Battelle and Affiliated National Labs Win 24 R&D 100 Awards.

Battelle runs a number of national laboratories in the US and Oak Ridge National lab won  six of the 24 awards, second only to Lawrence Livermore National Lab based in California.

You can learn more about the specific awards by clicking on the link above.

Congratulations to Battelle and the labs for their great work!

David Skriloff is a Renaissance financial guy – either that or a man with more lives than a cat. He is currently running MKM Capital Advisors LLC in New York City, a firm he founded in June 2008, after a couple of years as a Managing Director at Vision Capital Advisors where, among other things, he raised a $100 million closed-end fund for investing in China.He was a co-founder and EVP of Millivision, a homeland security company that eventually was subsumed by L-3, and whose scanning technology has recently been introduced by L-3 and the TSA at Denver Airport.Prior to that he was CFO of eGlobe, a Nasdaq-listed international telcom carrier, and was co-head of telcom banking at Gerard Klauer Mattison in their go-go days throughout the 1990s. He went to school at Carnegie-Mellon in electrical engineering, and took an MBA from NYU.

David Skriloff, MKM Capital Advisors LLC

 David founded MKM with the goal of being a longterm investor in small and microcap companies.  Most of the investments in his $20 million portfolio are publicly traded (75%); the nonpublic portion (25%) is composed of companies with a prospect of near-term liquidity, either from M&A activity or from a potential reverse merger into a public shell.  MKM is industry agnostic, but invests in non-cyclicals and tends to be event-driven.

 We talked to David yesterday and asked him to give us an example of the type of company he looks for.He nominated Covington, KY-based Valley Forge Composite Technologies Inc (EBB: VLYF, http://www.vlyf.com), a “homeland security” company in the broadest sense.

They have,” Skriloff said, “two detection systems: one that looks at people, and the other that looks at metal cargo containers.Our judgment is that the cargo screening system is far and away the best available, especially since cargo container screening is a difficult task .This is the only technology that we know of that works. Their people screener is also the best of breed but in a more competitive space.  We are excited about both products, particularly since the company has recently announced its first major order from a Middle East government, but are most excited by the cargo screener since it is truly unique. With my background at Millivision, transportation scanning is a segment I have paid a lot of attention to.

“Valley Forge is a newish company founded on technology that originated in Russia. In a post-9-11 effort to guarantee that Russian nuclear scientists did not go to work for ‘dangerous’ regimes, the US, through DOE, provided funding for the commercialization of certain Russian technologies.  Through this program Valley Forge was able to form a joint venture with Lawrence Livermore Labs and the Russian Lebedev Institute to commercialize Lebedev technologies.  MKM was the first institutional investor; prior investments were a combination of government grants and friends & family.”

We checked, and VLYF closed March 3 with a market cap of just under $25 million, a stock price of $0.47, and average trading volume of just over 30,000 shares, probably double-counted. We asked if stock liquidity is not a concern for MKM.

“We don’t care about liquidity,” Skriloff said.“We are not short-term investors. There is a point of view that says that low liquidity can position us to get an even better value for our investment than we would if there were a lot of trading. We tend to buy senior secured convertible notes with warrants, and we are very risk-averse, which means that we try to make sure that our investment is potentially covered with some saleable asset. In the case of VLYF, we could recoup easily by selling the technology.  But assuming the company performs in the way we believe it will, our investors will do very well indeed.”

That example told us a lot about the style of investing, which seems to be characterized by an eagle eye for strong niche noncyclical products balanced by a careful structure pointed at capital preservation.

“We seldom look at biotechs or drug development companies,” he said.  “The problem is that drug development is too expensive, takes too long, takes too many expensive people and laboratories. Medical devices are different; we tend to like them. If their 510(k) is nearly finished, they have potential joint-venture partners, and they are pointed at major indications, we want to see them.

For instance, we have investments in a diabetes device company, Echo Therapeutics Inc (EBB: ECTE, http:www.echotx.com) . It is a company that has developed a non-invasive, needle-free, continuous glucose monitor in conjunction with MIT.  But we are wary of large cash burn rates in today’s economy. We tend to like companies that, in a pinch, we could keep funded ourselves if no one else stepped up to the plate – not that we prefer to be a sole funder (we don’t), but being a sole funder is better than a sale on the courthouse steps.”  ECTE is trading at $0.62, vs a 52-week high of  $2.15, for a market cap of about $11.7 million.

He said his fund likes greentech companies too, primarily those that are developing technologies or gear, rather than those that are generating electricity.  He mentioned a company with a technology developed at Rice University for a new photovoltaic approach that works with the entire light spectrum, and not just visible sunlight. As a result, it can product ‘solar’ electricity even at night, and has no carbon footprint at all. Ideally the technology will lend itself to being silkscreened onto any surface: a roof, for instance. But the identity of that company remains secret, until, one supposes, MKM has completed its investment.

San Diego-based Ethos Environmental Inc (EBB: ETEV, http://www.ethosfr.com) is a favorite. This small company specializes in “additives to fuel and oil. Their EthosFR product,” Skriloff said, “ is a nontoxic, non-hazardous additive that reduces emissions and significantly improves fuel efficiency.  We invested in the third quarter of 2008, and again in February 2009. We believe their California Air Resources Board tests, which will be completed shortly, together with the completion of several trials by large fleets, will make all the difference for them, which also tickles our own event-driven strategy.” ETEV closed on Tuesday at $0.17, with a market cap of $6.5 million, evidence of MKM’s microcap interest.  Their average volume of just over 28,000 shares also testifies to MKM’s independence of a need for stock liquidity at the time of investment.  

We asked David who should be investing in MKM itself. He said it is a hedge fund that requires that its investors be super-accredited, and have $5 million in liquid net work. The investment in MKM ought to be between 2% and 5% of an investor’s portfolio, representing the higher end of risk, volatility and returns (although he believes that the downside is limited since the investments are generally convertible notes backed by assets). He said they were up 5% for 2008, not bad for a fund that was only begun in June and therefore could not have made all its money in the comparatively frothy first half of the year. He said they are flat so far for 2009.

Interested investors can contact Skriloff at david@mkmcap.com,  or by telephone at 212-473-8610.

The News: From the BBC science program Horizon, here’s a cool story about building  fusion reactors – “stars on earth” –  to generate clean electricity by 2030.

The Space 2.0 Connection: The technology is proven, and if it can scale (which is a big “if”), nuclear fusion reactors could power the Earth for generations to come with clean energy from the universe’s most abundant element, hydrogen.

It’s not a trivial problem, notes Manchester University Professor Brian Cox, because stars “are big and hot.” The sun at its core is 15 million degrees, and it’s the size of a million Earths and burns six million tons of hydrogen every second. According to Cox:

Despite the obvious difficulties, however, the UK has hosted a working nuclear fusion reactor in Oxfordshire for the last three decades.

Jet, the Joint European Torus, routinely heats a cocktail of different forms of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium to well over 100 million degrees and initiates nuclear fusion at a rate far in excess of that in the centre of the Sun.

Housed at Sandia National Labs, the Z-Machine has achieved fusion in a test run.

Jet is too small to produce meaningful amounts of electricity, but it is a prototype for a much bigger and potentially commercial design called Iter, now under construction in southern France.

The Jet/Iter approach to fusion is to heat and contain a gas so hot that the electrons are stripped away from the atomic nuclei to form a lively and difficult to control sub-atomic soup known as a plasma.

The plasma is held in an intense magnetic bottle so it never touches the walls of the reactor. If enough deuterium-tritium plasma can be held for long enough at a high enough temperature and pressure, Nature will do the rest. The result is helium and clean, abundant energy.

In the United States, two projects run by the U.S. Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories’ Z-Machine and the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California, are taking a different approach – inertial fusion – to the question. The NIF, billed as the world’s largest laser, is slated for completion this year.

Thanks to White Label Space for the link.

One important “pupil” who paid Fuchs an early visit was Qian Sanqiang. In 1959 Qian was the designated mastermind of Mao’s A-bomb program. In July of that year, Qian made his way to East Germany, where he met with Fuchs at length. (H. Terry Hawkins, now a senior fellow at Los Alamos, told Stillman in 2006, “I read this report in an unclassified publication, that this meeting took place shortly after Fuchs returned to East Germany. Fuchs gave Qian information that greatly assisted the Chinese program.” Also see http://www.oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/category/klaus-fuchs.) During those long summer days of 1959, Fuchs gave Qian a full tutorial on the design and operation of Fat Man. In all likelihood, he also added his thoughts on the role of radiation pressure in thermonuclear weapons.

http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_61/iss_9/47_1.shtml

Above article by Thomas Reed former Secretary of the Air Force (1976–77) and scientist at Lawrence Livermore.

CFR also links to the Reed article at Physics Today.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/17360/physics_today.html

Its possible that Klaus Fuchs gave nuclear know-how to Huanwu-Peng and Kun Huang in the UK between 1945 and 1950.  They were assistants to Max Born.  They returned to China later and became stars in China.

The French may also have helped train them starting even before the German occupation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Sanqiang

Qian went for France in 1937. He studied in Collège de Sorbonne and Collège de France, doing research under Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie. He returned to China in 1948.

Joliot-Curie was a communist.

There were Chinese “students” at several key places.  In America, UK, France, and possibly even in Germany.  (I have misplaced the reference.)

After graduating in 1936 from Qinghua University, one of China’s leading science institutions, he traveled to France to conduct research at the Curie Laboratory and elsewhere.

Like many Chinese scholars who studied abroad, Qian Sanqiang (pronounced cheeyen sahn-cheeyahng) was sympathetic to the Communist revolution in 1949 and resolved to help the Communists “build the country.”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6DC133FF930A35754C0A964958260

Hypothesis: Chinese students abroad were in many cases communists and dual agents of the Russian and Chinese intelligence services.  This may have included Qian Sanqiang, Huanwu-Peng, Kun Huang and others.

Fuchs may have passed additional technical secrets to Russia and China in the late 1940’s through Huanwu-Peng, Kun Huang, both Max Born assistants like Fuchs and possibly in meetings with Qiang Sanqiang before 1948.

China has been intentionally spreading nuclear know-how to other countries according to a new book coming out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/science/09bomb.html?_r=2&ref=science&pagewanted=all

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2008/12/nyt-hidden-travels-of-atomic-bomb.html

==

Steven Chu has been nominated to Department of Energy by Obama.  Chu’s parents came from China c. 1945.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1997/chu-autobio.html

My father, Ju Chin Chu, came to the United States in 1943 to continue his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemical engineering, and two years later, my mother, Ching Chen Li, joined him to study economics. A generation earlier, my mother’s grandfather earned his advanced degrees in civil engineering at Cornell while his brother studied physics under Perrin at the Sorbonne before they returned to China.

==

After the Liberation, he served as director of the French National Center for Scientific Research and became France’s first High Commissioner for Atomic Energy. In 1948 he oversaw the construction of the first French atomic reactor. A devout Communist, he was relieved of his duties in 1950 for political reasons. Joliot-Curie was also one of the eleven signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955. Although he retained his professorship at the Collège de France, on the death of his wife in 1956, he took over her position as Chair of Nuclear Physics at the Sorbonne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Joliot-Curie

Search

Perrin Joliot-Curie

Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb – Google Books Result

by Thomas Powers – 2000 – History – 640 pages
In the years before the war Perrin and Joliot-Curie, longtime friends, both acquired summer houses in the small French coastal town of Paimpol. …
books.google.com/books?isbn=0306810115…

==

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Pontecorvo

In 1948, after he obtained British citizenship, he was invited by John Cockcroft to contribute to the British atomic bomb project at AERE, Harwell where he joined the Nuclear Physics Division under Egon Bretscher. In 1950 he was appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Liverpool which he was due to take up in January, 1951.

However, on August 31, 1950, in the middle of a holiday in Italy, he abruptly left Rome for Stockholm with his wife and three sons without informing friends or relatives. The next day he was helped by Soviet agents to enter the USSR from Finland. His abrupt disappearance caused much concern to many of the western intelligence services, especially those of Britain and the USA who were worried about the escape of atomic secrets to the Soviet Union after the then recent case of Klaus Fuchs. But as was pointed out immediately, Pontecorvo had had only limited access to “secret subjects” and even later no allegation of spying or of transferring of secrets to the Soviets has ever been made against him.

Steven Chu was one of 46 employees named in a 2006 PricewatershouseCoopers audit of improper compensation practices at the University of California. ^[11] Records produced under the California Public Relations Act also show that he was one of at least 29 employees offered unusual perks in hiring letters, perks which the university had not made public.^[12]

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (R) meets with Chinese-American physicist Steven Chu, the 1997 Nobel Physics Prize laureate, in Beijing on Oct. 11, 2007. [Xinhua Photo]

“I think that steven chu would be a great help. Not because he won some prize, but because he is Asian.” Slayer.

The world’s largest laser – with 192 laser beams – is to be fully operational in 2009 and used in experiments on thermonuclear fusion. When completed, it will focus nearly 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy in pulses lasting for a billionth of a second. (A 100-watt light bulb uses 100 joules every second.)

This extraordinary amount of energy is to be used by the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science at Lawrence Livermore hopes to search for the conditions necessary to trigger nuclear fusion – a potential source of nearly unlimited energy.

The laser’s energy will hit a BB-sized target filled with hydrogen and generate temperatures of more than 100 degrees and pressure more than 100 billion times the pressure in the Earth’s atmosphere, according to a press release from Oracle this week. That would be equivalent to the pressure present in stars.

So why is Oracle interested in this project? It is supplying a database.

Recent research on these three planet have surprisingly discovered that in the deep interior of these three planets may contain some solid ice. Here are some facts about the solid ice I took from Science Daily.

Through first-principle molecular dynamics simulations, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, together with University of California, Davis collaborators, used a two-phase approach to determine the melting temperature of ice VII (a high-pressure phase of ice) in pressures ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 atmospheres.

For pressures between 100,000 and 400,000 atmospheres, the team, led by Eric Schwegler, found that ice melts as a molecular solid (similar to how ice melts in a cold drink). But in pressures above 450,000 atmospheres, there is a sharp increase in the slope of the melting curve due to molecular disassociation and proton diffusion in the solid, prior to melting, which is typically referred to as a superionic solid phase.

“The sharp increase in the melting curves slope opens up the possibility that water exists as a solid in the deep interior of planets such as Neptune, Uranus and Earth,” Schwegler said.

Determining the melting curve of water is important to many fields of science, including physics, chemistry and planetary science.It has been proposed that the cold subduction zones in Earth are likely to intersect with the high-pressure melting curve of water, which would have profound implications for the composition and transport of materials in the interior as well as the long-term evolution of the planet as it cools.

The new research pinpoints the melting curve at extremely high pressures (350,000 to 450,000 atmospheres of pressure), similar to those found in the interiors Neptune, Uranus and Earth.At higher pressures, the team found that the onset of molecular dissociation and proton diffusion under pressure occurs gradually and bears many similarities to a type-II superionic solid, such as lead fluoride.

“To accurately determine the melting temperature of water, we used a two-phase simulation method that is designed to avoid the large super-heating and cooling effects that are often present in single-phase heat-until-it-melts or squeeze-until-it-freezes approaches,” Schwegler said.

The research team also includes former LLNL scientists (now at UC Davis) Francois Gygi and Giulia Galli and UC Davis researcher Manu Sharma. The article appears in the Sept. 22 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

-www.sciencedaily.com

National Ignition Facilty (NIF)

Ushering in a New Age for Science

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
—John Dewey

Scientists have been working to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and energy gain in the laboratory for more than half a century. When the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is completed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2009, that long-sought goal will be much closer to realization.

NIF’s 192 giant lasers, housed in a ten-story building the size of three football fields, will deliver at least 60 times more energy than any previous laser system. When all of its beams are operational, NIF will focus about two million joules of ultraviolet laser energy on a tiny target in the center of its target chamber – creating conditions similar to those that exist only in the cores of stars and giant planets and inside a nuclear weapon. The resulting fusion reaction will release many times more energy than the laser energy required to initiate the reaction. Experiments conducted on NIF will make significant contributions to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy, and will help the nation maintain its leadership in basic science and technology. The project is a national collaboration among government, industry and academia and many industrial partners throughout the nation.

Programs in the NIF & Photon Science Directorate draw extensively on expertise from across LLNL, including the Physical Sciences, Engineering, Computation and Chemistry, Materials, Earth, and Life Sciences directorates. This goal is a scientific Grand Challenge that only a national laboratory such as Lawrence Livermore can accomplish.

FACT: This week, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an arm of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), launched its new unclassified website.  What’s there is initially fairly minimal, but they’ll be adding to the public information posted there regularly.

ANALYSIS:  I spent the week in Orlando, as a Keynote speaker at the IARPA ”Incisive Analysis Conference.”  I’ll be writing a little more about the conference in the near future, as I saw some great demo’s and spoke to the principal investigators on many excellent and far-sighted advanced research projects sponsored by IARPA.  It was great to be there and to see so many old friends from the intelligence community, the national labs (PNNL, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Livermore), DoD, and innovative commercial R&D outfits.  Also, as the first IARPA conference since the organization’s launch, it was an opportunity to hear new director Lisa Porter communicate her vision and principles, which she did well and I’ll discuss those soon as well.  (She also kidded me about my efforts to make her a cultural phenomenon, but I blamed it on WIRED magazine.)

Until I get my notes together and determine what is and isn’t appropriate to discuss in the public blogosphere, I will at least post here for your downloading pleasure the slides from my Keynote address.  I was invited by Lisa Porter and Rita Bush to share thoughts on technology and the future of analysis, and since it was pretty open-ended, I wove together some thoughts about bringing greater speed and greater scale to intelligence analytic operations. The title, “Shorter Loop, Longer Tail,” describes the OODA speed aspect and the long-tail framework and their applicability (I argue necessity) to improving traditional analysis.

They also asked me to give some insight into Microsoft Research, which I was more than happy to do, though I made the point at the beginning that I have no sales role whatsoever for the company so I declined to discuss or pitch any current products. By and large the examples I used are all still in the lab, so I was comfortable being an evangelist, not a shill

I do see great potential in current MSR projects to address areas of technological benefit to analysis – for example, cloud computing and secure mashups, semantic computing, robotics, and something I called the “Virtual Long Tail,” combining geospatial visualization, advanced modeling and simulation in virtual worlds and mirror worlds.

I’d appreciate any feedback or thoughts on the slides, and would be happy to expand on particular research projects by email.

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Lawrence Livermore is reporting a new partnership with BP to study in-situ coal gasification. This is a novel idea. Here’s a diagram from the LLNL site:

The two year project has three goals:
1) feasibility for underground CO2 storage
2) environmental risk assessment
3) numerical modeling of the underground processing techniques

This is a novel research idea in that could yield some important information on some new ways of capturing as yet uncapturable coal and sequestering carbon. This is the first I’ve ever heard of doing an industrial process such as this underground. Its development could mean opening up a new niche of carbon product processes that can be done without exposing our atmosphere to it. One could imagine what this could mean in a more evolved sense – could we produce electricity underground indefinitely where we would never have to expose our processing needs to our atmosphere?

Our fundamental problem with greenhouse gas emissions is that we are depositing our naturally sequestered carbon (coal, oil, natural gas) into our atmosphere via our coal electrical plants and cars/trucks. The earth doesn’t re digest this carbon in a meaningful time period (it stays in the atmosphere for a long time). Biofuels represent an option of producing fuels with carbon that cycles through our atmosphere: from the atmosphere to biomass plants through our cars as fuel and back into the atmosphere as car emissions (otherwise known as pollution). It’s still not a pretty option, but it would provide a more stable carbon cycle. But what about coal? This process perhaps represents (if I dream a little bit) an option for using sequestered carbon (coal) within its own cycle: extract coal, covert it to syngas underground, burn the syngas in a turbine (above ground?) and re-sequester it back underground. This would make coal into a “technical nutrient” to use a “Cradle-to-Cradle” definition. It could really give some real options for engineers to continue to utilize coal, etc in a more sustainable way.

This research could be the first step.