Lanzatech makes the 2010 Guardian Cleantech 100

The 2010 Guardian Cleantech 100 was out yesterday. This list seeks to answer the question: which 100 of today's private cleantech companies are the most likely to make the most significant market impact over the next 5-10 years?

This year saw over 4000 nominations that were eventually funnelled down to around 200 companies, and then presented to an expert judging panel comprised of leading cleantech investors and corporations from Europe, the USA and Asia.

New Zealand company Lanzatech has made it onto this years list which is a fantastic achievement. Lanzatech uses a proprietary bacteria to convert 'dirty' waste gases from industry into ethanol that can be used as a fuel. It has run a pilot plant scale development to prove the technology at the Glenbrook Steel Mill, out of Auckland, since 2007, and has recently signed an agreement to build a demonstration plant at Baosteel's Shanghai steel mill.

Aside from Lanzatech's success in making the 2010 list, the site is a fantastic resource for what is happening in the cleantech sector right now. There is some incredible innovation happening - and proof that we have some of the solutions for combating climate change. The next challenge will be in how to scale them.

I'm back!

Its been a long time between posts and now as I arrive in Europe after 4 months travelling through South East Asia and China, I find myself with a lot more time on my hands and the chance to get back into posting. The next few months will be tough and hopefully I can keep you all updated on how the dreaded job hunt and return to real life is going.

This is a little late I know, but arriving a few weeks ago and taking a quick look at my feed reader, I saw some good news. The NZ government has in its 2010 budget allocated an increase in funding to science and technology of around $320 million. Although I won't go as far to say this is "huge" for NZ science (I agree with Colin James' article in the DomPost), it is good, and it is a step in the right direction.

I've noticed plenty of comment on how there isn't much in there for universities and so-called "blue sky" research, and that most of the benefits of this funding will go to business, which is probably correct. Looking at the graph (shown below) in the 'Igniting Potential' document produced by MoRST, one can see that NZ public sector investment in science is woefully low compared to OECD levels. More money would always be a good thing.

But one thing I have noticed since being in Europe and job hunting, is the presence of the large firms and how they interact with the public sector. I was at a job fair the other day and saw several presentations from large firms emphasising public-private partnerships (and in true corporate nature, the millions that were spent on them!).

NZ private sector investment in R&D is low because we don't have much industry. We don't have a mining industry like Australia (yet!), or the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world like Finland, or a thriving Cleantech industry like Denmark. It is my view that we need to get our businesses to a level where they are large enough to fund such public-private partnerships, develop their own niche industries, or at least have their capabilities recognised internationally in order to attract partnerships with Multinationals (see Craig Venter + Exxon Mobil).

How do we do that? By giving businesses incentives to undertake R&D, helping them leverage the talent that already exists in our universities and CRI's (Crown Research Institutes), assisting where the whole chain breaks down (technology transfer), and promoting ourselves internationally - which I believe is the important aspect of this new focus by the Government, and one that I am optimistic about.

The Last Hurrah (for now)...

It is with a tinge of sadness that I must announce to all my readers that I will be leaving New Zealand and moving overseas for the foreseeable future. I'm doing this not only to further my career, but also to experience what life in another part of the world is all about. I'm incredibly excited.

Since beginning blogging about 6 months ago I have notched up over a half century of posts (58 to be precise), read many more, and as result learnt far more than I may have otherwise. I have met (virtually) a great number of passionate people and hopefully I have managed to convince some of you of the importance of science and technology in not only determining New Zealand's future prosperity, but the World's.

Rest assured I still have many more posts in me, and I hope to continue while I'm abroad - which could make some interesting comparisons to how things are done here in NZ.

I'll be travelling through SE Asia and China en-route to Europe where I hope to settle. If you know of anyone in that area who would love to employ an enthusiastic and passionate young mind in a science & technology-related area, please ask them to get in touch via this blog!

Best wishes for the festive season,

Aaron

Living Cell Technologies

You might remember one of my early posts on Living Cell Technologies (LCT), a NZ company who are experimenting with the use of pig cells to treat diabetes patients. They are currently in trial at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, and I read this morning that the first trial patient has had no side effects after transplant 8 weeks ago, and has now been able to reduce his daily insulin intake by up to 30 %.


LCT is actively working to develop life-changing cellular therapies – treatments that will improve the quality of life of patients with diabetes, haemophilia, hearing loss, liver failure and brain degenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease.

In the case of diabetes, this is done by encapsulating the healthy living pig cells that produce insulin, in a seaweed derived extract (alginate) to form tiny particles that are then implanted into the patient to provide insulin.


Diabetes is suffered by 11,000 New Zealander's, and throughout both developed and developing countries, the number of those affected is increasing at a steady rate. Although there are clearly some ethical issues involved with this type of treatment, this is an emerging area which, through Living Cell Technologies, represents an opportunity for NZ to capitalise.

Punching above our weight

Prof. Richard Faull may not be known to many of you. In fact, until last weekend, he wasn't know to me either. I happened to be reading the latest issue of North and South Magazine, and an article on the new Centre for Brain Research at Auckland University of which Prof. Faull is the director.

What was suprising to me, is that Prof. Faull and his team (plus colleagues in Sweden) were the first to discover that diseased human brain cells can regenerate - that is they have a repair pathway. We previously didn't know this (we thought once they died that was that), and as such it turned accepted knowledge on its head. The discovery was so astounding, that the research plan couldn't even be written into the original grant application for fear of rejection because it was 'dreaming'. Here is yet another case of a New Zealander conducting world class research that has ashamedly slipped under the radar.

Prof. Faull also mentioned in the article that he likes to keep the facility in NZ, because here we were small enough to remain flexible and adapt to new challenges as they arise. That reminded me of comments made by Chief Science Advisor Sir Peter Gluckman, that NZ's advantage was its small size (something that some may find hard to believe) and something that Shaun Hendy has touched on with Innovation Networks - that NZ must remain flexible enough to change to any new demands, as the Finn's did with Nokia and the mobile phone boom - that is easiest if you are small.

We like to think we punch above our weight in sport (and we do), so why don't we take this frame of mind and apply it to other areas like science and business? I know the people active in these areas most certainly do, as do I, but the whole country should take a sense of pride in people like Richard Faull and the ground breaking work they're doing.

The Masters of Light

The 2009 Nobel prizes were recently been announced over at http://nobelprize.org. One half of the Physics Prize has gone to Charles K. Tao of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication". The other half was jointly awarded to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith of Bell Laboratories, USA, "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor" which is used in digital cameras.

From the Nobel website:

“Today optical fibers make up the circulatory system that nourishes our communication society. These low-loss glass fibers facilitate global broadband communication such as the Internet. Light flows in thin threads of glass, and it carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic in each and every direction. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.

If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour."

Although the hypertext transfer protocols (http) that allows users to view data over the Internet in web browsers (the ‘world wide web’) were developed mainly by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland (also home to the Large Hadron Collider), the development and laying of fibre optic cables is what has really enabled this technology to be of use to the world.

It is hard to imagine another 20^th century invention that has changed the way the human race interacts with each other as much as this one. Individuals are now empowered – they are the authors of their own digital content, they can collaborate rather than compete, they find the news rather than the news finding them, and anyone can do business with anyone else in the world. As author Thomas L. Friedman rightly points out - "The World Is Flat"...

The Bayer Innovator Awards

I was going to post about my PhD supervisor, Prof. Jim Johnston, winning a Bayer Innovator of the Year award, but was pipped at the post by the Gold Innovations Blog here! As the post points out, this was largely for his work on the innovative use of gold and silver nanoparticles as colourants for wool textiles.

As I've recently become involved in this research (along with current PhD students Fern Kelly and Kerstin Burridge), it may be a perfect time to explain a little bit more about it and what we're trying to achieve here.

As I've said before, when we shrink the constituent particles of a material down to the nano scale, we start to see new and interesting properties. This is because the particles can be considered closer to the size of atoms than to bulk materials - thus we see "quantum effects". One effect we see with gold or silver particles at this scale is a phenomenon called "surface plasmon resonance" which alters the way light interacts with the particles. Hence, instead of seeing the lustrous yellow colour we are all familiar with when we think of gold, we see a range of colours - red through blue. We then use these particles of different colour to "dye" wool (and a number of other materials too!).


The aim here is to link the high quality of NZ wool with the prestige of precious metals like gold and silver and sell into high value markets. Silver has the added benefit of being antimicrobial and so the resultant textiles are capable of killing bugs, making them ideal for medical textiles.

The work was funded by the World Gold Council's GROW Program (which I made a comment about here), and we are now progressing it towards commercialisation with a number of interested parties both in NZ and internationally. If you have any questions please leave a comment!

Quantum Dot Inkjet Printing

Here's a radio interview my PhD supervisor Jim Johnston, PhD candidate Andi Zeller, and myself gave to Radio NZ about Quantum Dot Inkjet Printing and it's application in anticounterfeiting - one of the main topics of my PhD thesis.


There is also a post on the work here, and an article on page 5 of the Autum 2009 issue of Victoria University's 'Victorious' magazine, found here.

Resistance is useless...

Superconductivity is the phenomenon whereby a material can conduct an electric current with no resistance. For some of you that might seem rather dull, but the implications of this are actually fairly significant. Because they can conduct an electric current with no resistance, there is no heat loss as a result. This, coupled with the fact they can transmit high current loads, makes them ideal as power transmission cables, replacing those that are currently quite inefficient over long distances.

Superconductors can also be used to create powerful magnets for better MRI instruments, magnetically levitated trains (like the Maglev train in Shanghai, China that can reach speeds of up to 430 km/h), and particle accelerators (like the LHC in Switzerland) that allow physicists to conduct ground breaking fundamental research about the world we live in.

As a result, superconductors have been "the next big thing" for a fair few many years now, but their application has been hamstrung by the fact they require bulky, complicated, and expensive cooling systems to get the superconducting effect - they only work below about -135 C and so need to be cooled by liquid nitrogen (-197 C). The obvious goal is to get them to work at ambient temperatures of around 0-30 C, but for this to happen, scientists still need to understand the fundamentals of these materials.

For a long time, scientists only thought there was one family of superconducting materials, which made it difficult for them to understand their fundamentals. Recently a Japanese group has discovered (by accident) a new family. Although operating at only -217 C, well below the current benchmark of -135 C, it is nonetheless exciting because now with two families to compare and contrast hopefully scientists can finally solve this problem and we might see some of these incredible applications become more widespread.


Endeavour Capital, who I work for, is an investor in HTS-110, a spin out company from fundamental research conducted at Industrial Research Limited (IRL) in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Researchers at IRL were one of the first groups in the world to develop a process for the production of superconducting wire from 1st and 2nd generation superconducting materials. As a result, they formed a partnership with American Superconductors Inc., one of the biggest companies in the world active in this area. HTS-110 use this wire to produce superconducting magnets. This is yet another example of how kiwi ingenuity can be a world beater - in some areas that probably not too many kiwi's suspect either.

I think their story, coupled with the exciting new discovery by the Japanese group, illustrates the vital role of fundamental research in the progression of any ground breaking new technology towards commercialisation.

Science behind record breaking swims

Hi-tech textiles in sport are nothing new. In recent years we have seen the design of fabrics that can take moisture away from the body, patches on All Black jerseys so players can dry their hands for better grip, fabrics that can sense high impact stresses on players joints, and fabrics that can sense heart rate, temperature and other physiological data (see Zephyr Technologies).

All are performance enhancing to varying degrees, but perhaps not quite as much as the latest hi-tech swimsuits worn by competitors at this years World Championships in Rome. There is a lot of talk in the media at the moment in regard to these swimsuits, which have seen numerous records broken so far. And not just broken, smashed in some instances, by up to 6 seconds! The science behind these suits is quite interesting. There are two aspects to it - posture and drag.



The corset-like suits are made of an incredibly compressive material (apparently they take an age to squeeze into) that holds the swimmer in an optimal posture. Because the swimmer doesn't have to use any of their muscles to hold this posture (like usual), more of their energy can be directed to their propulsion through the water. The compressive nature of the suit also stops water becoming trapped in the suit, and reduces the amount of skin 'wobble', which both contribute to drag, the second aspect.

Drag refers to the forces that oppose the relative motion of an object through a fluid medium. It is wasted energy. In chemistry we call something that is attracted to water hydrophilic, and something that repels water hydrophobic. These hi-tech suits are hydrophobic - they actually repel water, like a bead of water on a lotus leaf, or like oil in water. This creates a water-repellent seal that adds buoyancy, lessens drag and creates record swim times.

Speedo's LZR suit did this by adding polyurethane panels over the parts of the body that contribute the most to drag. This suit saw a multitude of records fall in Beijing 2008, and 94% of gold medals were won by swimmers wearing LZR's. The obvious next step was to make an entire suit from the stuff, and this is what the current outcry is about. There is an excellent article about it all here.

So, at what level is science in sport too much? Where does the competition of man vs. man instead become a competition of who has the best equipment? Personally, I have no problem with it - I believe sport science (both physiologically and technologically) will continue to evolve because people will always strive to be fitter, faster and stronger. The question is, how can we level the playing field, so that good competition, the real essence of sport, is still the centerpiece of the show?

Living Cell Technologies

Here's another cool Kiwi company doing some amazing work, even if quite controversial. There is a lot of hype around Living Cell Technologies (LCT) currently, some of which is outlined over at the NZ Science Media Centre. This is because LCT's pig cell trial for a diabetes cure is underway.



LCT is actively working to develop life-changing cellular therapies – treatments that will improve the quality of life of patients with diabetes, haemophilia, hearing loss, liver failure and brain degenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease.

In the case of diabetes, this is done by encapsulating the healthy living pig cells that produce insulin, in a seaweed derived extract (alginate) to form tiny particles that are then implanted into the patient. The seaweed extract coating is biocompatible, and so no immunosuppressive drugs are needed to stop to the body rejecting the cells. Nutrients can pass through the seaweed coating into the cell, and insulin can pass out into the patients blood stream where it is required. These implanted cells have led to near-normal blood glucose levels in patients, reduced the need for insulin injections and lessened episodes of high blood glucose that lead to long term complications.

LCT's pigs originate from the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands and are disease free. A new pig breeding unit recently opened in Invercargill, ensures that they remain free of viruses, bacteria and parasites.

This type of bioencapsulation technology is quite widely applicable, and can be used in stem cell research, for example. Although there are clearly some ethical issues involved with this type of treatment, this is an emerging area which, through Living Cell Technologies, represents an opportunity for NZ to capitalise.

Lumiblades and their NZ link

I saw this article on Stuff.co.nz yesterday about Lumiblades, developed by Philips. These new lighting devices will one day replace the methods of lighting we currently use, as they are incredibly energy efficient. As a result, they can be lumped into the broad CleanTech category of technologies that achieve tasks in a more environmentally sustainable manner. These ultra thin lighting devices are based on organic light emitting diodes, (OLED's for short), essentially special types of plastics that can conduct electricity and emit light.

There is a nice link to NZ here, in that this work stems from that of Victoria University graduate, Alan MacDiarmid (born in Masterton, New Zealand), who helped to pioneer the study of these materials in the 80's, and then won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 2000. His legacy lives on in NZ in the MacDiarmid Institute of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, and also in a new science building being constructed at Victoria University of Wellington. You can view a documentary about his life here.

His work provided a lot of scope, and forms the basis of the flexible electronics industry, which is set to revolutionize electronics in the next 5 years or so. Some products already exist today, but in the future we will see more widespread use of flexible electronics in areas such as:

• electronic textiles,
• flexible batteries
• solar cells,
• display screens you can roll up and put in your bag,
• cheap sensors for a range of biological matter, chemicals, diseases, gas detection
• radio frequency ID tags,

All this, because of a New Zealander. I think that's pretty cool, and proof that anyone in NZ (even if they're from Masterton...jokes!) can conquer the world.

Innovation in NZ

There have been some interesting comments in the media lately from Prime Minister John Key, regarding the decline in NZ's productivity. Economists sometimes refer to this decline as the New Zealand paradox: "The mystery is why a country that seems close to best practice in most of the policies that are regarded as the key drivers of growth is nevertheless just an average performer" (OECD, 2003). To those of us who work in science and technology, the missing ingredient is obvious: innovation.

Each week I receive from the MacDiarmid Institute, the MacDiarmid Update by email. Last weeks email mentioned a very interesting study by Dr. Shaun Hendy, the Deputy Director of the MacDiarmid Institute, on innovation in NZ. He and his research assistant have used an OECD patent database to investigate whether collaborative networks form between inventors through co-patenting.

It turns out that there are numerous large communities of inventors connected in this way, and one network from which NZ can learn a lot, is based in Finland (1,300 inventors), largely around patents owned by Nokia. This network appeared in only a decade in a country with a population similar to our own! As Shaun says, "in the early 1990s, few would have described ICT as a Finnish strength, but by the end of the decade they were vigorously patenting and writing papers in ICT, and had increased their electronics exports tenfold to more than NZ$20 billion per annum."

Where did they get that inventive talent from? It appears that the Finns trained Nokia's inventors in their Universities. Sure, the Finns were lucky that mobile phones came along when they did, but I think its proof, as Shaun says, that "an innovation-driven economy is not bound by its geography or its history". So we can forget about all this rubbish about NZ being too far away from anyone. With the MacDiarmid Institute being a collaborative network between NZ Universities and Crown Research Institutes, they are in an excellent position to try and emulate this here in NZ. The question is, what technology will NZ lead the world in? Perhaps something in the CleanTech area, as I've talked about before. Whatever it is, we will have to remain flexible and extensive enough to respond to new opportunities when they arise, which raises some very big questions regarding the current crappy science and technology policy of low investment and "picking winners."

I sincerely hope that Shaun's excellent research is spread far and wide, and I wish him well in achieving his (I believe attainable) goal that "one day people will be studying us to see how we did it."

The Fat of the Land

So its finally happened, I am posting about obesity on this blog. Some people, one in particular who shall remain nameless, will be thrilled.

I found this article on Chemistry World News this morning, which seemed quite timely considering the recent news of NZ's apparent obesity problem. Scientists have found a synthetic peptide molecule (a short chain of amino acids) that possesses key features of two natural hormones which are involved in regulating glucose metabolism and appetite control. When injected into obese mice, after one week the animals' body weights had decreased by 25 per cent and their body fat by 42 per cent. Kind of like The Nutty Professor in real life!



While research like this paves the way for improvement in many areas of human health, I am still a big fan of preventative measures. New technology can then be introduced, arming us with a number of tools in the fight. The link between obesity and diabetes, heart disease and stroke is well documented, and so it kind of annoys me that Health Minister Tony Ryall has commented here that the Government planned to announce programmes "around physical activity" and sports "in due course", when upon being elected one of the first things the National Party did was cut advertising for the very successful "Push Play" program by SPARC, and remove restrictions on the kinds of foods tuck shops can sell in schools. Like smoking, what is needed isn't an initial blitz, but a sustained approach.

It has been suggested that obesity has addictive elements just like alcoholism, drug abuse and smoking do. We are bombarded everyday by advertising about how drinking or smoking is harmful, yet where are the advertisements telling us that if we eat too many Whopper's or KFC Quarter Packs we will increase our risk of developing diabetes? Not to mention we have to run for something like 10km to work it off! Tobacco companies are not allowed to advertise, yet McDonald's can advertise just before dinner during children's TV shows. Or when we buy a bottle of wine it is taxed at a high rate to counter the health costs due to irresponsible behaviour of a few, yet this doesn't occur with fast food.

If this study has any substance, if our diets continue as they are, and if our Government keeps making nonsensical decisions about prevention, we will quickly end up with an obesity epidemic. Maybe this study is the wake up call we need.

Plastic Not-So Fantastic

A report has recently been released regarding the impact of plastics on the environment and human health. It aims to present the first comprehensive review of the impact of plastics on the environment and human health, and offers possible solutions. If it is the first of its kind, it baffles me that it has taken so long for a study of this scale to be conducted given our widespread use of plastic materials. Whether or not you believe what the report has to say regarding the toxicity of plastics (check out the comments, as usual there is a lot more substance there!), the fact of the matter is we are poor at disposing and recycling plastic materials and the effect of this on our environment is clear in some areas. What we need are more biodegradable packaging products.

Nonetheless, it is a perfect introduction to the basis of my PhD research, as I know some of you have wondered exactly what it is I did all those years at university (apart from corridor cricket, darts, and long lunches at KK Malaysia!).

The essence of our research group is to add value to natural products, particularly those that NZ is a world class producer of, like paper and wool. There is a big drive at the moment from the packaging industry to develop products that offer the technical characteristics of plastics, but with the biocompatibility of natural materials like paper.

My research looked at creating high tech packaging products by using the electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of nanoparticles (really tiny particles, 10,000x thinner than a human hair). These particles by themselves are hard to utilise due to their small size, but if we can capture them on a surface we can begin to create useful materials. I looked at a number of low cost coating methods and simple inkjet printing (like you can do at home) to impart these properties on sheets of paper.

Because the paper materials we made are electrically, magnetically, and optically active, we hope to use the findings of this research to create anticounterfeit packaging technologies (optical materials), for shielding equipment that is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation such as cellular and wireless network frequencies (electronic and magnetic paper), and in antistatic packaging for sensitive components (electronic paper). The image below is of the VUW logo inkjet printed with nanoparticles. Under normal light conditions this is invisible - just a white piece of paper, yet under UV light it glows orange. This forms the basis of the anticounterfeit packaging technology I was talking about above.


Hopefully someone can find a use for it!

Protecting Brand NZ

Yesterday I attended the GoTrace Symposium in Wellington, which was all about traceability, country of origin labelling, anti-counterfeiting and the like. It was a really interesting day, and was attended by the likes of Zespri, Wools of NZ, NZ Merino, Comvita (Manuka Honey), The Wine Industry etc., that have a vested interest in protecting their brand against rip-offs (mainly in Asia). There were some staggering figures shown throughout the day, including that the World Trade Organisation estimates that about 5-7 % of world trade is in counterfeit goods. That equates to about $520 Billion!

The conference looked at a number of ways to track goods to their origin, which was mainly done through trace metal analysis or isotopic testing. Basically, if a cow grows up eating grass in the North Island, the resultant steak will have a different trace metal or isotopic 'signature' to one that has been raised in the South Island. This is due to the different rainfall and geology in the regions. Scientists throughout the world have been working hard to produce huge databases so that they can test and match a wine, for example, to the vineyard the grapes were grown on, thus determining if it is a fake or not. This can be done with incredible accuracy, down to a few hundred metres in certain instances!

Counterfeit wines are a problem, but counterfeit drugs are a BIG problem. Not so much in NZ because our supply sources are very secure, but particularly in poorer countries. A group from GNS Science analyzed a number of malaria pills supposedly made by Guilin Pharmaceuticals (a legitimate company) in China, and found that in Laos, 88 % of the pills claiming to be from GPC were counterfeit. Because the particular malaria pills were bitter in taste, the counterfeiters tried to make their rip-offs bitter by adding various things such as floor cleaners or solvents. Because of this work, a few of the illegal supply chains were able to be shut down. Perhaps one way to stop this activity in the region is by donating genuine malaria pills (they are so cheap anyway), so that the incentive for the counterfeiters to counterfeit in the first place is removed. However, this was only one brand of malaria pill, and one disease in a list of many. Quite scary really.

Counterfeiting will always be a problem and so the work that is being done by many of the attendees is important not only for the economic livelihood of small exporting countries like ours, but also for the livelihood of many people in lesser developed nations that are being subjected to some horrendous practices at the hands of a few sick individuals.

Thanks to the organisers for a great day!

Enormous potential in tiny particles

There is a great article on the NZ Herald website this morning about a Dunedin company called Izon.

Their game is in making machines that measure, analyze and control small particles, right down to a single particle, which is pretty incredible. As the article says, scientists have been trying to find the next big nanoparticle application for a while now, and Izon's idea seems like a good one because it will allow them access into all of the broad research that's taking place in this area, which includes medical diagnostics, environmental diagnostics, nanoparticle measurement and biomolecule analysis to name a few. There are many more.

Izon plan to shrink their device down to the size of a cellphone in the near future, and I think that there are really exciting prospects in the area of rapid diagnostics, where a small device could be taken into remote, poverty stricken area's to quickly and cheaply diagnose illnesses. The right treatment could then be prescribed which saves time on lengthy lab analyses.

Awesome idea, good luck to them!

Printing organs?

I just read an interesting article on 3D printing, or rapid prototyping, which has been around for a while now. It works by layering down and bonding successive cross sections, building up a 3D object. You can see a YouTube video of the process here. It's pretty cool.

The article focused on one of the extraordinary potential applications of this type of technology - tissue engineering for regenerative medicine. Researchers can print down a gel or biodegradable "scaffold" that human cells can grow on to build up artificial body parts or organs that can then be implanted into the body. The benefit in doing it this way instead of using conventional techniques, is in both speed and in the control over the microscopic features of the tissue. One day, researchers may even be able to print down human cells to build up organs with close-to-natural detail, ready for implant!

This is could be a great niche market for someone in NZ to get into and become a world leader. Anyone want to go halves in a 3D printer?

A rant about Swine Flu

Yesterday I read an opinion piece here about Swine Flu (called influenza A H1N1) by Linley Boniface. I have to say I totally agree with her. Sure, at the moment it seems no more harmful than an ordinary seasonal flu, and yes, I am aware that 250,000-500,000 people die from that a year already.

What most people do not understand is that the WHO has raised the pandemic alert level to 6 due to the rapidity of its spread, rather than its severeness. The reason for this is that scientific information gathered about previous pandemics has shown the influenza A virus to be unpredictable. It can take on new genetic material and mutate to even more virulent forms, unlike seasonal influenza which is stable in this respect. If this happens and it spreads even faster, the main concern is that influenza A H1N1 is new and most people do not have any immunity to it, unlike they do with seasonal influenza. This happened in the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed an estimated 50-100 Million people. Although it is fair to say there are a number of differences between then and now in regards to medical knowledge and its communication, there is also a big difference in world population (1.6 Billion vs 6.8 Billion) and so there is still a very real threat to the many millions in underdeveloped areas if its spread becomes more rapid.

Like global warming, surely it is better to act on the information we do have, to be proactive and to take preventative measures rather than doing nothing and the unthinkable happen. The same people who cry "Conspiracy!", or who criticise the WHO and The Ministry of Health for taking what they deem to be unnecessary action, would likely be the same people that would label them incompetent should they do nothing.

Call it a media beat up and be bored with the story if you must, but please do understand the reasons behind the measures these organisations are taking. It might turn out to be nothing, and even if it does, in developed countries we might not see its full effect. But there are a lot of other people in worse situations than you and I (sadly, even some in our own country) and these measures are in their best interests.

Hello!

Last year I graduated with a PhD in chemistry after 8 years at Victoria University. Since then, I’ve been working to form a start up company out of some of our University research, and working as an analyst at one of New Zealand’s leading Venture Capital firms, Endeavour Capital.

What gets me excited are the amazing ideas I come across everyday - whether they are those I only hear about, or whether they come from the people I’m lucky enough to interact with. People don’t often think of scientists as being creative people, but indeed we are, and with the economy in decline and the future of our planet hanging in the balance, creativity in science is needed now more than ever.

I hope this small blog does justice to these ideas, opens your eyes to some of the amazing things Kiwi’s are doing, as well as highlighting things from around the world that I think are just plain awesome. I’ll try to shed some light on any relevant issues where I can, but this is also grounds for you to offer your opinions or advice, as I will never profess to know it all. Then we can all learn something…enjoy.