At L.A.’s prominent research universities, scientists are finding new ways of diagnosing and treating illnesses, keeping society safer and turning algae into oil. And when the experiments bear fruit, they spin off companies.

This special section presents noteworthy examples of companies that spun off from university labs. Among them is L-Nutra, which grew out of research at USC. The company’s medicinal foods could one day be used to slow the effects of aging and treat cancer. As noted below, UCLA and Caltech have also produced remarkable new technologies.

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he military is working with local law enforcement to develop software that will help track gang networks.

Software now known as the Organizational, Relationship and Contact Analyzer (ORCA) was initially developed and used in military operations to identify networks of insurgents, and is now being used domestically. The military will use the domestic tests as a way to hone the software for future wartime applications, while in the meantime providing police gang units with a valuable free tool that could eventually see a more widespread deployment.

Paulo Shakarian,...

From a small room in a Pakistan house, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) was shaken to its core in 2011.

Within the data seized from Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound was the al Qaeda plan to blow up oil tankers in U.S. waters to create an “extreme economic crisis.”

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John Pistole, the chief of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), often refers to random patrols or inspections as a key element of his agency's security strategy at US airports.

As recently as March 14, 2013, Pistole told the House Committee on Homeland Security that "TSA will always incorporate random and unpredictable security measures throughout the airport" to make it difficult for terrorists to observe patterns in security measures and thereby evade them.

However, there is another key motivator for randomizing security measures -- limited resources...