Spare Change
FedInvent Portfolio Patents for Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Hello from FedInvent,
We've turned our attention back to the world of taxpayer-funded innovation while keeping an eye on the developments in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, which seems like a decade ago, the U.S. Patent Office issued 7,205 patents. One hundred twenty-three had taxpayer funding.
Here is the link to this week's FedInvent Patent Report. To browse by department, start here.
Spare Change
A while back, we had a conversation with a lady working as a waitress to pay for college. She would earn her degree in five years instead of four but wouldn't have any student loans. (Commendable and very smart.) In the course of our conversation, we wound up talking about people who were cheap with their tips. (We always over tip and have been tipping on turbo during the pandemic.) She was puzzled by these miserly tippers adding that "they don't seem to realize that that extra dollar in the tip makes a big difference. It's probably equal to the amount of change between the seats in their car." This message resonated and has driven tipping behavior ever since.
This brings us to U.S. Patent 11260426, "Identifying Coins from Scrap."
The invention comes from inventors at Sortera Alloys, technology purveyors for the circular economy. The Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) funded this research.
The circular economy focuses on the reuse of resources to eliminate waste and pollution. The key elements include sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. Sortera Alloys is a startup focused on converting recycled material from vehicles into new tech products.
The invention uses cameras, machine learning, and a neural network to figure out if a round flat slug-looking thing in shredded automotive waste is a monetary coin versus a non-monetary disk. (Rings, jewelry, arcade tokens.)
We also learned other interesting things about the recycling industry.
Each year almost 25 million tons (~50 billion pounds) of automotive shredder metal scrap is produced from end-of-life automobiles and other products. Much of this recovered metal scrap is shipped overseas to be hand sorted into aluminum, copper, brass, zinc, and stainless steel and manufactured into parts. That's why you see these piles of old cars sitting on lots near the ports.
There are about 600 auto shredders in the U.S. (They are featured prominently in cops and robber movies along with the car crushers at the junkyards where the recycling process begins.)
Shipping the end-of-life vehicles overseas and then shipping the recovered material back results in a significant level of greenhouse gas emissions from the ships carrying this material back and forth.
There is also interesting terminology in the scrap recycling industry. "Zorba" is the collective term for shredded nonferrous metals, including those originating from end-of-life vehicles ("ELVs") or waste electronic and electrical equipment ("WEEE") -- all that e-waste piling up all over the place. Zorba scrap pieces are made up of nonferrous metals (e.g., aluminum, copper, lead, magnesium, stainless steel, nickel, tin, and zinc, in elemental or alloyed (solid) form). "Twitch" means fragmented aluminum scrap. Twitch is produced by a float process whereby the aluminum scrap floats to the top because heavier metal scrap pieces sink.
Back to our waitress friend. She was right. These cheap tippers probably have more than a dollar's worth of coins stashed in their car.
The patent notes that "It has been discovered that many automotive vehicles designated for shredding and subsequent recycling processes have a relatively significant number of monetary coins located within them, such as between the seats, underneath floor mats, etc. At least one study estimates that there can be about US$10-$15 of coins per vehicle."
Vehicle recycling industry reporting claims that between 12-15 million vehicles reach the end of life each year. At $10-$15 per car, successful recovery of these coins could yield between $180 million to $225 million at $15 per car. That's some serious change.
(Carwash vacuums also use coin capture technology. One developer of a coin-catching tech for commercial carwash vacuums claims that you can recover about $400 in loose coins over six months. Some miscreants also steal the dirt collectors in outdoor coin-operated vacuums to get the vacuumed-up coins.)
A Curious Patent From Nebraska and Beyond
Among this week's patents is 11261461. "Methods and Compositions for Selective Generation of Dopaminergic Precursors." This patent is assigned to both University of Nebraska and Tongji University in China. The patent was funded by NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The invention is for the treatment of Parkinson's Disease and other neurologic diseases using somatic cells obtained from a patient in need of cell or tissue replacement therapy.
This invention is the work of two inventors. The first-named inventor is a Chinese inventor named Jialin Zheng. In researching the patent, we learned that Dr. Zheng had his house raided by the FBI in April 2021. Jialin Zheng's most recent webpage notes that he is Dean of the Tongji University School of Medicine, where he is a Professor of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine. He is also a Professor of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). However, at the time the search warrant was executed, the University of Nebraska said that Dr. Zheng was no longer employed at the university.
The second inventor, Dr. Changhai Tian, has left the University of Nebraska and is now at the University of Kentucky.
There is no news on the outcome of the search or if Dr. Zheng was part of the FBI's investigation into the intellectual property from university research winding up in China. It’s always interesting to find a patent with a little international intrigue.
CRISPR Patents At the Gas Station
Earlier today, I went to fill my gas tank. We'll skip the part about the gas being $4.69 a gallon. It cost over $70 to fill up. The gas station news came on the pump while I was watching the dollars fly out of my wallet. The big story? The CRISPR patents owned by the University of California have been invalidated. The Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard is now the inventor of CRISPR. CRISPR patents are important enough for gas station reporting.
If you are new to this patent fight, CRISPR is a powerful tool for editing genomes, meaning it allows researchers to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function easily. CRISPR stands for Clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
This is the latest round in the legal battle to determine who the seminal inventor of CRISPR is. In 2017 USPTO ruled in favor of Nobel Prize winners Dr. Jennifer Doudna and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier and declared them the inventors of CRISPR. This 2022 round resulted in a ruling that decided that Dr. Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute, a research institute at both Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the inventor of CRISPR. Appeals to follow. For now, the world of gene editing patent licensing is in a tizzy.
Intel Inventions
It was a big week for inventions from the intelligence community. National Security Agency funded three inventions. NSA as the assignee on two of the patents. NSA being out in the open is unusual.
U.S. patent 11262785, "Methods and apparatuses for identifying and controlling quantum emitters in a quantum system," the inventors from the University of Maryland received funding from both NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from the intelligence community as well as funding from the Army Research Office.
Both 11265012, "Methods of secure communication using low-density parity check coding," and 11265627, "Bandwidth-reconfigurable optical interconnect based on wavelength and spatial switching," were funded by and are assigned to NSA.
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) received U.S. Patent 11264526, "Infrared photodetector with optical amplification and low dark current." This invention is the work of inventors from HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California.
Advances in Advanced Manufacturing To Tackle COVID
On February 28, 2022, The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded nearly $54 million in grants for 13 high-impact research, development, and testbeds for pandemic response. The funding provided by the American Rescue Act will support projects at eight manufacturing innovation institutes in the Manufacturing USA® network, working with more than 80 partners, including leading research universities, nonprofits, and small and large manufacturers. Here is a list of the awards.
Advanced Functional Fabrics of America Inc. (AFFOA), Cambridge, Massachusetts — $11,116,420
To enable manufacturing automation and supply chain diversification and to address the environmental impact of PPE; working with more than 12 partner organizations.
PowerAmerica (North Carolina State University), Raleigh, North Carolina — $4,982,299
To build pandemic resilience in remote, difficult to reach, underserved Native American communities through clean-energy-powered services; working with seven partner organizations.
AIM Photonics (SUNY Polytechnic Institute Research Foundation), Albany, New York — $4,974,630
To produce the first-ever inexpensive, disposable point-of-care sensors using integrated photonics to test for coronavirus and emerging viruses, increasing access without the need for expensive equipment and specialized expertise that limits use in doctor's offices, rural clinics, and resource-limited environments; working with eight partner organizations.
Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute (ARM), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — $4,933,561
To create the Robotics and Automation Decision Framework for Agility and Resilience (RADAR) that will allow small and medium-sized manufacturers to systematically evaluate the cost-to-benefit ratio of integrating robotics and automation into manufacturing processes to support coronavirus response; working with six partner organizations.
Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE), St. Paul, Minnesota — $4,729,690
To create a domestic supply chain for vaccine manufacturing that will remove supply chain bottlenecks in manufacturing vaccine components (currently foreign-sourced) using bioindustrial processing to develop and demonstrate pilot-scale manufacturing from sustainable, domestic plant sources and train workers in the same; working with three partner organizations.
RAPID Institute (American Institute of Chemical Engineers), New York, New York — $4,638,881
To develop a testbed for domestic manufacturing of critical pharmaceutical ingredients in the underserved Appalachian region; working with two partner organizations.
Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE), St. Paul, Minnesota — $4,075,202
To advance innovative, proof-of-concept biomanufacturing platforms and technologies for rapid, cost-effective, distributed domestic manufacturing of antigens to use in testing and medical treatments for coronavirus, as well as a mechanism to train workers on these production approaches; working with seven other organizations.
MxD (U.I. Labs), Chicago, Illinois — $3,880,343
To create the Rx Product Marketplace Orchestrator, an online marketplace for consumers and manufacturers of emergency health and medical goods that ensures rapid response across the supply chain to meet the demand for particular items (e.g., respirators, ventilators, face masks); working with nine partner organizations.
RAPID Institute (American Institute of Chemical Engineers), New York, New York — $3,773,536
To scale continuous manufacturing and modular production of high-quality, low-cost advanced respirators and biosensors to limit exposure to and transmission of coronavirus; working with four partner organizations.
America Makes (National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining), Youngstown, Ohio — $3,021,989
To use additive manufacturing to create a prototype of N95-level nonwoven filter materials for respiratory PPE that meets National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and U.S. Food and Drug Administration requirements and reduces dependence on foreign imports, and partner with a local community college and small and medium-sized manufacturers to train workers on this type of advanced manufacturing application; working with six partner organizations.
MxD (U.I. Labs), Chicago, Illinois — $2,369,302
To create a privacy-protecting local health alert system to conduct contact tracing and data analysis using blockchain technology, mapping linkages between disease detection and resulting supply chain demand estimates — translating real-time public health indicators into future demand signals to develop predictive capabilities for supply chain needs; working with seven partner organizations.
RAPID Institute (American Institute of Chemical Engineers), New York, New York — $1,109,520
To develop and deploy virtual technician and operator training for advanced processes in the biopharmaceutical, pharmaceutical, and specialty chemical industries; working with three partner organizations.
AIM Photonics (SUNY Polytechnic Institute Research Foundation), Albany, New York — $299,149
To develop a proof of concept for a disposable, lab-on-a-chip solution to COVID-19 testing using silicon photonics that does not need costly reagents or complex, large, power-consuming hardware while offering low-temperature sensitivity; working with three other organizations.
This round of COVID is on the wane. These technologies should help prepare for the next one.
Patents By the Numbers
On Tuesday, March 1, 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued 7,205 patents. One hundred twenty-three (123) of these patents benefitted from taxpayer funding. Here is how they break down.
One hundred nineteen (119) patents have Government Interest Statements.
Twenty-five (25) have a government agency as an applicant or an assignee.
A federal department is the only assignee on 11 patents.
The 123 new patents have 142 department-level funding citations.
These patents are the work of 411 inventors.
The 402 American inventors come from 32 states and the District of Columbia.
The nine (9) foreign inventors come from five (5) countries.
There are 66 patents (54%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
Six patents (6) resulted from the collaboration between two or more universities. Three patents have collaborators from foreign universities. Two are from Chinese universities and one from Chile.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) received 11 patents.
Six (6) patents were assigned Y CPC symbols indicating that the invention may be useful in mitigating the impact of climate change.
The Big Three States — Win, Place, and Show
The usual suspects are in the Win and Place positions. This week's patent Show position goes to New York.
California has 28 first-named inventors and 93 total inventors.
Massachusetts has 14 first-named inventors and 40 total inventors.
New York has eight (8) first-named inventors and 29 total inventors.
Patent Count By Department
Count By Technology Center
The Health Complex
The table below shows this week's count of the number of funding citations where the recipient cites the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the institutes at the National Institutes of Health, and other subagencies that are part of HHS, the Health Complex.
The Health Complex Year-To-Date
The table below is the year-to-date count of funding citations for entities FedInvent classifies as part of the Health Complex.
Before We Go
Next up is Thursday's newly published pre-grant patent applications. There are 199 taxpayer-funded patent applications in our initial pool, so there is a lot of analysis going on.
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The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.