Technology

In a sign that green technology investing is bouncing back, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures said Tuesday that it had raised $1.1 billion to spur development of renewable energy and other clean technologies. It is the biggest first-time fund in a decade and comes as venture capital investment in green technology is just beginning to recover from a precipitous fall prompted by the global economic collapse last fall. In the first half of the year, investments in green tech plunged to $513 million from $2 billion in the first six months of 2008, according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The nation's bellwether technology sector is kicking into gear as businesses and consumers boost their spending on computers and electronics. Shipments of semiconductors are on the rise. Some companies are hiring. Tech stocks outperformed the market all summer. And U.S. exports to China, including technology products, have climbed 33% since January. That's good news for California, home to hundreds of companies that make the software, chips and switches that power many of today's bestselling computer and electronics devices.

Every week, Alex Velez and Nikhil Arora collect 2,000 pounds of used coffee grounds from Peet's Coffee & Tea outlets near their UC Berkeley haunts and take them to a warehouse in Oakland. There, in a damp indoor farm, the college friends grow gourmet mushrooms that are sold at local Whole Foods Markets. Just a few months out of business school, they're on track to make more than $200,000 in their first year. The budding entrepreneurs' efforts were among 25 start-ups spotlighted during the third annual sustainable business conference hosted by L.A.-based Opportunity Green in partnership with UCLA's Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

Scientist Dusan Stulik, researcher Art Kaplan and photographic conservator Tram Vo have developed a new way to authenticate historic photographs. Instead of relying on human eyes and microscopes to date photographic images, as in the past, the specialists at the Getty Conservation Institute devised a scientific method that can determine the age of many photographs made in the 20th century. The key, they discovered, was to identify hidden chemical "signatures" associated with particular processes.

On March 4, 1901, a lone cameraman in the employ of Thomas A. Edison was dispatched to capture the swearing in of William McKinley. To posterity he delivered a total of 44 seconds of grainy footage showing a white-haired man on the Capitol steps solemnly, if indistinctly, raising his right hand. The snippet lives in the archives of the Library of Congress along with a note apologizing for the Edison Co.'s picayune contribution to American history: "The rain began falling in torrents with almost the first words of the President's speech, which of course prohibited our taking a greater length of film."

New technology is allowing researchers to watch the movement of large groups of fish as they gather and later split up. Using a system called ocean acoustic waveguide remote sensing, scientists observed Atlantic herring gather off Cape Cod, Mass., to spawn in the dark, according to a report Friday in the journal Science. With dawn, the fish return to deeper waters and scatter.

Two new techniques using different approaches to see molecular changes inside people's bodies could lead to faster, more-detailed imaging scans. The magnetic resonance imaging technologies manipulate the spin of molecules to provide detailed scans that one day could rapidly do things like analyze how well a drug is working or tell how fast tumors are growing, the researchers said in the journal Science.

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates on Sunday used his final keynote address at the tech industry's top trade show to tout some of the same futuristic technologies he ballyhooed at his first more than a decade ago.

The western Canadian province of British Columbia is set to start testing a high-tech driver's license, aimed at allaying U.S. security concerns while also allowing spontaneous trips across the border. The province unveiled new licenses that contain a microchip that will give border guards access to the driver's citizenship information and serve as an alternative to a passport. The licenses are initially designed to ease travel between British Columbia and Washington state, which is already taking applications for its own enhanced license project.

Major defense contractor Raytheon Co. is selling microwave technology to a large oil field services company to extract oil reserves in the West's vast underground shale deposits. In a deal to be announced today, Schlumberger Ltd. is buying technology that Raytheon developed with Boston-based CF Technologies, which supplied expertise to extract oil using so-called supercritical liquid carbon dioxide.