TR Editors' blog: funding - Technology Review

Valley Entrepreneurs Vent Frustration at Department of Energy

Cleantech entrepreneurs urge Washington to make better use of Bay Area intellectual capital.

Katherine Bourzac 02/26/2010

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At an event in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday, a representative of the Obama administration went before a gathering of Silicon Valley cleantech entrepreneurs to spread the good news about what's resulted from the stimulus package, and to get their feedback.

Peter Roehrig, a political appointee in the Department of Energy's office of energy efficiency and renewable energy, pointed to numbers released by the Congressional Budget Office that day suggesting that stimulus funding led to as many as 2.1 million jobs by the end of last year. The Department of Energy administrates $36.7 billion of the stimulus funds. Part of this, Roehrig noted, is going to a program to encourage energy-efficient retrofits for cities--a program being dubbed "cash for caulkers."

But the crowd at the "Meet the DOE" event at Nixon Peabody LLP on Tuesday didn't seem to agree that things were going so well, and used the Q&A session to vent their frustration about the lack of funding for energy startups. Several people asked why big, well-capitalized companies like DuPont and GM recieved funds while their start-ups can't get off the ground. Others noted that stimulus funding seemed to favor big companies, while on the other end the ARPA-E program favors very promising but less proven innovations; companies somewhere in the middle don't know where to turn. One man, representing a company developing an add-on for engines to make them fuel flexible, stood up with excitement as he told Roehrig that Washington needs to figure out a way to take better advantage of the intellectual capital concentrated in the Bay Area.

Roehrig, left to answer for the US government, took the criticism in his stride and deflected suggestions that all it takes is a grant writer and a lobbyist to win funding. Money for new energy technologies was indeed built into the stimulus package, he said, but all with the end of guaranteeing jobs--and bigger companies can make a better argument that they'll create jobs. Roehrig encouraged the companies to come to Washington to meet with DOE representatives personally, but no one seemed much comforted when he expressed that to help solve these problems, like everyone else in the room, he's hoping the economy improves.

Energy-Dense Silicon Batteries Get $3M

Startup Amprius has recieved government funding to scale up production of advanced lithium-ion electrodes.

Katherine Bourzac 12/17/2009

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has awarded $3 million in funding to start-up Amprius, which is developing silicon-nanowire battery anodes. The Menlo Park, CA company, spun out of Stanford University, will use the money to develop manufacturing processes. We've covered the Stanford research on silicon battery materials, and in November we wrote about the company's launch. Here's some more on the technology from that story:

Amprius' lithium-ion anodes are made of silicon nanowires, which can store 10 times more charge than graphite, the material used for today's lithium-ion battery anodes. According to the company, electric vehicles that run 200 miles between charges could go 380 miles on its batteries, and laptops that have four hours of run time could last for seven hours between charges.
[...]
When lithium-ion batteries are charged, lithium ions move from the cathode to the anode, while electrons flow in through an external electrical circuit; the process is reversed during discharge. Silicon has shown promise as an anode material because it can take up much more lithium than the carbon materials now used. Indeed, the theoretical maximum energy density of silicon is 10 times greater than carbon's. But silicon is fragile and tends to swell and crack after just one charge cycle.
However, battery anodes made from silicon nanowires can be cycled over and over again without damage. This fall, Yi Cui, Amprius founder and assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, demonstrated nanostructured silicon anodes that meet silicon's theoretical charge storage capacity without breaking. Mats of long, thin nanowires are pliable, which relieves the strain when the battery is charged and discharged. And collections of nanowires have a very high surface area, which means more sites for interacting with lithium.

What Physics Can Teach Us About Cancer

The National Cancer Institute launched 12 physical science-oncology centers.

Katherine Bourzac 10/27/2009

Today the National Cancer Institute announced that it has awarded grants to twelve institutions to apply the tools and methods of the physical sciences to cancer research. The Physical Science-Oncology Centers will be at sites including MIT, Cornell, Arizona State, and Johns Hopkins. A full list of the centers with links to explain the research focus of each is available here.

This approach to cancer biology is one that TR has been following. One of the primary approaches being pursued by these centers involves applying the measurement tools of engineering and materials science to the study of cancer cells. In recent years, researchers have pulled on cells with the tips of atomic-force microscopes, squeezed them between plates, and applied other physical methods, and found, for example, that cancer cells have a different stiffness than healthy ones. They have also discovered that a cell's physical environment can affect its behavior just as much as its chemical environment.

According to the Institute, another main line of research will be "Information Coding-Decoding-Transfer and Translation in Cancer." This is a bit convoluted but essentially refers to systems biology. As I wrote in this article about the field's founder:

"Systems biology takes a cue from engineering and treats organisms as complex systems. Systems biologists, often using computer models, try to understand how genes, proteins, cells, and tissues interact to create complex organisms. By mapping out, rather than reducing, biological complexity, systems biologists hope to reach a new understanding of the fundamental processes of life, from embryonic development to normal metabolism to the emergence of diseases like cancer."