#Biofuel-to-hydrocarbon conversion technology licensedvertimass LLC a California-based start-up company has licensed an Oak ridge National Laboratory technology that directly converts ethanol into a hydrocarbon blend-stock for use in transportation fuels.
The ORNL technology offers a new pathway to biomass-derived renewable fuels that can lower greenhouse gas emissions and decrease U s. reliance on foreign sources of oil.
Vertimass is pleased very to be partnering with ORNL to commercialize this revolutionary technology that can broaden the market for alternative fuels said Vertimass chairman William Shopoff.
and technology leaders including Dr. Charles Wyman our president and CEO who will take this novel catalyst from the lab to the marketplace.
We see this technology as a significant step in moving the United states toward energy independence. The technology developed by ORNL's Chaitanya Narula Brian Davison
and Associate Laboratory Director Martin Keller uses an inexpensive zeolite catalyst to transform ethanol into hydrocarbon blend-stock.
This technology is a pathway to overcome the ethanol blend-wall Narula said. The blend-stock can be mixed into gasoline at higher concentrations than ethanol's current limit of 10 percent;
Vertimass anticipates that the ORNL technology will be in demand by existing corn-based ethanol production plants as well as new refineries coming online that aim to convert non-food crops such as switchgrass
The technology could also supply a source of renewable jet fuel required by recent European union aviation emission regulations.
We plan to move quickly to make a bolt-on technology easily accessible to ethanol producers
We hope to move from the laboratory scale to a commercially available technology within four to six years.
Preliminary ORNL analysis in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado shows the catalytic technology could be retrofitted into existing bio-alcohol refineries at various stages of ethanol purification.
The direct conversion process produces minimal amounts of ethylene by-product making the technology more cost-effective than previous approaches.
and pressures and can be regenerated under mild conditions helping the technology withstand long periods of operation without significant degradation.
Initial funds were from the ORNL Laboratory Directed Research and development and Technology Innovation programs and from the Bioenergy Science Center
and widely license breakthrough technologies that substantially expand the use of sustainable transportation fuels that reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Commercialization will lead to the widespread use of proprietary Vertimass technology for low cost production of sustainable transportation fuels for aircraft and heavy and light duty vehicles from multiple sources of biomass on a large scale.
#New technique promises cheaper second-generation biofuel for carsproducing second-generation biofuel from dead plant tissue is environmetally friendly
Now a Danish/Iraqi collaboration presents a new technique that avoids the expensive enzymes. The production of second generation biofuels thus becomes cheaper probably attracting many more producers
We are proud to now introduce a completely enzyme-free technique that is not patented and not expensive.
The technique can be used by everybody explains Per Morgen. Together with colleagues from the University of Baghdad and Al-Muthanna University in Iraq he explains that it is not an enzyme but an acid that plays the main role in the new technique.
The acid is called RHSO3H and it is made on the basis of rice husks. My Iraqi colleagues have made the acid from treated rice husk.
methane-producing microbesan international team of researchers led by scientists at Virginia Tech and the University of California Berkeley has discovered that a process that turns on photosynthesis in plants likely developed On earth in ancient microbes 2. 5 billion years ago long before oxygen became available.
By looking at this one mechanism that was studied not previously we will be able to develop new basic information that potentially has broad impact on contemporary issues ranging from climate change to obesity said Biswarup Mukhopadhyay an associate professor of biochemistry at the Virginia Tech
and computational biology from the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biochemistry at Virginia Tech.
Usha Loganathan a graduate student in the Department of Biological sciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech also participated in the study.
The above story is provided based on materials by Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic institute and State university. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
and respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) benefited most from the new technology. Survival rates more than doubled for babies with RDS
The technology is a low-cost version of the continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) systems that are a standard feature of most neonatal units in the developed world.
Premature birth is now the second leading cause of death among children worldwide and most premature babies are born in low-resource settings where many of the basic technologies
The technology which costs about 15 times less than conventional CPAP machines was created as part the Rice 360â°:
°Institute for Global Health Technologies'award-winning hands-on engineering education program Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB.
Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden director of Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) founded the hands-on BTB engineering education program in 2006.
and to establish an innovation hub at the hospital where student-developed technologies can be showcased proven
Not only have shown we that this specific technology can save thousands of lives each year we've also demonstrated a technology pipeline that can produce many similar technologies in the future.
Through the Day One Project Rice 360â°and QECH hope to create a collection of low-cost neonatal technologies that an African district hospital serving 250000 people can implement for about $5000.
Thanks to the designation from the UN's Every Woman Every Child program the technology was displayed for the U n. General assembly Sept. 23 as part of an effort to mobilize governments multilaterals the private sector and civil society
valos who joined forces with Dr. Elizabeth Dumont and a mechanical engineer Dr. Ian Grosse (both of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) in a recently published paper in Evolution that lays out the team's findings relating mechanical advantage
The researchers also unveiled an engineering model of a skull that can be manipulated computationally to morph into the shape of any New world Leaf-nosed bat species to help uncover evidence for selection in long-extinct organisms.
The key development is an engineering model of a very complex structure--the skull--that can morph into both known observed skulls as well as into forms that do not exist
The team's approach to identifying natural selection for mechanical function combined both evolutionary and engineering analyses.
Dumont and Grosse developed the engineering model. The interdisciplinary effort involved evolutionary biology biomechanics and mechanical engineering.
The research was funded in part by National Science Foundation grants. The researchers first built the three-dimensional finite element model to simulate bat skulls with myriad combinations of snout length and width.
and engineering (dark blue) models for the base model of the omnivorous bat Carollia perspicillata (B) and the morphed models for the nectar-feeding Glossophaga soricina (A)
Finally they studied the engineering results across hundreds of evolutionary trees of the bats to uncover the three optimal snout shapes favored by natural selection.
if it weren't for the development of the engineering model which allows us to assess the biomechanical characteristics of very different bats.
This kind of engineering model may illuminate many other adaptive radiations and the origin of so much diversity On earth.
By coupling a flexible engineering model with analyses based upon evolutionary trees the study opens the possibility of discovering evidence for selection in other very diverse organisms
in order to calculate the engineering performance of different skull shapes. My goal as a scientist is to uncover the evolutionary forces that have shaped biodiversity says Dr. Dá
It also highlights the growing role of evolutionary trees in testing longstanding hypotheses on adaptation that could not be tested even ten years ago and certainly not without the engineering model.
Engineering at Harvard university. Its developers foresee electrical generators driven by changes in humidity from sun-warmed ponds and harbors.
If this technology is developed fully it has a very promising endgame said Ozgur Sahin Ph d. who led the study first at Harvard's Rowland Institute later at the Wyss Institute
Sahin collaborated with Wyss Institute Core Faculty member L. Mahadevan Ph d. who is also the Lola England de Valpine professor of applied mathematics organismic and evolutionary biology and physics at the School of engineering and Applied sciences
The work was funded by the U s. Department of energy the Rowland Junior Fellows Program and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard university.
The above story is provided based on materials by Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
Using engineering plus evolutionary analyses to answer natural selection questionsintroducing a new approach that combines evolutionary
and of reconstructing skull shapes in long-extinct ancestral species. Evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Dumont and mechanical engineer Ian Grosse at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with evolutionary biologist Liliana Dá
The engineering model allowed us to identify the biomechanical functions that natural selection worked on. Some form or function helps an animal to perform better in its environment
We studied the engineering results using the evolutionary tree which is a very cool new thing about this work.
She and colleagues built an engineering model of a bat skull that can morph into the shape of any species
Analyzing the engineering results over hundreds of evolutionary trees of New world leaf-nosed bats revealed three optimal snout shapes favored by natural selection they report.
As a beef industry we are being asked day in and day out to take a holistic view of technology.
The use of beta-agonists in cattle feeding is among the modern feedlot technologies making waves in the beef industry.
Are we using low-stress cattle handling techniques? How far away from the load out facility are the fat cattle being moved?
Advice for feedlot operatorsthomson said that he is very pro-technology. While Merck recently announced that it is too early to determine
and make sure technologies are continuously helping. We're given a job task and responsibility and we don't take it lightly Thomson said.
but it still has a lot of growing up to do--technology is still evolving and the need for more energy efficient buildings is still slowly making its way into planning and development agendas.
For example, IBM is involved in a project in Boston's Backbay to help the neighborhood implement smart grid technology that electronically monitors
Sensor technology, that is coming from the physical infrastructure (like that used on the IBM campus),
and by using people themselves as the sensor technology. With feedback from citizens, cities can be smarter.
use this sensor technology too. People are probably better at defining what they need than any technology,
providing a more dynamic interpretation of the surroundings, and apps can help them contribute, said Bartlett.
The technology implemented here is going to help him get transparency and find most and least efficient buildings,
The price of alternative technology is starting drop due to the technology getting more efficient, which will undoubtedly push people to use the new methods of looking at energy consumption.
and smart building technology is going to pick up the fastest in states that have incentives for those who do so.
Calif.-based firm that advises companies on corporate water strategy and the use of water technologies in commercial and industrial markets.
We spoke to her about the venture capital buzz around water tech, the practical problem with a price on water and the leverage points that are needed to make the sector attractive to investors and the general population.
You want the same technology to give you clean Water right? A large percentage of investment is in industrial applications.
and wait 10 years after municpialities to adopt technologies. 10 percent is in agriculture. On average, agriculture uses about 70 percent of the water in the world.
If you look at places that might consider sponsoring technology, it's usually because they have a dire water need to they have the academic
One who sees water technology as a critical issue. The water management on-site in hydrofracking areas has issues with accountability and oversight.
I've seen for water technology. SP: Because fracking uses a lot of water and is under the political microscope,
Founded by Motorola veteran and self-professed engineering geek Chas Studor, Briggo produces organic coffee (using fresh,
Customers benefit from the innovative technology--remote ordering, personalization and notification when the drink is ready.
Briggo is filling a void--one that serves the coffee drinker who wants to use smart technology for a high-end, mobile-friendly coffee experience.
The Briggo mantra is that it's first and foremost a gourmet coffee company--not a technology or device company.
It â¢s a good fit in Austin, with all the innovation and high-tech there, he said.
And Nahmias thinks Briggo could be successful in regions of the country that have high uses of mobile technology
Tech, sustainability meet on the robotic marijuana farmmr. Greenthumb's latest gardening tool may just be...
a green tech start-up that has a product line of equipment and mechanical systems for people who are looking to grow crops hydroponically, that is,
so what we did was just take it to the next level by implementing hydroponic technology and developing it into a full line of trailers for not only the medical marijuana community,
And since technology is much more energy efficient, we think there's a great opportunity to capitalize on this new green rush.
and now having the ability utilize technology that effectively reuses resources like water instead of letting it go to waste by flushing it down a storm drain.
and a smartphoneby using its proprietary icrop management technology in the United kingdom to help more closely manage crop cultivation and harvesting needs,
I recently chatted about mobile technology and its agricultural uses. The icrop experiment--highly dependent on various mobile technologies including notebooks,
handhelds and wireless sensors--is being spearheaded by Pepsico and Cambridge university on a pilot basis, as part of the food company's overriding agenda to develop an integrated crop management system that will help the company reduce the carbon emissions
the system is just one example of how the agricultural industry is using mobile technology to drive improve yields
--while farmers in developing nations have relied on these technologies for a longer period of time, in the absence of other management tools or wired-line access to the Internet.
I received in the past week from two companies seeking to provide smarter home irrigation technologies. These companies, Cyber-Rain and ET Water, have released both recently cloud services that provide guidance about
Cyber-Rain's application, called XCI Cloud, works in conjunction with the company's controller technologies to help residential users better control watering.
A controller that includes enough technology to monitor and manage 8 to 16 zones, along with access to the cloud application, starts at $499.
which is billed as ET Water's first consumer application doesn't rely on any particular sensor technology.
considering the investments that parent company Earth Networks is making in its predictive technologies. GNOME helps adjust for the following:
there are many smart irrigation technologies, but these cloud-based services will probably become more ubiquitous.
The pilot project provides an introduction of fabrication technology, moving from 2-D printers that yield items to be folded into 3-D objects to 3-D fabricators that create 3-D physical objects.
This technology is not new. It's been around for two or three decades already.
It's a wonderful technology. It's  amazing to see this physical object appear on your desktop that you can then use.
While the technology is in emergent state and there are certainly a number of technical challenges,
Addition of new content is not necessary to promote the engineering design process given its interrelatedness to science, mathematics and technology.
Thus, the incorporation of engineering concepts utilizing digital fabrication can be connected to existing mathematics and science standards.
children's engineering in the elementary grades can be described as design under constraint, optimizing to a goal,
with verifiable tasks that allow children to build a solution to an engineering problem. This offers opportunities for contextualized mathematics and science.
They had started a company called Reenergy over in Albany N y..That company had gained the rights to the technology where you can take an organic feedstock and turn it into liquid fuel.
HOW IT WORKS Smartplanet also spoke with Jim Rekoske of Honeywell UOP, one-half of the duo (Ensyn Technologies of Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada is the other half) Â responsible for Envergent Technologies. Below he explains how and why the pyrolysis process came to be used for the project.
Pyrolysis technology has been around for awhile, and scientists had been working on it for food additives: flavors and fragrances.
and said hey this is really neat technology but you can make renewable power on-demand with this.
 So we went through the technology and made it more robust. For fragrances, efficiency is not a big deal.
In petroleum refining, there's a technique called FCC--fluid catalytic cracking--that makes gasoline, predominantly.
this is game-changing technology. You create a densified power source out of biomass, which is 50 percent water.
We're pretty comfortable that this technology is able to produce electricity at 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.
We really look at this as substantial technology--Â technology that is economically manageable today without government handouts
Business intelligence technology is all about collecting and storing data relevant to your business. Analytics technology is about making thoughtful decisions using that data.
It's about taking action. You can be smart without taking action. Although that's not very smart, is it?
IBM analytics technology helps Sun World use drip irrigation to decrease its water usage by 8. 5%.That difference is readily apparent in a new agribusiness case study that was brought to my attention by the IBM mid-market group.
The company has been acting on its water consumption to change irrigation techniques, a practice that has helped now it reduce water usage by 8. 5 percent per unit since 2006.
Steve Greenwood, Sun World's director of budgets and reporting, says the technology behind these changes was Cognos,
director of business analytics for IBM, says there are typically three things that hold entrepreneurs back from a technology investment like this that could yield results similar to the Sun World example.
 Science and technology research lie at the heart of innovation. That's according to U s. Department of energy secretary Steven Chu, who said this morning that innovation has changed the world in remarkable ways
productivity through technology was the winning formula. In the long run, you've got to get better at
TELECOMMUNICATION But there are many more transformative technologies. The invention of modern electronics and the ability to use electronics to amplify signals is one
Clean energy technologies can positively impact the environment the same way that automobiles did. Not that cars don't produce smog,
how can we accelerate the decline to achieve the elusive $1/watt price where clean technologies are price-competitive with fossil fuels?
does America want to merely invent new technologies like Gottlieb Daimler, or manufacture it to great success like Henry ford, too?
if it doesn't fight to popularize clean energy technologies, too. Invented in America is not good enough,
some future technology could miraculously reconstruct every living thing in the forests on demand. Would you then be willing to take those steps
I imagine could sound ingeniously appealing to certain people with some overly optimistic views about the environment or technology (paging Bjorn Lomborg and Ray Kurzweil!).
Casey B. Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, raised the idea in Species Protection and Technology, a post on The New york times Economix blog.
and other extinct species through cloning technology point toward a cheaper solution, he suggested: we could stockpile the DNA of imperiled species now,
Pushing future cloning technology instead of conservation is a terrible idea. Cryonics and cloning represent, at best,
At the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, a clever engineer named Rudolf Diesel demonstrated his namesake engine with peanut oil.
The CEO of Silicon valley startup Cobalt Technologies says ethanol fuel has given biofuels a bad rap
but our technology doesn't need incentives to make money. We need money to keep this company going until we can build a profitable plan.
Once you build technology, you have to demonstrate it. Editor's note: The cleantech Valley of Death refers to the difficult time period that comes between the proof-of-concept stage and large-scale deployment.
That's really the challenge with all these fuel and chemical technologies, they have to cross the Valley of Death.
and the key to getting the technology really, really, really cheap, which we all want,
so I know what it takes to bring technology from test-tube scale to production.
I have no doubt in the technology in this stage. This is not the best environment to be raising money in.
That was among the more interesting details of Craig Binetti's presentation at the 11th Jefferies Global Clean Technology Conference on Thursday.
Once the technology becomes available, we expect plants to be built quickly, he said. We expect to get a significant share of these plants operating on our technology,
via tech licensing and assistance and support. As for biobutanol the company is partnering with oil giant BP on commercialization in the U s. and Brazil.
Again: Dupont brings the science, and BP brings the fuel blending, testing and marketing.)The advantage of butanol is that its higher energy content means more of it can replace gasoline,
We're going to need to approach this with multiple technologies in multiple ways. We're positioning ourselves
productivity with IBM analyticsanalytics technology that has enabled a Michigan agricultural cooperative better account for the source of fruits
The technology has allowed also the cooperative to better analyze its supply chain processes, allowing partners to address points of supply inefficiencies
The technology platform, built by IBM business partner N2n Global, collects, stores and analyzes data about the food being handled by Cherry Central Cooperative from the time it is harvested and processed,
Steve Eiseler, vice president of operations at Cherry Central Cooperative, said the IBM-based technology has allowed his organization to significantly reduce the amount of paperwork necessary to remain in compliance with government food traceability requirements
prompted its evaluation of technologies that could help it grapple with data that is growing exponentially on a monthly basis. Back in October,
The technology that Cherry Central is using includes IBM DB2 Web Query running on the Power system platform.
Cherry Central began using the technology about two years ago and Eiseler reports that what began as a project concerned with compliance has turned into a serious operational advantage for Cherry Central Cooperative.
I was first a chemical engineer for Nalco Chemical. I grew up in the industrial boat.
We have a lot of technologies around desalination that reduce the cost, take the energy cost out--about 50 percent of the cost of running a desal plant is energy
technology, economics, policy. From a technology perspective, it really comes down to, how are we able to take these really challenging waters
and treat them for reuse instead of just dumping them? How do I reduce the cost of making clean water?
There's a lot of technology we're developing on our own--we're up two to three times more in technology spend this year than the last
We do feel like technology is one of the major enablers to get us to the next level.
The technology you've just got to make it cheaper. The price of desal has dropped 80 percent since the early'90s.
technology, economics, policy. What can we do on Capitol hill? JF: The economics are getting close,
Wind technology is green and renewable, but a lot more expensive than a coal power plant. Early on, it needed incentives to get started.
--but we didn't have the technology then to do so safely. We need to bring those things up to 2010,
Now we have technologies to ensure those things don't happen. Smartplanet: How bad is the U s. water infrastructure?
Then there's the technology to do it. Then it's repairing stuff in place--companies like Insituform--how do you repair that pipe without digging it up?
It's a high-tech play: our infrastructure play in the power business is the big turbines.
My responsibility is for the water and process technologies business. And I expand into our broader power business.
Now we're looking at a project to treat our own waste--we're working on using our own membrane technology.
and we're deploying our GE Water technology into other GE sites. At our nuclear plant in Wilmington, North carolina we're doing water treatment there.
Making sense of water consumption (Water Wednesday) The Energy star label has become an iconic way to help people identify the most energy-efficient electronics gadgets, appliances and other technologies.
The first outdoor technologies to be labeled under the effort will be irrigation controllers, which control the frequency
The EPA figures that the new technologies could help save up to 110 billion gallons of wasted water annually,
Up until now, it has been focused on indoor technologies including faucets, showerheads, toilets and urinals. Past Water Wednesday posts:
Veolia offer twist on smart water management The philosophy behind Molson Coors beerprint Tech giant LG extends into water treatment Pepsico,
the value of wastewater Greenpeace challenges apparel industry to come clean Pushing for more disclosure Smarter home irrigation technologies Smart grid gains ground with water managers 3 water
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