Word: silver
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...Forum Technology Pioneers this year include entrepreneurs who are working to alleviate pain at the pump as well as human suffering. They produce energy-sparing new approaches to solar power, nanolighting and even a handheld haz-mat detector. Others are doing amazing work in creating synthesized disease killers, minting silver bullets for pathogens or using stem cells to cure heart disease. On the security front, there are new analyzers, sensors and antivirus hardware that could make our cities and computer networks safer. Finally, someone invented a way to clean up the e-waste left over when all that technology goes...
AgION's microbicide is silver, a metal long known to have potent anti-infective properties yet lacking the tendency of many organic agents to generate resistance. Trouble is, silver atoms have to be in an ionic (charged) state--as they are in solutions of silver salts--to kill microbes. Pure silver doesn't release enough ions to pack much disinfecting punch. Its salts, on the other hand, wash away too easily...
AgION worked around those difficulties by encasing silver ions in a type of powdery ceramic called zeolite. Each grain of zeolite is riddled with submicroscopic tunnels that are stuffed with silver ions. It releases the ions only in exchange for others--say, sodium ions in a salty drop of sweat. So ion-rich liquids, in which bugs often thrive, activate AgION's microbicide. "The ceramic delivers enough silver to be effective," says AgION CTO Jeffrey Trogolo, "but not so much that it loses effect over its lifetime...
...marketplace," says the unit's business manager, David Whitley. "It has value--and, bottom line, it works." AgION, for its part, is working with 60 companies, including DuPont and Reebok. "We're not introducing any new chemicals to the world," Trogolo points out. "We're just using silver contained in what is essentially sand." Only it's the sort of sand he'd like to see getting into everything...
...about that dancer.Joining Harvard’s ballroom dancing team that fall, Mariko soon benefited from the training and visiting professional dancing coaches.The Harvard team provides training for all dancers, those who have no experience and those who have a lot. There are different levels of dancing styles, bronze, silver, gold, and open, and the Harvard team takes you through that formal process, while also serving as a social outlet. Unlike ballet, where you just stand at the bar by yourself, Harvard ballroom forces you to meet and dance with many new people. And because the upper-level dancers teach...