BizSmooth——企顺学校博客

Madison invention basis for top honor in clean

A new company built to commercialize a green energy discovery at University of Wisconsin Madison earned the top honor and a check for $100,000 at this month Chicago Clean Energy Challenge.

The firm, named Hyrax Energy, is developing a process to make sugar from cellulose, the tough carbohydrate that gives structure to plants.

That sugar could be a raw material for the biofuels, chemical and plastics industries. Ethanol, a biofuel added to gasoline, consumes about 40 percent of the total American corn crop. Using cellulose would reduce pressure on the price of corn and greatly expand the range of raw materials.

The new technology was developed by company co founder Ron Raines, a professor of biochemistry and chemistry.

can take a cotton ball, which is essentially pure cellulose, and which does not dissociate in any common solvent, and drop it into this ionic liquid, and it dissolves. It like a magic trick, he says.

The starting point came in 2002, when another lab discovered that certain liquids could dissolve cellulose. That opened the door to simpler processing, says Raines. much easier to do chemistry in a solution rather than on a solid. 2009 process produced a type of molecule called a furan, but then Raines figured out how to arrest the reaction to produce glucose, a sugar that is a basic building block of chemical engineering. The process occurs in a single reaction vessel, at relatively low pressure and temperature.

The key step cheap jerseys was adding an exact amount of water to halt the reaction when the solution was essentially a soup of glucose molecules. Water locks onto the glucose molecules so they cannot reassemble into longer molecules that would difficult to process, but too much water interferes with the reaction.

published this in 2010, and the same day, http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ it was described in The New York Times as a potential game changing way to make sugars from cellulosic biomass, non edible biomass, Raines says.

Although only small quantities of glucose have been made to date with the new process, it is extremely efficient, Raines says. 90 percent of the mass of cellulose and related molecules in corn stover [waste material left after kernels are removed] are converted into sugar molecules. We have tested, and they support the growth of microorganisms that ferment sugar into biofuel. research was funded by the Department of Energy through the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center on the Madison campus.

are thrilled to see that there is commercial interest in further developing the ionic liquids technology that was created in Great Lakes Bioenergy, says director Tim Donohue, a UW Madison professor of bacteriology. recent clean tech award to Hyrax is outside endorsement of this promising technology. cellulose rather than corn into chemical feedstock is a holy grail in the effort to convert more plant material into biofuels and other industrial chemicals.

Unlike many scientists, who are investigating biological methods to break apart cellulose, Raines focused on chemistry. enzymes that break down cellulose contain thousands of atoms, but a simple proton is enough to catalyze the reaction, he says. protons can be sourced in acids, which are cheap and easy to come by. far, the process has worked with corn stover, and other cheap or free sources of cellulose such as pine sawdust, wood and oat hulls, Raines says.

Hyrax Energy is at such an early stage of startup that it does not yet even have an office. The firm is negotiating to license the patent pending Raines technology, which has been assigned to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Raines suggests the firm could move quickly once the license is signed. processes have a tendency to be much faster to scale up, because they are simple and we are really good at building chemical plants. Raines work is further evidence of the broad and deep expertise in plant material conversion and green energy at the UW Madison. The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center has a wide portfolio of techniques for converting plant material into chemical feedstocks. WARF has a library of patents from university research available for corporate licensing.

A Madison spin off called Virent uses catalysts to make biofuel has more than 100 employees, and Raines says co founder Jim Dumesic, a UW Madison professor of chemical and biological engineering, was an in showing the potential of new methods for converting organic materials into industrial chemicals.

Madison residents get details on budget

MADISON >> Residents filled the Polson Middle School auditorium Tuesday night to hear about the town and board of education budgets, as well as proposed changes to the town charter.

Residents had a chance to sound off on both the charter, as presented by the Charter Review Committee, and the budget, as presented by the Board of Finance.

Joan Walker, selectman and chairperson of the Charter Review Committee, said the Board of Selectmen will meet within 15 days to review the charter and make the appropriate changes.

board of selectmen have two special meetings set up to review all of the charters, they are going to do recommendations back to the Charter Review Committee, Walker said. will then take those recommendations under consideration, so we will have 30 days after that 15 days to be able to finalize the charter that will then be taken back to the board of selectmen for voting. 11px;

One of the big things Walker announced during the public hearing was the possibility of hiring a town manager, which she said had been requested by some in town.

hard to tell. It hard to predict what the board of selectmen will take because there have been lots of comments through the community and it not just this public hearing, Walker said. have been comments to the website, as well, so we have to see.

Walker said the first selectman is tasked with multiple duties at once. During the presentation she said hiring a town manager would help alleviate some of those roles the first selectman plays, which she said are chief elected official and chief operating officer.

The charter also suggests giving department heads the power to fire and hire staff, rather than having that duty placed solely on selectmen.

First Selectmen Fillmore McPherson said he also is uncertain as to which way the board will turn with hiring a town manager, but said it will be a part of a separate question when the public votes on the changes to the charter.

read is that there are mixed feelings in town and I don know how that will turn out. It will be a separate vote. So there will be at least two, and maybe three, questions on the charter, said McPherson.

McPherson said the board also will ask residents whether they want extended town meetings, which he said is not very common in the state.

extended town meeting is a significant change. It not been done before in the state of Connecticut and it one of those topics that sound nice, but cheap jerseys I personally am concerned if it doesn work out as well as hoped, then you stuck with it for ten years, said McPherson. maybe be some other ways to deal with that topic.

Davis said the public should be allowed to speak at least once more toward the end of the meeting before the board votes on anything, that way, the public has an opportunity to voice concerns should they ever change their stance on an issue after everything has been said and done, which the board agreed to.

The board of finance presented a $77,794,313 budget to the town, a 2.7 percent increase over the last budget. The town portion is $23,970,990, a 3.16 percent increase over last year, while the Board of Education portion was $58,823,323, a 2.49 percent increase.

McPherson said a good deal of the increase to the town budget can be attributed to capital projects, which contributed a 13.21 percent increase of the last fiscal year capital projects budget.

can speak to the Board of Ed, but on the town side, there is normal inflationary increase. People do get some raises every now and again. But we actually increasing our capital spending more than the operational spending, McPherson said. we putting more money into roads, putting more money into technology, we had several servers crash in our police department this year, so we doing some rebuilding in our technology area. We increasing our fire truck reserves because looking down the road, we will be buying a new hook and ladder truck in a few years and they don come cheap, so we have to put money away from that.

Resident Jeffrey Burt, who said he was a board member for Madison Youth Soccer, said support the budget that presented. One of the things that come to mind is this last year we had difficulties with our field, specifically at the surf club. It had gotten so bad we had to close them. But it not just soccer; my children play four different activities that essentially use all the fields in Madison. And if we don maintain our fields, it not only creates a safety issue but also creates a scheduling issue.

what was mentioned several times by the audience, we going to try to do a better job at maintaining our fields and our playgrounds, McPherson said.

The proposed charter http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ questions will be prepared for the November ballot by the Board of Selectmen by Sept. 3, and the budget will go to referendum May 12.

Madison researcher uses GPS to find asthma causes

David Van Sickle is looking for a few pioneering asthmatics.

He wants to attach a GPS device to their inhalers before they boldly go out into a spring world filled with allergens.

His goal is to map where and when environmental exposures trigger asthma symptoms, prompting them to puff on their inhalers, which deliver the medicine that keeps them breathing. It one of two asthma related projects in which Van Sickle, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, has worked with students in biomedical engineering.

It easy to predict problems when an asthmatic visits a lady or runs through a field of ragweed. But Van Sickle plans to use global positioning technology to find previously unknown causes of the lung disease and help doctors better monitor whether treatment is controlling symptoms and improving quality of life.

risk factors for asthma do not explain its global prevalence patterns and time trends, says Van Sickle. of epidemic asthma have demonstrated that understanding the locations where asthma exacerbations occur can help identify important new exposures. for example, an epidemic of severe asthma that struck Barcelona throughout the 1980s. On more than 20 days, emergency rooms were overwhelmed with people having severe, and sometimes fatal, asthma attacks.

put together a group of scientists to look at the meteorology, climatology, and levels of standard air pollutants and pollens in the city, but there wasn anything exceptional about those days, he says.

Finally, they asked where the patients had been when they got sick: All reported that their symptoms started near the waterfront. Further investigation showed that the port had been unloading giant heaps of soybeans from container ships.

victims were exposed to massive clouds of soybean dust because the appropriate filters weren installed in harbor silos, he says. took the group nearly eight years to prove, but it was the first time soybean dust had been shown to be a potent allergen. coming to Madison in 2006, Van Sickle was a disease detective in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, a job that led him to investigate a number of outbreaks, including exposure to mold in post Katrina New Orleans and chlorine gas in South Carolina.

In addition to tracing the causes of asthma, Van Sickle is also interested in better care for people who have the disease. Both interests have drawn him to work with the talented students enrolled in biomedical engineering classes. Past students designed early prototypes of the GPS device, which the CDC has now funded for use in the ongoing trial.

Current students enrolled in BME 201 are working on a low cost spirometer, a device that measures lung function and is used in diagnosing asthma and other lung diseases.

Van cheap jerseys Sickle, who has studied the increase of asthma in India, says commercially available spirometers are too expensive for most clinics there. The students are working on a design that could lower the cost from about $1,500 to $50. The project is set up as an source endeavor on the Internet, allowing anyone access to their designs.

Raj B. Singh, chief respiratory physician at Apollo Hospital in Chennai, India, says that asthma is often misdiagnosed there due to a lack of proper equipment.

of a cheap, accurate and robust spirometer would certainly create more interest in performing lung function measurements, resulting in better care for people with chronic lung diseases in India, says Singh, a member of the Global Initiative on Asthma (GINA) Executive Committee and founder of the Chest Foundation of India.

While the spirometers are likely to be of immediate benefit in the developing world, the GPS mapping may also someday help attack the spread of asthma.

Van Sickle says he can envision a time when GPS http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ mapping of asthma outbreaks can allow researchers to exactly what is making people sick.

will allow us to better target public health interventions to the places and times when people are really suffering, he says.