For a memorable enquiry about a Russian device called the Magic Mole, a great deal of lateral thinking and detective work was required to find the answer.
See our article here and as it appeared in The Global IP Matrix, 2, p7, September 2018.

The Magic Mole was the subject of a patent and our client needed to prove they were not infringing the patent claims by the sale of a similar product.
We were able to identify an expert witness and the case was settled.

We took care to obtain permission from the instructing attorney for us to publish an account of this interesting case. Click

This image shows a snapshot of our work in the biotechnology area. We are frequently asked for biotechnology patent searches and this PatBase Analytics Visual Explorer image gives an overview of the topics covered. The analysis is based on multiple answer sets prepared for individual clients, with the patents selected by using keywords, classification codes and sequences.

Here are some searches we have done for subject matter associated with Nobel prize winning topics. These included white light from blue light-emitting diodes (LED), high temperature superconductors and giant magnetoresistance.

The advance provided by the blue LED, for which Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura received the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics, enabled the production of highly efficient, low temperature white light either by combining red, green and blue LEDs in a single module or by stimulating yellow phosphor material with blue light. Our searches covered both mechanisms.

Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller were the first, in 1986, to prepare copper-oxide based ceramic materials which exhibited superconductivity at temperatures higher than any metal superconductors, and currently such cuprate ceramics have achieved a transition temperatures of 133° Kelvin, a cooling easily provided by liquid nitrogen thus avoiding the higher costs associated with refrigerating with liquid helium. They received the Nobel Prize for Physics just one year later in 1987.

Giant magnetoresistance is a quantum mechanical effect of great commercial significance, enabling much more precise magnetic field sensors that can read out data from much smaller domains in magnetic storage materials, thus allowing greatly increased storage capacity. Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg (US4949039) independently discovered the effect in 1988 in thin-film structures made of alternating layers of ferromagnetic material and non-magnetic conductive material and were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2007.

At one time we were also requested to perform quite a number of searches on cold nuclear fusion. The inventors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons (EP0463089) were never likely to receive a Nobel Prize, as their production of excess heat in the electrolysis of heavy water on palladium electrodes in 1989, accompanied by the production of neutrons and tritium was never satisfactorily replicated. It was discovered that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction byproducts. It is still astonishing how many patent applications were filed in a relatively short period, 130 in 1989 and 70 in 1990. The filings on low energy nuclear fusion then diminished to an average of about 25 a year over the subsequent 25 years.

Smart thermostats is another topic for which we have expertise gained from a large number of enquiries. These smart devices allow users to control their home's temperature remotely via wireless technology.