonation and sand filtration” effectively removes oil droplets dispersed in water, indicating it could be used to prevent oil sheen from wastewater discharged into coastal waters. Hong says the method — for which patents are pending — also could be used to clean a variety of pollutants in water and soil, including so-called “produced water” from oil and gas drilling sites on land; water from mining of tar sands and oil shale; groundwater contaminated by MTBE, a gasoline additive that pollutes water through leaking underground gasoline storage tanks; “emerging contaminants,” such as wastewater polluted with medications and personal care products; and soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs, from electrical transformers), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, from fuel burning), or heavy metals.

The method uses two existing technologies — ozone aeration and sand filtration — but doesn’t just bubble ozone through polluted water. Instead, the system uses repeated cycles of pressurization of ozone and dirty water so the ozone saturates the water, followed by depressurization so the ozone expands into numerous microbubbles in the polluted water — similar to the foaming of a carbonated beverage that’s opened too quickly. The tiny bubbles provide much more surface area — compared with larger bubbles from normal ozone aeration — for the oxygen in ozone to react chemically with oil. Hong’s study showed the new method not only removes oil sheen but also leaves any remaining acids, aldehydes, and ketones in the treated water more vulnerable to destruction by pollution-eating microbes. The water is clean enough to be discharged after the ozonation and sand filtration, Hong says. With success in the laboratory, Hong now plans for larger-scale pilot tests. “It is economical and it can be scaled up,” he says. Meanwhile, the University of Utah Research Foundation has signed options to license the technology to Miracotech, Inc., of Albany, CA, and 7Rev, LP, a Salt Lake City VC group.

Source: The University of Utah News Center

Irish biotech venture Equinome, set to launch commercially in 2010, is developing genetic tests to optimize decision-making in the breeding and racing of thoroughbred horses. Although thoroughbred horse breeding is an international, multi-billion-euro business with more than 100,000 thoroughbred foals registered globally each year, breeding techniques have remained relatively unchanged for hundreds of years. Breeders combine successful bloodlines and hope the resulting foal will contain the same winning combination of genes. Until now, breeders could only determine whether those winning genes had been inherited by observing the racing and breeding success of the horse over a period of three to seven years after its birth. Equinome seeks to improve those odds by providing genetic tests for performance-associated genes in thoroughbred horses. The company — founded this year by Emmeline Hill, a horse genomics researcher in the School of Agriculture, Food Science, and Veterinary Medicine at University College Dublin, in partnership with Irish racehorse trainer Jim Bolger — was recognized as the winner of the 14th NovaUCD Campus Company Development Program. NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre, is responsible for commercializing IP from UCD research programs.

Source: Business & Leadership

Partnerships in tech transfer can succeed wildly or fail miserably, depending on how they are structured, nurtured, and operated. To optimize the results of your partnering agreements takes diligent work before and after the deal is inked. That’s why our Distance Learning Division has scheduled a targeted 90-minute session — with the top tech transfer official from the National Institutes of Health and a TTO exec who’s a partnering veteran — to help ensure you make the most of these opportunities. Join us on Wednesday, December 8th from 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST for Tech Transfer Partnerships: Establishing Effective Legal and Operational Structures for Long-Term Success. You’ll receive loads of practical guidance from two outstanding speakers: Mark Rohrbaugh, PhD, JD, Director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Technology Transfer, and Gary Breit, Executive Director of the University of Manitoba Technology Transfer Office. For complete program details and to register, CLICK HERE.

Also coming next month: Post-License Monitoring and Support: Performance and Revenue Enhancement Strategies (and when all else fails, how to pull the plug and take back your IP!), Wednesday, December 16, 2009 ~ 1:00-2:30 pm (EST). CLICK here for details.

Jubilant Organosys Limited of Noida, India, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), and Birmingham-based Southern Research Institute have entered a joint venture that will leverage their collective innovation and enabling technologies in oncology, metabolic disease, and infectious diseases. According to a memorandum of understanding signed by the parties, key components of the agreement include selecting the most promising biological targets at the partner organizations, developing new drugs around these targets, using early research data to secure federal funding, securing partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry, and licensing drugs to pharmaceutical companies. “UAB has tremendous strength in research that identifies the targets — usually proteins — that contribute to the disease process,” explains Richard B. Marchase, UAB vice president for research and economic development. “Southern Research and Jubilant have the expertise, scientific work force, and equipment to take those findings and move them rapidly through the drug discovery and testing phases that lead to new commercially viable products.”

Southern Research, a nonprofit scientific research organization, has discovered and helped move seven FDA-approved cancer drugs to market, with five more drugs in late-stage preclinical and early clinical studies. Jubilant is India’s largest custom research and manufacturing services company. The firm also plans to partner with Duke University School of Medicine on drug discovery and development through its subsidiary, Jubilant Biosys Limited. The nonexclusive collaboration will apply Jubilant’s portfolio of drug development capabilities toward discoveries made at Duke. The process is designed to move early-stage translational technologies closer to clinical application, with the parties sharing revenues from successful technologies through licensing or partnership deals.

Sources: FierceBiotech and FierceBiotech

Filed under: Hybrid, Videos, Celebrities, Humor, Electric

Many electric vehicle fans out there are constantly complaining about how long it’s taking automakers to bring plug-in vehicles to market. We’ve had commenters on this site claim that automakers should be able to bring EVs to the street in six months. Apparently even six months is too long for the crew at Top Gear.

For those unfamiliar with the format of the show, most episodes involve the producers giving a challenge of some sort to hosts Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. The most recent episode, aired this week on the BBC in the UK, included just such a challenge. The boys were tasked to build their own answer to the extended-range EV Chevrolet Volt.

In a mere 18 hours they transformed a TVR Chimaera (interesting choice since a chimaera is a mythological creature composed of parts of a number of animals) into the Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust pictured above. Once the i-Thrust was completed, it was turned over to Autocar magazine for an independent road test. As you might guess based on the photo, the results were not surprising and are a testament to perhaps taking all the time you need when developing a car. You can grab a copy of AutoCar’s full road test as a PDF or just watch the entire Top Gear segment and video of the Autocar road test after the jump.

[Source: Autocar]

Continue reading Top Gear builds Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust, an ER-EV to answer the Chevy Volt

Top Gear builds Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust, an ER-EV to answer the Chevy Volt originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For Thomas Moore, PhD, director of the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis and a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Arizona State University, an invitation to guest lecture turned into a joint invention with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that contributed to a sustainable energy start-up. Moore had been asked to speak at a summer course taught by Daniel Nocera, PhD, the Henry Dreyfus professor of energy and professor of chemistry at MIT. After the lecture, Moore visited the MIT labs for a demonstration of a new catalyst that could split water into hydrogen and oxygen — a potential pathway to sustainable energy production. As the demonstration came to a close and the group headed to lunch, Moore mentioned that a type of solar cell he was developing could serve as a power source to enhance the ability of the catalyst to create this reaction. The co-invention was born, with Moore and his team developing a dye-sensitized solar cell that could power the MIT catalyst more cost-effectively. “This is what happens when scientists get together to dream,” Moore says. Arizona Technology Enterprises (AzTE), which manages ASU’s IP, entered into an agreement with MIT’s TTO to protect and market the joint invention, which has been licensed to Sun Catalytix, a Cambridge, MA-based early-stage renewable energy start-up.

Source: ASU News

The University of Colorado (CU) has executed a license agreement with Aurora, CO-based ValveXchange, Inc., for a process to transform cardiac imaging data into high-quality, three-dimensional models used for heart valve product development, clinician training, and pre-procedure planning. The CU technology converts data from routine medical imaging of soft tissues — ultrasounds and CT and MRI scans — into 3D models, which are then transformed into physical models using 3D printers. ValveXchange is developing an artificial heart valve that has the advantages of existing tissue-based heart valves but can be implanted and replaced through a small incision between the ribs. The approach is expected to replace traditional open-heart surgery for many heart valve procedures. The 3D heart modeling technology allows the company to develop replacement valves using patient-specific heart anatomy examples, and later to train physicians in implant techniques in a highly realistic manner. “We expect this advance in 3D heart modeling to provide ValveXchange with a real advantage in the market space,” says company CEO Larry Blankenship.

Source: Knowledge Innovation Technology

SiMPore, Inc., a start-up based in large part around technology licensed from the University of Rochester (NY), has launched its first product — a miniscule filter for a transmission electron microscope (TEM) — and hopes to have its second on the market within a few months. The TEM Grid is packaged in a plastic container smaller than a business card. The clear case contains an orderly arrangement of 10 dots, each about the size of a small bird’s eye. Each of those small discs is a cluster of tiny spots – each a TEM filter. The filters help scientists using an electron beam to look at structures such as proteins. SiMPore’s next filter could be used in protein separation or nanoparticle production. The company also is pitching its products for applications such as medical diagnostics and DNA separations for analysis. With polymer membranes and chromatography as competitors, SiMPore is positioning itself as cheaper and faster than chromatography and more precise than polymer membranes. “It looks like a pretty broad sweet spot,” says CEO Rick Richmond. SiMPore, which employs 10 people, is one of a handful of tech companies based at least partially at UR for the short term, says Gail Norris, director of the university’s OTT. “We were willing to enter into an arm’s-length lease to get (SiMPore) up and running,” she explains.

Source: Democrat and Chronicle

Just when you think the trailer-teasing and scan-watching has gone old, Square Enix releases another awesome vid for Final Fantasy XIII (Xbox 360, PS3…

An Ubisoft scriptwriter has confirmed that work has already begun on Ubisoft Montreal’s follow-up to last year’s Far Cry 2 (PS3, Xbox 360, PC).Ubisoft…

The world of startups can be a fast moving place, with lots of money thrown around quite rapidly at times. In such a world, it’s no surprise to hear stories of pure outright fraud mixed in with all of the real stories of actual startups. They seem to come along every year or so — and usually involve companies raising a ton of VC money and simply making up financial results, which the VCs never seem to check. Last year, it was Entellium who raised $50 million while totally making up revenue numbers. We wondered, at the time, how its investors never got around to actually auditing the company they gave so much money to. However, it really is par for the course for many investors to simply trust the management.

The latest such case, as revealed by TechCrunch, appears to be Canopy Financial, a high flying startup that had raised $65 million, but apparently made up a bunch of its revenue, potentially even forging audit statements from KPMG. Amazingly, the company’s CEO is claiming he had no idea this was happening, which is either untrue or an incredibly damning statement on what sort of CEO he is. Once again, though, you have to ask what the investors were doing, and how they handed over such large sums without ever doing any serious due diligence.

These sorts of scams are pretty depressing for all those legitimate startups out there, who work hard to build real businesses, and sometimes even lose out on being able to raise money from these same VCs who were totally snookered by the scammers (though, honestly, would you want those same folks to invest in you really considering their ability to get taken in such a scam?). There’s a lot of good things that happen in Silicon Valley… and a lot of money thrown around. Unfortunately, when that happens, it’s inevitable that some bad characters jump into the game as well and just cook the books.

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Artwork via fineartamerica.com

You should click here to read about the Tao of programming. Pretty well done…and profoundly funny!

 

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Filed under: Government/Legal, Recalls, Safety, Toyota

Toyota has announced that it will recall some 3.8 million cars and trucks to reshape and/or replace their accelerator pedals. The action is the result of fears that loose floormats may cause the accelerator pedal to stick, increasing the risk of an accident. The recall will be the largest in the Japanese automaker’s history, and it will cover a wide range of vehicles from the 2004 model year through 2010 – a complete list is available after the jump. The move comes after an earlier action where Toyota announced it would recall 3.8 million vehicles to only swap floor mats.

Working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Toyota will effect the recall by sending letters to owners of its Avalon, Camry, and Lexus ES 350 models by year’s end. Five other models, including the Prius, Tacoma, Tundra, and Lexus IS 250/IS 350 will receive similar notices sometime in 2010.

The plan includes training dealer service representatives to reshape gas pedals, and Toyota will develop and ship redesigned gas pedals beginning in April. Those customers who have elected to have their pedals initially reshaped will still be able to have the pedal replaced when the updated unit becomes available. Vehicles fitted with Toyota or Lexus-made all-weather floor mats will also receive a new set of redesigned front mats.

Interestingly, Toyota will also install a a brake override system that will turn off the engine if both the accelerator and the brake are depressed simultaneously. According to Automotive News, this update will occur on “involved Camry, Avalon, and Lexus ES 350, IS 350 and IS 250 models ‘as an extra measure of confidence.’” This action appears to be limited to vehicles that employ Toyota’s push-button start system, but interestingly its hybrid-only Prius has apparently been excluded.

For its part, Toyota says the cost of the action will come entirely from its dedicated recall fund, a $5.6 billion dollar stash, and therefore, the recall will have “no effect” on its business. The news come on the heels of yesterday’s announcement that Toyota will recall 2000-2003 Tundra pickups over frame rust issues.

A complete list of vehicles covered under the action and both NHTSA and Toyota’s official press releases are available after the jump.

[Sources: Reuters; Automotive News; NHTSA; Toyota]

Continue reading BREAKING: Toyota to recall 3.8M vehicles to reshape and replace pedals

BREAKING: Toyota to recall 3.8M vehicles to reshape and replace pedals originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The web is shaping up more and more as an extension of our identity. Social networks, wikis, even the search engines, know a lot more about ourselves than we realize and everything is becoming more catered and more integrated. It’s no surprise then that there’s a battle brewing for our online identities and two players are standing out, Google and Facebook. There’s definitely a need for a standard and unified online identity, but should this fall into the hands of one company, any company? Mozilla doesn’t think so and wants to tackle the issue at the browser level.

Mozilla’s user experience head Aza Raskin has some thoughts on the issue and has released some mockups of a possible way to handle logins and everything that has to do with identity inside the browser. He proposes that the entire login and signup process should be done by the browser, providing a unified and consistent experience across any number of services and sites.

“Most current solutions involve lots of redirects or iframes, which leads to a confusing and phishable experience. Besides the poor user experience, we are seeing market-moving effects of the identity/log in problem. Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect both let you use your pre-existing identity and social graph to super-power other websites. … (read more)