This first part of a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare focuses on the expansion of the venture business beyond traditional venture and large strategic investors. In the second part, I will outline the backdrop for the investment thesis that strategic healthcare investors are using to guide their capital allocation. Healthcare providers are finding their "play it safe" culture isn't conducive to breakthrough innovation at a time when it is critically needed. Having spoken with several innovation groups in health systems, most examples of "innovation" are decidedly uninspiring. Primarily, it is due to the fact that virtually all of their decisions have to go through the prism of how new ideas will fit with current businesses -- pretty much a guarantee that will doom so-called innovation to be little more than incremental improvements. Consequently, increasing numbers of hospitals and health systems are smartly allocating money to venture funds that have free reign to find truly disruptive new businesses.
Vanessa Williams has worn her share of tiaras, but she's horrified by the child beauty pageants she sees on reality TV. In an upcoming interview on Anderson Cooper's talk show Anderson, Williams, who was the first African-American to be crowned Miss America, bashes the moms of Toddlers & Tiaras for coercing their kids into the competition. Watch the clip below.
In what is truly a stroke of pure genius, this simple $5 birthday card will turn the last minute bottle of hooch you picked up at the corner store into the most thoughtful birthday gift you can give someone. More »
Filmmaker Jim Geduldick got hold of a Phantom Miro M120super-slo-mocamera and decided to put it to the test. The small-bodied camera can record a staggering 730fps at a full resolution of 1920 x 1200, but can go as 200,000fps if you aren't too fussed about image quality. After the break we've got the video that'll make you rush excitedly to the Vision Research website, only to find that prices start from $25,000 -- keeping it strictly for music video directors (and Engadget Show segments).
IN THE MATRIX, the famous "bullet time" effect showed how Keanu Reeves's character Neo was able to sway out of the path of incoming bullets, as time appeared to slow. Now the film has inspired engineers to develop a way to cope with cyber attacks on crucial infrastructure, such as electricity grids, water utilities and banking networks.
The idea, from security engineers at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, is to slow down internet traffic, including malicious data, to give networks time to deal with attacks. To do this, when a cyber attack has been sensed, an algorithm sends hyper-speed signals accelerating ahead of the malicious data packets to mobilise defences.
"Slowing the malicious traffic by just a few milliseconds will let the hyper-speed commands activate sophisticated network-defence mechanisms," says Sujeet Shenoi at Tulsa (International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcip.2012.02.001).
Such measures are needed because cybercriminals increasingly seem to target crucial industrial infrastructure. In 2010, for example, the Stuxnet worm infected Iran's nuclear programme. It was shown to be not so much a typical computer virus as a multifunctional weapon that can be reprogrammed to target any crucial industry. As industrial systems generally go for many years without software upgrades or password changes, they can often be vulnerable to such attacks.
Hyper-solution
Hyper-speed signalling could help, says Shenoi, although it would not be cheap to convert an existing network into one that can run the Tulsa team's algorithm.
The reason? First, a data pathway has to be reserved for the use of hyper-speed command-and-control signals during an attack ? and that could be seen as an expensive waste of capacity. And, when an attack is sensed by a scanning firewall-like sensor and the tainted data traffic is slowed down, more buffers and storage will be needed to cache the slowed data packets now swilling around on the network, otherwise crucial data could be lost.
Finally, new defence mechanisms need to be programmed into the network's routers, including the ability to inspect, tag and track suspicious packets, quarantine the risky ones and protect targeted devices on the network (like power grid relays, pump controllers or even hole-in-the-wall cash machines).
But hyper-speed signalling is only as good as its threat sensors. The system might sense malware program code disguised as text files, say, but only if it has prior knowledge of the virus or worm signatures. That opens the door to variants it has never seen before ? potentially allowing a Stuxnet-style attack to be initiated.
One way around this, says Shenoi, is to keep the network in hyper-speed mode at all times during, say, a period of international tension when cyber attacks could be launched in an initial bout of sabre-rattling at any moment. But slowing network speeds is not a great idea for telecoms networks who sell their services on the back of their speed capabilities, he says.
Another sensing option has been developed, however ? with funding from the US Department of Energy and Department of Homeland Security ? by computer scientists at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. Led by Dartmouth's Jason Reeves, they have developed a way for infrastructure to effectively monitor itself (International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcip.2012.02.002). The system is designed to raise a flag when out-of-the ordinary processor behaviour occurs ? such as running a motor too fast, just as Stuxnet did in 2010.
The team's software monitors the kernel ? a chunk of code that mediates between the software on one side and the processor and memory on the other. "We detect changes in the sequence of code the program runs, ones often introduced by malicious programs," Reeves says. "We can also verify the operating system code to see if it has been modified by malware."
Their system, currently set up for power-grid-embedded computers running the Linux operating system, could feasibly trigger the Tulsa team's hyper-speed algorithm. "Our system detects the presence of untrustworthy behaviour and leaves the response up to the administrator," Reeves says.
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"Footnote" starts with Professor Uriel Shkolnik(Lior Ashkenazi) being honored for his work in Talmudic research while his father, Professor Eliezer Shkolnik(Shlomo Bar-Aba), suffers through the evening in silence before declining a ride home. In fact, Eliezer is literally a footnote to history with his decades of research being pushed to the side in favor of a lucky break by a rival. But one day on his daily walk to the National Library, he is notified that he has won the prestigious Israel Prize. Everything would now be fine except for one little detail...
"Footnote" is a wry examination of the nature of identity and how very tenuous it all is. Take for instance, Eliezer, who was robbed by fate of everything that he is and ever could be. That same potential is fully brought to fruition by his son Uriel. While his father is nothing but bitter, Uriel acts like a mensch throughout.(I have heard of daddy issues but kiddy issues?) It might come as a surprise that something as petty as a prize could change everything, including their interactions with security personnel, but in their insular world, this is huge.(Uriel's losing/having his clothes stolen in the locker room could also be part of this world shift.) So, while the movie fares well intellectually in its Introduction/Conflict/Resolution structure and a sudden ending that actually comes at just the right place, it does not connect as well on an emotional level.
Chemical engineers at UMass Amherst find high-yield method of making xylene from biomassPublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Paul J. Dauenhauer dauenhauer@ecs.umass.edu 413-545-2819 University of Massachusetts at Amherst
A team of chemical engineers led by Paul J. Dauenhauer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered a new, high-yield method of producing the key ingredient used to make plastic bottles from biomass. The process is inexpensive and currently creates the chemical p-xylene with an efficient yield of 75-percent, using most of the biomass feedstock, Dauenhauer says. The research is published in the journal ACS Catalysis.
Dauenhauer, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, says the new discovery shows that there is an efficient, renewable way to produce a chemical that has immediate and recognizable use for consumers. He says the plastics industry currently produces p-xylene from petroleum and that the new renewable process creates exactly the same chemical from biomass.
'You can mix our renewable chemical with the petroleum-based material and the consumer would not be able to tell the difference," Dauenhauer says.
Consumers will already know the plastics made from this new process by the triangular recycling label "#1" on plastic containers. Xylene chemicals are used to produce a plastic called PET (or polyethylene terephthalate), which is currently used in many products including soda bottles, food packaging, synthetic fibers for clothing and even automotive parts.
The new process uses a zeolite catalyst capable of transforming glucose into p-xylene in a three-step reaction within a high-temperature biomass reactor. Dauenhauer says this is a major breakthrough since other methods of producing renewable p-xylene are either expensive (e.g., fermentation) or are inefficient due to low yields.
A key to the success of this new process is the use of a catalyst that is specifically designed to promote the p-xylene reaction over other less desirable reactions. Dauenhauer says his research colleagues, professors Wei Fan of UMass Amherst and Raul Lobo of the University of Delaware, designed the catalyst. After a series of modifications, the team was able to help enhance the yield of the reaction. He also says additional modification of the process can further boost p-xylene yield and make the process more economically attractive.
"We discovered that the performance of the biomass reaction was strongly affected by the nanostructure of the catalyst, which we were able to optimize and achieve 75-percent yield," Fan says. Computations conducted by the team have been instrumental in understanding the reaction mechanism and the role of the catalyst as well as making alteration to the catalyst to improve the yield of the process.
Besides Dauenhauer and Fan, the research team is made up of UMass Amherst's C. Luke Williams and Chun-Chih Chang, doctoral students in chemical engineering, and their collaborators, professors Raul F. Lobo, Dionisios G. Vlachos and Stavros Caratzoulas, as well as doctoral student Nima Nikbin, and postdoctoral fellow Phuong Do from the University of Delaware.
This discovery is a part of a larger effort by the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) to create breakthrough technologies for the production of biofuels and chemicals from lignocellulosic biomass. The center is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the Energy Frontiers Research Center (EFRC) program which combines more than 20 faculty members with complimentary research skills to collaborate on solving the world's most pressing energy challenges.
The discovery for the production of plastics adds another dimension to the portfolio of accomplishments of CCEI. In 2010, a CCEI research team led by Mark Davis of Caltech discovered a new catalyst, called Tin-Beta, which can convert glucose into fructose. This is the first step in the production of a large number of targeted products including biofuels and biochemicals, including p-xylene, from the building block of cellulose, the major constituent of trees and switchgrass.
In addition, a team led by Ray Gorte and John Vohs at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a novel fuel cells technology that converts solid biomass to electricity and another led by George Huber and Wei Fan of UMass Amherst has improved the yield to aromatics that can be used as drop-in fuels to gasoline.
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Chemical engineers at UMass Amherst find high-yield method of making xylene from biomassPublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Paul J. Dauenhauer dauenhauer@ecs.umass.edu 413-545-2819 University of Massachusetts at Amherst
A team of chemical engineers led by Paul J. Dauenhauer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered a new, high-yield method of producing the key ingredient used to make plastic bottles from biomass. The process is inexpensive and currently creates the chemical p-xylene with an efficient yield of 75-percent, using most of the biomass feedstock, Dauenhauer says. The research is published in the journal ACS Catalysis.
Dauenhauer, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, says the new discovery shows that there is an efficient, renewable way to produce a chemical that has immediate and recognizable use for consumers. He says the plastics industry currently produces p-xylene from petroleum and that the new renewable process creates exactly the same chemical from biomass.
'You can mix our renewable chemical with the petroleum-based material and the consumer would not be able to tell the difference," Dauenhauer says.
Consumers will already know the plastics made from this new process by the triangular recycling label "#1" on plastic containers. Xylene chemicals are used to produce a plastic called PET (or polyethylene terephthalate), which is currently used in many products including soda bottles, food packaging, synthetic fibers for clothing and even automotive parts.
The new process uses a zeolite catalyst capable of transforming glucose into p-xylene in a three-step reaction within a high-temperature biomass reactor. Dauenhauer says this is a major breakthrough since other methods of producing renewable p-xylene are either expensive (e.g., fermentation) or are inefficient due to low yields.
A key to the success of this new process is the use of a catalyst that is specifically designed to promote the p-xylene reaction over other less desirable reactions. Dauenhauer says his research colleagues, professors Wei Fan of UMass Amherst and Raul Lobo of the University of Delaware, designed the catalyst. After a series of modifications, the team was able to help enhance the yield of the reaction. He also says additional modification of the process can further boost p-xylene yield and make the process more economically attractive.
"We discovered that the performance of the biomass reaction was strongly affected by the nanostructure of the catalyst, which we were able to optimize and achieve 75-percent yield," Fan says. Computations conducted by the team have been instrumental in understanding the reaction mechanism and the role of the catalyst as well as making alteration to the catalyst to improve the yield of the process.
Besides Dauenhauer and Fan, the research team is made up of UMass Amherst's C. Luke Williams and Chun-Chih Chang, doctoral students in chemical engineering, and their collaborators, professors Raul F. Lobo, Dionisios G. Vlachos and Stavros Caratzoulas, as well as doctoral student Nima Nikbin, and postdoctoral fellow Phuong Do from the University of Delaware.
This discovery is a part of a larger effort by the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) to create breakthrough technologies for the production of biofuels and chemicals from lignocellulosic biomass. The center is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the Energy Frontiers Research Center (EFRC) program which combines more than 20 faculty members with complimentary research skills to collaborate on solving the world's most pressing energy challenges.
The discovery for the production of plastics adds another dimension to the portfolio of accomplishments of CCEI. In 2010, a CCEI research team led by Mark Davis of Caltech discovered a new catalyst, called Tin-Beta, which can convert glucose into fructose. This is the first step in the production of a large number of targeted products including biofuels and biochemicals, including p-xylene, from the building block of cellulose, the major constituent of trees and switchgrass.
In addition, a team led by Ray Gorte and John Vohs at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a novel fuel cells technology that converts solid biomass to electricity and another led by George Huber and Wei Fan of UMass Amherst has improved the yield to aromatics that can be used as drop-in fuels to gasoline.
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
This first part of a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare focuses on the expansion of the venture business beyond traditional venture and large strategic investors. In the second part, I will outline the backdrop for the investment thesis that strategic healthcare investors are using to guide their capital allocation. Healthcare providers are finding their "play it safe" culture isn't conducive to breakthrough innovation at a time when it is critically needed. Having spoken with several innovation groups in health systems, most examples of "innovation" are decidedly uninspiring. Primarily, it is due to the fact that virtually all of their decisions have to go through the prism of how new ideas will fit with current businesses -- pretty much a guarantee that will doom so-called innovation to be little more than incremental improvements. Consequently, increasing numbers of hospitals and health systems are smartly allocating money to venture funds that have free reign to find truly disruptive new businesses.
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Public release date: 30-Apr-2012
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