Alien Technology, one of the leaders in radio frequency identification chips (RFID), filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said on Thursday. It will try to raise $120 million in the IPO.

Investors have already invested $200 million into the company, a fairly sizeable amount compared to most high tech companies going public in the past few years. The company posted around $20 million in sales in 2005.

A team of researchers at UC Berkeley have genetically engineered a species of yeast to produce artemisinic acid, a chemical cousin to a powerful anti-malaria drug.

The research is at the cutting edge of synthetic biology in which compounds produced by plants or animals are reproduced more cheaply and faster by bacteria or industrial chemical processes. UC's Jay Keasling, with a $43 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been trying to develop a synthetic way to produce Artemisinin, an antimalarial drug that derives from a mangrove plant in Southeast Asia. Harvesting it naturally is very … Read more

Au Optronics has agreed to acquire Quanta Display, the LCD division of the contract manufacturing giant, in a stock swap. The merged company will likely have around 19 percent of the market, putting it third behind number two LG Philips and number one Samsung. Both LG and Samsung come out of South Korea.

The merger also brings to Taiwanese giants closer together. Au is a spin out from the Acer conglomerate, which makes a wide variety of hardware products. One of its chief competitors is Quanta, which makes more laptops than anyone else in the world. Most Quanta laptops, however, … Read more

Right now, 148 of the largest 1,331 companies in the world have structured nanotechnology initiatives (i.e. research projects or product development plans) for nanotechnology, but that number will double to around 290 by 2008, according to a report from Lux Research, which tracks the nano industry.

By then, corporate nanotech R&D spending will also increase to $12 billion.

Nanotechnology, the science of making products out of components measuring 100 nanometers or less, will likely have tremendous impact on medicine, electronics and material science, but over a long period of time. Thus, the field is in many … Read more

update A large, somewhat rare piece of floating ice in the Sea of Galilee may explain one of the signature events in Christian theology, according to a report from Florida State University.

Doron Nof, a Florida State professor widely known for his studies on ancient lakes, said in a study published this month that cooler climates in what is now Northern Israel combined with the unique environmental chemistry in the body of water (known as Lake Kinneret to Israelis) could have led to the formation of large, floating sheets of ice.

A sheet of ice would have also been unobtrusive … Read more

Flight testing is set to begin by the end of the year for the U.S. Air Force's Airborne Laser project, in which a modified Boeing 747 will act as a giant--and potentially potent--laser pointer.

The flight will follow ground-based tests of solid-state lasers that are expected to end in August, Space.com reported this week. In the flight test, the low-power lasers will be fired at a target aircraft adorned with the painted image of a ballistic missile, according to a Boeing executive cited by Space.com.

The eventual goal of the ABL program is to shoot down … Read more

The Bush administration is starving the U.S. tech industry of two crucial ingredients, according to members of a panel of academics and entrepreneurs at Stanford University: foreign students and research grants.

"If you make it difficult for foreign students to come here or work here, you will have a dramatic influence on education in the United States and the quality of industry," said Mark Horowitz, a professor of electrical engineering at the university and the founder of Rambus. "The U.S. is becoming less attractive for graduate students."

Academics often are hostile to politicians, but … Read more

If you type in 'Don' into Google, who do you think you would get first? Don Corleone? Don Johnson?

Actually, you get the home page of Don Knuth, professor emeritus of the art of computer programming at Stanford University and author of the three-volume classic The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth demonstrated it during a presentation at a symposium at Stanford today commemorating the 40th anniversary of the university's computer science department. (They taught it before, but it wasn't a full-on department.

I tried it on my own search and it works. He beats out Don Johnston Incorporated … Read more

What does a fuel cell manufacturer and a company formerly known for porn sites have in common? A Nasdaq over-the-counting listed listing.

Growth Merger Inc., a publicly traded shell company, merged this week with Neah Power Systems which has created a membrane for methanol fuel cells. Methanol fuel cells may one day help power MP3 players and even laptops.

Still, the market remains small and many companies have delayed putting out fuel-cell powered products, so getting enough business to pull off an IPO remains difficult.

Enter Growth. The company originally stated out as a purveyor of adult web sites, but … Read more