Open Source Online Textbooks In Classrooms Now

I love it when VCs give a vote of confidence to something I've hailed as a worthwhile innovation; makes me think once in awhile I get it right. That's what happened this week when Flat World Knowledge, the open source online textbook start-up I wrote about for CNN Money and Fortune Small Business in December, got an $8 million injection of VC funds from Valhalla Partners, Greenhill SAVP and High Peaks Venture Partners. Now, I know 8 mil is small potatoes, but with VC channels all but dry right now and this being Flat World's first round (previous funding was all from unnamed Angels), it's one of those times the thought counts.

The pinch hitting schools, students, and their families may mean good timing for the plucky start-up, which has its first ten titles -- all aimed at management and business schools -- ready for show and tell to college faculty this spring.

Catching Cancer Before It's Cancer with Magnetic Nano-Particles

What if it were possible to find cancerous tumors while they were so small they were really just clusters of hyperactive cells circulating in the blood? (Which is what tumors really are, except on a larger, and scarier, scale.) That's the promise of a new magnetic nanotechnology currently in development as a joint project at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz. Described by the research team as "real-time magnetic nanotag sensing" in a recent paper, the technology uses nanosize magnetic beads as "tags" that attach to multiple cancer-related proteins -- known as biomarkers -- in a blood serum sample. Still in the prototype stage, it's much more sensitive than other fluorescent assays currently being tested, most of which can detect only one biomarker at a time. The research is being supported by the National Cancer Institute's Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, an iniative that we hope will deliver on the promise of nanotechnology to catch cancer while it's still curable. Two of the lead researchers, Dr. Shan Wang of Stanford and Nader Pourmand have cofounded a startup, MagArray, to develop the technology. Definitely worth keeping a watch on.