(12-10) 10:45 PST Ithaca, N.Y. (AP) —

Neil Kane and his staff had figured out how to rearrange methane gas to create industrial diamonds, but their company couldn’t afford to build the highly specialized lab needed for developing such nanotechnology.

So they hit the rental market and paid for lab time at Cornell University’s Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility.

Thirteen nano-level university laboratories across the country are hiring themselves out to businesses eager to make their mark in the millennium of the minuscule. The intimidatingly named National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network, begun in 2004, is funded in part with $14 million a year from the National Science Foundation.

Participating business owners say the network allows them to do much more research than they would have without access to its resources. That research, to which the businesses retain all rights, will foster better products and industrial processes that will bolster the national economy, they say.

The number of companies taking advantage of the network is growing 10 percent a year, said the National Science Foundation’s senior engineering adviser, Lawrence Goldberg.

Host universities can apply the fees they receive to anything they like, including beefing up their lab equipment. Those fees ranged in fiscal 2007 from a few hundred dollars to $100,000. Cornell’s lab and a dozen other campus nano-labs around the country cater mainly to students, faculty and visiting scholars. They are built and run with public and private money.

In addition to Cornell’s lab, participants are at Stanford, Pennsylvania State, Harvard, Howard and North Carolina State universities, at Georgia Institute of Technology and at the universities of Michigan, Washington, California, Minnesota, New Mexico and Texas.

Even though the universities must give up some use of the labs and don’t get royalties from the business work done there, as they would from most academic work that later proved marketable, the arrangement seems to sit well with universities, businesses and government.

Mark Zupan, dean of the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business Administration in Rochester, N.Y., sees the tradeoff as promoting innovation. He said he worried only that businesses might try to use the universities’ names or reputations to enhance the credibility of their research.

In response to concern among participating researchers about how research and technology move between academia and business, a group of researchers will explore and monitor the issue, according to the network’s Web site.

Kane, president of Advanced Diamond Technologies Inc. near Chicago, said his company could not hope to turn its patented material into a cell-phone chip or a vision-restoring retinal implant if it couldn’t rent lab time at Cornell.

“We have our own equipment for making the diamond,” Kane said. “But all of the subsequent steps require access to a clean room, to tens of millions of dollars of equipment that no small company could ever afford. Many big companies can’t afford it either.”

Machines coated with hard, heat-resistant, low-friction diamond last longer and work more efficiently, Kane said. His company’s specialty is depositing the diamond uniformly on silicon wafers, a key innovation toward someday making micro-machines entirely out of diamond.

Even Fortune 500 firms “that can afford to have their own research infrastructure are not comfortable enough to handle some new nanomaterials” and rely on academia to help them out, said Yoshio Nishi, a former chief scientist at Texas Instruments who heads the Stanford Nanotechnology Facility in California.

Although the operating scale is infinitesimal Д a nanometer is roughly 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair Д the economic possibilities are colossal. By 2014, nanotechnology might generate $2.6 trillion of manufacturing output and employ 2 million people, Lux Research Inc. of New York estimates.

“It’s the fixed costs that kill you,” said Matt Miller, chief executive of Multispectral Imaging Inc. of Parsippany, N.J., which is renting lab time for two of his researchers at Cornell.

Miller’s three-year-old startup is developing thermal imaging technology to help find people trapped in burning buildings.

In the 12 months through September, nearly 700 companies Д mostly small startups, but also some corporate titans Д paid for lab space and research help from the network, which is anchored by Cornell and Stanford and boasts top-of-the-line nanoengineering tools, techniques and staffs.

Business community members prefer the university labs to five similar ones owned by the federal government, which spends $1.4 billion on nanotechnology each year, because the government labs impose more restrictions.

“They’re open to the outside community but require collaboration with Department of Energy researchers,” Goldberg said.

“Many biotech or semiconductor-related technologies have emanated from university campuses as a result of our nation’s investment in basic scientific research, and that’s very much the case here too,” said Sean Murdock of NanoBusiness Alliance, a trade association.

___

On the Net:

«www.nnin.org»

«www.thindiamond.com»

«www.multispectralimaging.com»

Greek and Turkish coastguards were tonight searching the Aegean sea for the survivors from a boat carrying up to 100 illegal migrants, at least half of whom are believed to have drowned in a perilous crossing from Turkey to the EU.

The dramatic rescue operation came as Turkish officials announced that at least 53 migrants from Palestine, Somalia and Iraq had died when the overladen vessel, thought to be carrying up to 100 people, capsized off the country’s Aegean coast late on Saturday night.

Although the Turkish coastguard estimated some 85 had been on board, officials on the Greek island of Chios said they believed as many as 100 had been crammed into the vessel.

The death toll was expected to rise. It was the biggest loss of life in the Aegean since smugglers, attempting to outwit increased patrols in the western Mediterranean, began using the route to ferry would-be emigres into Europe.

“I cannot remember so many casualties in one single incident,” Metin Corabatir at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees told the Guardian from Ankara. “The bodies of two women have been found but many are still missing and there is a good chance that children will be among them, too.”

With the waters whipped up by gale force winds, only six men had managed to swim to shore by yesterday, staying afloat with the aid of inflatable inner tubes.

The bodies of the dead had washed up on the shores within hours of the 15-metre boat sinking off the coast of Seferihisar, south of the city of Izmir. Turkish television channels showed body bags being lined up along a local dock. Despite gale force winds hampering rescue efforts, helicopters and boats rushed to the scene.

“We are trying to keep our hopes alive but the possibility of more survivors is diminishing,” Orhan Sefik Guldibi, a local governor in Izmir province told the state-run Anatolia news agency. “Boats and helicopters are searching for more migrants in the sea,” he said, adding that while it appeared the migrants had drowned, autopsies would be conducted.

By this evening, Greek coastguard officials had also joined the effort, searching the waters off Chios, where the boat is thought to have been headed.

The survivors, who included two Palestinians, shouted for help when they reached the land and were taken to hospital and treated for shock. Later, they described how they had embarked on the journey in the dead of night, ignoring the bad weather as they set off from Turkey, in the hope of finding a new life in Europe.

Turkey has become a major hub for illegal migration from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, with thousands fleeing poverty and conflict heading to the smuggler strongholds along its Aegean coast once they arrive in the country.

Migration experts say the illegal flow into Greece - a border EU state with one of its longest coastlines — has tripled since the year began. In recent months, far-flung Greek islands such as Samos, Chios and Mytiline have been overwhelmed by the influx.

Although ties between Nato rivals Greece and Turkey have generally improved dramatically, the appearance of so many clandestine migrants threatens to increase tensions with Athens angrily accusing Ankara of not doing enough to stop the flow. Most of the boat people head to central Europe and Britain if they succeed in reaching Greece.

“This is a global problem with very deep roots that has to be addressed in the countries of origin through improving democracy, human rights and local economies,” added Metin Corabatir at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Turkey.

George Bush offered North Korea a peace deal yesterday that would end the world’s oldest and bloodiest cold war conflict on condition that Pyongyang gives up its nuclear weapons programme.

Prodded into the commitment during a testy exchange with South Korea’s president, Roh Moo-hyun, on the eve of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Sydney, Mr Bush said he would reward North Korea with a security arrangement that would replace the armistice signed at the end of the Korean war in 1953, which had cost 4 million lives.

The offer represents another shift away from Washington’s hardline stance towards the communist country, which Mr Bush once included in the “axis of evil”. It came as Pyongyang invited the US, China and Russia to survey its nuclear facilities, work at which was halted earlier this year.

Mr Bush’s move towards engagement rather than confrontation was the subject of an awkward dialogue with Mr Roh played out in front of the TV cameras.

Mr Roh leaned across and urged the president to be more explicit about the security arrangement.

“I might be wrong. I think I did not hear President Bush mention a declaration to end the Korean war just now,” Mr Roh said through an interpreter. “Did you say that, President Bush?” Mr Bush replied it was “up to Kim Jong-il”.

The South Korean leader remained unconvinced. “If you could be a little clearer,” he said.

A clearly irritated Mr Bush said that he had in mind a formal peace treaty that would end hostilities in the war, which ended with the US still technically at war with the North.

South and North Korea have also failed to agree a truce and their border remains the most heavily fortified in the world.

“I can’t make it any more clear, Mr President,” Mr Bush said. “We’re looking forward to the day when we can end the Korean war. That will happen when Kim Jong-il verifiably gets rid of his weapons programmes and his weapons.”

The US offer came after Christopher Hill, Washington’s chief nuclear negotiator and assistant secretary of state, reported that North Korea had agreed last weekend to dismantle its nuclear programme by the end of the year.

Mr Bush urged Mr Roh, who has been criticised by the US for being too soft on the communist regime, to hold Mr Kim to his nuclear commitments during a bilateral summit scheduled for next month in Pyongyang.

With international efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions at a critical stage, White House officials blamed the leaders’ misunderstanding on poor translation. “There was clearly something lost in translation during the photo op,” said Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman.

“President Bush considered it a good meeting and both the US and [South] Korea are on the same page with regards to the need for [North] Korea to comply with its obligations under the six party talk agreement.”

In a further sign of progress, nuclear experts from the US, China and Russia will travel to North Korea next week at the regime’s invitation to survey the nuclear facilities targeted for closure.

The unusually cordial diplomatic relations between Washington and Pyongyang have raised hopes for a peace deal to their highest level in decades, but there is still a long way to go before the two sides are likely to agree on terms for a verifiable disarmament of North Korea’s nuclear programme.

Oh dear …
On the third sentence of his address to Apec, Mr Bush told the Australian prime minister, John Howard: “Thank you for being such a fine host for the Opec summit.” He then quickly corrected: “Apec summit.” He then joked that Mr Howard had invited him to the Opec summit next year (an impossibility, neither are members). His next gaffe was a slip of the tongue. Talking about Mr Howard’s visit to Iraq last year to thank his country’s soldiers serving there, Mr Bush called them “Austrian troops”. Speech over, Mr Bush headed out - the wrong way. Mr Howard and others redirected him.