From the Lab

Engineers at a recent Facebook Hackathon event created a pretty cool visualization of how people use Facebook to connect with each other around the world. The model, named Palantir,  utilitizes information from the "social graph" to show the frequency of different types of interactions on the social network by plotting 3-D dots of light that stream outward from the globe. The application is built in Java and actually shows the Facebook activity in real time. Click on the video to the left to see how it works.

Facebook's developer blog describes the Hackathon event the best:

"There are so many great ideas floating around Facebook, but there is never enough time to implement them all. In order to attempt to solve this problem, we engineers throw a Hackathon at Facebook every few months. Hackathon is an all-night-long hack session that gives every Facebook engineer a chance to work on that awesome feature they've been meaning to build for so long. Many of the cool features that you see on the site today were either built during or were started during a Facebook Hackathon."

International students at the Polytechnic School of Design (SPD) in Milan, Italy got the opportunity to submit the design proposals for Alfa Romeo's next generation concept car, the Alfa 169, in their Transportation Design course earlier this year. They got to work along side Centro Stile Alfa Romeo in Arese (Milan) headed by Italian Fiat Group Automobiles and Maserati Chief Designer Lorenzo Ramaciotti. If they are lucky, one will be chosen as Alfa Romeo's flagship executive design.

9 models were submitted as part of the program: "Alfa Romeo Camaenae" by Ryu Seung-Wook (Korea), "Alfa Romeo Coelus" by Ian Bunjak (Slovakia), Iulian Bumbu (Romania), "Alfa Romeo Tessa" by Murat Atvur (Turkey) and Adam Denning (USA), "Alfa Romeo 6C Torio" by James Edmund van der Merwe (South Africa) in collaboration with Artem Popkov (Russia), "Alfa Romeo Exelixis" by Gabriel Feyer (Brazil) and Kostantinos Paradeisou (Turkey), "Alfa Romeo Essentija" by Franco Grassi (Italy) and Alessandro Fiorentino (Italy), and "Alfa Romeo MilleMiglia" by Aleksej Ivaskievic (Russia).

Via [Autoblog]

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On Monday, IdeaPaint landed $5 million in Series A funding from Breakaway Ventures to turn smooth surfaces into supersized seamless high performance dry-erase boards with their entirely new type of paint. The paint provides a more flexible, lower cost, higher performance solution to the typical dry erase board. Not only that, but it gives you ability to turn your entire conference room into a creative haven to mastermind your next new idea. The startup is the brainchild of Babson College's entrepreneurial program and recently won the Innovation Award and Best New Product Award at NeoCon, an important event for the contract furnishing industry. As part of their presentation, they created 3,000 square foot dry-erase board and hired 25 muralists to engage and captivate their audience.

Ideapaint already has a distribution channel lined up MDC Wallcoverings, one of the leading marketers in the industry for these types of products. It really does seem like an all around great product, it's also environmentally friendly. They also guarantee that you won't experience "ghost" marks from erasers from leaving ink up for too long like you do with most dry-erase boards. Its great for creative companies who are always running out of room on their boards. Now, you might as well paint your whole startup office with IdeaPaint and cover the walls with your business plan and adjust it as you go.

Use IdeaPaint as a:

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Bill Gates was only 17 when he started working on Microsoft full time, and for that reason, he recognizes the importance of cultivating students' entrepreneurial and technological curiosity. He's been doing just that for the past year with his DreamSpark program that is a software package that gives students free access to Microsoft's latest developer and designer tool kits. They launched the program in the US in early February this year and is now available to over 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S.. Yesterday, they have officially launched the program in India as they continue to expand to reach their goal of providing the software to 1 billion high school and college students worldwide.

“We want to do everything we can to equip a new generation of technology leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to harness the magic of software to improve lives, solve problems and catalyze economic growth,” Gates said. “Microsoft DreamSpark provides professional-level tools that we hope will inspire students to explore the power of software and encourage them to forge the next wave of software-driven breakthroughs.”

The program isn't only generous, its clearly a clever business strategy to hook bright engineers and techies to their software early on. Its also necessary in order to combat their competitors like the Google App Engine and open source technologies, such as Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla that are eating away market share. Startup Blog Cont. »

Science and entrepreneurship don't usually slow as much as other sectors in the economy doing economic downturns. Mike Micalowitz, author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, even says these are the best times to start a business. Further, since science isn't as wrapped up in the business world, and because science is so much about inquiry and experimentation, there is a great likeliness that science will continue to produce great things no matter how bad the economy is. However, by wrapping up the industry of entrepreneurship, the savyness of the web, and science into one mold there might just be something great on the horizon; SciVee. Founded by Professors Philip E. Bourne and Leo M. Chalupa (of UC San Diego and UC Davis respectively), SviVee makes a unique service for scientists and students to share findings, reports, projects, and thoughts. The greatness of the idea and service relies heavily in the ability to create a professional and easy to use interface where scientists can upload videos, online presentations, writings, power point presentations, and other things. The following is a description written up by the SciVee team: Startup Blog Cont. »

In Tanzania and other areas of Africa dependent on subsistence agriculture, a successful harvest is the only chance for survival. But plentiful rainfall and high crop yields don't end the struggles for Tanzanian families. Processing maize is labor intensive and therefore requires the support of health care and sustenance, both of which are lacking in the region. Tractors and other machinery would dramatically decrease health risks and time spent harvesting, but unfortunately the necessary technology has been far too expensive-until now.

Jodie Wu, an MIT senior in mechanical engineering, spent the summer traveling from village to village in Tanzania to introduce a new system for processing maize. The invention is a simple attachment for an ordinary bicycle that makes it possible to remove kernels quickly and efficiently using human-generated power from pedaling. Wu observed that the device makes processing up to 30 times faster and can be completed by a single farmer in one day.

Wu's attachment is actually a refined, more practical and cheaper version of a corn-sheller system originally designed by Bernard Kiwia of Global Alliance for Africa that required the bicycle to be dedicated solely to that purpose. The device is now so affordable that microloans are sufficient for purchases.

To read more about Wu's experience, visit her blog here.

[via MIT News]

Dirty bombs (the ones that spread lethal radiation) have been an increasing concern for national security since 9/11, there’s no surprise there. However, even though security has been beefed up and we have advanced technology to detect radiation, its still very difficult due to false alarms. According to an article in Newsweek, (believe it or not) bananas, smoke alarms, toilets and large granite buildings all have enough radiation to set off expensive radiation detectors. On top of that, the 350,000 radiation-therapy patients have a tendency of setting them off too, if they get too close.

Because of these variables, radiation detectors are only effective in entrances and check points that you normally see in airports and large events. So, how can we pin point dirty bombs in a more effective way? How can we design a system that not only works in airports, but in large cities, where dirty bombs are also likely to cause threats. A team at Purdue University in Indiana is designing radiation technology so small that it can fit into cell phones. Newsweek reports:

"The project, known as Distributed Nuclear Detection by Ubiquitous Cell Phone, would help locate dirty bombs or nuclear weapons by "triangulating" the source of radiation when people carrying mobile phones pass by. (The greater the number of equipped cell phones, the greater the precision: phones closest to radioactive material would register stronger signals.) The Purdue project and others like it represent a "major shift" in combating radiation terrorism, says Rita Colwell, a former director of the National Science Foundation and now a professor at the University of Maryland." Startup Blog Cont. »

The ongoing goal to find a cure for cancer seems to be never ending. Although researchers and companies continue to spend countless hours and dollars, there are still only two treatment options for patients with prostate cancer - either cut out the tumor or undergo painful radiation. NeoCore Therapeutics, a startup out of MIT, hopes to provide a third alternative that is both less invasive and expensive. Their novel approach brings the potential to extend life while reducing pain.

Cutting the tumor out is risky and ultimately ends with a high rate of incontinence and impotence. Radiation on the other hand is both painful and unpleasant. NeoCore's approach is different because the operation closely resembles a simple injection. In laymen terms, their device essentially ejects a chemical into the localized part of the cancer and stunts the producing cancerous cells to substantially slow growth.

Although its not a cure, this is great news for older patients. The difficulty to determine whether or not a patient's cancer is an aggressive type forces most patients to undergo one of the two treatments above. In elderly patients, the cancer doesn't necessarily need to be cured, only slowed because they will inevitable die of some other disease. NeoCore's treatment is an alternative because it can slow growth and allow patients to avoid the downsides of the other options. Aaron Baker (A Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Health Science and Technology) and David Wu (A Pathology Fellow at the Brigham and Women's Hospital), whom I met with, give their scientific explanation below:
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Universities provide hot breeding grounds for some of today's hottest technologies. For instance, check out this prosthetic robotic limb controlled by a monkey and developed at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine. Scientists there have been able to implant electrodes into the monkey's brain so that the animal can control the limb and feed itself via electrical impulses sent through a computer chip.

After only two days of training the monkey could pick up food and feed itself. Right now the device is fairly cumbersome. But later, the scientists predict that a wireless version will be able send signals from brain to device. Testing on humans may happen sometime over the next two years. Check out the video here.

Via: HowToSplitAnAtom.com

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Companies have been attempting to bring viable 3-D technologies to life for a while now, but have had trouble due to high costs and the difficulty associated with producing crisp images. Scientists from the Graphics Lab at USC seem to have the answer. By using spinning mirrors, high definition projectors, and complex math algorithms they have been able to recreate a 3-dimensional TIE Fighter from Star Wars that appears to be floating in space.

The image is created by projecting nearly 3,000 images onto a spinning mirror every second. To achieve this, the team had to design a formula to trace the beams so that the projector can adjust to a viewer's position relative to the display and adjust to changes in height and distance in real time. For a more technical, jargon packed description, you can read the following abstract taken from their website:
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