Three local venture firms put on what amounted to a university startup fair at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square yesterday. I went hoping for a peek at a few of the companies that could be pulling down Series A rounds a year or two from now.

Now in its second year, the invitation-only University Research & Entrepreneurship Symposium was organized by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners, and General Catalyst and sponsored by Boston-based law firm Goodwin Procter. The firms formatted the event so that university research teams with hot, potentially commercializable technologies had a chance to give their best 12-minute pitches to a large collection of venture capitalists and corporate representatives from all over the region. Attendees had one track to hear about nine companies in the life sciences industry, and other track for nine more infotech- and energy-oriented companies. The research teams weren’t just from places like Harvard and MIT, but represented 15 different institutions from around the country.

Eight of the presenting teams were from New England. One, Boston-based Novophage, is a company that Ryan already covered; it’s working on “engineered bacteriophages” to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as MRSA. I couldn’t be in two places at once, so I had to skip presentations by three of the remaining seven local teams. But the following is a quick rundown of the four local presentations I did hear. All of these groups are in the lab-bench or seed-funding stage, and are looking for venture capital to get to the next step in the commercialization process.

Making Ethanol from Soybean Hulls—Without Destroying the Protein

Jonathan Mielenz of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, talked about a project with Dartmouth engineers John Bardsley and Charles Wyman to study soybean hulls as a potential raw material in the fermentation of ethanol.

Soybeans are used to make soy oil and other food products, and their hulls, which have a high protein content, are usually used as feedstock for cattle. That would seem to make them a bad choice as a source of biomass-derived ethanol; indeed, a lot of the effort in ethanol production these days is going into technologies, like ideas being developed at local firms like Mascoma and Verenium, that use non-food, high-cellulose sources such as wood chips or switchgrass.

But Mielenz said his group has come up with a simple way to ferment the sugars in soybean hulls without destroying the protein. The high-temperature pretreatment to which most other high-cellulose biomass is subjected before fermentation would break down the proteins in soybean hulls, Mielenz said. Simply by skipping this step, Mielenz says, his startup—which doesn’t have a name yet—found it was able to extract the sugars in the hulls without disrupting the amino acid sequences in their proteins, thus preserving their value as feed.

Selling the remains of the fermentation as feed could help bring down the net cost of ethanol production and make biofuels more competitive with fossil-based fuels, Mielenz argued.

Cheaper, More Powerful Methanol Fuel Cells

Nathan Ashcraft, a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Paula Hammond in the Chemical Engineering department at MIT, gave a talk about DyPol, a startup looking to commercialize a new, more efficient type of membrane for methanol-based fuel cells.

A methanol fuel cell works by exposing methanol on the anode side of the cell to a membrane where a catalyst such as platinum splits off protons and electrons. The electrons exit the cell to form an electric current while the protons travel through the membrane, meeting oxygen from air on the cathode side of the membrane to produce water as a waste product. DuPont makes the leading membrane material for methanol fuel cells, a polymer called Nafion. But Nafion has a few weaknesses, Ashcraft said; it’s costly to make; it depends a toxic fluorination process; and it’s easily permeated by raw methanol, reducing its efficiency.

Ashcraft and colleagues in the Hammond Lab, collaborating with a number of other labs around MIT, have devised a way to build polymer membranes layer by layer, allowing them to blend polymers that couldn’t otherwise be used together. The layers are less permeable to methanol, and can be created in a non-toxic, water-based solution. Prototype fuel cells built using the new membranes have 53 percent greater energy output than … Next Page »

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Chicago Plans to Cut Greenhouse Gases

The City of Chicago wants to cut its emission of greenhouse gases to three-quarters of 1990 levels by 2020, and one-fifth of 1990 levels by 2050. The Associated Press reports that the plan includes updating the city’s building code to improve insulation and heating and cooling systems in all buildings, increasing recycling and carpooling, and promoting alternative fuels. Chicago emits 34.6 metric tons of greenhouse gases each year.

Scientist Automates Nanotube Production

Carbon nanotubes hold the promise of making lighter aircraft, splitting hydrogen from water to use as fuel, and making high-density batteries, among other innovations. But it can takes researchers hours of fussing with tiny adjustments to a nanomaterial-building furnace to make enough of the little buggers to perform experiments. Now Wired tells us that Stephen Steiner, a graduate student at MIT, has written a program based on English syntax and fuzzy logic to automate the furnace and produce longer and more uniform nanotubes.

Researchers Synthesize Cancer Protein

Scientists trying to cure cancer have a new tool in their arsenal, thanks to researchers who have figured out how to synthesize a protein that plays an important role in some types of cancer and immune system diseases. Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have applied for a patent on a protein known as a chemokine, UPI reports. The researchers say having the protein available will allow them to perform studies on new methods of treating cancer.

Web Running Out of Early Adopters

With all the users of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their associated applications, developers of new Web 2.0 services are facing application overload, a column in the New York Times warns. Developers are finding that there are so many applications out there, getting people to try your new one often means convincing them they should drop one they’re already using. This may explain why I haven’t looked at my Friendster account in months.

Future May Bring Intelligent Cloud

Over at the official Google blog, Google employees are speculating about what the future holds for development of the Internet. An engineer and a research scientist look at the growth of parallel-processing computer clusters becoming increasingly linked and handling more and more data, and suggest that the computing cloud may develop a form of intelligence. I’m pretty sure I read that in a Heinlein novel, and it didn’t work out so well for the builders of the computer.

IBM Looks Ahead to Even Smaller Transistors

Computer chips have become more powerful by cramming more and smaller transistors into the same space, and the industry right now is moving from technology where the key size measurement is 65 nanometers to 45-nanometer technology. But as CNET News reports, IBM is looking a couple technology generations ahead, to 22-nanometer devices. The challenge they’re tackling: Technology to produce such small features doesn’t yet exist, and it’s not obvious how to create it.

New Device Could Replace Batteries in Electric Cars

Capacitors, which store energy electrically instead of chemically, the way batteries do, may be better than batteries in electric vehicles because they can charge and discharge energy much faster. The problem is that they don’t typically hold very much of a charge. Now Chinese scientists say they’ve designed an ultracapacitor, based on an array of carbon nanotubes, that can store enough energy to be practical for use in a car, New Scientist reports.

Web Science Aims to Study the Internet

The development of the World Wide Web has brought about developments that nobody predicted back in the early days of the Internet, from the rise of social networking to the increase in identity theft. As Scientific American tells us, in an article co-authored by WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee, a new discipline known as “web science” is arising. The aim of web science is to discover how society-changing effects arise on the Web and to try to harness them for the common good.

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You may remember a few weeks back, when Nanocomp Technologies of Concord, NH, announced that it was able to make what it called the world’s largest sheets of carbon nanotubes. Well, it seems like the folks at Slashdot weren’t the only ones intrigued by the technology. The Air Force has awarded the company a Small Business Innovation Grant to try and develop wires and cables made from carbon nanotubes. The Phase One grant is to study the feasibility of the concept. If it looks promising, further grants could follow.

Even in today’s high-tech world, the main method of transporting electricity through a machine is good old-fashioned copper wire. But despite its excellent conductivity, copper has its downside when you’re flying across continents or launching things into orbit—weight. Nanocomp says that a third of the weight of a 15-ton satellite comes from copper wire, while a Boeing 747 has more than 135 miles of wire weighing two tons. If wires and cables made of carbon nanotubes were to replace all that copper, they could weigh as little as one fifth as much. Lighter weight, in turn, translates into a significant savings in the amount of fuel needed to hurl these things through the air.

Most of the industrially produced carbon nanotubes today are only a few microns long, essentially coming out of the process as carbon nanotube powder. Nanocomp has come up with a way to grow the tubes to lengths of about a millimeter, a thousand times as long, which the company says are “significantly more conductive.” Nanocomp is able to put out nanotubes that overlap each other and form a mat, creating sheets that measure three by six feet and may be as large as 100 feet square by this summer.

Because of the way the carbon atoms link together, nanotubes are potentially as strong as steel but much lighter, and have desirable electrical properties. In announcing the grant, Nanocomp CEO Peter Antoinette said, “Our work can result in a true 21st century change in the game, creating electrically optimized carbon nanotube wires and cables, comparable to copper in terms of electrical conductivity but up to 80 percent lighter and more robust.”

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