It’s hard to believe it’s that time of year again! The R&D 100 Awards has increasingly become a year-round event for R&D Magazine’s editors. In the fall, even as we present the year’s winners with their awards at a black-tie event in Florida, we have already opened the doors online for the next year’s entries.

As the awards grow in size, and our coverage online grows more extensive, we find ourselves reaching out more frequently for the expertise of professionals working in high-technology fields. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been collecting more entries over the past few years, and, increasingly, the products we evaluate are highly innovative, complex, and require the knowledgeable of someone who has experience in a given field, whether it’s live cell imaging, metals, spectrometers, or solar cells. In fact, the number of technology categories we do evaluate has grown from 17 or 18 in 2007 to a full 20 in 2012. We fully expect that, as we mark off a full half-century of the leading awards program for industry-wide innovation, we will require more help than ever.

At the same time, judges have less time then ever before as the demands of life leave little time for reading a lot of entry material. Over the past few years, the R&D’s editors have worked hard to streamline the judging process so that, aside from reading the entry, it only requires a quick download of the entry form and the completion of simple, secure online survey. This leaves judges to spend the majority of their time absorbing the entry material, whether this encompasses videos, patent information, or simply the entry form itself. The survey method is a great help to editors as well, as it allows them to quickly hone in on stand-out technologies and truly begin the evaluation process.

Even if you have just an hour or two on the weekend, consider spending some time helping us find the top 100. We expect to receive plenty of entries for each of the 20 technology fields we review for these awards. With your commitment to judge new products in your field of expertise, we can quickly reach 100 winners.

2012 R&D 100 Awards Judge Application Form

As we sent the August issue to press, the editors of R&D Magazine are busy preparing for the September issue, which will profile the top innovations selected for the 2011 R&D 100 Awards. At the same time, we have opened nominations for the 2012 competition, which will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the awards. If your company introduced a product this year, you can enter your product now. Here are typical questions we receive about the process:

What products or processes are eligible? Any new technical product or process that was first available for purchase or licensing between Jan. 1, 2011, and Dec. 31, 2011, is eligible for the 2012 R&D 100 Awards. The product must be a working, marketable product: proof-of-concept prototypes do not qualify. Products requiring regulatory approval must have received approval for marketing by a governing regulatory authority.

How do I enter? Companies must complete and submit an entry form, pay the entry fee, and submit all documentation electronically by the deadline of March 16, 2012.

The entry is a written document, (typically 10 to 20 pages in length) that details development history, primary functions, methods of operation, scientific theories behind the technology, the materials, composition, construction, or mechanism of action, and product price. Supporting information—scientific papers, images, videos, testimonials—is encouraged.

Editors' Advice: Answer all of the questions in a clear, concise, and objective manner. Do not write this as an advertisement or marketing brochure. Write the document as an informative, scientific report that will be read by very busy judges.

How do the judges evaluate entries? The most important section of the entry is the product comparison. Entrants are asked to list their product's competitors and supply a matrix showing how the key features of the product—including price and operating costs—compare to existing products or technologies. The judges also want to know a product's limitations. If you say the product has no shortcomings, expect the judges to be skeptical about your entry.

It is in the competitive matrix where many entries fail to explain their technology and its contribution to the market in clear, objective terms. The statement "We have no competition" sends up a red flag. Every product and process has competition of some form. For example, the first telephone competed with the telegraph and in-person conversation. The first motor vehicle competed with the horse and buggy.

How do I improve my entry? To provide additional assistance to companies submitting entries, particularly first-time entrants, the editors are offering an Early Bird review for entries submitted before Nov. 15, 2011. Upon request, the editors will provide recommendations to help you improve the entry by Dec. 15, 2011. While we can’t guarantee that the recommendations will translate into a win, the suggestions will guide you to provide the information that the judges seek.

Can you tell me more? You can find detailed instructions, read "How to Win An R&D 100 Award" and "10 Most Common R&D 100 Questions", sign up for the mailing list, and download the entry form on our website: http://www.rdmag.com/Awards/RD-100-Awards/R-D-100-Awards/

If you are an R&D Daily subscriber you are probably used to seeing us appear in your mailbox between lunch and quitting time. Now you can have a little R&D Daily with your morning coffee—as well as your afternoon break. Starting May 2, you will receive--two R&D Daily newsletters: the a.m. Edition and the p.m. Edition. Each newsletter will feature the science and technology news that R&D Daily readers seek every day. There’s no need for existing subscribers to sign up again; and if you haven’t subscribed yet, give it a try here.

If you are like me, you may groan at the prospect of yet more email. But I like to think the Daily is a far more welcome arrival to the inbox than, say, yet another important message about great deals on inkjet cartridges or another bogus offer to enter into a money laundering arrangement with the wealthy relatives of Hosni Mubarak. We think you might rather read about the ability for Earth recover from global warming events in our past or development of the world's deepest-diving submersible.

And the new format will help keep us editors on our toes. Yes, we are well-practiced at chasing down the some of the best and most pertinent R&D news out there, and we enjoy the chase. But sometimes we wish we could jump on a breaking story more quickly, or share more content that normally wouldn’t fit into our newsletter.

So, basically, the new Daily format will be leaner, faster, and offer more insight than before. Not too shabby. And if you have any ideas or suggestions for stories, feel free to send it our way.

Enjoy the fresh supply of R&D news.

Netflix is wonderful for the mailbox. Alongside bills, credit card offers and a never-ending stream of fat magazines, that familiar red-and-white envelope holds the promise of an hour or two of mindless entertainment. Inevitably, though, for every dumb movie or stand-up comedy, I feel obligated to add a documentary, exposé, or heart-wrenching Oscar-winner. The latest was Gasland, which sat on the shelf unwatched for some weeks until I heard it mentioned on the radio during my morning commute. I got what I expected; a Michael Moore-esque “j’accuse” laced with free-form cinematography and folk music.

The filmmaker, Josh Fox, was offered $100,000 to allow natural gas wildcatting on his land. Instead of just accepting the money, he investigated the history of the Marcellus Shale drilling projects. Curious about rumors that one type of extraction method, fracking, was responsible for destroying drinking water wells, he began filming his visits to unfortunate landowners.

Fox isn’t really as interesting, shocking, or clownish as Moore, so the style didn’t quite work. His home visits did, however. He spoke to enough real people, like ranchers, with real problems, like flaming faucets, bubbling creeks, dead fish, to make a convincing case about the dangers of allowing fracking companies to tap wells. It didn’t to show a little clownish behavior on the part of the gas industry and state DEP officials.

But is a single documentary enough to encourage the entire natural gas industry to abandon fracking? Not really. None of Moore’s documentaries were enough to change the car industry, the oil industry, the health industry, or even GM. And America is still a fast food nation. The fact is, a documentary about environmental hazards could be made about nearly any energy-related industry. Living creates waste.

But his project helped open the floodgates on some reality checks for the natural gas industry and the wildcat-like atmosphere surrounding the Marcellus Shale, the repository of enough gas energy to keep the U.S. running for decades. The ability to harvest this resource through fracking--pumping water and chemicals deep underground to crack open gas deposits--has been celebrated as the short-term answer to foreign oil.

But nobody in the natural gas industry has had to answer for what is becoming a major issue: what should we do with the waste?

Waste is the head scratcher for many industries. Take solar energy. Silicon manufacturing creates toxic byproducts, like silicon tetrachloride. In 2008, a Chinese company caught dumping this material, which can break down to hydrochloric acid, gave the “green” solar industry a black eye. This is the ugly part of process development. Perhaps R&D will close the loop and find a good use for that byproduct. The Dai-ichi reactors would not have cause such an awful mess had they not been holding so many spent fuel rods. The reason they were is because the nuclear industry as a whole still doesn’t have a good solution for its waste.

And this is what’s biting the natural gas industry. The fracking itself occurs deep underground, where most of the fracturing and propping open of cracks is accomplished with treated water and sand. This water also returns to the surface, laden with chemicals. Early this week, staffers working for the House Energy and Commerce Committee found that 14 hydraulic fracturing companies used 866 million gallons of products, hundreds of which contained chemicals that are or might be carcinogenic or are listed as hazardous air pollutants. Laced with a variety of common (benzene, toluene) and custom (proprietary) chemicals, this water is a liability and a cost as soon as it comes out of the ground. Drillers have been increasingly finding way to recycle this water, which is typically held in above-ground ponds. It’s used to melt ice, or tamp down dusty roads. With a little research, perhaps the chemicals can be separated before it's dumped or evaporated.

But other byproducts are also causing headaches. Methane, a gas well-known for greenhouse properties, is dissipated from drilling wells and equipment at a far higher rate than initially thought. In addition, as we’ve seen with oil drilling, accidents happen. Many of the complaints about contaminated water so far have probably resulted from blowouts and casing failures, both of which will spread contaminants through groundwater. T. Boone Pickens, who is backing legislation that would transition the 18 million diesel trucks in the U.S. to natural gas power, has defended the fracking practice, saying that he wasn’t aware of a single lawsuit or complaint that arose from its use. With legislation in play, it certainly doesn’t help his case any to claim that natural gas drilling can be bad.

But while Pickens is right that it would be a great idea to stop burning diesel and to start burning domestic fuel, it’s also true that public is now more educated about fracking. Even beyond the media reports, experts are now gauging the impacts of natural gas, and gas doesn't always win. And there are legal conundrums that plague the mature industry, too. Proprietary chemicals, for example, are undisclosed to environmental agencies. Without independent oversight we simply can't know for sure the long-term impacts of their use.

In Pennsylvania, where Fox filmed some of his documentary, coal mining was the first energy rush. Some coal mines caught fire, and at least one there has never stopped burning. The town above it remains abandoned. The gas industry fortunately doesn’t face runaway fires and ghost towns, so we can call it progress. And I certainly love the benefits of a gas stove and gas heat, and would probably buy a natural gas-powered car if one was offered. But the industry can do a better job of explaining what these chemicals will do to water in the long-term, how we can dispose of the wastewater responsibly, and how the benefits of natural gas outweigh the inevitable environmental impacts.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the last hurdles in human exploration of the globe were overthrown, notably the scaling of Mt. Everest and the plumbing of the depths of the Marianas Trench. They paved the way for planting a flag on the Moon. But one notable project went underfunded and eventually forgotten.

Project Mohole was the first effort to dig down to the Mohorovičić Discontinuity, where exists an unsolved mystery. Named after a Croatian seismologist, the Discontinuity is where seismic waves abruptly change in frequency. The change can be attributed to a difference in material as the basalt of Earth’s crust gives way to perioditic materials of the more plastic mantle. The switchover is so sudden, however, that this theory clashed with the expectation that the interface between the mantle and the crust is not well defined. As a result, other explanations have been offered, such as the idea that the waves undergo a phase switch as the result of passing through temperature gradients in mantle.

After digging about 600 feet into the crust (in nearly 12,000 feet of water), Project Mohole’s original support mechanism, the American Miscellaneous Society, dissipated and funding from Congress dissipated after control was passed to the National Science Foundation. However, the project was considered successful, and the techniques developed proved that deep holes could be dug in deep water.

Digging through the ocean floor, of course, is easier in that the crust is just 3 miles thick in many places, letting researchers avoid many miles of extra drilling. That didn’t stop the Soviet Union, of course, from drilling their monstrous 40,000-foot Kola Superdeep Borehole.

In a commentary in the March 24 issue of Nature, Damon Teagle of the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, UK, and Benoît Ildefonse of the University of Montpellier in France say we can now drill into the Earth’s mantle. I cannot vouchsafe their argument as I do not have an online access to Nature’s articles, but perhaps it’s best to say that we can finally do so without having to spend quite so much time and money. Nature, in fact, has published several articles about mantle-deep boreholes, dating back to a 1958 piece by T.F. Gaskell, a physicist at British Petroleum.

The technology to reach the mantle has probably been available since Project Mohole, but whether anyone is willing to commit to the effort is another question. We have some precedent for what to expect at these depths. Temperatures in the Russian borehole achieved 360 degrees C, hot enough to spur a hoax about the discovery of Hell. In addition to the Kola Superdeep, another 34,000 foot hole was drilled in the U.S. in search of oil. Crushing pressures of 25,000 psi were encountered before molten sulfur melted the drill bit.

Undoubtedly drilling will be very expensive and fraught with setback. The drill team will probably need to design an entirely new drill setup that can do without the traditional riser that vents explosive gases. And some method of forcing drilled material to the surface will need to be invented. Insights derived from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program will probably be crucial to the effort.

But is it worth it? Absolutely. In the 1950s, the excitement of Project Mohole was enough to prompt a gushing article from Popular Science. I think we can consider it unfinished business.

In February 2001, the journal Science published two scientific papers that, for the first time, described parts of the newly sequenced human genome. Ten years later, the journal has dedicated the month of February to a special series of literature about one of the most celebrated scientific breakthroughs our time.

It’s a fitting time to discuss genomics. The field has attracted an unprecedented array of entrepreneurial activity and venture capital, but it’s promise has lost a little luster to an array of technical and logistical challenges. Granted, most scientists hadn’t foreseen practical findings in just a decade, but the business case for sequencing companies is getting slightly more challenging. Clinical results do not yet exist, and the greater challenge of proteomics is considered by many the realm of study where a true understanding of systems biology lies.

The Science articles reflect the mixture of satisfaction and warning. National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins wrote about how genomics is now beginning to impact real people:
“When the draft sequence of the human genome was published in February 2001, Nature and Science featured human faces on their covers. As striking as these images were, they could be seen as more art than science, because systematic genome-wide sequencing had yet to be applied to individuals for medical purposes. What a difference a decade makes. Real faces are now appearing that demonstrate the medical value of comprehensive genome sequencing.”

Collins goes on to describes a 6-year-old Wisconsin boy who until recently suffered from a poorly understand inflammatory condition of the bowels. A whole genome analysis was performed. Researchers identified a genetic mutation that eventually led to an experimental but potentially successful treatment.

Even as Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, is counseling scientists not to expect too much too soon from genomic mapping breakthroughs, Collins message is an auspicious one. Most researchers are still confident that the golden age of genomics will soon be upon us.

But in the same issue of Science, genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter strikes a cautionary tone. Although sequencing techniques are constantly evolving and improving, most cost-effective, or “cheap”, sequencing efforts fall far short of the techniques required to obtain the full diploid human genome sequence of 3 billion base pairs. As recently as 2007, he writes that sort of comprehensive effort required nine months. A period of months is a vast improvement over the four years it took Venter’s team to sequence influenza, the first living species to be decoded. But even today, most sequencing technologies produce much shorter sequences from much smaller DNA fragments.

Sequencing shortcomings might not be as problematic, Venter writes, but for the fact that we lack a library of standardized human phenotypes against which clinical trials and predictive DNA analysis can be performed. The result, he says, is a gap between expectations and reality that is likely to persist until we improve DNA data analysis:

“Although many ‘genome’ companies and researchers are promoting personal genomics for medicine and/or life choices, regulation of data quality and standards is lacking, which has made deceptive marketing a reality in some instances. We have sequence and genetic data quality that is suitable for some scientific analyses but no standards adequate for clinical practice or even for informing individuals of results that exist. “

Venter, the 1998 R&D Magazine Innovator of the Year, is no doubt aware that lack of standardization does not indicate stagnation: development in sequencing technologies will continue as long as potential benefits exist. Researchers are inclined to look ahead. In the same issue of Science, the prospect of whole population genetics and the ability to target and track disease mutations is discussed, even though we don’t yet have the tools to accomplish such wide-scale or high-throughput analyses.

Both Collins and Venter are likely aware of efforts in areas like metabolomics and proteomics that may be complimentary to a better understanding of the human genome. And as soon as real and positive results emerge like the young boy cited by Collins, the push will be on for standardization, clinical transitions, and, hopefully, universal accessibility.

On Wednesday, the National Institute of Technology and Standards--more simply, NIST--demonstrated that in microscopy, there’s always a new way "slice a sample".

In 1931, when the first transmission electron microscope was built in a laboratory in Germany, researchers tested their handiwork by firing the electron gun at mesh gratings, gauging the ability of their instrument to deflect electrons. In recent work at NIST, the grate has become a star player. Built using nanoscale openings, the new grating uses the shape of its apertures to finesse the orbital momentum of electrons generating by the gun, creating a corkscrew shape in free space.

NIST researchers twisted the flat electron wavefronts into a fan of helices using a very thin film with a 5-micron-diameter pattern of nanoscale slits, which combines the wavefronts to create spiral forms similar to a pasta maker extruding rotini. This method produces several electron beams fanning out in different directions, with each beam made of electrons that orbit around the direction of the beam.

By "twisting" the angular momentum of the electrons by 100 times, NIST can fan the beam 10 times more widely than a conventional electron microscope. The wider beam deflects within the sample more readily, offering the possibility of allowing TEM to be used on a greater variety of specimens, such as biological samples, which tend to be invisible the powerful beams.

The nanograting is the latest in a stream of inventions that has positioned TEM firmly near the top of the commercial lab technology food chain, with a price tag to match. The TEM has a deserved reputation among researchers. It’s big, It’s capable. It’s complex. It’s finicky. It’s pricey. And it requires a healthy dose of training and experience to extract the true value of its prodigious resolving power. In short, it’s like the nuclear reactor of the lab; nothing else can perform the way the TEM can, but few inventions cost so much to build and demand so much expertise to create and operate.

And yet, this hasn’t stopped demand for TEMs, which command a hundred million dollar market despite the limited array of customers. Because we can’t do without it’s ability to so handily outperform the best optical microscopes, the technology base has received almost continual attention since Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska at Siemens in Germany improved on earlier cathode ray oscilloscope designs to create that very first TEM. The idea that a magnetic “lens” could be used to deflect a beam of electrons (a cathode) dated back to the mid-19th century, but, amazingly, Knoll and Ruska had, at the time, no concept of the wave nature of electrons. They were more concerned with the function of the devices to ever think about putting an actual specimen in the beamline. In 1932, de Broglie’s hypothesis, by then a 5-year-old paper, came to their attention. Mathematically, the theory suggested that electrons, whose wavelength is a tiny fraction of the wavefront of light, could be used to show much finer detail than any conventional microscope, even down to the atomic level.

The first practical TEM, Originally installed at I. G Farben-Werke and now on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany

They quickly abandoned test images of mesh grids and gratings and began inserting samples of objects in the path of the electron beam. The first image to show better resolution than an optical microscope? Cotton fibers, which were promptly destroyed by the electron beam.

In 1939, the first commercial TEM was built. After World War II, a steady stream of improvements emerged: sample preparation techniques, more advanced electromagnetic lens and ultrahigh vacuum equipment, and field-emission guns to allow scanning-type TEMs.

Interestingly, the give-and-take dynamic between universities and electron microscope vendors that emerged after World War II continues to this day. Publicly-funded institutions push the limits of electron beam technology to solve theoretical problems, while industry partners provide technical and manufacturing resources, as well as experience, in return for the regular addition of features to meet new industrial applications. Perhaps the most advanced recent example has been the collaboration between FEI Company, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and others on the TEAM microscope, an R&D 100 Award winning STEM (scanning transmission electron microscope) that is capable of resolving to one-half Angstrom.

While the TEAM microscope may live up to capable but cantankerous reputation of previous TEMs (which often require their own sound-proof enclosures and gigantic vibration-free stages) that’s the price to pay for the world’s best imaging resolution. Not many can pay for it, so hopefully NIST’s innovation, and its potentially small price tag as an additional feature in existing TEM designs, is a sign of things to come.