Silicon

What's the deal with these silicon brushes that are used for basting? They say they are food-safe, dishwasher-safe, heat-resistant. I'm seeing them everywhere. The brushes are indeed heat-resistant, which makes them handy for working with hot mixtures. Another nice feature is that they don't shed bristles like nylon or natural-hair brushes. The only problem I've had with some styles is that because nothing sticks to them, it can be difficult to pick up enough of the glaze or whatever you're brushing on. However, OXO has a clever solution: brushes that have inner strips with holes in them, sort of like bubble wands.

The venture capitalists at Accel Partners fly around the world to find hot companies ripe for investment. The Silicon Valley-based firm was the first major investor in Facebook years ago, and its portfolio is a Who's Who of fast-growing technology enterprises. But a few years ago, a little company in Columbia called Tenable Network Security Inc. caught the eye of Accel's executives. They followed Tenable closely as it steadily emerged as a top player in cybersecurity. Then, in September, the bombshell: Accel decided to pump $50 million into Tenable, a staggering amount even by venture capital standards and the biggest investment that Accel has ever made in a North American company.

There is a new, seemingly pervasive architecture in our lives. It is the architecture of computer chips -- the ultimate planned community, where nothing is present by accident.Chips have interstate highways and secondary roads, warehouses and industrial zones. A chip is a wholly planned metropolis of transistors and silicon.Pentium is the brand of chip, the silicon city, that is most in demand. Designed and manufactured by Intel Corp., it is the standard for personal computers. You've seen the ads: "Intel Inside," they say. But in the ads, all you see is a small black box, while the soul of the machine is the sliver of processed silicon inside.

The space sure looked like a science lab, with beakers full of brightly-hued potions and a dry-erase board covered in graphs and mathematical scrawl. But at the heart of the operation sits a hunk of metal with a hand crank on the side. "It's a pasta maker," said Barry Margulies, a biology professor who presides over the Towson University lab. No joke. When it occurred to Margulies' graduate researcher that Williams Sonoma might have the answer to their prayers, it was a major breakthrough for the lab's efforts to treat one of America's most prevalent sexually transmitted diseases.

In one of the Columbia laboratories of Martek Biosciences, Steve Dubin proudly displays the company's collection of more than 2,000 types of microalgae -- considered the second-largest such collection in the world.Many of the green, blue and red aquatic plants are no larger than a thumbnail, but they may hold the key to developing drugs to treat drug-resistant bacteria and perplexing neurological disorders, Mr. Dubin, Martek's financial officer, says.The tiny plants also represent a small part of a much larger body of industrial research that is turning Howard and Montgomery counties into one of the nation's leading areas for pioneering biotechnology and high-technology research.

"Silicon Sky," by Gary Dorsey. Perseus Books. 320 pages. $26.There's something un-American about Gary Dorsey's "Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven." Or perhaps the story is quintessentially American, though it flies in the face of our country's idealized notions about free enterprise. Dorsey's tale is not one of first-rate engineers working long hours to produce a first-rate satellite. He writes of compromise and mediocrity -- how a team of the best and brightest deliberately threw together a "B minus" satellite to meet crippling schedule and financial constraints.

Bookham Technology PLC, a British fiber-optics company that is opening its North American headquarters in Howard County, said yesterday that it made a multimillion-dollar deal with Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe Ltd. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Bookham announced that it would supply up to 10,000 pieces of equipment to Fujitsu each month this year. Bookham makes telecommunications components that help information flow along fiber-optic networks. With headquarters in Oxfordshire, England, Book- ham announced plans last month to open a North American headquarters and manufacturing plant in Columbia that is expected to eventually employ 1,000.

When Louise Sengupta, a founder of Paratek Microwave Inc. in Columbia, went searching for a bank to establish a line of credit with, she ended up with one practically unheard of in the mid-Atlantic: Silicon Valley Bank.But Silicon Valley Bank is no stranger to chief financial officers and executives at regional high-technology start-ups.During the past three years, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based institution has quietly built a $100 million credit portfolio among dozens of promising high-technology ventures in the Baltimore-Washington-Northern Virginia region.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Power crisis? What power crisis? Sure, California's two biggest utilities have a $12 billion deficit and are close to bankruptcy. Silicon Valley manufacturers have lost tens of millions of dollars because of sporadic outages. And the Chinese ambassador to the United States found himself sitting in the dark last week at the $450-a-night San Jose Hilton. But Andrew Sims, for one, is tired of hearing that his state - the world's sixth-largest economy and birthplace of some of its most innovative technology - is in panic mode because lights have gone off here and there.

Michael Davidson was peering through his microscope at the tiny landscape of a silicon microchip when he saw it: A boy's face, nestled among the millions of tiny transistors. And he could swear the boy was smiling.He closed his eyes, opened them again and pumped up the magnification.No, he wasn't imagining things. It was Waldo - the elusive hero of the ``Where's Waldo?'' children's book series - his familiar smirk a fraction of the width of a human hair.Although he didn't know it at the time, Davidson had stumbled onto the Lascaux Cave of the computer industry: A secret cache of microscopic doodles buried inside computer chips around the globe and known only to the small priesthood of bunny-suited engineers and technicians who created them.

A 45-year-old Atlanta woman admitted Wednesday that she used a downtown Baltimore hotel room to inject exotic dancers with commercial-grade silicone, commonly used in furniture polish, to enlarge their buttocks, according to federal prosecutors. As part of her guilty plea in Baltimore's U.S. District Court, Kimberly D. Smedley conceded that she earned more than $200,000 giving silicone shots to women for eight years in cities around the country, using glue and cotton balls to prevent leakage.

Loyola University Maryland is expected to announce Tuesday a partnership with a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm for a startup accelerator that will help students quickly form new companies — one of a handful of such programs recently launched in the Baltimore area. Wasabi Ventures will work with the university to attract and mentor students into the accelerator program. The venture firm will provide professional staff to manage the program, oversee funding for new companies, and offer internships.

Derek Gabbard wasn't dreaming of California when he sought to raise investment capital for his Baltimore-based cybersecurity firm. But the CEO of Lookingglass Cyber Solutions lucked out with a connection to venture capitalists in the state that dwarfs all others in terms of venture capital. With a San Francisco investment firm taking the lead on the investment and a Maryland firm following, Gabbard recently raised $5 million. Such deals, where Mid-Atlantic technology companies straddle both coasts for investors, have been cropping up lately, though the dynamics underlying them vary.

Thanks to demand from the defense sector, the vacancy rate for office space in Baltimore's suburbs is lower than anywhere else in the United States except for two suburban markets in California, a new commercial real estate report shows. Suburban Baltimore had an office vacancy rate of 14 percent, according to an overview of the mid-Atlantic commercial market released this month by Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate firm that operates nationwide. That's lower than any other suburban market the firm tracks except for two high-tech hotbeds: the San Francisco peninsula, which has an 11.6 percent vacancy rate, and Silicon Valley, with a 12.7 percent rate.

Some women who want rounder, fuller buttocks are turning to a dangerous cosmetic procedure: illegal injections of silicone offered by people who lack medical training and may buy their supplies in home improvement stores. The trend — which has already sent one exotic dancer from Baltimore's Block to the hospital with silicone in her lungs — has alarmed public health officials and plastic surgeons, who say the injections can maim or kill recipients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other agencies have been investigating the incident in Baltimore and others across the country.

Those who think the government shouldn't be promoting energy innovation have short memories. The federal government's satellite and ballistic missile program spillovers are what brought us Silicon Valley. The energy program spillovers are going to land someplace else. Bringing about a technological and industrial revolution requires a huge commitment of collective resources as well as private initiative. It requires fundamental research, well ahead of the possibility of commercialization.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A few shacks and old cars dot the brown landscape around Tulare Hill. Cows graze languidly nearby. The 350-foot hill itself is scarred by rows of high-voltage transmission lines that are part of a network running from Canada to Mexico. The 14 acres at the hill's base don't look like much, but this site in Silicon Valley is ground zero in a fierce battle over a proposal to build a $400 million power plant that would serve the electricity needs of every home in San Jose and help satisfy the voracious energy needs of chip-makers and so-called "server farms."

Michael Rolle, a veteran of Oracle Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. who trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, has started a new job: umpiring junior varsity high school softball for $20 a game. It's not the direction he thought his career would take when his last serious contract ran out two years ago. Since then, Rolle's only stint as a software engineer has been at a start-up that laid him off after one month. "I see everybody spending all their days going to networking meetings, calling their friends, doing all the various things people tell you to do, and after months of that, they're still looking," said Rolle, 57, of Cupertino, Calif.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - The need was direct: How to facilitate the exchange of money and goods between a consumer and an online merchant. The concept was simple: a service that would allow the shopper to purchase an item without sharing financial information, and, at the same time, enable retailers, small-business owners and individuals a guaranteed quick and sure payment for a small fee. PayPal Inc., the San Jose company that revolutionized the way payments...

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - Intel's billion-dollar Vietnam bet along the Hanoi Highway - its biggest semiconductor manufacturing plant ever - is rising from the flatlands of former rice fields. The Santa Clara, Calif., chip giant jolted the tech world two years ago when it announced it would build a huge assembly factory in this Southeast Asian country known more for making shoes and growing crops than assembling key PC components. Intel Corp. picked Vietnam, a nation of 85 million that lacks a single world-class university, over India, whose army of engineers has reordered the global software industry.