2010-1
7

Cell phone exposure may protect against and reverse Alzheimer’s disease

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Cell phone exposure may protect against and reverse Alzheimer’s disease
January 6, 2010
The millions of people who spend hours every day on a cell phone may have a new excuse for yakking. A surprising new study in mice provides the first evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may actually protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease. The study, led by University of South Florida researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC), was published today in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

“It surprised us to find that cell phone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms,” said lead author Gary Arendash, PhD, USF Research Professor at the Florida ADRC. “It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer’s mice.”

The researchers showed that exposing old Alzheimer’s mice to electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones erased brain deposits of the harmful protein beta-amyloid, in addition to preventing the protein’s build-up in younger Alzheimer’s mice. The sticky brain plaques formed by the abnormal accumulation of beta amyloid are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Most treatments against Alzheimer’s try to target beta-amyloid.

The highly-controlled study allowed researchers to isolate the effects of cell phone exposure on memory from other lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise. It involved 96 mice, most of which were genetically altered to develop beta-amyloid plaques and memory problems mimicking Alzheimer’s disease as they aged. Some mice were non-demented, without any genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s, so researchers could test the effects of electromagnetic waves on normal memory as well.

Both the Alzheimer’s and normal mice were exposed to the electromagnetic field generated by standard cell phone use for two 1-hour periods each day for seven to nine months. The mice didn’t wear tiny headsets or have scientists holding cell phones up to their ears; instead, their cages were arranged around a centrally-located antenna generating the cell phone signal. Each animal was housed the same distance from the antenna and exposed to electromagnetic waves typically emitted by a cell phone pressed up against a human head.

If cell phone exposure was started when the genetically-programmed mice were young adults — before signs of memory impairment were apparent — their cognitive ability was protected. In fact, the Alzheimer’s mice performed as well on tests measuring memory and thinking skills as aged mice without dementia. If older Alzheimer’s mice already exhibiting memory problems were exposed to the electromagnetic waves, their memory impairment disappeared. Months of cell phone exposure even boosted the memories of normal mice to above-normal levels. The memory benefits of cell phone exposure took months to show up, suggesting that a similar effect in humans would take years if cell phone-level electromagnetic exposure was provided.

Based on their promising and unexpected findings in mice, the researchers concluded that electromagnetic field exposure could be an effective, non-invasive and drug-free way to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s disease in humans. They are currently evaluating whether different sets of electromagnetic frequencies and strengths will produce more rapid and even greater cognitive benefits than those found in their current study.

“If we can determine the best set of electromagnetic parameters to effectively prevent beta-amyloid aggregation and remove pre-existing beta amyloid deposits from the brain, this technology could be quickly translated to human benefit against AD” said USF’s Chuanhai Cao, PhD, the other major study author. “Since production and aggregation of β-amyloid occurs in traumatic brain injury, particularly in soldiers during war, the therapeutic impact of our findings may extend beyond Alzheimer’s disease.”

The memory test used to evaluate the effects of cell phone exposure in mice was closely designed from a sensitive test used to determine if Alzheimer’s disease, or its very early signs (mild cognitive impairment), are present in humans. “Since we selected electromagnetic parameters that were identical to human cell phone use and tested mice in a task closely analogous to a human memory test, we believe our findings could have considerable relevance to humans,” Arendash said.

The researchers found a slight increase in brain temperature during the two one-hour periods when mice were exposed to electromagnetic waves each day. This increase in brain temperature was seen only in the Alzheimer’s mice, and only after months of exposure. The researchers suggest the increase in brain temperature helped the Alzheimer’s brain to remove newly-formed beta-amyloid by causing brain cells to release it.

The researchers were particularly surprised to discover that months of cell phone exposure actually boosted the memory of non-demented (normal mice) to above-normal levels. They suspect that the main reason for this improvement involves the ability of electromagnetic exposure to increase brain activity, promoting greater blood flow and increased energy metabolism in the brain. “Our study provides evidence that long-term cell phone use is not harmful to brain,” Dr. Cao said. “To the contrary, the electromagnetic waves emitted by cell phones could actually improve normal memory and be an effective therapy against memory impairment”

“It will take some time to determine the exact mechanisms involved in these beneficial memory effects,” Arendash said. “One thing is clear, however – the cognitive benefits of long-term electromagnetic exposure are real, because we saw them in both protection- and treatment-based experiments involving Alzheimer’s mice, as well as in normal mice.”

Previous human studies of electromagnetic waves from cell phones involved only brief exposures given to normal humans. While some studies reported small improvements in attention or memory (not enough to impact daily life), others reported no memory effects from short-term exposure. The new study by Arendash, Cao, and their colleagues is the first to investigate the effects of long-term electromagnetic exposure over many months on memory function in either humans or animals. The findings indicate that “long-term” exposure to cell phone level electromagnetic waves is needed to observe enhanced memory in normal or memory-impaired mice.

The USF researchers began investigating the effects of cell phone use on Alzheimer’s disease several years ago, after several observational studies in humans linked a possible increased risk of Alzheimer’s with “low-frequency” electromagnetic exposure — like the energy waves generated by power and telephone lines. However, cell phones emit “high-frequency” electromagnetic waves, which are very different because they can have beneficial effects on brain cell function, such as increasing brain cell activity, Arendash said.

There has been recent controversy about whether electromagnetic waves from cell phones cause brain cancer. Some researchers argue that the risk of glioma (40 percent of all brain tumors) doubles after 10 or more years of cell phone use. However, others argue that since the overall lifetime risk of developing a brain tumor of any type is less than 1 percent, any doubling of this risk would still be very low. Groups such as the World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society, and the National Institutes of Health, have all concluded that scientific evidence to date does not support any adverse health effects associated with the use of cell phones. Consistent with the view of these organizations, the researchers found no autopsy evidence of abnormal growth in brains of the Alzheimer’s mice following many months of exposure to cell phone-level electromagnetic waves. They also found all major peripheral organs, such as the liver and lungs, to be normal.

More information: Electromagnetic Field Treatment Protects Against and Reverses Cognitive Impairment in Alzheimer’s Disease Mice. Gary W. Arendash, Juan Sanchez-Ramos, Takashi Mori, Malgorzata Mamcarz, Xiaoyang Lin, Melissa Runfeldt, Li Want, Guixin Zhang, Vasyl Sava, Juan Tan and Chuanhai Cao. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Volume 19:1 (January 2010).

Provided by University of South Florida

2009-12
27

Guide to Startups

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The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters
This post is all about the only thing that matters for a new startup.
But first, some theory:
If you look at a broad cross-section of startups — say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns — two obvious facts will jump out at you.
First obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success — some of those startups are insanely successful, some highly successful, many somewhat successful, and quite a few of course outright fail.
Second obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of caliber and quality for the three core elements of each startup — team, product, and market.
At any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose.
And so you start to wonder — what correlates the most to success — team,product, or market? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure — what’s most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?
Let’s start by defining terms.
The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them.
You look at a startup and ask, will this team be able to optimally execute against their opportunity? I focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full of highly successful startups that were staffed primarily by people who had never “done it before”.
The quality of a startup’s product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it: How easy is the product to use? How feature rich is it? How fast is it? How extensible is it? How polished is it? How many (or rather, how few) bugs does it have?
The size of a startup’s market is the the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product.
(Let’s assume for this discussion that you can make money at scale — that the cost of acquiring a customer isn’t higher than the revenue that customer will generate.)
Some people have been objecting to my classification as follows: “How great can a product be if nobody wants it?” In other words, isn’t the quality of a product defined by how appealing it is to lots of customers?
No. Product quality and market size are completely different.
Here’s the classic scenario: the world’s best software application for an operating system nobody runs. Just ask any software developer targeting the market for BeOS, Amiga, OS/2, or NeXT applications what the difference is between great product and big market.

So:
If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. This is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn’t been built yet, or the market, which hasn’t been explored yet.
Plus, we’ve all been raised on slogans like “people are our most important asset” — at least in the US, pro-people sentiments permeate our culture, ranging from high school self-esteem programs to the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — so the answer that team is the most important feels right.
And who wants to take the position that people don’t matter?
On the other hand, if you ask engineers, many will say product. This is a product business, startups invent products, customers buy and use the products. Apple and Google are the best companies in the industry today because they build the best products. Without the product there is no company. Just try having a great team and no product, or a great market and no product. What’s wrong with you? Now let me get back to work on the product.
Personally, I’ll take the third position — I’ll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure.
Why?
In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.
The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.
The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.
In short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy.
And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.
This is the story of search keyword advertising, and Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers.
Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn’t matter — you’re going to fail.
You’ll break your pick for years trying to find customers who don’t exist for your marvelous product, and your wonderful team will eventually get demoralized and quit, and your startup will die.
This is the story of videoconferencing, and workflow software, and micropayments.
In honor of Andy Rachleff, formerly of Benchmark Capital, who crystallized this formulation for me, let me present Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success:
The #1 company-killer is lack of market.
Andy puts it this way:
• When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
• When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
• When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.
You can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.
And neither a stellar team nor a fantastic product will redeem a bad market.
OK, so what?
Well, first question: Since team is the thing you have the most control over at the start, and everyone wants to have a great team, what does a great team actually get you?
Hopefully a great team gets you at least an OK product, and ideally a great product.
However, I can name you a bunch of examples of great teams that totally screwed up their products. Great products are really, really hard to build.
Hopefully a great team also gets you a great market — but I can also name you lots of examples of great teams that executed brilliantly against terrible markets and failed. Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.
In my experience, the most frequent case of great team paired with bad product and/or terrible market is the second- or third-time entrepreneur whose first company was a huge success. People get cocky, and slip up. There is one high-profile, highly successful software entrepreneur right now who is burning through something like $80 million in venture funding in his latest startup and has practically nothing to show for it except for some great press clippings and a couple of beta customers — because there is virtually no market for what he is building.
Conversely, I can name you any number of weak teams whose startups were highly successful due to explosively large markets for what they were doing.
Finally, to quote Tim Shephard: “A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product.”
Second question: Can’t great products sometimes create huge new markets?
Absolutely.
This is a best case scenario, though.
VMWare is the most recent company to have done it — VMWare’s product was so profoundly transformative out of the gate that it catalyzed a whole new movement toward operating system virtualization, which turns out to be a monster market.
And of course, in this scenario, it also doesn’t really matter how good your team is, as long as the team is good enough to develop the product to the baseline level of quality the market requires and get it fundamentally to market.
Understand I’m not saying that you should shoot low in terms of quality of team, or that VMWare’s team was not incredibly strong — it was, and is. I’m saying,bring a product as transformative as VMWare’s to market and you’re going to succeed, full stop.
Short of that, I wouldn’t count on your product creating a new market from scratch.
Third question: as a startup founder, what should I do about all this?
Let’s introduce Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success:
The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.
Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens.
My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit.
Carried a step further, I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this “BPMF”) and after product/market fit(”APMF”).
When you are BPMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit.
Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.
When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else.
I’m not suggesting that you do ignore everything else — just that judging from what I’ve seen in successful startups, you can.
Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit — and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful.
Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30″ monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board — heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit.
Ironically, once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit.
Because, really, what else could it possibly be?
[Editorial note: this post obviously raises way more questions than it answers. How exactly do you go about getting to product/market fit if you don't hit it right out of the gate? How do you evaluate markets for size and quality, especially before they're fully formed? What actually makes a product "fit" a market? What role does timing play? How do you know when to change strategy and go after a different market or build a different product? When do you need to change out some or all of your team? And why can't you count on on a great team to build the right product and find the right market? All these topics will be discussed in future posts in this series.]

2009-11
13

The Great Reaction

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The World’s Most Powerful People
The Great Reaction
Matthew Herper, 11.12.09, 08:20 PM EST
Forbes Magazine dated November 30, 2009
Nobel laureate K. Barry Sharpless hopes to make drug design as simple as building with Legos.

As a boy growing up in the late 1940s, K. Barry Sharpless fell under the spell of the coelacanth. The lungfish-like creature was believed to have been extinct for 6 million years until researchers pulled one out of the waters off South Africa in 1938. Sharpless fished obsessively in the rivers of his native New Jersey and never found any archeologic creature. But in the end he did find virtual coelacanths–biochemical treasures that took nature eons to produce.

Sharpless has produced some of the most important breakthroughs of chemistry in the past 30 years. Scientists long knew that some medicinal molecules come in mirror-image forms, only one of which is effective or only one of which is safe. Sharpless discovered several reactions that could produce just the useful form, an innovation that won him the 2001 Nobel Prize in chemistry. That work led to mass-production of heart pills, antibiotics and pain medicines.

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Sharpless, 68, is now a professor with a large lab at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. (He’s named one of the seven most powerful innovators by Lemelson-MIT Program director Michael Cima.) For the past decade he’s been pushing an idea called click chemistry, a term Sharpless coined before the ink on his Swedish diploma was dry. Click chemistry might have an even bigger impact than his Nobel-winning work.

Click chemistry is as much an operating philosophy as it is a recipe. Organic chemists make much of what we see–drugs, plastics, food, gasoline–by linking carbon atoms via such methods as heat, pressure, enzymes, caustic chemicals and explosions. But figuring out how to devise complex new chemicals can be a laborious and time-consuming process. It took chemists two decades to figure out how to produce the cancer drug Taxol in the lab. Before that, it had to be derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree.

Sharpless aims to simplify medicinal chemistry by devising reliable ways to link together small chemical building blocks to form far more complex structures. If his concept works, drug design will become a bit like building with Legos. Chemists could rapidly create new drugs by linking together numerous simple building blocks, one after the other.

Sharpless and his colleague Valery Fokin demonstrated in 2002 one such reaction that can within minutes latch together smaller carbon molecules into bigger ones at room temperature by adding copper as a catalyst. The results are stable and repeatable.

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Building with LEGO is a suitable and appropriate analogy. However, the bricks are always “LEGO”, all caps and singular for one or a zillion. Former LEGO employee

Post a CommentClick chemistry is still mostly being used for basic research, but the method has already attracted the attention of forward- thinking drug designers. “It’s become the standard way of linking two molecular pieces to make a larger structure,” says David Tirrell, a professor at Caltech.

James Heath, a professor of chemistry at Caltech, is using click techniques to develop new diagnostic tests that will spot specific proteins in the blood. Current diagnostics can cost a hundred dollars per test because they use antibodies to spot proteins. Such antibodies, usually made inside animal cells, are expensive and unstable. Heath clicked together a chain of peptides that assembles only when it binds to the protein being targeted, exactly the job of an antibody. The solution is stable enough to be dried into a powder and shipped anywhere. He thinks someday the cost of diagnostics testing could drop to pennies per test.

Derek Lowe, a chemist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals ( VRTX – news – people ) who also writes a blog called In The Pipeline, is looking into similar approaches for drug discovery. The hope, he says, is that click chemistry will turn up fewer duds–compounds that look like they bind to a target in the lab but then don’t work in animals. “If there is one reaction like this out there that nobody has discovered, it makes you wonder how many more there are,” Lowe says.

2009-11
10

Fuel from Thin Air

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Fuel from Thin Air
Joule Biotechnologies achieves conversion of CO2, sunlight into hydrocarbons – no biomass, no extraction, no kidding

In Hawaii, at the BIO Pacific Rim Summit, Joule Biotechnologies announced that it has achieved direct microbial conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons via engineered organisms, powered by solar energy. Joule’s Helioculture process mixes sunlight and CO2 with highly engineered photo synthetic organisms, which are designed to actually secrete ethanol, diesel or other products.

However, unlike algae and other current biomass-derived fuels, the Helioculture process does not produce biomass, requires no agricultural feedstock and minimizes land and water use. It is also direct-to-product, so there is no lengthy extraction and/or refinement process. The breakthrough was made possible by the discovery of unique genes coding for enzymatic mechanisms that enable the direct synthesis of both alkane and olefin molecules – the chemical composition of diesel. Production was achieved at lab scale, with pilot development slated for early 2011.

Because its organisms are being engineered to directly secrete hydrocarbon molecules, Joule will avoid costly steps such as large-scale biomass collection, energy-intensive degradation, or other downstream refinement. In addition, Joule’s process requires just marginal, non-arable land, no crops and no fresh water.

More on Joule Biotechnologies at biofuelsdigest.com.

2009-11
8

Singularity University

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Epicenter The Business of Tech Singularity University, Day One: Infinite, In All Directions
By TedGreenwald November 8, 2009 | 9:50 am | Categories: Future Shock
Singularity University faculty and administration: Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, and Kurzweil front and center
A security guard checks my driver’s license as I drive into the entrance to Moffet Field, a disused naval airbase that hosts the nascent Singularity University. Night has fallen, but it still feels like entering a top-secret installation out of a James Bond movie, crowned by with strange domed buildings and adorned by sculptures of airships.

The Singularity University Executive Program is small — one-to-one staff/faculty ratio, according to executive director Salim Ismail, formerly of Yahoo’s tech hothouse. Inside an elegantly appointed palace, some 30 students assemble, a bright, well groomed group of 30-to 50 somethings representing a dozen industries and nearly as many countries.

The SU administrators shoo the crowd into an adjacent room where rows of chairs have been arranged to face Raymond Kurzweil’s slide show. After introductions from Ismail and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, who is clearly the driving force behind the school, Kurzweil steps in front of the assembled students. He’s a surprisingly unimposing character, a sort of Walter Mitty for the Facebook age. A casual mention of pills leads him to root around his pockets, looking for the vitamins, minerals, and who-knows-what he pops hourly to slow down the aging process so he can live to see the Singularity – the moment when machines overtake human intelligence and human history shifts into hyperdrive.

He begins by taking on his critics, which he does periodically throughout the address. “They say, Kurzweil underestimates the complexity of — fill in the blank. I agree with critics about the challenge. I disagree about the power of the tools we’ll have to solve the problems at hand.” The essential point is that humans are geared to linear change — say, an elephant charging across the African veldt. But evolution — both biological and technological — happens exponentially, clouding our view of the future. Exponential change is inherently counterintuitive, so we underestimate its power. “30 steps linearly is 30 steps,” he says. “30 steps exponentially is a billion.”

For the next half hour, Kurzweil rifles through graph after graph showing how technology is changing exponentially — in all fields, in all eras. It’s a compelling presentation that leaves the audience slack-jawed. Some are resistant, though. What happens when terrorists have the same capability to re-engineer viruses that makes it possible for medical science to disable them? Won’t politics and economics to derail technology? What about capital — does it grow exponentially as well?

The futurist deftly swats down such questions like so many pesky mosquitos. Concerns like that arise from linear thinking. A quick look at history confirms that human problems stimulate technological solutions that then yield further exponential evolution. I’m not entirely convinced, but it’s hard to disagree with the man’s logic.

Kurzweil poses for some group photos and then runs to catch the next flight back to his home near Boston. The inaugural SU Executive Program is underway. Classes start tomorrow at 8:30am.

Ted Greenwald is Tweeting from SU (http://twitter.com/tedgreewald) using #singularityu

2009-11
2

Segway creator unveils his next act

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Segway creator unveils his next act
Inventor Dean Kamen wants to put entrepreneurs to work bringing water and electricity to the world’s poor.
By Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large
February 16, 2006: 2:06 PM EST
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San Francisco (Business 2.0) – Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don’t have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world—and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.

To solve the problem, he’s invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.

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“Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,” says Kamen. “The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don’t care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.”

Light in the darkness
Kamen is not alone in his quest. He’s been joined by Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Grameen Phone, the largest cell phone company in Bangladesh. Last year, Quadir took prototypes of Kamen’s power machines to two villages in his home country for a six-month field trial. That trial, which ended last September, sold Quadir on the technology.

So much so in fact that Quadir’s startup, Cambridge, Mass.-based Emergence Energy, is negotiating with Kamen’s Deka Research and Development to license the technology. Quadir then hopes to raise $30 million in venture capital to start producing the power machines. (With the exception of the Segway, which Kamen’s own company sold, Kamen has typically licensed his inventions to others.)

The electric generator is powered by an easily-obtained local fuel: cow dung. Each machine continuously outputs a kilowatt of electricity. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to light 70 energy-efficient bulbs. As Kamen puts it, “If you judiciously use a kilowatt, each villager can have a nighttime.”

A satellite picture of the earth at night shows swaths of darkness across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. For the people living there, a simple light bulb would mean an extension of both their productivity and their leisure times.

Entrepreneurial power
The real invention here, though, may be the economic model that Kamen and Quadir hope to use to distribute the machines. It is fashioned after Grameen Phone’s business, where village entrepreneurs (mostly women) are given micro-loans to purchase a cell phone and service. The women, in turn, charge other villagers to make calls.

“We have 200,000 rural entrepreneurs who are selling telephone services in their communities,” notes Quadir. “The vision is to replicate that with electricity.”

During the test in Bangladesh, Kamen’s Stirling machines created three entrepreneurs in each village: one to run the machine and sell the electricity, one to collect dung from local farmers and sell it to the first entrepreneur, and a third to lease out light bulbs (and presumably, in the future, other appliances) to the villagers.

Kamen thinks the same approach can work with his water-cleaning machine, which he calls the Slingshot. While the Slingshot wasn’t part of Quadir’s trial in Bangladesh, Kamen thinks it can be distributed the same way. “In the 21st century, water will be delivered by an entrepreneur,” he predicts.

The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water – even raw sewage — and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine’s waste heat.

Compared to building big power and water plants, Kamen’s approach has the virtue of simplicity. He even created an instruction sheet to go with each Slingshot. It contains one step: Just add water, any water. Step two might be: add an entrepreneur.

“Not required are engineers, pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists,” says Kamen. “You don’t need any -ologists. You don’t need any building permits, bribery, or bureaucracies.”

The price of freedom
Still, even if some of the technical challenges have been solved (”I know the technology works and I’d fall on my sword to prove it,” insists Kamen), the economic challenges still loom.

Kamen’s goal is to produce machines that cost $1,000 to $2,000 each. That’s a far cry from the $100,000 that each hand-machined prototype cost to build.

Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.

“Isn’t that better for democracy?” Quadir asks. “We see a shortage of democracy in the world, and we are surprised. If you strengthen the economic hands of people, you will foster real democracy.”

Lights, water, freedom. Now that’s entrepreneurial.

2009-10
29

MHG launches free Web-based biomass moisture calculator

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MHG launches free Web-based biomass moisture calculator
Posted July 9, 2009, at 1:03 p.m. CST

Finland-based MHG Systems has launched a free calculator service on its Web site. This calculator reveals how the moisture level of biomass affects the profitability of the biofuel business. The service has been designed during several different projects and in cooperation with the Joensuu Research Unit of the Finnish Forest Research Institute (Metla), the University of Joensuu and several forest biofuel suppliers. This tool will explicitly reveal the importance of acknowledging the effects of biofuel moisture levels on the profitability of the biofuel business and rapidly increasing environmental impacts, especially when the biofuel supply chains are not working properly. Biofuel moisture management and detailed documentation constitute an integral part of the MHG Bioenergy ERP service.

According to the lead designer of the moisture calculator, Professor Lauri Sikanen of the University of Joensuu, the biofuel moisture level can be influenced by choosing the correct storage location, covers and harvesting methods, and the right technical structure of the storage. The algorithm that predicts the moisture level must be incorporated into the transportation and storage maintenance systems. This algorithm can determine the moisture level and energy content of the storage at any given time based on the departure data, time and weather. “The algorithm is currently developed in the Finnish Forest Research Institute and University of Joensuu, and its integration to the MHG Systems’ MHG Bioenergy ERP service is also under way,” said Seppo Huurinainen, the managing director of MHG Systems Ltd. “We will receive more data from our fuel suppliers during this summer and autumn, after which we will have sufficient amount of data to accurately predict the moisture levels of forest biofuels in our service. MHG Systems’ bioenergy industry ERP solution, designed specifically for the bioenergy industry, enables the customers to monitor the moisture levels of other biofuel deliveries (such as agro energy) in real time,” Huurinainen continued.

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Based on the research data gathered so far, it seems that the optimal moisture level with regards to the profitability of the business and environmental emissions would be approximately 30 percent. The typical moisture level of forest biofuel deliveries is currently almost 50 percent. MHG’s moisture calculator reveals that this level will increase the costs of a forest biofuel delivery chain by nearly €240,000 ($332,450) for a heating and power plant in a medium-sized Finnish town. Measured in truck loads, it means more than 800 additional 60-ton truck loads of chips to be delivered to the plant. ”If the fuel is to be delivered from young forest stands, the plant would have to buy, harvest, chip and transport 874 hectares (2,159 acres) more of them. All this additional work in the various stages of the delivery chain causes almost 500 tons of unnecessary carbon dioxide emissions,” said Dominik Röser, a senior researcher of the Joensuu Research Unit of the Finnish Forest Research Institute. The new Web-based calculator will help, especially biofuel suppliers and investors who rely on the use of forest fuels, to evaluate chip requirements and to understand how the quality of their operations affects the profitability of their business.

The MHG Bioenergy ERP service is a true operative tool, designed for electricity, heating, pellets, forest industry and forest service companies. It can be used via Web browser or mobile devices. It is a specific bioenergy sector ERP system and map service solution, which provides valuable information for developing one’s business operations. Bioenergy ERP allows the use of new, particularly contract-based, and empowering operational models. The superior features of the service include transparency throughout the delivery chain, managing the moisture content of bioenergy masses, reporting features based on the amount of energy, i.e. megawatt hours, and accounts and invoicing.

MHG Systems Ltd is one of the world’s leading suppliers of bioenergy ERP systems. The company utilizes its partner network to produce customer-oriented IT and map service solutions designed for developing bioenergy and forest energy, and field work business operations. MHG ERP synthesizes mobile communications, the Internet, real-time maps, satellite-based location information, and CO2 monitoring into one business-enhancing service, and allows the use of new and empowering operational models, accurate cost monitoring and real-time enterprise resource planning of biomasses and delivery chains. The company’s services bring significant cost savings to all operators in the bioheat, bioelectricity, and biofuel production chain. MHG Systems’ services allow companies to verify the social and environmental responsibility of their operations, as the origin of biomasses, energy content and carbon dioxide emissions as well as expenses and profits can be reliably proven.

For more information, visit the Web site at http://www.mhgsystems.com/.

For more information about this press release:
Tel: +358 44 581 4950
Email: communications@mhgsystems.com
Contact information
MHG Systems Ltd.
Mikpoli, Patteristonkatu 2
FIN-50100 Mikkeli
Tel: +358 10 400 6280
Fax: +358 10 400 6289
Email: info@mhgsystems.com
Internet: http://www.mhgsystems.com

2009-10
23

US MAC Client, Heptagon, raises over $22M in New Equity Financing

Category: ICT | Tags:  | Comments Off

Dear US MAC Friends,

We are proud to announce that one of our clients, Heptagon, the world-leader in replicated wafer-level micro-optics, raised over 22 Million in equity financing from GGV Capital of Menlo Park. Heptagon is a reflection of the type of high quality company we accept into our facility. Please see the press release below. Thank you.

best regards,

The US MAC

Zurich, July 20, 2009. Heptagon, the world-leader in wafer-scale micro-optics, is announcing today that it has raised over $22m in new equity financing. Most of this financing is coming from a new syndicate led by GGV Capital. GGV Capital is headquartered in Menlo Park, California with a dual focus on US and Asia technology companies and offices in China and Singapore. Heptagon’s current investors, including Innovations Kapital of Sweden, Innovacom of France and Nokia Growth Partners have also participated in this latest round.

“Heptagon has a truly unique and proven value proposition: Optics which are glass-like in quality, being lead-free reflow and Telcordia compatible, but manufactured in the same wafer-scale format as the CMOS image sensor, LED and VCSEL technologies we support. This technology allows us to quickly ramp from several millions to several tens of millions of components per month and enables our customers to benefit from wafer-scale integration of optics with semiconductors,” says Chuck Milligan, Heptagon’s CEO. “This is leading to exponential growth in the demand for our products in applications such as CMOS Image sensing. We have introduced several new products this year, including 2 and 3 megapixel camera lenses. These new products increase our addressable market by an order of magnitude and therefore drive the need for a significant capacity expansion for which part of this new equity investment will be used.”

“We are extremely pleased,” Chuck continues, “to have been able to raise this investment despite the currently challenged investment environment. This is a testament to our strong leadership position in this industry-changing technology. We are also very excited with the quality and commitment of our new investors. GGV Capital and partners have a fantastic track record and will add great experience and knowledge of consumer electronics and Asian manufacturing to Heptagon’s investor base and board.”

Scott Bonham, founder and managing partner of GGV Capital, says ”We believe that wafer-scale optics is a technology whose time has come and which has the potential to revolutionize first the CMOS image sensor market and then other semiconductor photonics markets. Heptagon is the clear leader in this space with several years of volume production with market-leading customers, rapid growth and a very exciting product roadmap. We are looking forward to supporting the Heptagon team in continuing this growth and making wafer-scale optics the dominant optics technology in semiconductor-based opto-electronic modules.”

For further information please contact:

Chuck Milligan, CEO, Heptagon, chuck.milligan@heptagon.fi

About Heptagon

Heptagon designs and manufactures advanced micro-optics products for OEM suppliers. Heptagon’s components are used in many applications including CMOS imaging, LED optics, display, optical communications, consumer electronics and industrial optics. Heptagon is headquartered near Zurich, Switzerland and has its volume manufacturing facility in Singapore.

About GGV Capital

GGV Capital is a leader in expansion-stage venture capital investments in the United States and Asia. Focused on driving expansion-stage innovation worldwide, GGV Capital’s highly diverse team manages over $1 billion from its offices in Silicon Valley, China, and Singapore. The firm invests across a range of sectors in information technology, services and healthcare, as well as the consumer growth sector in China. GGV Capital has provided capital and helped accelerate international expansion for its worldwide portfolio of high-growth companies, particularly in the U.S. and China. GGV Capital’s portfolio includes AAC Acoustic (HKSE: 2018), Alibaba (HKSE:1688), Appirio, BCD Semiconductor, Boston-Power, BCD Semiconductor, Endeca, Inside Contactless, SuccessFactors (NASDAQ: SFSF), Teranetics, and WildTangent. For more information, please visit www.ggvc.com.

2009-10
2

A Genetic Fountain of Youth

Category: Bio Tech, Education | Tags:  | Comments Off

A Genetic Fountain of Youth
Researchers have identified a genetic tweak that can slow aging in mice.
By Jocelyn Rice Thursday, October 01, 2009
• o • • o

By disabling a gene involved in an important biochemical signaling pathway, scientists have discovered a way to mimic the well-known anti-aging benefits of caloric restriction, allowing mice to live longer and healthier lives. This finding, published online today in Science, offers a promising drug target for combating the many health problems associated with aging.

Aging machines: Mice lacking a functional version of the protein S6 kinase 1, an important regulator of the body’s response to nutrient availability, live longer and healthier lives than their normal counterparts. The mouse on the left lacks the protein.
Credit: George Thomas, University of Cincinnati
“This research points the way to potential pharmacological approaches to treating aging-related diseases in humans,” says senior author Dominic Withers, professor of diabetes and endocrinology at University College London.
“It really defines this as a pathway that’s affecting aging all the way from yeast to mammals, which I think is pretty striking,” says Matt Kaeberlein, professor of pathology at the University of Washington and coauthor of a commentary accompanying the new study.
Caloric restriction has long been known to extend lifespan and reduce the incidence of age-related diseases in a wide variety of organisms, from yeast and roundworms to rodents and primates. Exactly how a nutritionally complete but radically restricted diet achieves these benefits has remained unclear. But recently several studies have offered evidence that a particular signaling pathway, involving a protein called target of rapamycin (TOR), may play a pivotal role. This pathway acts as a sort of food sensor, helping to regulate the body’s metabolic response to nutrient availability.
Withers and colleagues noticed that young mice with a disabled version of the protein S6 kinase 1 (S6K1), which is directly activated by TOR, bore strong resemblance to calorie-restricted mice: they were leaner and had greater insulin sensitivity than normal mice. The researchers wondered whether these benefits would persist into middle and late age, and whether the mice would live longer.
To find out, they bred two large groups of “knockout” mice that lacked a functional version of the gene for S6K1. One group lived out their lives undisturbed, providing a measure of the group’s natural lifespan. The other group was put through extensive testing of cognitive and motor performance and metabolic health.
In female mice, the results were profound. Knockout females lived substantially longer than their normal counterparts. At 600 days–the mouse equivalent of human middle age–they excelled at motor performance tests, outdoing normal mice at tasks requiring balance, strength, and coordination. They were also more inquisitive and apt to explore new environments, suggesting improved cognitive function. Physiological measures also pointed to better health: the knockout mice had stronger bones, better insulin sensitivity, and more robust immune cells. While male knockout mice did not have extended lifespans, they did have the same array of health benefits as females.
“We added life to their years, as well as years to their life,” says Withers.
The effects of disabling S6K1 were similar to those of caloric restriction, though less pronounced. Female mice without S6K1 lived up to 20 percent longer than normal mice; the longevity increase with caloric restriction can reach 50 percent. “That probably means that deleting S6 kinase is not capturing all the effects of caloric restriction,” says Withers, “but the range of health benefits is similar.”
Withers’s findings follow on the heels of a study published in July that showed that the drug rapamycin–which interferes with the same pathway by inhibiting TOR–extends lifespan in mice. Although rapamycin had a pronounced effect on longevity and health, the drug’s potential in humans is limited by its potent immunosuppressant effects. (Rapamycin is already used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients.) Targeting S6K1 directly–effectively bypassing TOR, which acts on a number of other proteins–may circumvent this dangerous side effect.
“We’ve triaged out one of the downstream rapamycin targets, S6K1, and we appear to have a lot of the benefits without major side effects,” says Withers.
The new study also implicated the protein AMPK, a component of the TOR pathway even further downstream than S6K1, as a key potential drug target. The role of AMPK is especially intriguing because it is activated by metformin, a widely prescribed drug for treating type 2 diabetes. Withers says this means it may be possible in the next few years to design clinical trials that would test metformin’s ability to prevent or treat age-related diseases.
In future studies, Withers and his colleagues hope to begin teasing out the details of the link between TOR signaling and aging. Based on the new paper and other recent studies, it is increasingly clear that throwing a wrench into the TOR pathway can have powerful effects on the aging process across a wide variety of species. And it seems likely that caloric restriction achieves its benefits in part by tapping into the TOR pathway. But it’s not yet obvious why that is.
The TOR pathway is known to act as a kind of fuel gauge, sensing nutrient availability and responding by altering how efficiently proteins are manufactured. For instance, when food is scarce, the TOR pathway responds by scaling back protein synthesis. One hypothesis, according to Kaeberlein, is that while protein manufacture is reduced overall, a small subset of proteins might actually be upregulated. “It’s pretty speculative,” he says, but identifying the functions of those select few proteins could lead to new insights into the way aging works.

2009-9
28

By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain…

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By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain…

…or at least that’s what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we’re on the brink of a new age – the ’singularity’ – when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) – and even live forever. Is there sense to his science – or is the man who reasons that one day he’ll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?

By Mike Hodgkinson

Sunday, 27 September 2009
believes that opposition to advances such as genetic modification harm humankind

 

Should, by some terrible misfortune, Ray Kurzweil shuffle off his mortal coil tomorrow, the obituaries would record an inventor of rare and visionary talent. In 1976, he created the first machine capable of reading books to the blind, and less than a decade later he built the K250: the first music synthesizer to nigh-on perfectly duplicate the sound of a grand piano. His Kurzweil 3000 educational software, which helps students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, is likewise typical of an innovator who has made his name by combining restless imagination with technological ingenuity and a commendable sense of social responsibility.

However, these past accomplishments, as impressive as they are, would tell only half the Kurzweil story. The rest of his biography – the essence of his very existence, he would contend – belongs to the future.

Following the publication of his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil has become known, above all, as a technology speculator whose predictions have polarised opinion – from stone-cold scepticism and splenetic disagreement to dedicated hero worship and admiration. It’s not just that he boldly envisions a tomorrow’s world where, for example, tiny robots will reverse the effects of pollution, artificial intelligence will far outstrip (and supplement) biological human intelligence, and humankind “will be able to live indefinitely without ageing”. No, the real reason Kurzweil has become such a magnet for blogospheric debate, and a tech-celebrity, is that he’s convinced those future predictions – and many more just as stunning – are imminent occurrences. They will all, he steadfastly maintains, happen before the middle of the 21st century.