1. How is the electron beam in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) generated?
2. How does hitting a sample with electrons give us images?
For answers and more photos, Read more…
For three years, Nathan has been directing and funding a team here at the Lab dedicated to culinary sciences. Chemists and chefs from some of the best restaurants in the world working on the cutting edge of applying scientific knowledge to the way we prepare food. They are just about to ship the cookbook they’ve created – Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking is a 2400 page tome (in six volumes) on the science of cooking, available to pre-order from Amazon. Check out the 20-page excerpt for a preview. The Lab kitchen has a drill press, a bandsaw, a rotary evaporator, a homogenizer and a pharmaceutical freeze dryer. They cook with liquid nitrogen and most of the rest of the periodic table. They’ve kept our machine shop busy with requests like “can you cut this microwave in half?” to make cross sectional images of cooking processes so cool that kitchenware companies have started sending us their products in hopes that we will cut them in half too.
We’re proud of this team, some of the hardest working people in the lab. Hopefully they can take a good break and then come back to work to help us invent the future of food.
Lots of people are inspired by inventions, but they rarely get a chance to be inspired by the inventors directly. This is largely because they are out of view, sequestered in a basement finicking with soldering irons and zip ties. Les Paul was a prolific inventor who has inspired nearly everyone indirectly, and a lot of people directly. His inventions have probably had the biggest impact on the sound of popular music over your lifetime.
Les Paul invented the solid body electric guitar, multi-track recording, & tape delay. He died one year ago today.
Here is a wonderful interview by NPR from 1992.
Over the last few years there has been a lot of destruction caused by a handful of very devastating hurricanes. In fact, six of the 10 costliest hurricanes to hit the United States have struck since 2004 (Katrina, Wilma, Ike, Charley, Ivan and Rita).
One of the consequences of global warming is that more energy is available in the ocean and the atmosphere to produce weather. Energy from the sun heats up the surface of the ocean. As that heat irradiates up and fuels storms, they can become ever more dangerous hurricanes. Reducing their destructive potential is possible if we could cool off the surface of the ocean.
A few years ago, Intellectual Ventures inventors, including wave energy expert Stephen H. Salter, an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, began work on a new approach that may offer a more feasible and affordable way to drain energy from hurricanes and typhoons.
As we head into this tough hurricane season, we wanted to answer some of the most common questions we receive about the Salter Sink.
The most important thing we are working on isn’t any particular invention. It is figuring out how to improve invention. What the world needs more than any of our inventions is a better ability to invent. This is what Intellectual Ventures is all about. Last night our founder, Nathan Myhrvold got a chance to explain that in an interview with Charlie Rose.
Modeling the Eradication of Malaria
Despite decades of attempts to control malaria, the disease still afflicts some 250 million people every year and claims the lives of about one million, mostly children. The parasite that causes malaria has shown stubborn resilience against the most powerful antimalarial drugs, and the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite have similarly grown resistant to insecticides. Although there is great hope for an effective vaccine, none is yet available.
At Intellectual Ventures, we believe history shows that trying to control malaria is an insufficiently ambitious goal. We in the scientific and technical community should instead develop technologies and strategies that can be used to completely eradicate the disease. Much of the progress we make toward eliminating malaria will also be directly useful in exterminating other infectious plagues of humanity, such as polio and tuberculosis.
Toward this goal, a team led by Dr. Philip Eckhoff is developing a completely original computer model that calculates not only how malaria spreads in a particular part of the world, but also how it will respond to a deliberate suppression campaign. The goal of this model, more ambitious than any similar software ever attempted before, is not just to understand and control the disease, but to stamp it out completely.
Why We Work on Solutions for the Prevention, Detection and Eradication of Malaria
Why are you inventing in this area?
Humanity faces significant global health challenges that have been difficult to solve through traditional methods. Our hope is that through inventive thinking, we can find new ways to tackle some of these issues.
With regard to our malaria projects, we are actively pursuing several invention ideas that could help detect, prevent and eradicate the disease. We believe that introducing the right combination of these technologies—while keeping older approaches in place—will lead to a better chance of completely eradicating malaria.
But why malaria and not AIDS or other health issues?
We have a variety of global health projects underway. One reason we are focusing on malaria first is it is a disease that is both preventable and curable. Yet more than one million people—including half a million children—reportedly died of the disease last year.
TerraPower is making great progress on their nuclear reactor design by using supercomputing clusters for computational modeling work. A calculation that takes all day to run on a desktop computer can run in one minute on our cluster.
This past year, the TerraPower team has been heavily involved in engineering work and design with a confidence and speed that would not be possible without the use of a computing cluster. Rigorous modeling techniques present intricate insight into the physics of the online cultivation of fuel, that enables the unique fuel cycle of the Traveling Wave Reactor. Extensive computer simulations and engineering studies produced new evidence that a wave of fission moving slowly through a fuel core could generate a billion watts of electricity continuously for well over 50 to 100 years without enrichment or reprocessing. The hi-fidelity results made possible by advanced computational abilities of modern supercomputer clusters are the driving force behind one of the most active nuclear reactor design teams in the country. Read more…
You can learn even more about the StratoShield and the science behind it on our video, Climate Science page, Our Answers about Geoengineering and the StratoShield White Paper.
What is the StratoShield?
The StratoShield is one possible way to respond to a climate emergency in which greenhouse warming becomes intolerable. The StratoShield would reverse greenhouse warming by slightly reduc¬ing the amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth. The shield does this by increasing the amount of sulfur aerosols injected into the atmosphere by about 1%, a process that happens naturally whenever volcanoes erupt. The aerosols reflect incoming sunlight back into space. Although the change in sunlight would be imperceptible to human eyes—and probably beneficial for plants—it would have a substantial cooling effect for the part of the Earth under the shield.
Read more…
Because these are controversial areas of exploration, we are often misunderstood. We hope these clear statements will help us steer towards more scientific discussion.
1. What is geoengineering?
“Geoengineering” describes how the earth’s systems can be influenced by engineering solutions. There are many historic examples of how humans have used technology to change geological systems. From using fire to drive game to building irrigation for agriculture, seeding clouds during droughts, reversing the Chicago River to building the Hoover dam, the term can encompass all sorts of ideas. Today, options discussed often include large-scale engineering of the environment in order to combat or counteract the adverse effects of human-induced changes in the atmosphere and climate.
2. Why is Intellectual Ventures researching geoengineering technologies?
Intellectual Ventures looks at hard problems facing the world and brainstorms ideas and technologies that can lead to better solutions. Global warming is a very significant problem, but it won’t be solved with old ideas and old technology alone. We believe that the solution to this crisis will involve new ideas and new technologies.
Intellectual Ventures recognizes that the process of bringing new global warming ideas to the surface can be challenging and controversial. But as an invention company, we believe research needs to be done now, rather than after the full complications of global warming are upon us. Read more…