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It depends on the surfaces being exposed to UV. Surfaces with titanium dioxide in them do tend to be self-cleaning.

Nothing like the open source computing movement has ever caught fire in biology or pharmaceuticals

Informatics for Biology... Bioinformatics. Is RUN by open source software. BLAST http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST ,one of the most important Bioinformatic tools ever written, is public domain. It's paper is one of the most cited of the past 30 years http://archive.sciencewatch.com/sept-oct2003/sw_sept-oct2003_page1.htm . Bioinformatic clusters almost universally run Linux. Almost all popular tools are written by academics and supplied under open source licenses. To the degree that I'd say closed source software finds it hard to break in to this area, not the other way round. This is not only true of Bioinformatics, but also large scale Protein simulations. Namd p://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/ is also available under and open source (though more restrictive than GPL or BSD license). And is one of the most popular Molecular Dynamics codes available.

"Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Corporation of Japan demonstrated the first high-brightness blue LED based on InGaN, borrowing on critical developments in GaN nucleation on sapphire substrates and the demonstration of p-type doping of GaN which were developed by I. Akasaki and H. Amano in Nagoya. The existence of the blue LED led quickly to the first white LED, which employed a Y3Al5O12:Ce, or "YAG", phosphor coating to mix yellow (down-converted) light with blue to produce light that appears white. Nakamura was awarded the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize for his invention."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6900465.PN.&OS=PN/6900465&RS=PN/6900465

"In 1991, I made n-type gallium nitride. The following year I succeeded making p-type using a thermal annealing technique. Now all gallium nitride researchers use my technique for p-type gallium nitride. Another big breakthrough was making the first single crystal of indium gallium nitride, which we needed for an emitting layer. Finally at the end of 1993, I succeeded in making the first commercial-based blue LEDs."

http://archive.sciencewatch.com/jan-feb2000/sw_jan-feb2000_page4.htm

The invention this woman claims to have done was already done years previous by the true inventor of the blue LED and laser diode, Shuji Nakamura. She is a patent troll, and the fact the FTC is wasting taxpayer money with an investigation into something that could've been resolved by 5 minutes of looking at dates on Wikipedia is sad.

First small inventors are not without options. They are encouraged by the system to market and sell (or lease) their rights to larger groups that have the money to defend them and the resources to bring them to market....That average readers think they carry any actual weight is a product of not informing themselves or hiring someone who is more informed to represent them.

This doesn't sound anything like "promoting the useful arts and sciences." It sounds like a system hijacked by interests that are consumed with extorting as much money as possible out of corrupt practices.

As for Nakamura. He was not working alone is some garage. He was part of a large team of engineers refining LEDs.

The company, on the other hand, had been pursing LED tech for some time before and after Nakamura.

I'm sorry, but you lost credibility long ago. Now you are just making stuff up. Just an observation about people in general: those who have to lie to themselves to justify their own actions often end up creating their own reality around lies. Do you really believe what you are saying? Because it certainly is coming across as less and less believable with every sentence you write.

Capitalism relies on the idea of property. You have to materialize any thing of value so it can be traded and protected. This includes inventive concepts.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

To be honest, this particular piece of research is almost a footnote in his career. Most of the things he does will never end up in something the average person ever comes into contact with, but the salient ideas will change the landscape of technology 20 years down the road. If you're at all interested in nanoscience, this is a guy to watch.

To be honest, this particular piece of research is almost a footnote in his career. Most of the things he does will never end up in something the average person ever comes into contact with, but the salient ideas will change the landscape of technology 20 years down the road. If you're at all interested in nanoscience, this is a guy to watch.

On the other hand this depends in part on what you call "great". The following link was mentioned on Slashdot a few weeks ago:
http://www.sciencewatch.com/jan-feb2000/sw_jan-feb 2000_page3.htm

Mr. Nakamura created the blue LED... A lower court had awarded 20 billion yen, nearly $200 million

Pretty cool.

From the articles that I have read on this very suspect claim it hints that they used the same method as was used with Dolly. I did my Senior Thesis on Geron, the company that purchased the rights to the methode that cloned Dolly; therefore, I have a fare understanding of what is involved with Nuclear Transfer. Although I am not an expert and have never attempted the process in a lab, I have read enough to know that it is a terrible idea to try this on humans at this point.

There is a easy to understand FAQ on the Roslin Institute web site written by the people that actually cloned Dolly. Here are some interesting highlights:

Are clone embryos like IVF and normal pregnancies?
Not so far. The scientists at the Roslin Institute, who pioneered this work, have repeatedly found that the clone foetuses grow much larger than normal ones, and there is a much higher chance of the pregnancy failing, of stillbirth, or of forced Caesarean sections. Dolly was the one successful pregnancy of more than 277 embryos.

What do the experts think? "I think you are always going to run the risk of having aging DNA," says Professor Lord Robert Winston, an IVF pioneer. "I would hate to think of a child of mine being cloned because I think it would be very likely he would have an accelerated aging process." Dr Jamie Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at New York University, says: "Cloning is no better than any of the other treatments that are out there. A biological child is the husband's sperm, the wife's egg. A clone is not a biological child." Dr David Stevens, of the Christian Medical and Dental Society, asks: "Are we really willing to sacrifice hundreds of embryos - developing human beings - to make one baby who may suffer monstrous consequences?"

So, there are two very important points that must be stressed. The first is that there is a high percentage probability of genetic defect supported by further experiments. Think of the threat of genetic abnormalities in a fetus that managed to survive as much higher than if you had children with immediate family members.

The second is that each cell has an "age" that is determined by the number of times that a cell has divided. If you use DNA from adult cells that have divided many times, than all of the cells cloned from that DNA will be older. A cell can only dived around 50 times before it dies at which point you reach the Hayflick Limit. Although there are ways to prolong the life of cell lines similar to the way cancer spreads through a body, I doubt that this group of individuals thought of adding telomeres back to the end of the chromosomes that would be used to clone a human baby.