Beta Bytes - Week Of September 19th
Snippets of financial news calibrated to science, technology, and engineering companies as well as our client’s interests.
Illumina Wins Cut of $129M NIH Funding to Scale Up COVID-19 Testing
San Diego-based Illumina Inc. is among nine companies awarded a total of $129 million in funding by the National Institutes of Health.
The funding is part of NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative that was launched in April.
The funding will help significantly expand national testing in September, with the laboratories managing collection, analysis and reporting of tens of thousands of tests a day.
HP Inc. announced the launch of its annual Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Business Challenge designed to engage and attract Black students seeking careers in business and technology.
Previous challenges attracted more than 300 students across 44 HBCUs, select participants later becoming full-time employees or interns at HP.
Government data shows that while about 12 percent of Americans are Black, African Americans make up only about 7 percent of the US high-tech workforce and just 3 percent of the total Silicon Valley workforce. HP’s partnership with HBCUs seeks to dispel the myth of the "pipeline problem" for qualified young Black candidates.
General Atomics Delivers Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Concept to NASA
General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) announced that it has delivered a design concept of a Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) reactor to power future astronaut missions to Mars for a NASA-funded study.
The GA-EMS design proposes new features that address issues observed in historical designs, such as fuel element corrosion, and achieves a compact core using High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) instead of High-Enriched Uranium (HEU).
General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) Group is a global leader in the research, design, and manufacture of first-of-a-kind electromagnetic and electric power generation systems.
ServiceNow (NOW) Teams Up With Cisco to Create Safe Workplace
ServiceNow, Inc. NOW recently announced collaboration with Cisco’s CSCO DNA Spaces to augment its Contact Tracing app to create a safer return to work
Employees are confident of returning to workplace only if they are convinced of their employers’ pandemic preparedness.
Cisco’s DNA Spaces is a location-based cloud platform that will provide location services like toolkits, and analytics to its customers.