The first paragraph of the story is below. Click here to read the full story by Juha-PekkaTikka.
What recourse does an entrepreneur have when there is no venture capital for a start-up with a truly promising invention? At San Diego’s Biological Dynamics, 27-year-old founder Raj Krishnan’s solution is to win entrepreneur and student competitions—and so far he has won 13 awards, nine of them this year, including most recently a $40,000 first prize in the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge, where the judges were impressed with his presentation skills. “We went to the competitions because venture capital is extremely hard to find now, and we have been fortunate. It enables us now to protect our IP and pay bills,” Krishnan says.
If you are reading this from a computer at a university or other organization with an institutional subscription to Science, you should be able to follow the link no problem. Below I have excerpted the story for those without this access:
As if cramped quarters and freeze-dried ice cream weren't enough,astronauts face the unpleasant necessity of urinating in near-zerogravity. Apollo crews solved this problem with condom like devices.Current models consist of a vacuum-cleaner-like hose with attachablefunnels for males and females—now more sophisticated,but still sometimes uncomfortable and messy.
So 10 engineering students from the University of California,San Diego, have teamed up with thermal and fluids engineer EugeneUngar of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, to developsomething better. In January, they were accepted into NASA'sMicrogravity University, a program that gives undergraduatesthe chance to conduct experiments on board a plane that performsparabolic maneuvers to simulate ultralow gravity. By April,the students were in the air testing their "pee machine," acontraption that pushes a column of water through a simulatedurethra into an acrylic box where they can track the flow dynamicswith high-speed cameras.
"We're really going to hit hard with designing and testing differentmethods for collecting urine in the coming years," says TimothyHavard, student leader of the project. One promising design,he says, is a receptacle filled with a honeycomb network thatharnesses surface tension and the velocity of the fluid to capturethe urine with minimal splash-back.
I was just hitting the RSS feeds that this blog links to, and I noticed that the Chronicle of Higher Education's The Wired Campus blog covered the story out this week at UC San Diego has its own iPhone app.
Calit2's Doug Ramsey has a nice wrap up of the strong presence the electrical engineers at the Jacobs School and Calit2 had at Microwave Week in Boston.
Remember Engineers Week? Remember the 400 plus 8th graders who swarmed campus with their neon green shirts and left with an idea of how exciting it is to both go to college and study engineering?
I have also listed all the Jacobs School web stories that are focused on undergrads. Check it out, and send me links to other interesting projects Jacobs School undergrads are involved in both inside and outside the classroom.
The HPWREN project includes creating, demonstrating, and evaluating a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties. The network includes backbone nodes at the UC San Diego and San Diego State University campuses, and a number of "hard to reach" areas in remote environments.
