Paul Heney

Following up on the enormous success of the first two episodes of R&D 100 – The Podcast, we are happy to report that Episode 3 is now live! Today, co-hosts Paul J. Heney and Aimee Kalnoskas, editors with R&D World magazine, are day drinking — but it’s all in the name of science! We swear! In…

Graphene is a flat hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms, just one atom thick. It is a form of carbon related to carbon nanotubes and buckyballs (C60). Although it has always occurred naturally, it is only recently that it has been isolated and it’s individual properties examined. It is now known that graphene has exceptional electrical,…

Non-destructive testing (NDT) is a general term for any method that determines material properties without damaging the object being tested. Most commonly it is used to measure cracks and pores in materials that may be subject to a brittle failure. Because these defects could act as crack initiation sites, the size and frequency of the…

By Mark Butler, IPS The race for a COVID-19 vaccine has highlighted the importance of accelerating the design and construction process, in order to bring manufacturing facilities online to produce the vaccine as quickly as possible. The silver lining of the COVID pandemic is that it has fostered innovation and collaboration. While companies are racing…

Late last year, I attended an excellent CDX conference at Georgia Tech that was focused on digital transformation. There were speakers from all sorts of well-known organizations, from Accenture to Verizon. But all of these months later, I’m still struck by the intriguing talk from Rajesh Anandan of Ultranauts, an organization I’d never heard of.…

About half of the respondents to the 2020 Global R&D Funding Forecast survey expect their 2020 R&D budgets to rise. More than a third also expect to see their capital budgets increase and their organization’s participation in alliances grow as well. Only 16% of the respondents expect to see their acquisition of outside intellectual property…

An imaging technique that shows the underlying spectrum for each pixel Hyperspectral imaging combines digital imaging with spectroscopy, so that the underlying frequencies in the spectrum for each pixel can be identified. Because only a single wavelength can be represented as a colour for a pixel, a two-dimensional hyperspectral image effectively represents three-dimensional information, in…

One can almost see the future of R&D in current biopharmaceutical research labs: There are often no researchers in attendance. Yet the instrumentation is humming away, and automated loading and unloading systems are quietly and smoothly shuffling sample trays. Data is detected, collected and automatically loaded into digital files which are available immediately in real-time…

A Bunsen burner is a type of gas burner commonly used as a heat source in laboratory experiments. The burner consists of a flat base with a straight tube extending vertically, known as the barrel or chimney. Natural gas (predominantly methane) or a liquified petroleum gas such as propane or butane is supplied at the…

Following up on the popular inaugural episode of R&D 100 – The Podcast, today, Episode 2 was released. In this episode, co-hosts Paul J. Heney and Aimee Kalnoskas, editors with R&D World, talk a little about the first year of the publication’s revamped website and what the top article has been. Then, they delve into…

Winners for the 2020 R&D 100 Awards in the Mechanical/Materials category have been announced by R&D World magazine. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 58th year, received entries from 19 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel grew to include nearly 50 well-respected industry professionals across the globe, including new judges in places such as…

Neural networks are a way of processing information that is used in both biological nervous systems and in artificial intelligence, or machine learning. Digital computers follow a von Neumann model, moving data from memory, performing clearly defined calculations on it, and then storing the resulting transformed data back in the memory. Neural networks on the…

Winners for the 2020 R&D 100 Awards in the Mechanical/Materials category have been announced by R&D World magazine. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 58th year, received entries from 19 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel grew to include nearly 50 well-respected industry professionals across the globe, including new judges in places such as…

Winners for the 2020 R&D 100 Awards in the first two categories have been announced by R&D World magazine. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 58th year, received entries from 19 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel grew to include nearly 50 well-respected industry professionals across the globe, including new judges in places such…

Winners for the 2020 R&D 100 Awards in the four Special Recognition categories have been announced by R&D World magazine. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 58th year, received entries from 19 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel grew to include nearly 50 well-respected industry professionals across the globe, including new judges in places…

A spectrometer is an instrument which identifies the underlying frequencies in a spectrum. This is a very broad technique that can be applied to different form of energy spectrum in order to measure different types of physical properties in matter. Most commonly, a spectrometer refers to an optical spectrometer. Spectra and Resonance Resonance, and how…

Finalists for the 2020 R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World magazine. This renowned worldwide competition, now in its 58th year, received entries from 19 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel grew to include nearly 50 well-respected industry professionals across the globe, including new judges in places such as Australia, Nigeria, and the…

China and Asian R&D During the 2008-2009 financial crisis, China’s massive demand for goods and materials supported global economic growth, especially in areas like Brazil, Germany and Australia, which avoided recessions because of Chinese trade. That type of response for the COVID-19 pandemic is not likely this year. China’s economy was affected more in 2020…

A DNA sequencer is a machine which automatically determines the sequence of nucleotides in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the fundamental code which stores genetic information. DNA is a complex molecule made up of two long polynucleotide chains, known as strands, coiled around each other to form a double helix. Each strand is built up from a…

European Union/U.K. R&D Like most other regions of the world, the European Union (EU) and the U.K. have been caught in the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and economic consequences. In April, the U.K., the world’s sixth largest economy, saw its output drop 20% from March and 25% from April 2019. The U.K.’s Office for National Statistics…

Energy R&D With the COVID-19 recession, restricted travel and dramatically reduced aerospace demand, demand and production of oil and gas declined more than 20% in the spring. Global oil prices crashed in April. The West Texas and Eastern New Mexico Permian Basin, with its fracking technologies, helped lead the U.S. into global oil leadership just…

Aerospace and defense R&D The commercial airline industry — both suppliers and operators — has been one of the hardest hit industries by the COVID-19 pandemic and is likely to be one of the longest affected industries as well. Boeing, Airbus and General Electric have seen their business models go from years-long production backlogs to…

A burette is used to dispense small volumes of liquid called aliquots, or sometimes gas, with high accuracy. It consists of a long glass tube with a valve at one end to control the flow of liquid. Burettes serve essentially the same purpose as a pipette. Volumetric burettes are manual instruments with graduations inscribed on…

Global pharmaceutical R&D The global biopharmaceutical R&D community has been tasked with finding a cure for the COVID-19 virus. The global health-care industry, up until this pandemic, had been one of the best performing sectors for the investment community. But since the rapid global expansion of the COVID-19 virus in April 2020, it has been…

Putting COVID-19 in perspective The COVID-19 pandemic is not unique. There have been similar events throughout history, including the H1N1-based influenza pandemic (Spanish Flu), which started in 1918 and was estimated to result in 50 million deaths worldwide (and 675,000 in the U.S.). The H3N2-based Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968 was estimated to be…