Incubators have been around since the early 1980s as vehicles to help universities and research laboratories transfer technology to the commercial sector or to help governments manufacture jobs in parts of cities from which jobs had walked away.

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"The Critical Materials Institute will bring together the best and brightest research minds from universities, national laboratories and the private sector to find innovative technology solutions that will help us avoid a supply shortage that would threaten our clean energy industry as well as our security interests, " he said in a statement.

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The research, which was completed in conjunction with scientists from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology ( Empa) is published in the journal Nature.

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The web co-working clause will see AOL, which in America Online has the world's biggest internet service provider, swap research with Unilever's New Jersey laboratories, which are developing next generation mobile and in-home technology.

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If the light were not infrared but were instead in the visible spectrum, there was enough of it that the naked eye could have seen a glow, according to Phaedon Avouris , manager of nanometer scale science and technology at IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) Research Laboratories in Yorktown Heights, N.

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