Daily News Briefs

James Houck, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, was awarded NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for leading the successful development of the Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared spectrograph. The spectrograph, the largest of the three instruments on the orbiting space telescope, has been used to observe a wide range of phenomena, including ultraluminous galaxies, brown dwarfs, nascent stars and organic material in remote galaxies. The Spitzer Space Telescope, the fourth and last of NASA's Great Observatories, is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ball Aerospace's Technologies Corp. built the infrared spectrograph under Houck's direction. Houck will accept the medal at a ceremony to be held June 22 at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., . . . NTERA Ltd., a material science and applications company, announced it has transformed an existing LCD facility in Taipei, Taiwan, into a factory for its NanoChromics display line, which uses proprietary nanostructured materials, "NanoChromics displays look like ink on paper and act with the intelligence of an electronic display," the company said. In business since 1997 through a relationship with University College Dublin in Ireland, NTERA has offices in Philadelphia, and in Dublin, Ireland, and manufacturing facilities in Taiwan and Dublin.