The moon is both seductively close to Earth and cosmically far away: Decades after the end of the space race, it remains extraordinarily expensive and difficult to actually get there. The journey just got a bit easier, however, thanks to a freshly published NASA invention. The agency's patent doesn't cover a new piece of equipment or lines of code, but a trajectory — a route designed to save a lunar-bound mission time, fuel, and money and boost its scientific value.

On June 30, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted and published NASA's patent for a series of orbital maneuvers, which Business Insider first learned about via a tweet by a lawyer named Jeff Steck. (read more at Business Insider)

Microsoft's patent is for a keyboard with a small prism under each key. This prism has enough sides to reflect four different beams of light onto the key above it.

To display a character, the keyboard shines light in the shape of the character onto a prism. The beam reflects off of the prism onto the underside of a key, which then displays the character.

However, because these key markings are just beams of light, they can be changed on the fly. This gives them an advantage over keyboards with printed or etched keys, which stay that way for life.

(Read more at Makeuseof.com)

A coalition of four technology companies - Apple Inc, Google LLC, Cisco Systems Inc, and Intel - have sued the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over a rule change that allows the agency to decline to review patents that are also being litigated in federal court.

The four companies sued the PTO on Wednesday, alleging it violated administrative law by adopting a policy known as the “NHK-Fintiv rule,” which allows the agency to decline to review patents through proceedings known as inter partes review (IPR).

(Read more at Reuters)

The United States and China find themselves in fierce competition to see which country will dominate the AI landscape and control future implementations of this emerging technology. One of the most hard fought areas in the struggle is the race to develop AI-accelerated hardware and acquire patents to protect innovations here. The current goliath from the U.S. is Nvidia, the market leader in graphic processing unit (GPU) hardware that has been used for increasing the speed of AI applications. In the past three years, however, a Chinese contender named Cambricon Technologies has become the poster child for the Chinese effort to lead in this area. From a patent innovation perspective Cambricon is dominating this battle, with more than four times as many patent inventions as Nvidia.

(Read more at Forbes)

Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing an increasingly influential role in the biotech space, driving the formation of new partnerships between the tech and healthcare industries. While big pharma is increasingly seeking collaborations with AI startups, major tech players such as Google, IBM and Microsoft are taking steps into the biotech space. A 2019 survey of pharmaceutical and biotech professionals by ICON found that 80% of respondents were using, or planning to use, AI technologies. …resolving the issues around copyright protection will be relevant for the protection of source code. However, AI is increasingly becoming capable of generating patentable output with diminishing human supervision. Here, inventorship is generally understood to reside with the person who developed the AI, which is seen as a ‘tool’ of the human inventor.

There are as yet no specific legal provisions addressing the notion of AI as an inventor, and most jurisdictions require the named inventor to be a natural person. Both the UKIPO and EPO recently rejected patent applications because the named inventor was an AI, despite acknowledging that the criteria for patentability were met. The USPTO followed suit, arguing that US patent law limits inventorship to natural persons. Such refusals are unlikely to be the end of the issue. As unsupervised learning algorithms become more complex and their use more widespread, cases where human oversight over the final output are not sufficient to meet the legal criteria of human inventorship will bring this point back to the forefront.

(Read more at thepharmaletter)

Lithium Australia (ASX: LIT) has received a clear international preliminary report on the patentability of processes described in its application for the recovery of lithium phosphate from lithium-bearing solutions. The company announced this morning that the international patent examiner has indicated all the claims in its application are “novel, involve an inventive step and are applicable to industry”.

Lithium Australia is working with the Australian Nuclear Science & Technology Organisation (ANSTO) on revolutionary technologies – such as the proprietary SiLeach® and LieNA® processes – to optimise the recovery of lithium phosphate from a range of lithium-bearing solutions. The lithium phosphate is then refined to the standard required for the production of lithium-ferro phosphate (LFP) lithium-ion batteries (LIB). LFP LIBs – which are enjoying renewed popularity in China – have become the battery of choice for the Tesla Model 3 marketed to the region’s consumers.

Read more at SMALLCAPS