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According to the Small Business Survival Committee of Washington, D.C., the five states most hospitable to small business, in descending order, are the following: Nevada, South Dakota, Washington, Wyoming, and Florida.
BENLATE BITES DUPONT AGAIN Jury convicts DuPont of hiding evidence; orders $78 million payment
D
UPONT SAID IN APRILTHAT
it would stop selling its 30-year-old Benlate-brand benomyl fungicide by the end of this year because of high litigation costs, but its troubles are far from over. A Miami jury has ordered DuPont to pay $78 million to two Costa Rican plant nurseries for damages they allege were caused by Benlate. "This verdict was the result of a seriously flawed proceeding," a DuPont spokesman says, because jurors were not allowed to hear all of the relevant facts.
He adds that allegations presented during the trial that DuPont had concealed evidence showing Benlate could damage plants was false. "We didn't destroy any evidence, and we didn't hide anything," he says. "We look forward to a higher court's review" The verdict was issued under Florida's Civil Remedies for Criminal Practices Act, which is modeled after the federal Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations Act. The act allows plaintiffs to recover triple damages.
The Dade County Circuit Court jury found DuPont liable for racketeering, fraud, and negligence. It awarded Palmas y Bambu $15 million and Productura de Semillas $14 million. After discounting the award by 10% for the growers' portion of fault and then tripling the award, the court ordered DuPont to pay $78 million. DuPont's problems date to 1991 when a contaminated Benlate batch first caused plant damage. DuPont initially paid out $500 million to cover growers' losses. But as claims mounted, the company did its own tests, which it maintains showed Benlate had not caused damages that growers continued to claim. Nonetheless, the company has paid out $ 1.3 billion in legal costs and settlements since 1991, and it has about 120 claims pending. Benlate sales last year were $90 million.-MARC REISCH
MICROFABRICATION
Working Microdevices Edge Closer To Reality 4É
F
antastic Voyage"—the film in which a miniaturized Raquel Welch and her colleagues venture through a patient's bloodstream in a tiny submarine—no longer seems so fantastical. Recent news reports have described a camera-containing pill that photographs the digestive tract. And Japanese researchers have now made microdevices that could proceed through the body "through even the smallest blood vessels, for example, to
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deliver clinical treatments" [Nature, M29 697 (2001)]. Applied physics professor Satoshi Kawata and coworkers at Osaka University have crafted what they say are the smallest model animals and among the smallest functional micromechanical systems ever made. Their "micro-bulls" are 10 pm long and 7 pm high, about the size of a red blood cell. Their similarly sized "micro-oscillator system" consists of a bead fastened to a spring attached to a
cubic anchor. The scientists employ laser-trapping force to catch hold of the bead and pull on it. When released, the bead moves as the spring contracts and relaxes. The Japanese team uses "two-photon photopolymerization" to create the 3-D structures. An infrared laser is beamed into a liquid urethaneacrylate resin containing photoinitiators, and the resin solidifies wherever two photons are simultaneously absorbed. Movement of the laser's focal point location is managed by computer. After the pattern is completed, unreacted resin is washed away. The researchers bettered the technique's previous minimum feature size of 600 nm by controlling laserpulse energy and exposure time to give a resolution of 120 nm.-SOPHIE WILKINSON
D O W N S I Z E D The fine features of the bull and the functionality of the ball-ona-spring device demonstrate the laser technique's capabilities.
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