Technology Transfer Services Immortalized

Written on Thursday, May 29, 2008 by Gemini

In recent times, the world's leading technology universities are opting in for a different business model, for the sole need of survival. Earlier they were involved only in research & development, and were least focused on the business front. The things started changing when investors in these institutions reduced their investments and hence these R&D centers started looking concentrating on business as well. That's why you'll see many R&D institutes going out in the market selling their research. Many leading technology institutes are in this league. However, in my opinion, Yissum - the technology transfer services company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - is in the lead position through its highly appreciated university technology transfer programs. It is responsible for marketing the inventions and know-how generated by the University's renowned researchers and students.

It has expertise in diverse domain from nanotechnology to medicine and pharmaceuticals, agriculture and nutrition, water and environmental technologies to computer science to homeland security. Speaking in terms of numbers, Yissum has granted 400+ technology licenses and is responsible for commercializing products of over $1 billion in worldwide sales every year. Over the past 40 years, Yissum has churned out many popular products like Exelon, Doxil, Superior ceramic ink, UV pearls, Sumo - louse repellent, and Ram onion. There are many successful companies that are born at Yissum including Algen Biopharmaceuticals, Avian Tech, Ester Neurosciences, HumanEyes Technologies, and many more.

Yissum has won many patents (and many more are pending) on various technologies namely Single Image Dehazing, Prevention of Age-Related Retinal Deterioration, New Biosensor for Nerve Gases, Drought-Tolerant Trees, and Process for Producing Organic Ultra Thin Films. I am mesmerized by the wide array of their research in technology field - Improved Cache Performance with Reduced Energy Consumption; Compiler Aided Ticket Scheduling; Markov Model Application for DNA-Arrays and Gene Identification just to name a few. If you want to involve yourself in the world's leading technology institution and contribute to the award winning technologies / products, I recommend Yissum - a true technology transfer company.

Posted in Communication research, Dangerous research, Energy research, General research, Health research, Interesting, Life Saving Research, Nanotechnology |

Now we have a biochip that can detect cancer before symptoms develop

Written on Sunday, May 11, 2008 by Gemini

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have developed a chip that can save lives by diagnosing certain cancers even before patients become symptomatic. A tumour – even in its earliest asymptomatic phases – can affect proteins that find their way into a patient’s circulatory system. These proteins trigger the immune system to kick into gear, producing antibodies that regulate which proteins belong, and which do not.


-- Picture: Argonne biologist Daniel Schabacker prepares to load a biochip onto a scanner. The biochip (below) contains grids of small wells or ‘dots’, each of which contains a protein, antibody or nucleic acid, which helps detect cancer. --

The new technology, known as a biochip, consists of a 1x1 cm array that comprises anywhere between several dozen and several hundred ‘dots’, or small drops. Each of these drops contains a unique chemical that will attach itself to particular proteins that could be cancer tell-tales. “Antibodies are the guardians of what goes on in the body,” said Tim Barder, president of US-based Eprogen, Inc, which has licensed Argonne’s biochip technology. “If a cancer cell produces aberrant proteins, then it’s likely that the patient will have an antibody profile that differs from that of a healthy person,” he added.

In their hunt for cancer indicators, Eprogen uses a process, which sorts thousands of different proteins from cancer cells by both their electrical charge and their hydrophobicity or “stickiness.” The process creates 960 separate protein fractions, which are then arranged in a single biochip containing 96-well grids. Scientists then probe the microarrays with known serum or plasma “auto-antibodies” produced by the immune systems of cancer patients.

By using cancer patients’ own auto-antibodies as a diagnostic tool, doctors could potentially tailor treatments based on their personal auto-antibody profile. What makes this technique unique is that scientists can use the actual expression of the patient’s disease as a means of obtaining new and better diagnostic information that doctors could use to understand and fight cancer better. Biochips have already shown promise in diagnostic medicine and are useful in rapidly and accurately detecting other diseases, said Argonne biologist Daniel Schabacker, who developed the technology.

Posted in Health research, Life Saving Research, Nanotechnology |

Sexy sells, does RFID?

Written on Saturday, April 19, 2008 by Gemini

American Apparel makes RFID sexy...

Retailer American Apparel Inc., known for its risqué ads and "Made in Downtown LA" label, is putting radio frequency identification tags (RFID) on every Boy Beater tank, Baby Rib brief, Cross-Back bra and Sleeve Ringer T-Shirt in its 17 New York metropolitan area stores. That's 40,000 items per store, each tagged with a high-tech chip, starting with the Columbia University location in Manhattan. The company is using Vue Technology's TrueVue software to manage the RFID data, Motorola Inc. RFID readers and antennae to capture the data and Avery Dennison Corp. tags to locate and store that data at the item level. Los Angeles-based American Apparel is on an aggressive timetable to roll out the sophisticated inventory tracking system to an additional 120 stores in North America.

The question is why. RFID tagging on crates -- never mind individual pieces -- is currently on the radar for only a handful of retailers, mainly behemoths like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and its legions of suppliers now under orders to adopt transponder tags or else.

RFID is tricky, said John Fontanella, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Boston. "The use cases for RFID are not as obvious as some proponents would have you believe," he said. Automating a process like taking inventory changes the way people work, and that "requires a significant amount of re-engineering," Fontanella said, and up-front labor. There's little doubt of that, said Zander Livingston, RFID technology director at American Apparel. The manual tagging for a single store alone required multiple employees working three full days. But for American Apparel, with its numerous, nearly identical styles in a rainbow of colors, the technology makes a lot of sense.

"The No. 1 reason is inventory accuracy," Livingston said.

American Apparel differs from a lot of other apparel companies, Livingston said, in that it displays one -- and one only -- of each size, style and color of a particular item on its sales floor. Each item in each of its color and size variations has a place on the salesroom floor, but the company does not load up the racks with multiples of the same kind. "So basically, as soon as an item has been taken off the rack to be tried on, or purchased or just carried around the store as the customer is browsing, the item is no longer available. We also have a lot of items that look similar to each other, and because of that a lot of items get misplaced," Livingston said. The high sales volume often means that more than 1,000 items a day are moving back and forth between stockrooms and salesrooms.

"We'd have 10% of the items lost in the stock room that needed to be on the sales floor. Part of my goal was to make sure that we had a perfectly fitted sales floor, at 100% capacity," said Livingston, an old classmate of American Apparel CEO Dov Charney from their prep school days at the elite Choate Rosemary Hall, who was recruited by Charney to put RFID to work. Accuracy was a big problem. Taking manual count of 10,000 items on the sales floor and the 30,000 stocked in the basement means having to ask employees to come early or stay late. Fatigued employees might glance at the tag in the collar, but because of the similarity in styles, misidentify the item. RFID accuracy is 100%.

Tom Racette, director of RFID market development for Mortorola's Enterprise Mobility Division, said RFID is becoming easier to implement. "A couple of years ago, this was all about the big challenging implementation, putting RFID across the supply chain. We are seeing more and more retailers, and businesses of all kinds, who are finding creative ways of implementing RFID in ways that are providing value," Racette said. Dr. Bill Hardgrave, professor of information systems and executive director of the Information Technology Research Institute at the University of Arkansas, said in a statement, "We've noticed an increasing trend among retailers that are implementing RFID at the item level, and American Apparel is a prime example of a retailer on the forefront of this trend."

By deploying the technology in additional stores, American Apparel expects to increase sales and customer service by having real-time visibility into products at nearby stores, enhancing the intrastore transfer process to balance stock, Racette said. Furthermore, the retailer will be able to respond more efficiently to market behavior by using RFID to record and report on purchases, not only within one location, but also across a region of stores.

For CIOs, they are looking at RFID and seeing that inventory accuracy is going from 80% to 99%, as it did in the American Apparel pilot, and that RFID is reducing the cost of managing inventory substantially, said Chris Schaeffer, director of RFID product marketing at Motorola. "CIOs are tasked with figuring out how to utilize the IT infrastucture to bring business value, and this can improve processes and efficiencies. It's good for a CIO to be able to say, 'See how this technology investment helped me do that,'" Schaeffer said.

Livingston did not give out a dollar figure for the investment, except to say the cost was about equivalent to the salaries of two full-time sales employees per store. The project is not without challenges, he cautioned. The deployment takes a "little more human interaction" than perhaps initially anticipated to verify everything being transported from the stockroom to the sales floor. He had to re-evaluate certain work movements so RFID readers were not blocked. It can be difficult to read tags around metal, for example. Down the road, he wants to design portals to capture theft -- people walking out the door with stuff -- but the "gates" have to be "aesthetically pleasing" so they are not in odds with American Apparel's meticulous stores. Livingston said the next step is to cut down on the manual labor by tagging items at the manufacturing plant. "I'm not going to tag another item in New York until there is source-level tagging."

Source: SearchCIO article

Posted in Communication research, Energy research, Gadgets, Interesting, Nanotechnology, RFID |

Now we have a Phone with a Screen that Folds!!!

Written on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 by Gemini

The 5-inch display of Polymer Vision’s ‘Readius’ is the world’s first that folds out when the user wants to read news, blogs or email and folds back together so that the device can fit into a pocket.Polymer Vision, spun out of Philips, whetted the appetite of gadget fans more than two years ago when it showed off a prototype. Now, the gadget is in production and will go head-to-head with Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s ebook reader Kindle when it hits stores mid-2008.

Posted in Gadgets, Mobile, Nanotechnology |

It's Official Now - Indians used nanotechnology 2,000 years ago

Written on Tuesday, January 01, 2008 by Gemini

Visakhapatnam: Indian craftsmen and artisans used nanotechnology extensively about 2000 years ago to make weapons and long lasting cave paintings, a Nobel laureate of Chemistry said here.

Posted in General research, Nanotechnology |