WSJ tech award winners announced

The Wall Street Journal just announced this year's winners of its annual Technology Innovation Awards, reports Medgadget.

The Gold winner, and the top entry in the medicine-biotech category, is Abbott Laboratories and its Ibis Biosciences unit that developed the T5000, a pathogen-detecting scanner that uses a novel combination of mass spectrometry and mathematics to match up molecular readings against a large database of known genetic signatures.

The Silver, and the winning selection in the medical devices category, went to Touch Bionics for the i-Limb hand prosthesis. The device has individual powered fingers and is probably the most advanced artificial hand on the market today.

Vu1 has posted a documentary which for the first time publicly demonstrates the company's Electron Stimulated Luminescence (ESL) lighting technology, states Reuters.

According to Vu1, it is continuing development of its ESL technology in order to bring consumers a highly energy-efficient light bulb, without the environmental hazards of mercury, limited features, price concerns and poor light quality associated with other lighting sources such as compact fluorescent lamps or light emitting diodes.

More than 30 countries worldwide, including the US, have looming timelines to ban the incandescent bulb (some beginning in 2009), in order to reduce the global warming impacts and wasted energy in favour of new energy-efficient lighting options.

Algae blooms are unpleasant and unpredictable phenomena that arise quickly and strike seas and oceans, often causing serious problems to local ecosystems, writes Gizmag.

But in an effort to try and find a use for such algae, a research team from Uppsala University, Sweden, has recently managed to design a record-breaking 'green' lightweight battery that is incredibly easy to produce and could just even out the environmental consequences of these blooms.

As the authors explained in a paper published in the latest edition of the journal Nano Letters, the key idea behind the design of this battery was to exploit the unique cellulose structure of the Cladophora algae. By coating this structure with an extremely thin (50 nanometers) layer of conducting polymer, the team managed to produce a battery that weighs very little and can be fully charged in as little time.