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DOE Recovery Act Funds status, 9/30/11. Credit: recovery.gov

Two things out of the box: First, remember, permissum lector caveo (translation: What the hell does Peter know, anyway?). Second, the opinions expressed below are totally my own and should be blamed on no one else.

Thus forewarned … Nature has what strikes me as a very disturbing article out regarding the interesting ways funds from the American Recovery Reinvestment Act—you know, the ones earmarked to provide a sharp stimulus to direct and indirect hiring and spending in the science–technology sector—are being used for obviously non-stimulus purposes.

The story, “Stimulus-Response,” carries this summary one-liner: ”The United States’ 2009 financial stimulus bill has provided research with breathing space, rather than the sharp shot in the arm that many anticipated.”

(FYI, just so readers know where I am coming from, my personal point of view is that these types of stimulus programs can be excellent tools to quickly strengthen aggregate demand in the economy, especially during periods when borrowing rates are nearly zero, as long as the funding 1) is substantial in total size; 2) gets into the private economy; and 3) gets into economy quickly.)

Story author Colin Macilwain, seems like he is playing it overly safe or is unable to be able to make up his mind about what’s going on. On one hand, he correctly acknowledges that “the stimulus package as a whole was designed to create jobs and ease the pain of the recession, and at first the administration pledged to get this money distributed and spent as quickly as possible.” [emphasis added]

But from there onwards, the piece is a series of vignettes – focused on ARRA monies available at NIH, NSF and DOE’s Office of Science (collectively $15.1 billion) – about how interesting it is that researchers and institutions have unexpectedly used much of the money to buy “breathing space” for what already exists. For example, there’s this,

From the beginning, however, the funding pulse didn’t have quite the anticipated effects. Duke University in Durham, N.C., for example, expected a hiring rush after it attracted $210 million in ARRA funds, making it one of the ten most successful universities in the country in this regard, says Jim Siedow, Duke’s vice-provost for research. But staffing barely budged. “We gave a party that nobody came to,” he says. “A lot of people used the money to keep the people they already had.”

In the next paragraph, Macilwain reports

[D]espite the early political pressure to get the money out of the door quickly, agencies have allowed funds to be released gradually, to avoid waste.

Macilwain does suggest that whatever claims of job creation reported under ARRA funding are suspect because they rely on self-reported data and may reflect the continuation of previously existing jobs.

Finally, a chart accompanying the story says that NIH, NSF and the Office of Science have only spent 55 percent of their ARRA allocations. (In fact, DOE, alone, has left unspent $15 billion of ARRA money.)

Macilwain is overly generous when he describes what’s going on as a “stretching out and morphing.” He and Nature may not want to say it, but this pretty clearly indicates some enormous failures in the ARRA.

Let me be clear here: The criticism isn’t that the monies won’t eventually be helpful to R&D — they will be. My criticism is that the monies, now, can’t be helpful in the ways that would have been the most helpful and with the greatest impact for science and the nation.

The most glaring failure is that the administration and these agencies have not spent the ARRA money fast enough. As I have written before, I think that DOE Secretary Steven Chu was exactly right when in February 2009, just two days after the ARRA legislation was signed, he announced “a sweeping reorganization of the DOE’s dispersal of direct loans, loan guarantees and funding contained in the new recovery legislation. The goal of the restructuring is to expedite disbursement of money to begin investments in a new energy economy that will put Americans back to work and create millions of new jobs.” Chu also went on to promise to disperse 70 percent of the investment by the end of 2010.

But, the DOE didn’t come close to that dispersement goal in 2010 and it looks like it won’t make it by the end of 2011 either. As the chart above indicates, the agency reports this week that it has only spent 56 percent of its ARRA funds. With unemployment around 10 percent, leaving $15 billion on the table is an administrative shame and embarrassment.

A couple of important distinctions and economic points must be made here in regard to the concept of “spending” in this context. ARRA money that is held by a principle investigator or an institution but unspent is far different than DOE, NSF or NIH unspent monies. Dispersed money is in the economy and is arguably stimulating, well, something. Undispersed money is not in the economy and stimulates nothing because it is “funny money” that doesn’t really exist until the checks are sent and cashed. It’s not like DOE has the undispersed $15 billion in a bank account somewhere.

Put even another way, by definition, as soon as either funder or fundee starts to play the game of “stretching out and morphing” nondispersed stimulus funds, the funds cease to be able to stimulate anything.

In its defense, the DOE would probably point to the approximate 45,000 jobs it claims to have created via the ARRA, but as noted above, that number would hold more weight if it was verified and actually represented all new jobs.

What went wrong? My guess is a couple of factors have created failures at the policy level. The first factor is that it appears that the agencies have been overly preoccupied with accountability. Regardless of the Solyndra situation (which still looks to me to be about malfeasance and not accountability), DOE and the others should have figured out a way to issue all ARRA funding shortly after it was allocated. (All of the DOE funding has been allocated for over a year.) Unemployment has been and still is a much bigger problem in theory and in fact than the possible misuse of ARRA money.

The second factor is that long-standing agency habits are really, really hard to break. I spent much of two decades trying to change and redesign/reengineer government operations. Getting a large bureaucracy to implement something like a large novel stimulus funding effort is very difficult, but it can be done.

Along these lines, one mystery is what happened to Matt Rogers? Chu selected Rogers, who had been working on energy issues at the well known McKinsey & Co. consultancy, to be the DOE ramrod for whatever changes were needed in the agency to expedite the grants, loans and loan guarantees, and he was given the title Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy for Recovery Act Implementation.

Rogers, however, was never very visible to those of us on the outside. On occasion, he would be tasked with making some public appearances. But, while other federal agencies were quick to spend their ARRA money, as I have reported on many times, DOE was slow to spend from the start.

I suspect that Rogers was the right man for in the wrong job. I don’t doubt he had expertise in energy market strategic planning, but I don’t think he had any systems management expertise or track record in this field. It didn’t help that Rogers engaged in the allocation-versus-spending word games or criticism of us writers who nagged about the DOE’s sluggish dispersements. Cocky, premature and inaccurate videos about job creation were also a mistake.

Rogers claimed in September 2010 that DOE jobs would peak during that quarter at 45,000 and hold that level for the next six quarters. In fact, as is apparent in the above graph, (self-reported) jobs numbers didn’t reach or surpass 45,000 until the first quarter of 2011 and appear to be heading downwards already. I, for one, am not surprised that Rogers has quietly returned to his post at McKinsey & Co.

For researchers, keeping a steady flow of funds is never easy. Likewise postdocs and post-postdocs are looking for new opportunities, and lab suppliers are struggling to crawl out of the recession. So, I get that people have to resort to “stretching and morphing” when times are particularly tough. But there is still more than $15 billion unspent. Let’s focus on acknowledging and fixing the ARRA funding bottle necks instead of making up terms that paper-over how dysfunctional things are.

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The new Timken Engineered Surfaces Laboratory will be housed in the University of Akron’s new engineering research building. Credit: University of Akron.

Back in July, the top story in national news was the budget and the debate over the debt ceiling. In the 11th hour Congress and the president came to an agreement that raised the United States’ debt ceiling and avoided a potential government default.

What this episode and perhaps others in the future means for US research universities is unclear but probably not good, according to an Aug. 12 article in Science by Jeffrey Mervis. The budget bill holds all discretionary spending static for the next two years and calls for trimming out $917 billion over the next ten years, and R&D comprises around 12% of federal discretionary spending. Mervis cites lobbyists who estimate that cuts in discretionary spending starting in 2013, including most research programs, will be in the range of 7-11%.

On  the other hand, President Obama had requested increases of 13% for the NSF and 12% for DOE’s Office of Science.

The funding stall-out is disappointing, especially in light of all the attention that the administration and funding agencies are giving to innovation and manufacturing initiatives, specifically the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership and the Materials Genome Initiative. However, according to the article, the administration says there is enough money to advance research programs, although “the agreement doesn’t spell out how the money will be allocated across federal agencies.”

The future is anything but clear as the House and Senate have yet to determine their 2012 spending priorities and begin the painful slog through the 2013 budget cuts. Mervis in the article, sums up the views of a staffer at MIT’s federal relations office, William Bonvillian, noting that “[Bonvillian] thinks there are simply too many variables, including a presidential election, to even hazard a guess beyond 2012.”

Meanwhile, a recent Nature News article first reminds readers that Congress commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to advise them on effective ways of providing long-term stability to research universities without increasing investment much more, and then article goes on to say that the NAS recommendations are expected to be released before the end of the year. (The Nature article did not say when the study was commissioned, but NAS studies typically span about 18 months, so the study had to have been commissioned before this year’s epic budget battle.)

Although the NAS document, being developed by a 21-person “influential” group of researchers, business people and university administrators,” is still in its draft stages, Nature says it was able to learn that it will probably call for universities to become more thriftier and much more efficient (the story also refers to it as “fat trimming”). One recommendation will be for researchers to economize by “sharing equipment, facilities and supervision duties—not only between research groups, but even between institutions in the same city.” The example cited is collaboration programs like the multi-institutional DOE Energy Innovation Hubs.

The NAS report is expected to urge federal and state funding agencies to simplify regulations that apply to research grants, especially regarding reporting. The article says the report will also recommend that funding agencies pay the full indirect cost of research (i.e., overhead). In 1991 Congress capped indirect costs at 26%, despite actual overhead amounting to about 30%.

According to the article, research universities have been tapping undergraduate tuition fees to make up the difference. (For years, universities have been selling prospective students and their parents on the research opportunities available to undergrads. Undergrads would be well advised to participate if they are helping pay for it.) The NAS panel realizes that calling for more overhead spending in an era of flat budgets will mean less money for research. The article says the panel’s solution to the dilemma is that the report “will urge the government to target funding strategically, concentrating on research areas with the greatest potential to produce innovation and jobs.”

The problem, of course, was eloquently stated by American zoologist Marston Bates, “Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”

There is another way, which may prove to be an effective mechanism for funding university research. Because it has a grassroots-or perhaps boutique-flavor, it may not get as much press beyond local interest.

Last week the University of Akron and the Timken Company announced a “specialized research” collaboration to “accelerate technology development.” The press release says Timken will provide funding and equipment valued at about $5 million to establish the new Timken Engineered Surfaces Laboratory. Timken’s chief technologist Gary Doll will join the academic ranks and lead the lab’s efforts when he assumes a newly established endowed chair.

The dean of UA’s College of Engineering says in the press release that the agreement “creates a new, important platform for innovation that will benefit our engineering students, Timken, UA, and the region through our joint research and commercialization efforts.”

That is, innovation… and jobs.

(For some of the tenor that is going to be coming out of the NAS report, check out the recent video of a presentation Chad Holliday, one of the members of the aforementioned 21-person NAS panel, made July 15th to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.)

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Optical vortex generated using a radial polarization converter. Credit: Altechna; Kazansky et al., University of Southampton.

Back in May, University of Southampton researchers published a short paper in Applied Physics Letters regarding how they used novel microscopy-based optical polarization techniques to turn nanostructured silica glass into a new type of relatively inexpensive, data-dense, stable computer memory. Now, the group says it has extended five-dimensional memory capabilities to their system, adding even more data storage possibilities, and the potential applications seem to be mounting.

Let’s back up a little bit. The research group, led by Peter Kazansky at the university’s Optoelectronics Research Center, describes in the initial paper how they are able—if I understand this correctly—to use a femtosecond laser combined with a space variant polarization converter to “write” self-assembled nanostructures in silica glass. The vortices can either be “left handed” or “right handed” depending on whether the converter is used to induce radial or azimuthal polarization. In other words, on a nanoscale, information can be stored by switching from radial to azimuthal polarization (or vice versa) by controlling the “handedness” of the incident circular polarization.

Put even more simply, this approach uses microscopy tools and ultra-short laser pulses to create tiny voxels (volumetric pixels) in glass.

The authors acknowledge that somewhat similar techniques have been used with liquid crystals and photolithography/subwavelength gratings. However, they point out that a problem with the former is that the liquid crystals have a low damage threshhold, and a problem with the latter is that there are limits to the resolution.

Besides resilience and resolution, several other immediate advantages to nanostructured glass approach jump out, particularly in regard to costs and permanence.

For example, the investigators claim the use of microscopy tools makes the approach 20-times cheaper and it is more compact. In a university news release, Kazansky says, “Before this we had to use a spatial light modulator based on liquid crystal which cost about £20,000. Instead we have just put a tiny device into the optical beam and we get the same result.”

However, since publication of the paper, the researchers have developed this technology even further and adapted it for a five-dimensional optical recording. “We have improved the quality and fabrication time and we have developed this five-dimensional memory, which means that data can be stored on the glass and last forever,” said Martynas Beresna, lead researcher for the project. “No one has ever done this before.”

When Beresna says, “No one has ever done this before,” I think he is mainly referring to the use of glass plus the combination of five-dimensional memory. Five-dimensional memory (think of this as two polarization orientation options, plus three wavelength options) isn’t novel by itself. In 2009, for example, Nature carried a widely covered paper about a team led by Min Gu, which was doing 5D memory work with gold nanorods in a polymer on a glass substrate.

In an interview with the London Telegraph, Beresna says their rewritable approach can, “currently store the equivalent of a whole Blu-ray Disc – up to 50GB of data – on a piece of glass no bigger than a mobile phone screen.”

The researchers say the stability of the glass they studied, its resistance to temperature, moisture, etc., gives it an obvious edge compared to existing archival media. On this issue, Beresna also says in the Telegraph piece, “Data can be stored on the glass and last forever. It could become a very stable and safe form of portable memory. It could be very useful for organizations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan. Museums who want to preserve information or places like the National Archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit.”

Regarding the mention of table-top particle accelerators in the headline—something I’ve always wanted for my coffee table at home—the authors don’t directly mention this, but the university’s press release does speak of particle accelerators as another possible application for the radial polarization converters, along with high-resolution medical imaging and laser processing of materials.

The university and the researchers have already partnered with a Lithuanian company, Altechna, to transfer the technology to various markets. The Altechna website does not specifically discuss a memory device, but does suggest uses related to laser machining, optical tweezers and Raman spectroscopy systems.

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One of the editors at Nature has written a good (free) article that provides some of important perspective about the movement of nano-carbon products (fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and, more recently, graphene) from lab to sustainable markets.

Richard Van Noorden, with quotes from a number or researchers and business reps, describes what a tricky path it can be to go from super-promising materials to specific applications to efficiency-scaled production capacity.

He notes that the first of these to emerge, fullerene, has been pretty much a commercial flop. CNTs emerged in the early 1990s and their semiconducting and metallic-type properties, not to mention their ruggedness, has teased R&D groups and investors ever since. But, CNTs electrical properties can be difficult to control and manufacturing pure bulk CNTs in predictable dimensions and orientations has been illusive. The same same problems are being faced with the newer graphene.

The problem with electronics is that a decent and cheaper alternative is readily available: silicon chips. Van Noorden quotes one organic chemist who points out that, “There have been millions and person-years and trillions of dollars put into the development of silicon electronics. Asking graphene to compte with silicon now is like asking a 10-year-old to be a concert pianist because we’ve been giving him piano lessons for the last six years.”

Van Noorden provides an overview of some of the pros and cons of CNTs and graphene in various applications and how the cost-benefit model can shift over time (e.g., graphene looks more promising in touch-screen applications as the cost of indium – and thus ITO  – trends upwards .)

But even in less esoteric applications, such as using CWTs and graphene flakes in composites, these materials that can retail in the hundreds of dollars/kg are competing with substitutes that sell for less than a dollar/kg. Even with an expected stream of science and manufacturing innovations, experts like Lux Research estimate the $/kg for CNTs will only drop by half in the next ten years.

That’s not a blazing speed for price reduction, but one of the experts Van Noorden interviews points out, the arc of now-ubiquitous carbon fiber began very slowly, eventually found usage in less cost-conscious military applications and much later made its way into large-scale commercial usage.

Nevertheless, manufacturers are bringing more and more capacity on line, and as they do so, they will be scrambling for outlets. Some early niches for graphene will emerge like they have for CWTs (Van Noorden speculates that supercapacitors, such as the one I recently wrote about, electrodes and flexible electronics may pay off), but despite the excitement everyone will have to be patient — perhaps very patient — until they see the first truly transformational uses.

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Depiction of chromophores attaching to a transistor made from a single carbon nanotube. Credit SNL.

Research being conducted at Sandia National Lab might eventually be applied to an optical detector with nanometer-scale resolution, ultra-tiny digital cameras, solar cells with more light absorption capability and a better device for genome sequencing. However, the near-term purpose of the research is basic science.

The Sandia researchers report they have created the first carbon nanotube device that can detect the entire visible spectrum of light. This might allow them to study single-molecule transformations, how the molecules respond to light and change shape as well as other fundamental interactions between molecules and nanotubes.

As with many other recent studies, the researchers went back to nature, in this case the human eye, and they improved on the model. A cascade of chemical and electrical events that ultimately trigger nerve impulses occur when light strikes a chromophore on the molecules in the eye’s retina. Likewise, when light strikes a chromophore in the nanoscale color detector, it causes a conformational change in the molecule. This, in turn, causes a threshold shift on a transistor made from a single-walled carbon nanotube.

“In our eyes the neuron is in front of the retinal molecule, so the light has to transmit through the neuron to hit the molecule,” says Sandia researcher Xinjian Zhou. “We placed the nanotube transistor behind the molecule - a more efficient design.”

That carbon nanotubes are light sensitive has been known for a long time, but earlier efforts using an individual nanotube were only able to detect light in narrow wavelength ranges, and then only at laser intensities. The Sandia team nanodetector is orders of magnitude more sensitive, down to about 40 W/m2, which is about 3 percent of the density of sunshine reaching the ground. “Because the dye is so close to the nanotube, a little change turns into a big signal on the device,” says Zhou.

Zhou and his colleagues François Léonard, Andy Vance, Karen Krafcik, Tom Zifer and Bryan Wong created the device, which they described in a paper published in Nano Letters. Zhou and Krafcik created a tiny transistor made from a single carbon nanotube. They deposited carbon nanotubes on a silicon wafer and used photolithography to define electrical patterns to make contacts. Meanwhile, Vance and Zifer synthesized molecules to create three types of chromophores that respond to either red, green or orange bands of the visible spectrum. Zhou immersed the wafer in the dye solution until the chromosphores attached themselves to the nanotubes.

“Detection is now limited to about 3 percent of sunlight, which isn’t bad compared with a commercially available digital camera,” says Zhou. “I hope to add some antennas to increase light absorption.”

The team is now working on detecting infrared light. “We think this principle can be applied to infrared light, and there is a lot of interest in infrared detection,” says Vance. “So we’re in the process of looking for dyes that work in infrared.”

“A large part of why we are doing this is not to invent a photo detector, but to understand the processes involved in controlling carbon nanotube devices,” says Léonard, author of The Physics of Carbon Nanotubes, published September 2008.

The next step is to create a nanometer-scale photovoltaic device. Such a device on a larger scale could be used as an unpowered photo detector or for solar energy. “Instead of monitoring current changes, we’d actually generate current,” says Vance. “We have an idea of how to do it, but it will be a more challenging fabrication process.”

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