In a letter to her mother, she wrote: ''As a last wish I have asked that my 'material substance' be left to you.

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Since a federal appeals court affirmed the USPTO in In re Bilski, lower courts around the country have adopted the same logic, saying patents must involve a machine or a process that transforms some type of material substance.

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What Transphorm is doing is making new kinds of power conversion devices, based on a material called gallium nitride (a substance best known for its use in LED lighting), which it embeds in modules and sells to equipment manufacturers.

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There's a vial of a substance he calls KimSim, a material his girlfriend helped create to figure out how to rescue the Spirit rover after it got stuck in a "sand trap" of alien soil on Mars in 2009.

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The hope is that pairing up researchers and businesses will hasten the development of material and component manufacturing processes for the carbon-based substance, and make it possible for graphene to find its way into products such as flexible electronics, batteries and faster processors.

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Instead, the team modified a substance known as Powder Suspension, a thick, tar-like material, and found that it produced a clear, high-quality mark on the smooth-surfaced food items such as onions, apples and tomatoes.

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Also, scientists at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University have been able to build a nano-thin layer of particles of titanium dioxide, a substance that reacts with sunlight to break down dirt and other organic material.

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They built a thin layer, or "nanostructure, " using minute particles of titanium dioxide, a substance that reacts with sunlight to break down dirt and other organic material and can be coated on cotton to keep the fabric clean.

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The gooey substance produced by mixing cornstarch with a little water is a commonplace example of such a material.

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Developing a substance that would work reliably in potentially extreme conditions and remain stable over the life of the material was also a challenge.

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Locklin and his colleagues sprayed the substance onto materials and exposed them to ultraviolet light, which causes a covalent bond with the host material.

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