Source: optics.org

Sales of lasers for industrial uses are falling, but fibre lasers should bounce back first.

Industrial applications for lasers of all kinds are being hit hard by the economic downturn. If sales patterns continue in their current pattern, the overall industrial laser market will fall by 32% in 2009, back to the level of 2004, according to Strategies Unlimited.

Sales should subsequently return to 2008 levels by 2013, helped by military, biomedical instruments, and energy-related applications. However, many materials processing applications, from laser marking to metal cutting and welding, will take longer to recover. Fibre laser sales will show a shallower decline of 24%, and subsequently bounce back more strongly. To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Scientists needing to make sensitive displacement measurements will benefit from a simple way to increase the resolution of an interferometer.

Reducing the fringe spacing

Researchers in France have discovered a clever way to increase the resolution of a standard two-beam interferometer. Their new approach could be used to make ultrasensitive displacement measurements as well as to perform ultraprecise atom localization (Optics Letters 34 755).

The resolution of an interferometer is directly linked to the fringe spacing of the recorded interferogram. Now, Hugues Guillet de Chatellus and colleagues have found a way to reduce the fringe spacing by a factor of 2, increasing the resolution of the interferometer. To know more, click here.

Source: Bay Area tech Wire

Oakland — Livescribe, the Oakland-based developer of a mobile computing “smartpen” that records and links audio to handwriting, said on Monday that it has raised $7.5 million in its second round of funding from Switzerland’s Aeris Capital. The news comes just a month after the company also secured $11.1 million in its first round, co-led by Vantage Point Ventures Partners and Lionhart Investments. The company expects to use a large part of the capital to bolster the marketing efforts for its core Pulse smartpen product. “Our focus in 2009 is to increase awareness of Pulse and put it within reach of millions of online and retail shoppers,” said Jim Marggraff, the company’s founder and CEO. The company said that it also plans to launch an online application store; expand internationally through partnerships in Australia, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and the U.K.; and increase its focus towards professionals in healthcare, law, journalism, education and sales.

To know more, click here.

Source:R&D magazine

“The United States must move aggressively to establish a new innovation infrastructure to become competitive again,” SPIE CEO Eugene Arthurs said at a hearing on nanotechnology and optoelectronics in Washington, D.C., on 24 March.

Arthurs spoke as a member of a three-person panel before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, on the impact of industrial policy on U.S. companies, workers, and the economy. The commission reports to Congress annually on the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

Arthurs urged the commission to recommend that Congress develop “a comprehensive, informed review of the United States’ fragmented national photonics technology portfolio,” and provide ongoing, active guidance to federal science agencies.

For example, a comprehensive national policy will help ensure that decades of work in the Department of Energy laboratories, particularly the National Renewable Energy Lab, is applied to enabling solar energy manufacturing in America, Arthurs said. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Dark days aren’t dampening some local tech executives’ outlooks. In the middle of a brutal recession, more than two-thirds of local technology executives surveyed expect company revenue to stay flat or increase for the first quarter of 2009, which ends next week.

Tech executives generally expressed optimism about 2009 in the survey, conducted by Mass High Tech and NETSEA (the New England Technology, Sales, Marketing & Business Development Executives Association). Almost 70 percent of those surveyed expected first-quarter revenue to remain steady or grow, and more than 80 percent expected sales to stay flat or grow for the year. Almost 30 percent said they plan to hire between one and 50 employees this year. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Entrepreneurs have long suffered the habit of bringing work home with them. A Cambridge condo development has decided to put the two together — by building a living space for academics and entrepreneurs looking to live with those they already work and play with.

The new University Residential Community, an eight-story complex of condominiums in Kendall Square, is nearly complete. It was intended initially as an exclusive residential development for MIT and Harvard University alumni. It is now open to anyone — at least anyone with an interest in borrowing a cup of sugar from someone who may summon a robotic butler to fetch it, or who may have made it synthetically in the kitchen.

The condo building’s goal, say developers, is to foster networking, raise the intellectual stimulus of its residents and — just maybe — result in some new startups from the cross-pollination of so many learned minds.

“This is the opportunity to interact with people of common interests who are engaged in academic life or developing a company,” said Bob Simha, the emeritus head of planning at MIT and executive director of the University Residential Community LLC, the organization that has been steering the project for the past four years. It includes Simha and eight other proponents from MIT (including former MIT president Paul Gray), Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital.

“The idea of bringing together a community of people associated with science and technology in a residential cooperative in the hub of science and technology at Kendall Square is extremely intriguing,” said Simha.

The condo development with its modern architecture stands on a former site of the Cambridge Electric Light Co., at 303 Third St., hemmed in by companies such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Biogen Idec Inc. One Kendall Square neighbor Timothy Rowe is particularly enthusiastic about the development, saying it can actually help hone the region’s competitive edge. Rowe is the founder and CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center, a facility that offers office space to local startups. To know more, click here.

Source: Washington Post

LOS ANGELES — U.S. hospitals have a long way to go to join the digital age. Fewer than 2 percent of U.S. hospitals have abandoned paper medical charts and completely switched to electronic health records, a national survey found.

An additional 8 to 11 percent have basic electronic systems in place, with at least one department converted to digital. The most common obstacle to conversion cited by the surveyed hospitals was cost.

The findings, published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, come as the Obama administration plans to spend $19 billion to help modernize medical record-keeping systems.

Source: Nasa Tech Briefs

(…) In every issue of Photonics Tech Briefs (PTB), we select one product from the numerous submissions we receive to be the Product of the Month. The choice is based on a variety of criteria such as innovation, technical merit, practicality, etc. Then, at the end of the year, we invite the readers of PTB to visit the Web site and vote for the products they think should be named PTB’s Annual Readers’ Choice Product of the Year.

Well, the votes are in and once again, our readers have demonstrated their technical savvy by choosing three very interesting winners. In no particular order they are: DILAS’ 1940nm diode laser modules, the IR Revolution 360 panoramic infrared camera from HGH Infrared Systems, and the VK-9700 3D laser scanning confocal microscope from Keyence Corporation.

(…)

With security seeming to be a high priority on everyone’s corporate agendas these days, the IR Revolution 360 panoramic infrared surveillance camera was probably as close to being a sure bet as any entry in this year’s competition. This 3 MP beauty operates in the 8-12 micron wavelength, offers a full 20-degree vertical, 360-degree horizontal field of view, and features automatic detection and tracking. Try sneaking past that! (…)

For more information, click here.

Source: optics.org

Bright spots included a new anti-UAV weapon and entry into the metal cutting sector.

laser avenger

A mobile laser system featuring high-power diodes from IPG Photonics has become the first to destroy an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), echoing the impact that the company’s fibre-laser products are having on its own competitors. December 2008 saw a demonstration of the multi-kilowatt output laser as part of Boeing’s Avenger mobile defence system at a New Mexico missile range. To know more, click here.

Source:optics.org

Growth continues in materials processing, but the full potential of fibre lasers is not yet known.

The worldwide market for fibre lasers has grown by an impressive 42% over the last three years, and reached $300 million in 2008 according to Fibre Lasers 2009 published by Optech Consulting.

The most important application area is materials processing, where fibre lasers have achieved a market volume of $210 million and now account for 7% of the total market for lasers in such applications. Nevertheless, more development work will be needed before fibre lasers can replace current technology in many applications in materials processing, medical therapy, information technology, and defence.
To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Fingertip control of a set of optical tweezers offers users an intuitive method of particle trapping and manipulation.
The optics community could soon be getting its hands on a user-friendly holographic optical tweezer system thanks to UK researchers. A team from the Universities of Bristol and Glasgow have developed a multitouch console that enables users to control multiple optical traps using their fingers (Optics Express 5 3595).
To know more, click here.

Source: Laser Focus World
Article by Jonathan R. Birge and Franz X. Kärtner

A new pulse-characterization technique is designed for few- and single-cycle laser pulses. Called two-dimensional spectral shearing interferometry (2DSI), it has been demonstrated on sub-two-cycle 4.9 fs pulses centered at 800 nm.

In the four decades since the first demonstration of laser modelocking, short-pulse laser technology has steadily progressed from nanosecond pulses to the point at which near-IR pulses shorter than 5 fs (less than two optical cycles) are regularly produced directly from tabletop lasers. Such precise creation of coherent light over more than 200 THz of bandwidth has opened up new areas of applied and fundamental physical research: pulses at this timescale allow for the probing of physical phenomena on a femtosecond timescale, sufficient to resolve electronic relaxation processes in molecules or bonding dynamics, and have coherent bandwidths sufficient to control molecular quantum states to guide reactions. To know more, click here.

Source: Laser Focus World

Completed in early 2008 at the University of Texas at Austin, the Texas Petawatt is a 200 J, 150 fs, mixed-glass, optical-parametric chirped-pulse-amplifier (OPCPA) laser that has reached a peak power output of 1.1 petawatts (1.1 × 1015 W)–more than 2000 times the power output of the entire U.S. electrical grid. And now, according to Todd Ditmire, project director, and Mikael Martinez, project manager, it appears possible to use the technology developed for the laser in future work toward developing an exawatt (1018 W) laser.
Mixed-glass gain material
The Texas Petawatt laser uses new ultra-high-power laser technology and older, well-demonstrated technology from high-energy fusion lasers such as Shiva, Nova, and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser (all developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA). As described by Ditmire and Martinez, the laser design is a hybrid approach of three main laser technologies.
To know more, click here.

Source: Biophotonics, March 2009

Look into my eyes, p.22-25: Talks about OCT and wavefront sensing applied to non invasive diagnostic of eye disease. Long paragraph about Phaseview.

Mending broken DNA, p.28-29
“Optical laser traps DNA molecules and ” dips” them into protein for repair”. This research is conducted at the University of California, Davis, by researchers Stephen Kowalczykowski and Jovencio Hilario.

Medical Laser Market: There wont be blood, p.32-34. “The correlation between the economic environment and laser vision correction is well established. (…) If there is any stability in applications served by the medical laser market, it is most likely to be found in surgical applications where the procedures cannot wait until the economy turns around - and in any event are often reimbursed by Medicare and other insurance providers”.

Source: Mass High Tech

Radiation therapy startup Still River Systems Inc. reports that it has closed on a financing round worth $33 million, led by new investor Venrock Associates and existing investor Caxton Health and Life Sciences.

Returning for the new round was existing investor CHL Medical Partners. As part of the financing deal, Anders Hove of Venrock Associates and Myles Greenberg of CHL Medical Partners will join Still River Systems’ board of directors.(More)

Source: Mass High Tech

Quattro Wireless Inc. has raised a $10 million Series C round, the Waltham-based mobile ad network announced today. Highland Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners led the round.

In a press release issued today, Quattro executives said they plan to use the funds to enlarge a global expansion campaign it announced in January. Founded in 2006, the company reported that 1,000 new ad campaigns ran on its network in 2008, and current monthly visitors number 25 million.

(More)

Source: Washington Technology
IBM Corp., the Social Security Administration (SSA) and MedVirginia have launched a medical health record exchange system that will speed the processing of disability claims.

Two years in the making, the system links SSA with MedVirgnia, a regional health information exchange in Richmond, Va., that allows hospitals, doctors and other health care providers to share information electronically with SSA as the agency processes disability claims.

The system is a model that SSA could use across the country, said Tom Romeo, an IBM vice president and government healthcare services leader. The agency processes three million disability clams a year.

“Today when you file a disability claim, Social Security sends letters and collects records from physicians and labs but it is all paper-based,” he said.

Inevitably something is missing from the claim, so more letters are written and sent back and forth. The process takes weeks and often months just the collect the records, let along make a determination of benefits. “The result is that the person with the disability has to wait a long time for their benefits,” Romeo said. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass high Tech

Radiologists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston are using a browser-based application to hold virtual meetings and share electronic medical records online. The Radiology Theater, developed by IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), has the potential to change the way radiologists communicate with patients and other health-care professionals, said Francine Jacobson, a thoracic radiologist at the hospital.

“In many ways, it’s better than being in the same room with someone,” said Jacobson. “It does force people to point to what they’re talking about, and you have a record of that.” The web-based application can improve on face-to-face communication by taking an exact record of ancillary information like participants’ discussion, and exactly which parts of an image or a record they were referring to, she explained.

That means when a discussion participant goes to relay information to a third party, he or she will have access to the original material, reducing the likelihood of a communication error. To know more, click here.

Source: VentureWire

AOptix Technologies Inc., a maker of biometric and communications equipment, has secured $12.9 million in its latest round of financing.

Source: Electrooptics magazine

Photonics industry counters credit crunch, p.5
Non Invasive innovation: William Payne on the emerging area of biophotonics, which sees laser applied to many aspects of biology, p.10-12
Dumbing down? With Laser at ever higher power levels, and being used increasingly by non -photonics specialists, test equipment has to adpat to be accessible and user-friendly. Gemma Church looks at how laser testing equipment manufacturers are addressing this need. p.16-18

Source:Venture Wire

Iconic American companies - ranging from the brick-and-mortar to the Internet-based - are paying more attention to their mobile offerings, often partnering with start-ups to reach on-the-go customers.

“We want to move with this fast-moving tide,” said Douglas Brown, senior vice president of mobile product development at Bank of America Corp., which now has 2.3 million customers doing their banking via mobile devices.

Brown joined other executives in a panel discussion Wednesday about “mobilizing business” at the Dow Jones Wireless Innovations 2009 conference in Redwood City, Calif.

Companies as diverse as Kraft Foods Inc., MTV Networks Co., eBay Inc. and Facebook Inc. have all seen a surge in customer activity from mobile devices, and they have tried to respond accordingly, panelists said.

“The audiences we serve are using mobile devices non-stop,” said Allen Duan, vice president of digital distribution at MTV Networks. “Mobile is essential to reach our audience, and it’s also a revenue driver for us.”. To know more, click here.

Source: HS Daily Wire

Sarnoff Corporation promises to make it faster and easier to verify users through iris scanning technology; Schiphol Airport want to know more about it

Iris recognition is accepted as one of the most accurate biometric technologies, but its adoption has been slow because people feel uncomfortable standing still for relatively long time and placing their eyes in a very small capture zone. A couple of weeks ago we wrote that InSight from AOptix solves this problem (see 3 March 2009 HS Daily Wire).

Now, another company is making a similar claim. Some systems require users to stop and stare directly into a scanner for a positive ID, but a new offering from Princeton, New Jersey-based Sarnoff Corporation promises to make it faster and easier to verify users through iris scanning technology. To know more, click here.

Source: Bio smartbrief

The $19 billion allocated in the economic-stimulus package for incentives to adopt health information technology will result in more than 75% of doctors using e-prescribing within five years and savings of $22 billion in drug and medical costs within 10 years, according to a study commissioned by the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association. The savings would offset money spent on the incentives and other health IT programs mandated in the stimulus, the study says. To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Turning a laboratory laser into a real industrial application needs flexibility. Koheras tells Tim Hayes how it adapted its fibre laser technology to suit two different markets.

Koheras has its origins in the Technical University of Denmark and the work done there on fibre lasers in the late 1990s. “At that time a group was spun out from the university, originally with the aim of developing a relatively immature distributed feedback (DFB) fibre laser technology,” said sales manager Søren Løvgreen. “This was initially targeted at the telecoms sector, but we found the fibre laser to be ‘overqualified’ for that market, and to be a very good fit with a range of uses in sensing instead.” . To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org
Optical nanolithography receives a boost as researchers claim that their new approach is a major step forward in generating arbitrary nanopatterns.

Researchers at Princeton University, US, have unveiled a parallel process that writes patterns of nanoscale features directly into a substrate. Their simple optical technique uses one laser to trap an array of microlenses and then another to fabricate 100 nm structures with both a feature size uniformity and relative positional accuracy of 15 nm (Optics Express 17 3640). To know more, click here.

Source: CMPMedica

Using biotechnology developed from fireflies and seaweed, Johns Hopkins researchers are developing radiopaque stem cells for targeted delivery of therapy in patients with peripheral arterial disease. The technique may allow guidance and tracking of stem cell injections meant to grow new blood vessels and offer a way to confirm therapy response. (More)

Source: Mass High Tech

Veracode Inc. has secured a $5 million tranche of venture financing, part of a $10 million Series C round that has brought the Burlington-based security testing software company’s total investment up to $29.5 million, according to company executives and published reports.

Veracode offers an on-demand testing service for application software, designed to flag security risks in application coding. Returning investors include .406 Ventures, Atlas Venture, Polaris Venture Partners, Macrovision Corp., Symantec Corp. and In-Q-Tel, the venture investing arm of the CIA.

The company, launched in 2007, tripled its business in 2008 and expects to double in size in 2009, said CEO Matt Moynahan. “2009 is the year of the partner for Veracode,” he said. The company plans to OEM with consultants and managed security software providers, Moynahan said. He declined to provide specific customer numbers.

However, he said current marquee customers include Barclays PLC, Delta Air Lines Inc. (NYSE: DAL) and First Data Corp. Veracode next expects to expand into United Kingdom markets and add clients in the U.S. government, he added. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech
The continuing economic recession has abruptly halted a number of large solar and biofuels projects. But while green-technology companies dependent on such capital-intensive projects have foundered, things look brighter for other ventures, such as those that require little in the way of expensive equipment and facilities, or those that have managed to attract foreign investment. Those were some of the conclusions of clean-tech investors who gathered at this week’s GoingGreen East conference in Boston.

As the credit markets have tightened, many capital-intensive projects have stalled. For example, OptiSolar, a company based in Hayward, CA, has sold planned solar-farm projects because it couldn’t raise money to expand manufacturing. Corn-ethanol plants are being shut down and some sold in bankruptcy proceedings for a fraction of their value. Meanwhile, some next-generation biofuels companies, such as Mascoma, based in Boston, have put plans for new plants on hold.
To read more, click here.

Source: optics.org

The 42 m Extremely Large Telescope is one of the key priorities identified in Europe’s newly unveiled 20 year astronomy roadmap. Jacqueline Hewett finds out how this decision was reached and the monumental challenges facing the scientists developing the massive mirror.

Making unanimous decisions by committee is always an arduous task. However, next time you find yourself in this situation, spare a thought for Michael Bode and his colleagues on the ASTRONET project who have spent the last three years compiling a roadmap that prioritizes both the ground- and space-based facilities that Europe should invest in over the next 20 years to ensure its leading position in astronomy. To read more, click here.

Source: R&D Magazine

With adequate financial and political support, renewable energy technologies like wind and photovoltaics could supply 40% of the world’s electricity by 2050, according to findings from the International Scientific Congress “Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions.” However, if such technologies are marginalized, its share is likely to hover below 15%.

This research was presented at a press conference by Peter Lund of the Helsinki Univ. of Technology’s Advanced Energy Systems in Espoo, Finland, ahead of the scheduled congress session titled, “Renewable Energies: How Far Can They Take Us?”

“Our findings demonstrate that with global political support and financial investment, previous notions that the potential for renewables was in some way limited to a negligible fraction of world demand were wrong,” says Lund. “If we prioritize and recognize the value of renewable energy technologies, their potential to supply us with the energy we need is tremendous.”

Previous projections put renewables’ share at only 12% by 2030. Other research within the same congress session further supports the viability of renewables, examining closely the limitations and potential of wind, biomass and biofuels. To know more, click here.

Source: Yahoo! News

British scientists said on Tuesday they had developed a treatment that transports anti-cancer genes selectively into cancer cells using nanotechnology. The therapy has so far only been tried out on mice, but the aim is to test it in humans within two years. If it works in people, it would provide a highly targeted mechanism for delivering cancer-fighting gene therapy.

Cancer Research UK’s Andreas Schatzlein, based at the School of Pharmacy in London, said it was the first time that nanoparticles had been shown to target tumors in such a selective way. (More)

Source: optics.org

Economic conditions are going to remain difficult, but photonics companies should not stop looking for inward investment. Bill Magill explains why strong projects can still attract the attention of venture capital.

Bill Magill is a venture capital (VC) general partner with over 20 years experience in technology, including hands-on engineering, market consulting, equity research and venture investing.

How do VCs regard photonics?
The collapse of the telecoms bubble left some scars, but they are diminishing. At that time photonics was an industry of extreme interest to the VC community and companies incorporated words like photonics or optical or all-optical into their names as if it was a magical solution to any problem. Those days are behind us. Today what matters is how you address a particular market and the pain in that market.

To read more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Eye examinations could become faster and much less intrusive thanks to the first fluidic lenses that correct vision.

Seeing clearly with a liquid lens

Opticians could one day use fluidic lenses to determine ophthalmic prescriptions simply and quickly say researchers in the US. A team from the University of Arizona has developed the first fully adjustable fluidic lenses that can correct for near- or far-sightedness as well as astigmatisms (Optics Letters 34 515).

To know more, click here.

Source: spectroscopy now

Infrared (IR) and Raman spectroscopy are emerging biophotonic tools to recognize various diseases. The current review gives an overview of the experimental techniques, data-classification algorithms and applications to assess soft tissues, hard tissues and body fluids. The methodology section presents the principles to combine vibrational spectroscopy with microscopy, lateral information and fiber-optic probes. A crucial step is the classification of spectral data by a variety of algorithms. To know more, click here.

Courtesy: The Journal of New England

Cambridge stem cell research and technology firm Stemgent Inc. has pulled in a $14 million Series A-1 round of funding, according to published reports. Website PEHub.com notes that HealthCare Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures were the investing companies. (More)

Source: Mass High Tech

Cambridge NanoTech Inc. has moved its headquarters within Cambridge to accommodate the company’s growth in laboratory space and personnel. The new headquarters, located at 68 Rogers Street in Cambridge, gives the atomic layer deposition (ALD) developer an 11,000 square-foot facility — more than four times Cambridge NanoTech’s former site — with more than 1,000 square feet of clean room space. (More)

Source: Mass High Tech

Verivue Inc., a Westford startup launched by local industry veterans to attack the Internet protocol distribution and delivery space, has launched its first product.

Dubbed the MDX 9000 Series Media Distribution Switch, the unit is aimed at helping communications companies, cable operators and content delivery networks store and deliver IP video quickly, to any end device.

Founded in 2007 by an eight-person team that includes former Juniper Networks Inc. executive Jim Dolce and former Sonus Networks Inc. co-founders Rubin Gruber and Mike Hluchyj, Verivue raised $25 million in funding in April of 2007 and another $40 million last July, according to a company spokesperson.

To know more, click here.

Source: HS Daily Wire

Iris recognition is accepted as one of the most accurate biometric technologies, but its adoption has been slow because people feel uncomfortable pushing their faces against a glass panel and placing their eyes in a very small capture zone; InSight solves this problem

Campbell, California-based AOptix Technologies, Inc. today announced the commercial product release of InSight, the company’s iris recognition system. The InSight, which operates at a nominal 2-meter stand-off distance, uses the company’s proprietary Adaptive Optics technology. It is targeted at a variety of end-users, including border and immigration control, ID card programs, aviation security, and access control applications.

To know more, click here.

Source: R&D Magazine

Construction of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s largest and highest-energy laser system, was essentially completed on Feb. 26, when technicians at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where the laser is located, fired the first full system shot to the center of the NIF target chamber.

Composite photo shows all three floors containing the 264,000-pound, 10-meter diameter target chamber. Diagnostic instruments will be attached to the round hatches. Photo montage by Jacqueline McBride

The test was the first time all 192 laser beams converged simultaneously in the 10-m-diameter chamber. NIF has met all of its project completion criteria except for official certification of project completion by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, due by March 31. “This a major milestone for the greater NIF team, for the nation, and the world,” says Edward Moses, LLNL’s principal associate director for NIF & Photon Science. “We are well on our way to achieving what we set out to do—controlled, sustained nuclear fusion and energy gain for the first time ever in a laboratory setting.” “Although not required for formal completion of the NIF Project,” adds project director Ralph Patterson, “it is extremely satisfying to wind up the project by firing all beams.” To know more, click here.

Courtesy: Reuters

An implant consisting of bone ’scaffolding’ containing stem cells can promote bone healing in patients who have undergone foot and ankle operations, a new report shows.

The report is “first review of implantation of Trinity Multipotential Cellular Bone Matrix as a viable bone matrix product containing adult stem cells in humans,” lead researcher Dr. Shannon M. Rush told Reuters Health.(More)

Source:Washington Technology

IBM Corp. has created a consulting practice around helping agencies manage their overall effect on the environment, including their carbon footprint.

The practice will help agencies analyze energy and water use, assess waste management, evaluate their environmentlal impact and develop strategies for improvement, the company said, adding that the practice will be known as IBM Public Sector Energy and Environment Diagnostic.

The concept began with the idea of helping federal agencies meet Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requirements that agencies track and report their environmental performance, said Jim Loving, IBM U.S. federal government executive. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass HIgh Tech

The less money you have, the more you have to do to keep thieves from grabbing it.

That appears to be the lesson from Memento Inc., which has seen its business grow as the economy tightens and its banking customers consolidate and shrink. The Concord-based fraud detection software company reports 140 percent revenue growth in 2008, and now counts six of the top 15 U.S. banks as customers.

Accusations of investor fraud against Stanford International Bank and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC have commanded front-page ink.

Bank mergers, layoffs, cash-straitened employees and high customer account turnover have provided fertile ground for schemes, and banks are responding, Memento executives say. Scams include everything from simple check fraud to sophisticated identity theft and phishing strategies that reach across multiple channels to siphon out money. T o know more, click here.

For more information, visit our career page http://hubtech21.com/career/

Source: Physics Today

Smaller, cheaper accelerators promise to make proton radiation therapy available to more cancer patients.

The recent wave of newly constructed medical centers dedicated to proton radiation therapy comes as no surprise to James Slater, a radiation oncologist at Loma Linda University Medical Center. By 2010, four new US centers will start treating cancer patients. With two others that opened in 2006, that’s more than double the number that had existed in the US in the first 15 years after Slater led the Southern California medical center in building the first hospital-based proton center in 1990. “I expected [this growth] to happen much sooner,” he says.

To know more, click here.

Source: Physics Today

Wim Leemans and Eric Esarey
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California

In conventional accelerators, energy from RF electromagnetic waves in vacuum is transformed into kinetic energy of particles driven by the electric field. In high-energy-physics colliders, some of that kinetic energy is in turn transformed into short-lived exotic particles. To know more, click here.

Coustesy: First World

Vertex Pharmaceuticals reported that the company will enhance its hepatitis C virus (HCV) drug pipeline, which already includes late-stage compound telaprevir, through a definitive agreement to buy ViroChem Pharma. As part of the transaction, estimated to be worth roughly $376.8 million, Vertex will acquire the worldwide rights to experimental polymerase inhibitors VCH-222 and VCH-759.(More)

Courtesy: BBC

Patients with a type of severe asthma benefit from injections of an antibody, research has shown.

Two teams, in the UK and Canada, found the treatment mepolizumab helped those patients with asthma exacerbated by a condition called eosinophilia.(More)

Courtesy: Yahoo! News

American researchers say they’ve engineered a virus that disables the defense systems of bacteria to enhance the effectiveness of antibiotics.


The scientists said this approach could help prevent bacteria from becoming resistant to antibiotics and kill bacteria that have already become antibiotic resistant.


The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University scientists engineered existing bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) to attack the SOS system — a bacterial DNA repair system that bacteria use when they’re exposed to antibiotics that damage DNA — and other gene networks in bacteria.(More)

Source: HS Daily Wiire

Microsecond pulses have been used for years to punch temporary holes in cell membranes, to shove genes or drugs into cells; this can also cause a cell to destroy itself in a process known as apoptosis, something being investigated as a cancer treatment; the nanosecond pulses are also being researched as a way temporarily to disable human muscles — as a taser gun would.

Talk about dual-use technology: A technique thought to be a promising cancer treatment is also being investigated for use as a Taser-like weapon that stuns for longer, New Scientist has learned. David Hambling writes that he technology involves short, nanosecond-long pulses of extreme voltage. To know more, click here.

Source: Industrial Laser Solutions

New ideas in micromachining capabilities and the latest in thin film photovoltaic scribing and wafer-level applications were presented at JPSA’s Advances in Laser MicroMachining Technology Seminar held March 3rd in Nashua, NH. The nearly 50 attendees (from New Hampshire and Massachusetts) were offered insight to innovations available through laser technology and how the latest developments could improve their processes. To know more, click here.

Source:Industrial Laser Solutions

IPG Photonics (Oxford, MA) announced the opening of a new 8,000 sq. ft. laser microprocessing applications facility that will serve West Coast customers. The facility will concentrate on the advancement of laser microprocessing for the photovoltaic and medical device industries. Located in Santa Clara, California, the heart of Silicon Valley, it will also work with IPG’s other applications facilities around the world, including Oxford, MA, Novi, MI, Yokohama-shi, Japan, Moscow, Russia, Daejon, Korea, Beijing, China, Milan, Italy, and Burbach, Germany.
To know more, click here.

Courtesy: Wall Street Journal

BOSTON — Merck & Co., Eli Lilly & Co. and Pfizer Inc. are teaming up to create new drug-discovery methods, which the companies say could save them large sums by reducing the failure rate of clinical trials.

The three companies, normally archrivals, and Boston venture-capital firm PureTech Ventures LLC have invested $39 million to launch Enlight Biosciences LLC, which aims to speed the way drugs are found and developed.(More)

Source: OSA newsletter

On February 17, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the economic stimulus bill. Although the legislation contains increased funding for S&T programs throughout the federal government, it is not good news for SBIR/STTR funding at NIH. A last minute, behind-the-scenes change was made to the stimulus bill that exempts NIH stimulus funding from the SBIR/STTR programs. According to estimates, this would have been $250 million available for these programs. Please note that this includes only funding under the stimulus bill; existing grants will not be affected. In addition to funding not being available for small businesses, it sets a dangerous precedent for the future of SBIR/STTR.

At the same time, in less than two weeks, the SBIR program is set to expire. Last year, Congress could not come to agreement on reauthorizing both the SBIR and STTR programs. The House passed reauthorization legislation with overwhelming support but the Senate failed to act. A six-month extension was passed to keep the program operating until March 20, 2009. (STTR is reauthorized through September 30, 2009.) When the extensions were passed, there was hope that the six months would be enough time to get a reauthorization bill passed and signed into law. Without action by Congress, the SBIR program will no longer exist after March 20.

Source: Boston Globe

WASHINGTON - “Harder on Cancer, easier on you,” proclaims the banner on the University of Florida Proton Therapy Institute website, a pitch to men scouring the Internet for advice on prostate cancer. This type of radiation treatment targets tumors more precisely than X-rays, the site claims, reducing side effects.

But a study found that though proton beam therapy is at least five times as expensive as other forms of radiation, only a few small, brief studies have examined its effectiveness. There was no evidence that it was better at curing prostate cancer, and insufficient evidence that it was superior at preventing side effects.

With US healthcare spending on track to nearly double in the next 10 years to $4.4 trillion, the federal government is building a system to study the relative benefits of different treatments for diseases.

The economic stimulus package contains $1.1 billion for “comparative effectiveness research,” a down payment on a project that could ultimately cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The legislation also creates a council in the Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate the work. To know more, click here.

Source: HS Daily Wire

Proposed budget increase DHS budget by 6 percent; priorities include cyber security, helping TSA screen travelers, increase bomb disposal and counter-IED capabilities, border security, emergency response.

President Barack Obama’s proposed 2010 budget, submitted to Congress yesterday, outlined his homeland security and intelligence priorities for the next year. DHS will receive $42.7 billion in discretionary spending for 2010, a 6 percent increase over 2009. AP reports that the increase may be only 1.2 percent after Congress completes appropriations for 2009.

Security Management Matthew Harwood writes that cybersecurity features prominently in both budgetary areas (note that the details of the intelligence budget are classified), with the document noting, “”The threat to Federal information technology networks is real, serious, and growing.” According to the homeland security portion of the document, $355 million will go to help the private and public sectors create more resilient cyberinfrastructures, while $36 million will aid research and development into technologies to help prevent and detect biological threats. To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Bright spots included a new anti-UAV weapon and entry into the metal cutting sector. A mobile laser system featuring high-power diodes from IPG Photonics has become the first to destroy an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), echoing the impact that the company’s fibre-laser products are having on its own competitors. December 2008 saw a demonstration of the multi-kilowatt output laser as part of Boeing’s Avenger mobile defence system at a New Mexico missile range.To know more, click here.