The winners of the 2009 R&D 100 Awards competition will be announced on July 15, 2009. Check rdmag.com for the official list of winners and watch for special editions of the R&D Daily e-newsletter explaining what makes this year’s winners the best of the best. The R&D 100 Awards represent the some of the most technologically significant new products of the year.
Today's News
A bright future for the 60-year light bulb? Jul. 3, 2009
Gallium nitride is already is in use for lots of lighting purposes, but LEDs using this material is still expensive and the light is too harsh for household use. But because a GaN LED bulb can burn for 100,000 hours, researchers are trying to master the technology. The latest innovation: growth on silicon wafer instead of sapphire for a tenfold reduction in cost.
Computer compel cars to cooperate Jul. 3, 2009
Embedded sensors are everywhere, particularly in modern passenger cars, but their functionality is limited by complexity. A new middleware platform cooked up by European computer scientists intends to bring those sensors under a central umbrella so that they can accomplish new tasks, such as reporting traffic obstacles to maintenance and safety officials automatically.
Corn-to-plastic gains traction from polylactic acid Jul. 3, 2009
A team at Battelle’s Advanced Materials Group has made headway in their research on a type of polymer derived from the bacterial fermentation of corn. Plastics from corn is nothing new, but this bio-polymer for the first time, say its developers, shows marked improvements in heat resistance and flexibility while remaining transparent. They also created new testing procedures, and acknowledge more work must be done.
Energy advances are tied to composites innovation Jul. 3, 2009
The “Composites for Energy” seminar held in the UK this week is a showcase of materials innovation, from bi-stable wind turbine blades of glass and fiber-reinforced plastics able to snap between two distinct rigid shapes to lithium-doped nano-diamond electron emitters, which draw on infrared radiation to produce thermionic emissions—and then electricity—in a vacuum valve.
New material made from paper sludge Jul. 3, 2009
According to its inventor, the reformulated wastepaper method patented at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain does not yield a agglomerate, but an entirely new material. The referenced article does not explain the underlying biotechnology, but apparently the result is moldable, fire resistant, impermeable, porous, and low in density. Its use as a replacement in building and packing materials is anticipated.
Silk-screen works batteries as well as T-shirts Jul. 3, 2009
Imagine a battery that is thinner than a millimeter, lighter than a gram, and can be produced cost-effectively through a printing process. Its here, say researchers who built a zinc anode-manganese cathode cell that can be created with a simple silk-screen method. The output is 1.5 V, and can be place in serial formation for higher voltages.
Ultra-thin material absorbs (almost) all light Jul. 3, 2009
Despite a thickness of just 4.5 nm, a film created by researchers in Germany absorbs nearly 100% of incident light, shattering the previous record of 50%. It is a niobiumnitride (NbN) layer, already noted for its ability in sensors to absorb light at many angles and polarizations. The new device, however, is a lattice of NbN filaments that capture almost every photon by way of its redundant structure that claims all polarizations.
World's largest computing grid passes shakedown Jul. 3, 2009
The world’s biggest particle collider, the LHC, will require the services of an equally impressive network of computers when it begins operations later this year. According to officials at the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, the latest comprehensive test involving 150,000 analysis jobs was accomplished at 94% efficiency. The grid will handle 15 million gigabytes of data when CERN is running.
2009 R&D 100 Awards
An R&D 100 Award is a mark of excellence known to industry, government, and academia as proof that a product is one of the most innovative ideas of the year. Nominations and submissions for the 2009 R&D 100 Awards have closed. Winners will be announced in early July.
Promoting Enrollment through Renovation
To help realize its goal of increasing enrollment in its chemistry program, Carleton Univ. combined its old chemistry laboratories into one Steacie SuperLab.
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Delicate Balance
Dedicated to understanding the fundamental nature of the Earth, the Gary C. Comer Geochemistry Division lab at Columbia Univ. achieves harmony with its surroundings, while giving its researchers both form and function.
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Understanding Sustainability
Built around the idea of scientific collaboration and environmental, social, and economic
sustainability, the Harvard Univ. Northwest Science Building will be used to enhance
cross-disciplinary research and energy savings.
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Making Lemonade from Old Labs
A modest, basic building once housed an advanced polymer research lab for one of India's biggest companies. After renovations the building remains, but everything else has changed for the better.
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On July 15, the editors of R&D Magazine will announce the winners of the 47th annual R&D 100 Awards. As always, these are the cream of the crop in high-tech products from a wide spectrum of innovators. We’ll see winners from tiny start-up companies boldly entering new markets. We’ll see highly refined instruments from top science OEMs. We’ll see elegant solutions to problems deceptively simple and horrendously complex. And we’ll probably see some wild stuff from research labs around the country and abroad.
Whether we’ll also glimpse a winner that has an extra “wow” factor that makes it household name (think fax machine, Blu-Ray, Kodak film) for decades remains to be seen, but it’s safe to predict that, behind the scenes, many of this year’s R&D 100 Awards winners will have a lasting impact.
The frequent newsmaking ability of former winners leads me to this conclusion. Earlier this week, research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan announced that it had presented NeXolve Corp. with a product innovation award for its CORIN polyimide, which was a 2008 R&D 100 winner entered by NeXolve’s parent corporation, ManTech International. The colorless, transparent, organic/inorganic nanocomposite material has been tapped as a lightweight replacement for glass in space-borne photovoltaic arrays. Such arrays will likely become far more commonplace as efforts like the International Space Station and lunar exploration proceed.
On the national laboratory side of things, software advances have given rise to whole new pseudo-agencies, such as DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, which is devoted to solving complex and numerically immense physical problems using massively parallel supercomputers. In June of this year, a 2005 R&D 100 winner, VisIt, was stretched to new performances levels by leveraging up to 32,000 processing cores to process datasets of a staggering 500 billion to 2 trillion zones, or grid points. VisIt is the sort of fluids visualization tool that will be used to characterize reactions like those that will take place in the National Ignition Facility. Understanding exactly how these reactions might take place will be crucial to cracking the puzzle of fusion, and colorful visuals are a fast way to gain insights into the mathematics of the processes.
These are just two recent examples of R&D 100 Awards winners making a splash. It will be interesting to see in a couple of weeks what new waves will be set in motion.
The winners of the 2009 R&D 100 Awards competition will be announced on 
