Washington, U.S.A.  – NASA has announced the selection of 10 research efforts from the agency’s inaugural Space Technology Research Opportunities for Early Career Faculty solicitation. NASA will provide grants of as much as $200,000 per year for as long as three years in support of these faculties and their research in specific, high-priority technology areas.

The selected faculty will conduct research in areas closely aligned with NASA’s Space Technology Roadmaps and priorities identified by the National Research Council. These priorities include extending and sustaining human activities beyond low Earth orbit, exploring the evolution of the solar system and potential for life elsewhere, and expanding our understanding of Earth and the universe.

“It’s an honor to announce this outstanding group of early career faculty researchers, representing some of the most talented new faculty from the best institutions of higher learning in America,” said Michael Gazarik, director of NASA’s Space Technology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “NASA will benefit from the work these researchers conduct in unique, disruptive or transformational space technologies or concepts, while strengthening America’s continued global leadership in the new technology economy.”

The selected Early Career Faculty researchers are:

• Chih-Hao Chang, North Carolina State University, Raleigh
• Nicolaus Correll, University of Colorado at Boulder
• Julia Greer, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
• Mary Lind, Arizona State University, Tempe
• Michele Manuel, University of Florida, Gainesville
• Jeremy Munday, University of Maryland, College Park
• Marco Pavone, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.
• Mina Raies-Zadeh, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Debbie Senesky, Stanford University
• Wei-Chuan Shih, University of Houston

Newly-selected early career efforts will develop technologies to automate the production of food in space and investigate and test advanced wastewater recovery technologies. These efforts also will look to develop robust timekeeping technologies that enable more precise landing and autonomous rendezvous in space, and formulate new ultra-lightweight materials with properties that can be tailored.

NASA’s Early Career Faculty efforts are an element of the agency’s Space Technology Research Grants Program. It is designed to accelerate the development of technologies originating from academia that support the future science and exploration needs of NASA, other government agencies and the commercial space sector.

Image Courtesy of  Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com

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New York, U.S.A. – In the new issue of Philanthropy Management, a panel of experts from the philanthropic sector agreed that charitable giving is often hampered by misdirected government tax policies.

Sam MacDonald, charity taxation expert for Farrer & Co., a London-based law firm, told Philanthropy Management, “There’s a point where the logic of taxing charities falls down. Taxing the assets of a legitimate charity takes money from a public good and recycles it to deliver what is purportedly another public good. It can be difficult to see what benefit has been achieved.”

Government taxation of charities tends to reduce the philanthropic sector’s ability to address social needs that are often not covered by government, according to Richard Schwartz, Philanthropy Management‘s editor. “This calls into question the ability of tax authorities to assess the consequences of their policies,” he commented.

The panel considered the position shared by Stanford University’s Robert Reich that charitable giving is a form of consumption and should be taxed as such. Schwartz and other panelists questioned this thinking, noting that it equates consumption with activities that can contribute to, and strengthen, society.

Members of the panel observed that the US and UK have consistently enjoyed a high level of giving, according to a Charities’ Aid Foundation study. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also offer the most generous tax relief among developed nations. Germany was mentioned as an example of a country that offers minimal tax relief and has a much lower degree of giving as a percentage of GDP.

Panelist David Altschuler, chairman of the Board of the One to One Children’s Fund, suggested that government services and philanthropy are not mutually exclusive. “Somehow we need to find a way to work more closely together, whether fiscally or in partnership,” he said. Charles Keidan, director of the Pears Foundation, concurred that there is no reason why public-private partnerships shouldn’t exist, but cautioned that nonprofits should not undertake initiatives that are “the proper role of government.”

About Philanthropy Management

Philanthropy Management, an Asset International publication, focuses on the financial, operational and strategic services provided to foundations, endowments and other large-scale grant makers by banks, asset managers and other professional advisors. Edited by Richard Schwartz, it is distributed globally to more than 11,000 senior executives within the largest grant making entities in the Americas, Europe, Asiaand Middle East, including foundations and endowments, family foundations and family offices.

Philanthropy Management aims to provide philanthropic institutions with a broader and more refined range of tools, resources and research to measure their own success and the impact of the advisors they use. Please visit philanthropy-management.com.

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Transparency Life Sciences (TLS), the world’s first drug development company based on open innovation and crowdsourcing, announced that it has concluded an agreement with Stanford University giving the company an exclusive option to license intellectual property covering the use of lisinopril as a treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS).

Separately, TLS announced that MS expert Dr. Lawrence Steinman, the George A. Zimmermann Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences & Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine and Chair of the TLS Scientific Advisory Board, presented preclinical data on the potential of lisinopril in MS at a recent Gordon Conference.

“This is an exciting development for those of us who have been exploring the potential of lisinopril as a treatment for MS,” noted Professor Steinman. “We have assembled a substantial body of preclinical data that confirms the role of the angiotensin system in the pathology of MS, along with evidence that the widely used ACE inhibitor lisinopril can modulate those effects in target-specific ways.

We are delighted that drug development game-changer Transparency Life Sciences has chosen lisinopril as its first development candidate, enabling us to test whether these provocative preclinical findings can translate into a safe and affordable new therapeutic option for MS patients.”

Interested individuals are invited to contribute to the design of the protocol for the Phase II trial of lisinopril in multiple sclerosis. The protocol template is currently available on a prototype of the company’s crowdsourced web platform that allows patients, physicians, researchers and others to participate in the design of clinical studies for compounds that TLS has in-licensed for development.

Tomasz Sablinski, M.D., Ph.D., founding CEO of TLS, noted, “Lisinopril is an inexpensive and effective drug that has been used safely by millions of people around the world to control their high blood pressure. A growing body of evidence suggests that it could also play an important role in helping to control the complex immunological and inflammatory processes associated with MS.

Lisinopril is an ideal candidate for our strategy of radically redesigning the clinical trial process to assess the potential of drugs that might otherwise never be tested. We invite anyone with an interest in helping to advance MS therapy to visit our website and contribute to the design process.”

The work of Dr. Steinman and others has demonstrated that both angiotensin receptors and an angiotensin-producing enzyme are abundant at sites of disease and inflammation in brains affected by multiple sclerosis. In animal models of MS, studies have shown that blockade of these receptors with the angiotensin inhibitor lisinopril reduces the areas affected by pathology and provides significant clinical benefits, including reduction in paralysis and improved mobility.

In these studies, lisinopril reduced molecular measures of inflammation that accompany MS, yet it did not inhibit overall immune function. In addition, lisinopril triggered proliferation of regulatory T cells, which are known to help moderate or prevent autoimmune disease.

Transparency’s game-changing approach is based on three principles. First, crowdsourcing is being employed to design clinical protocols with the participation of patients, medical experts, front-line physicians and others, which is expected to result in protocols focused on those parameters most relevant to actual clinical practice.

Second, Transparency is leveraging telemedicine and related technologies to reduce burdens on clinical trial subjects, enhance data quality and reduce costs. Third, TLS is committed to demonstrating how data transparency can accelerate and improve the drug development process.

Professor Steinman’s talk, “New Targets for Old Arrows: Potential for Angiotensin Blockade in Multiple Sclerosis”, was presented at the Gordon Conference Angiotensin: Emerging and Evolving Paradigms In the Renin-Angiotensin Systemin Ventura, CA on March 1, 2012.

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Last week, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), electrical engineer Ada Poon reported that she has developed a wireless device that swims through the blood-stream and delivers medicine throughout the body.

“Such devices could revolutionize medical technology,” Poon states in the Stanford University news release. Poon works as an assistant professor at the Stanford School of Engineering. She states, “Applications include everything from diagnostics to minimally invasive surgeries.”

Prior, implanted medical devices (such as pacemakers and cochlear implants) were usually powered by battery, and were heavy and stationary. Poon’s device, on the other hand, is wireless and self-propelled; it does not require batteries or cables to keep itself energized, and is instead powered by electromagnetic radio waves that come from a radio transmitter outside the body. According to Stanford University,

“The transmitter and the antennae [from the device] are magnetically coupled such that any change in current flow in the transmitter produces a voltage in the other wire – or, more accurately, it induces a voltage.”

Wireless implantable devices are not a new concept. Scientists have been working on this sort of device for half a century, using Maxwell’s equations– which consist of a set of equations that explain the fundamentals and relationship between electricity and magnetism– to perform calculations. However, scientists have stopped due to the equations results, which expressed that radio waves would exponentially decrease as it traveled through the body.

Poon identified several mistakes in their calculations. The scientists had assumed the body acted as a good conductor of electricity. It turns out that it is not so. Poon, instead, viewed the body as dielectric – a good electric insulator. Collaborating with graduate students David Pivonka and Anatoly Yakovlev, she used a different set of equations, from which she realized radio waves can still move through tissue and not decrease in energy. She further discovered that they can travel much farther than she or anyone previously expected.

Poon then developed two types of the self-propelled device. One powers itself by driving an electric current directly in the blood, propelling itself five centimeters per second. The other produces a current goes that back and forth through a loop of wire. It produces whooshing motion as maneuvers as if it were a kayak.

“There is considerable room for improvement and much work remains before such devices are ready for medical applications,” says Poon. “But for the first time in decades the possibility seems closer than ever.”

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Undergraduate students from Tufts University, the University of California at Berkeley and Ohio University are being recognized by IEEE-USA this week – National Engineers Week – for creating inspirational 90-second YouTube videos for youngsters 11 to 13 years old on “How Engineers Make a World of Difference.”

Nita Patel, IEEE-USA vice president of communications and public awareness, praised the quality and diversity of the entries and announced the $5,000 in student awards for IEEE-USA’s fifth annual online engineering video scholarship award competition:

• $1,500 to Kristen Ford (and her team) at Tufts for best in content and message, reinforcing that engineers and technical professionals are creative people who seek to make life better for all
• $1,500 to Matthias Mentink (and his team) at Berkeley for best production quality and most professional look
• $1,500 to Paul Stocklin at Ohio University for the most-viewed submission as of the competition deadline

In addition, $50 in Amazon gift cards will be awarded to each of the three winning team leaders, as well as to all of the entering team leaders.

To view this year’s winning entries and entries from four previous years, see http://www.youtube.com/user/ieeeusavideo. Entries were also received in 2011-12 from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Norfolk State University, Virginia State University and the University of Texas at Dallas.

For the fifth consecutive year, IEEE-USA’s judging panel included Andrew Quecan, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Stanford University and J.D. candidate at the University of Texas; Suzette Aguilar, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin; and Nate Ball, mechanical engineer, entrepreneur, and former host of PBS’ “Design Squad Nation.”

IEEE-USA advances the public good and promotes the careers and public policy interests of 210,000 engineering, computing and technology professionals who are U.S. members of IEEE. For information on the benefits of IEEE membership, see http://www.ieee.org/join.

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