and the House in pre-dawn votes on 1 and 2 january keeps researchers on tenterhooks for at least another two months by delaying mandatory spending cuts that could threaten science funding.
but could push the country s weak economy back into recession. The cuts, known as the sequester,
Rancorous last-minute negotiations yielded a tenuous agreement to raise taxes for the wealthy, but deferred decisions on the sequester#an across-the-board reduction of about 8%in nondefence discretionary spending, with at least 9%carved from defence#by two months."
"But it does give advocates more time to convince policy-makers that cutting the US investment in R&d is counterproductive.
in case there is a sudden plunge in government funding. Nancy Andrews, dean of the Duke university School of medicine in Durham, North carolina, says that the medical school may need to cut back on graduate admissions,
But it does give advocates more time to convince policy-makers that cutting US investment in R&d is counter#productive.
"If we need to spend more to help current faculty members maintain their research programmes through funding gaps,
it will be harder to provide start-up funding for new faculty members, she says. The delay means that law-makers will debate the sequester at the same time as they tackle the overall federal budget.
The US Congress s inability to agree on a 2013 budget last year led it to adopt a continuing resolution that allows the government to keep functioning at roughly 2012 funding levels.
Olah argues that a future economy could use methanol directly as a liquid fuel, so the world should work on ways to produce it#perhaps by capturing carbon dioxide.
In particular, millions of dollars have been poured into drugs that inhibit a protein called PCSK9, an enzyme involved in cholesterol synthesis. This approach lowers LDL
which included billions of dollars for science, and also charged the OSTP with improving public access to research (see Into the open).
when thousands petitioned the White house to require free access to journal articles arising from US taxpayer-funded research.
The UK funding agencies plan to finance this gold open-access route by diverting some 1%of the national research budget
and this is a side dividend to the main mission, is that the galactic planetary census is a lot different than we had believed from looking at our own planetary system,
For Second sight, FDA approval follows more than 20 years of development, two clinical trials and more than $200 million in funding#half from the National Eye Institute, the Department of energy and the National Science Foundation
and the rest from private investors. The Argus II has been approved for use in Europe since 2011 and implanted in 30 clinical-trial patients since 2007.
The scheme hopes to become self-sustaining by requiring milestone payments as drugs move from laboratory to clinic and from additional partnerships and screening services."
"To justify the subsequent investments you have to make in hit-to-drug lead programmes,
that challenged the legality of funding for the work by the National institutes of health (NIH. This means NIH-funded researchers can continue to work with the 195 new human embryonic stem cell lines the federal government has made available to them.
It cost the economy an estimated#8. 5 billion (US$12. 9 billion) in agricultural and tourism costs,
The team got around the problem by engineering the vaccine to have disulphide bonds cross-linking the protein triangles together.
breaks the most new ground is in its support for the reigning theory that describes the instant after the Big bang. The theory, known as inflation,
"Planck could have found that there was something majorly wrong with inflation, says astrophysicist Jo Dunkley at the University of Oxford, UK,
In the minutes that followed the burst of inflation, particles such as protons and electrons formed from the cauldron of proto-matter,
But unambiguous confirmation of a cosmic burst of expansion known as inflation remains elusive. ES a
But for those who argue that investments in basic research are necessary for innovation and prosperity,"this is a really bad budget,
"There is a consistent pattern of steering money away from basic research, says Turk.""More and more of it is being directed to company needs.
That money comes from interest accrued on the foundation s endowment that the government is now releasing for use
but that money is earmarked for research partnerships with industry rather than basic research. The National Research Council,
This investment was welcomed by Clare Demerse, federal policy director at the Pembina Institute, an energy policy think tank in Calgary.
Although the money is less than half the investment that Pembina and others had called for, Demerse said in a statement that it would be a"lifeline for the country s estimated 700 clean technology companies.
there is a piecemeal approach, with the government"picking winners and providing new money to the automotive, aerospace, forestry and aquaculture sectors."
the Universe expanded at a staggering rate#a process dubbed inflation. Inflation would explain why the Universe is so big,
and why we cannot detect any curvature in the fabric of space (other than the tiny indentations caused by massive objects such as black holes).
in a pattern that carried the echoes of inflation. Those photons are still out there today
The simplest models of inflation predict that fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background should look the same all over the sky.
This rules out some models of inflation, but does not undermine the idea itself, he adds.
"It s a huge unmet need, says David Ferreiro, a biotechnology analyst with investment bank Oppenheimer & Company in New york,
there is also money to be made. The companies, many of them based in California s Silicon valley,
The venture could add#40#billion (US$60#billion) to the UK economy over the next 30#years,
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, various companies explored the possibility of harvesting them#but as metal prices fell,
however, climbing prices and advances in deep-sea equipment such as remotely operated vehicles and flexible risers#pipes used to lift material#have revived interest."
as a means of providing a long-term, reliable stream of money to researchers. The White house has argued that energy innovation is not only good for cutting carbon emissions to tame global warming,
but that it also plays an important part in growing the economy. Ahead of his March 15 announcement, White house officials offered a preview of the plan s details.
The money for the fund, which would probably be dispersed in the way that the ARPA-E program does it,
would come from an increase in expected revenue generated by a more efficient permit approval process and other reforms.
Image credit: Tom Deerinck, NCMIR, UC San diego. In the new Molecular Psychiatry paper, conducted with collaborators across the country and world,
Image credit: Hari Prasad and Rajini Rao. Based on their autism research, the team suspected that the boost NHE9 gave to glioblastomas was explained by abnormal endosome acidity.
Anyone caught participating in such unlawful activity as free speech will be fined up to about $600 (30,000 rubles)
Could Your Body parts Replace Credit cards? Credit card security breaches are becoming more and more common, and customers'personal information is being exposed.
Could biometric payment methods replace credit cards altogether? Researchers from Tsinghua University and Tzekwan technology, a financial security protection firm, have announced the first ATM that works with facial recognition capabilities, reports the South China Morning Post.
The researchers stated that this new kind of ATM MACHINE will apply facial recognition technology, high-speed banknote handling,
and an improved capacity to recognize counterfeit bills. Gu Zikun, Tzekwan chairman, said that the machine would soon be available on the market.
but Baltimore Securityplus Federal Credit union did run a trial for a machine that used facial recognition tech
and currently comes with a 30-day money back guarantee u
#Printing Color Images Without Ink A new technology creates colorful images by manipulating light rather than applying ink.
They are now working on a prototype for potential investors: a desk lamp that provides an Internet connection
#'Edible Barcodes'Help Fight Counterfeit Drugs Who knew that the answer to fighting the trillion-dollar global counterfeit drug problem rested in a particle the size of a speck of dust?
At least that what entrepreneur Dr. Hank Wuh is counting on with Trutag Technologies, one of the companies that falls under the larger umbrella of Skai Ventures, the tech-focused venture capital accelerator that he founded.
Think about healthcare economics, think about public health it impacts all of those areas. We think of this technology as a tremendous way to sort of improve the system. he company ags,
rings and cufflinks, ranging in price from $54 for a cube to $271 for a piece of jewelry.
Pressing the device big black button creates a vacuum that sucks the blood into a maze of tiny channels within its disposable credit cardized cartridge.
and whether it might hurt the Dutch economy. The court acknowledged that it is has no scientific expertise in climate changeut it didn need really to
But whereas a power plant is huge and costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build,
Insurers might find it useful in investigating fraud and councils in tackling environmental assaults such as waste incineration or illegal logging and quarrying.
or an insurer checking a car is parked off-road as claimed. But most of the work will involve images taken by orbiting satellites especially as recent earth observation start-ups like Planet Labs
For instance commodity traders might pay top dollar for detailed information on the level of oil in Saudi arabia's storage facilities.
It will no longer be heroic to go to space it will become a commodity and it's about time says John Logsdon a space policy expert at George washington University's Elliott School of International affairs in WASHINGTON DC.
The waves were said to be the smoking gun evidence for the theory of inflation which suggests that space expanded faster than the speed of light in the first moments after the universe's birth.
For now Europa is slightly ahead in terms of funding. NASA's budget for next year includes $15 million to design possible missions there
because acceleration and diversification would involve a lot of money. NASA's suspension of working with the Russians will likely be received in Russia much the same way other sanctions over its actions in Ukraine have been:
Meanwhile, Benjamin Longmier at the University of Michigan in Ann arbor, who leads a rival project, announced that his team also has private funding
But you could dump a thousand Cubesats in one place then spread them out to the right points, for a fraction of the price.
No matter what happens, the team already has enough money to launch and propel the Cubesat next year."
The company has sold more than 600 tickets so far with prices currently set at $250000 but has yet to conduct a commercial launch.
We do however know that high speed impacts are a ubiquitous process as we see impact craters on every solid surface in the solar system says Mark Price at the University of Kent UK.
To find out if this works in practice Price and colleagues made model comet ice in the lab containing various amounts of ammonia carbon dioxide and methanol.
The goop that remained after the ice was evaporated away was analysed by Price's colleague Zita Martins at Imperial College London who found it contained the amino acids alanine and norvaline.
This is significant as we now have a simple realistic mechanism to generate amino acids Price says.
And it won't break the bank. Ardusat-1 and Ardusat-X were launched to the International space station (ISS) on 3 august aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle
So as long as the money holds out and political stability reigns they might well get to some place like Mars
because they are persistent and willing to spend the money and make the effort t
#Multibillion-dollar race to put internet into orbit The next-generation internet could come from above, with fleets of satellites delivering broadband to under-served areas of the world THE race is on to build a new kind of internet.
A host of companies and billions of dollars are in play, with the ultimate goal of ringing the planet with satellites that will allow anyone, anywhere,
investing $1 billion in Spacex's venture. The move is motivated by net neutrality concerns, says Kerri Cahoy, an aerospace engineer at the Massachusetts institute of technology.
but are made for a few hundred dollars less and operate with greater efficiency, Coe-Sullivan says.
#Hewlett Foundation funds new MIT initiative on cybersecurity policy MIT has received $15 million in funding from the William
Simultaneous funding to MIT Stanford university and the University of California at Berkeley is intended to jumpstart a new field of cyber policy research.
How financial institutions can reduce risk by sharing threat intelligence; Developing cybersecurity policy frameworks for autonomous vehicles like drones and self-driving cars;
but also engage with stakeholders outside the Institute including government industry and civil society organizations. We want to understand their challenges
and here are the things that lead to outcomes such as turnover sales and job satisfaction says Ben Waber Phd 11 cofounder and president of Sociometric.
In one of its earliest studies with a Bank of america call center for instance Sociometric tracked co-workers for three months.
Sure enough when the bank instituted the changes Sociometric measured a 15 to 20 percent bump in productivity a 19 percent drop in stress levels and decreased turnover from 40 to 12 percent.
and other solutions produce a 20 percent rise on average in productivity and employee satisfaction and a similar decrease in turnover.
Peter Gloor a researcher in the Center for Collective Intelligence was using surveys of employees at a German bank where the marketing division was split into four teams located across 10 rooms on two floors.
The bank wanted to know how this physical layout affected productivity and job satisfaction. Waber Pentland and other researchers developed
and deployed 22 prototypes of Sociometric badges at the bank for a month registering when two wearers were talking to one another and for how long.
Armed with these results the bank rearranged its layout to increase the proximity of the close-knit employees
to advance the field by funding research proposals; to help individual research projects proceed more efficiently through shared services such as a regional sample facility or support for regulatory compliance;
with shipping constraints on tower diameters and the expense involved in construction. Now Keystone Tower Systems co-founded by Eric Smith 1, SM 7, Rosalind Takata 0, SM 6,
and other industries, for investors. As wind energy picked up steam about five years ago, venture capitalists soon funded Smith, Slocum,
In launching Keystone, Smith gives some credit to MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), which advised the startup cofounders on everything from early company formation to scaling up the business.
and is raising investments to construct the first commercial scale machine. Although their first stops may be Germany
and base stations waste energy and lose money. But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones)
Backed by millions in funding Eta Devices co-founded by David Perreault an MIT professor of electrical engineering
That Deshpande Center grant was big in terms of the funding and connecting us with local venture capitalists and really helping with being in that business mindset Dawson says.
called Liris (for lidocaine-releasing intravesical system), for $69 million up front and what could total more than $600 million in milestone payments.
with $15 million in funding to enter phase-one clinical trials. Taris would go on to earn $30 million in subsequent funding rounds.
t was a big unmet need, Langer says of his decision to co-found Taris;
#MIT launches Laboratory for Social Machines with major Twitter investment The MIT Media Lab today announced the creation of the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), funded by a five-year, $10 million
""With this investment, Twitter is seizing the opportunity to go deeper into research to understand the role Twitter
which would add greatly to the complexity and expense of a solar power system. This is the first device that is able to do all these things at the same time Chou says.
in a paper by a team led by Xuanhe Zhao, the Brit (1961) and Alex (1949) d'Arbeloff Career development Associate professor in Engineering Design,
Now, with its most recent $25 million funding round Airware plans to launch the platform for general adoption later this year,
Since then, theye raised $40 million from investors and expanded their team from five to more than 50 employees. he last 18 months has been a rapid rise,
Over a four-day period he says ride sharing saved $18000 in fares and operational costs and more than 1000 pounds in carbon emissions.
This system can be built at a very low cost relative to the million-dollar MRI machines used in a hospital Peng says.
The researchers are launching a company to make this technology available at an affordable price.
which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars Currently the startup has raised $6 million in funding
and working with a Dutch health care insurance company to bring the Medeye to 15 hospitals across the country as well as Belgium the United kingdom and Germany.
We left with a fairly sizeable business plan to take to investors and get funding. The team felt unsure of the technology at first.
But a 2010 demonstration at a Dutch hospital of an early prototype a bulkier version of the Medeye with off-the-shelf parts constructed at MIT changed their perception.
and oil rigs these simulations require intensive computation done by powerful computers over many hours, costing engineering firms much time and money.
This research was supported by grant funding from the National institutes of health and the National Cancer Institute e
which requires introducing mutations into embryonic stem cells can take more than a year and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This research was supported by funding from the Air force Office of Scientific research r
#Extracting audio from visual information Algorithm recovers speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass.
Commodity hardware In other experiments however, they used an ordinary digital camera. Because of a quirk in the design of most camerassensors, the researchers were able to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video recorded at a standard 60 frames per second.
The sensor of a digital camera consists of an array of photodetectors millions of them, even in commodity devices.
But it will take all of us philanthropists government funding agencies scientists patients and families working together to achieve it.
and the historic commitment of funding announced today stems in large part from the devotion of three extraordinary people
Arnold Scott, vice chairman and director of First Commons Bank, who was involved not in this research but mentored the group in the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition, says this approach s very important because of its size.
The cryptographic schemes that protect online banking and credit card purchases have proven their reliability over decades.
As more of our data moves online a more pressing concern may be its inadvertent misuse by people authorized to access it.
In practice audit servers could be maintained by a grassroots network much like the servers that host Bittorrent files or log Bitcoin transactions s
can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoidable annual costs. That why KGS aims to ake buildings betterwith cloud-based software, called Clockworks, that collects existing data on a building equipment specifically in HVAC (heating, ventilation,
and money, while providing more comfort, enjoyment, and productivity, says Nicholas Gayeski SM 7, Phd 0, who co-founded KGS with Sian Kleindienst SM 6, Phd 0 and Stephen Samouhos 4, SM 7,
working through funding stages, and continuously returning to the customer. oing through the process there showed
The duo along with Harvard university grad student Alain Goubau and investor Alex Rohde then an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow soon formed Altaeros.
and test winches and cables Looking back Glass credits his undergraduate years on MIT s Solar Electrical Vehicle Team a student organization that builds and races solar
and finance problems whose solutions don appear in the back of the teacher edition of a textbook.
With the prize money, the team including students from MIT, the California Institute of technology, and Stanford university aims to further develop the technology and launch the company.
But a more cyclical approach where waste is used as an energy source could provide higher profit yields
and liminate the tension between the environment and economics, says CEO Matt Silver SM 5, Phd 0, who co-founded Cambrian with Justin Buck Phd 2,
At that rate, a winery would shave about 2 pounds of CO2 per case off of its carbon footprint
Silver says. s our economy grows, water tables are dropping and wastewater pollution is rising, causing many companies to consider water risk in their overall strategy.
We are leveraging biotechnology to provide the highest return on investment for managing water. To that end, Cambrian is working on other projects that leverage exoelectrogenic microbes to treat wastewater.
and investment to get from bench to bedside Herr says. Starting a company is one way of enhancing that efficiency.
Today s Biom system has undergone more than 20 iterations funded by roughly $50 million of venture capital
and food can pose safety risks and cost governments and private companies hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
smartphone-readable particle that they believe could be deployed to help authenticate currency, electronic parts, and luxury goods, among other products.
or printed onto currency, the researchers say. They could also be incorporated into ink that artists could use to authenticate their artwork.
#One currency one price? Economics has a aw of one price, which states that identical goods should, in theory,
sell for identical prices or else markets will even out the differences. Empirical work on the topic, however, has produced little evidence in support of this aw,
and many studies showing deviations from it. Now a newly published paper co-authored by two MIT economists,
along with a colleague from the University of Chicago, presents evidence of a strong convergence of prices within the Eurozone, the region of European countries sharing a common currency.
The divergence of product prices is 30 to 50 percent lower in Eurozone countries than it is even in neighboring countries
whose currencies are pegged to the Euro. hat is surprising about our paper is that we found the law of one price,
says Roberto Rigobon, the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of management,
nd we found it to be very strongly dependent on the currency in which the prices are quoted.
Indeed, the unity of the currency seems to be a more powerful factor in determining prices than the characteristics of particular countries
or consumers. conomists tend to think what drives international price differences are things like transportation costs, information costs, tariffs, cultural differences, and other factors,
says Alberto Cavallo, a professor at MIT Sloan, and another co-author of the paper. ee finding those things don seem to matter relative to the retailer showing prices in the same currency.
The paper, urrency Unions, Product Introductions, and the Real Exchange rate, is being published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Along with Cavallo and Rigobon, the study was conducted by Brent Neiman, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of business.
The study covers prices of thousands of products, drawing on data from four major international firms:
Online pricing data was crapedusing a harvesting technique that Rigobon and Cavallo first developed for the illion Prices Project,
which provides real-time inflation estimates. All told, the researchers examined nearly 120,000 products sold in 85 countries from October 2008 to May 2013.
The researchers checked online and in store prices against each other, finding no significant divergences. Moreover, because the study dealt with international firms that often produce all their goods in a single location
the variation in prices observed in non-Euro countries most likely does not come from variations in production and distribution.
In evaluating the law of one price Rigobon observes, ne question has been, can you find the same item delivered to the consumer in the exact same way with the exact same retailer, with the exact same procedures?
More evidence for the idea that the common currency drives identical pricing is that in countries like Denmark,
which do not use the Euro but peg their currencies to it, prices diverge markedly from nearby Eurozone countries.
The same holds for countries that do not use the U s. dollar, but peg their own currencies to it. hen we look at countries that do not use the same currency
but are pegged, we still find an enormous amount of dispersion, Cavallo says. hat points to the fact it not the flexibility
or rigidity of the exchange rate that explains the differences. The research also uncovered nuances in pricing strategies.
For one thing international firms take country-specific taxes into account when setting prices, so that the pretax price in France,
which has a relatively high Value-added tax (VAT), will be lower than in other countries. After taxes,
however, the prices shown to consumers are uniform. One explanation for the price convergence, the researchers suggest,
is shaped consumer psychology by access to prices online: People who can see prices from country to country across the Eurozone would consider it unfair
if those prices diverged. hat possibly driving this, Cavallo says. r it could be that these firms just think about their pricing just in terms of currencies.
Whatever the benefits or flaws of the Eurozone, the research indicates that the common currency is delivering on one of the stated aims of its backers:
a more unified pricing system in Europe. However, as the researchers point out, unified pricing is a double-edged sword:
Relatively well-off consumers in some European countries may gain when prices equalize. But in a place such as Greece, currently suffering a severe recession with deep wage reductions,
unified Eurozone pricing reduces consumerspurchasing power. he companies are pricing Greece and Germany as if they are two neighborhoods of the same city,
Rigobon says, adding: aving one currency means implicitly that in good times, you are buying the price stability of Germany.
But that also means that in bad times, unfortunately, you are buying the price stability of Germany.
The study has attracted already considerable attention among economists. Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard university, calls the work terrific paperthat adds new information to the field. hat we did not know,
and what this paper shows, is that even when the volatility of the exchange rate is down to zero,
it matters a lot if this zero volatility has to do with countries being in a currency union,
versus if it is fixed because of a exchange rate, Gopinath says. However, she adds, the precise mechanism at work remains unclear:
his striking finding is need something we to understand better. Cavallo, Rigobon, and Neiman take the same view in the paper. uture work should focus on understanding
what determines when prices behave like those documented here and when they do not, they write.
They would also like to collect more data illuminating how companies set prices when new goods are introduced first.
The researchers are already pursuing follow-up studies: For instance, with the entrance of Latvia to the Eurozone, they are now comparing how that change in currency has affected prices in Latvia u
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