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RESEARCH: Rockefeller Foundation looks for innovation via InnoCentive

Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive's president and CEO. Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Founda­

tion, adds that the agreement with InnoCentive "will enable researchers and entrepreneurs addressing the needs of the developing world to access one of the same cutting-edge opportunities to innovate now enjoyed by Fortune 500 companies." The partnership is the first step in a broader Rockefeller Foundation initiative to promote innovation and spur development on behalf of poor or vulnerable populations.

The 94-year-old private foundation will select non­profit and other charitable organizations eligible to use the InnoCentive website. It will recruit and screen these "seeker" organizations through a new area on its own website that includes an online questionnaire. On behalf of sponsored seekers, the foundation will pay access, posting, and service fees to InnoCentive, as well as the awards to researchers who solve the posted problems.

InnoCentive's scientific operations group will work with the foundation and seeker organizations to define and articulate solvable problems and set award amounts. The nonprofit seekers, like InnoCentive's corporate cli­ents, will choose the best solution to their problems.

"Our platform is agile, and we're open to new and evolving ways of adapting InnoCentive," says Ali Hus­sein, InnoCentive's chief marketing officer and vice president of global markets. Late last year, Prize4Life, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., used InnoCentive to offer a $1 million prize for the success­ful identification of a biomarker for amyotrophic lat­eral sclerosis.—ANN THAYER

In this false-color radar image, lakes dot the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. The lakes likely are filled with liquid methane.

METHANE LAKES ON TITAN

PLANETARY SCIENCE: Cassini spacecraft finds long-predicted bodies of liquid

I T'S OFFICIAL: The northern hemisphere of Sat­urn's giant moon Titan is dotted with liquid hydro­carbon lakes. The finding vindicates a long-stand­

ing prediction that Titan, shrouded in dense nitrogen and methane clouds, should also have reservoirs of liquid—likely methane—on its surface.

Images showing the lakes, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft as it scanned the northern area of Titan with its cloud-piercing radar, were initially released last July. Now, after detailed scrutiny, scientists are confident that they're seeing about 75 lakes, some enclosed by craterlike rims and some intersected with riverlike channels (Nature 2007,44s, 61).

"They have so many characteristics expected of lakes," says Ellen R. Stofan, a planetary scientist at Proxemy Research in Laytonsville, Md., who is on the Cassini radar team.

The discovery also adds weight to the idea that cold, dense methane on Titan participates in a cycle of evap­oration and precipitation as does water here on Earth. "This is the first body we have found in the solar system besides Earth that has an active hydrologic cycle—only in Titan's case, the fluid is methane, not water," Stofan says.

Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since June 2004, provided the first detailed view of Titan's sur­face, but no lakes or oceans were seen initially. A small lander piggybacking on Cassini, the Huygens probe, touched down on Titan's surface two years ago, snap­ping pictures that showed an eroded, dry landscape with drainage channels that indicate liquid had once flowed there. Scientists began to wonder if Titan's methane source lay underground.

According to Cassini scientists, some of the depres­sions are formed by volcanism and some lakes maybe fed by surface drainage and rainfall, whereas others, without river channels, maybe fed by a subsurface methane table.

Cassini is scheduled to fly by Titan 22 more times. "But to really understand the chemistry of these lakes, we will need a follow-up lander mission to directly measure their composition," Stofan tells C&EN.— ELIZABETH WILSON

WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG g JANUARY 8, 2007

THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION will create a nonprofit area within InnoCentive's global scientific network to attract scientists who can

offer solutions to critical humanitarian challenges. Since 2001, InnoCentive has operated a website

on which research-based companies can pose scien­tific problems to be solved by researchers around the world (C&EN, June 26, 2006, page 24). With the foundation's involvement, the site is now expanding to include nonprofit orga­nizations and technologi­cal challenges faced by the developing world.

"The Rockefeller Foun­dation challenges are go­ing to be new and exciting additions to our usual challenge set," comments