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Tuesday, 17 August 2010 21:19 |
 Christopher Loose is the founder and chief technology officer of Semprus BioSciences (formerly SteriCoat Corp), a biotechnology start-up developing long-lasting anti-infective coating for medical devices. Loose graduated from Princeton's chemical engineering department before working in ChemE R&D at Merck Research Labs. Loose earned a PhD in chemical engineering at MIT under Professors Greg Stephanopoulos and Bob Langer as a Hertz Fellow. |
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Thursday, 15 July 2010 15:07 |
 When he was just 26, bioengineer Christophe Schilling won a small-business grant from the National Science Foundation. His plan was to reengineer the genomes of microorganisms such as bacteria and yeast, which are used as living chemical factories, to produce new or better products. With his university mentor, Bernhard Palsson, Schilling raised $3 million to launch Genomatica in San Diego in 2000. |
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Saturday, 26 June 2010 10:55 |
 The heart has a limited capacity to generate new cells on its own, making it hard to heal after injury. Scientists have experimented with injecting stem cells into the heart, but they have found it difficult to predict how the cells will behave, and they've had little success in coaxing cells to make functional tissue. To better anticipate which cell types may help heal hearts, bioengineer Milica Radisic has used embryonic stem cells to create a small patch that mimics human heart tissue. |
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Tuesday, 15 June 2010 08:30 |
 Organisms that live in exotic environments have evolved unique traits in order to survive. Michelle Chang, an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, hijacks the chemical reactions that confer those traits, combining them in novel ways. |
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Thursday, 29 April 2010 12:30 |
 PROBLEM: Every day, plants, algae, and bacteria generate more energy than all the world's power plants, using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then storing the energy in sugar molecules. Artificial photosynthesis--the process of using solar power to split water through the creation of chemical bonds, as plants do--holds promise as a clean, cheap source of hydrogen to power fuel cells. But to make the process practical, researchers must find catalysts to decrease the amount of energy needed.
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Sunday, 28 March 2010 08:55 |
 Solar power simply won't be able to supply the terawatts of power we need until we identify better materials for solar cells. Silicon, which is used in most photovoltaics, is too expensive; the materials used to make cheaper thin-film solar cells, such as cadmium telluride, are rare--and some are toxic. |
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Friday, 05 March 2010 10:24 |
 In 1997, when search engines were relatively new, Jaime Teevan took an internship at Infoseek the summer before her senior year at Yale. William Chang, the chief technology officer, put her in a room with some research and told her to "find something fun to do." She came up with some ideas for judging link quality and helping people navigate the company's search engine, and she wrote the code to implement the changes. "Once, I brought the search engine down for a couple of hours," she says with a laugh. |
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Tuesday, 16 February 2010 10:21 |
 Elena Shevchenko is a master at making nanoparticles and assembling them into precise structures with useful properties. Materials made from the nanocrystals created with her methods could lead to ultra-efficient solar cells, tiny but powerful magnets, super-dense hard disks, and faster computers. |
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Wednesday, 27 January 2010 15:09 |
 Chris Burge admits it’s been hard to choose a research focus. In high school he won math contests but in college majored in biology. He traveled to Nicaragua to see if medicine was his calling but wound up teaching people there about computers. |
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Thursday, 31 December 2009 15:39 |
 Nerve cell transplants offer tremendous promise for patients who are suffering the effects of stroke, or from Parkinsons disease or other neurodegenerative illnesses. |
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Tuesday, 17 August 2010 10:10 |
 Each year, billions of dollars worth of drugs, from insulin for diabetics to the stroke drug tPA, are made in huge vats full of microbes engineered to produce human proteins. The process is both inefficient and enormously expensive. Matthew DeLisa, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University, was the first scientist to use a twin arginine translocation (Tat) pathway to produce human proteins. |
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Thursday, 15 July 2010 14:15 |
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 Of the thousands of drugs used to treat disease, most are small molecules--organic compounds that bind with proteins and influence their activity. But researchers must screen many compounds to find potential drugs, and the large number of chemical reactions needed to synthesize any one compound makes the process slow and painstaking.
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Saturday, 26 June 2010 10:18 |
 Christopher Chang, UC Berkeley, wants to revolutionize cellular imaging by changing the way biologists tag the molecules they want to see. Most tags fluoresce continuously, and each one binds to a target molecule of a specific shape. Chang, however, is developing probes that fluoresce only when they react chemically with their targets. This will allow scientists to observe the generation, accumulation, and release of molecules involved in passing signals within and between cells. |
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Tuesday, 15 June 2010 08:08 |
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 In 2006, scientists demonstrated that inserting four embryonic genes into mouse skin cells induced a small fraction of them to look and behave like embryonic stem cells.
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Thursday, 29 April 2010 12:24 |
 Using the engineering approach of synthetic biology, Chris Anderson has set out to program bacteria to selectively kill cancer cells. He is combining DNA sequences from different types of bacteria and inserting them into the bacterium E. coli to create an organism that can evade the immune system, home in on tumors, and trick cancer cells into letting it inside, where it releases a toxin. |
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Sunday, 28 March 2010 08:52 |
 Zinc-air batteries, which use zinc metal as the anode and an alkaline paste as the electrolyte, are simple, inexpensive, nontoxic, and long-lasting. But engineers haven't been able to figure out how to recharge them. |
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Friday, 05 March 2010 10:17 |
 Solar power simply won't be able to supply the terawatts of power we need until we identify better materials for solar cells. Silicon, which is used in most photovoltaics, is too expensive; the materials used to make cheaper thin-film solar cells, such as cadmium telluride, are rare--and some are toxic. |
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Tuesday, 16 February 2010 10:17 |
 Andrea Armani, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science in University of Southern California, has developed the first optical sensor that can detect single molecules without the use of labels such as fluorescent tags. No label-free detector previously developed has been sensitive enough to distinguish a single molecule. |
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Wednesday, 27 January 2010 14:58 |
 While involved in biomedical studies funded by NASA, Cori Lathan realized that astronauts in orbit encounter physical challenges much like those faced by people with disabilities. An astronaut, for example, must learn to move in an awkward space suit much the way a spinal-cord injury victim may have to relearn to walk. |
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Thursday, 31 December 2009 15:28 |
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 When Xudong Wang finished his PhD in materials science at Georgia Tech at the end of 2005, he knew he had a good thing going. He opted to stay put in the lab of Zhong Lin Wang (no relation), sure that he and his lab mates were close to creating a new nanotech-based generator--an invention they felt could change the future of nanotechnology. |
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