By Chris

, a bioengineering startup that says its scientific approach can rapidly find alternatives to fossil fuel-based chemicals, has some advice for the beleaguered ethanol industry: Don’t make ethanol. The company has bred a new microorganism capable of going through the same distiller’s process that makes ethanol, but instead producing methyl ethyl ketone, a common industrial solvent also known as butanone or MEK. Chief executive Chris Gann says existing ethanol plants can use the microorganism without making any significant changes. Ethanol is still going through a painful comedown from its highs of a couple years ago, when quite a few...

With a carbon cap and trade now a near certainty for the United States, investors are rushing to fund companies that will help create the market. A Sterling, VA company called Clear Standards is the latest, with $4 million for an inventory system corporations can use to track their greenhouse gas emissions. Measuring emissions is becoming a more exacting science as companies like this one consolidate studies showing the environmental impact of thousands of different materials, products and activities. In time, certain measurements will become the accepted standards, which will likely coincide with several measurement startups becoming dominant players....

, an Israeli company that hopes to give users more information about topics on web pages without them having to perform a search or leave the site they’re on, is rolling out a product called into private beta. The idea is to give on-the-spot access to reams of information that today’s web sites can’t or won’t add for themselves. So if you see a reference to a movie on a blog, for instance, a tiny Headup icon will appear beside it. When you click the icon, a pop-up box will appear that might show, for example, clips from the...

The has opened four $10 million competitions so far in its short history: the Ansari Prize, for suborbital spaceflight; the Archon Prize for genome sequencing; the Progressive Prize for the best 100 mile per gallon vehicle; and the Google Prize, to put a lunar vehicle on the moon. While the latter two remain unclaimed, there’s now another to add to the group: The WellPoint Prize, for solutions to the United States’ muddled healthcare system. In some respects, it may be the most challenging competition yet. The prize is sponsored by the WellPoint Foundation, a non-profit that’s funded by WellPoint,...

Conspiracy theorists will love this one: A computerized assistant that can help you manage your day to day life, built atop an artificial intelligence platform developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the United States’ internal military research group. , the startup building the assistant, disclosed Monday $8.5 million in venture funding. As befits its spookish origins, Siri isn’t saying a great deal yet about what it will do. Co-founder Dag Kittlaus, who licensed technology from DARPA’s CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) project, calls it “a smarter, more personal interaction paradigm for the Internet.” Unfortunately,...