Intellectual Ventures Lab

If you still haven’t flipped through the latest issue of Make Magazine, well here it is.  Not the whole thing, just 3ric Johanson’s critically (do I qualify as a critic?) acclaimed article on the Photonic Fence.  Creating a machine that shoots mosquitoes out of the sky with lasers has been no small task.  3ric gives the low down on everything from the preliminary eye-rolling brainstorms, to the three challenges in mosquito assassination, as well as explanations of the hardware, software and methods he is currently using.  Read the entire article below.

Make 23: Mosquito Blaster

Want to learn more about what the Lab is about?  Starting today, and for the next week, Gizmodo will be running a series of stories on Intellectual Ventures and some of the projects that are underway.  The first story about invention gives a brief mention of us. The second, more extensive, piece describes who we are and why we’re here, including a video tour of the facilities. Keep an eye out this week for a lot more coverage from Gizmodo.  We’ll link to the articles below as they are released.

• Eureka: Hello Invention (8.25.10)
• How Intellectual Ventures Wants to Reinvent Invention (8.25.10)
• Why Ideas are Expensive (8.26.10)
• Why We Need More Inventions. Lots More Inventions (8.26.10)
• Why Failure Is an Option at Intellectual Ventures (8.27.10)
• How Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures Would Change the Patent System (8.27.10)

Last weekend we held a smallish release party for Make Magazine Issue 23 at Ada’s Technical Books in Seattle.    The cover features none other than the Photonic Fence project, and contains a lovely write up by 3ric Johanson with support from many folks here at the lab & Make Magazine.

Copies of the issue were passed out in exchange for participation in a single-question survey.   Here are the results:

Just tell us what you like to make.

monkey men, circuit bending, tesla coils, amps, lasers, machines of death and destruction, furniture, low cost audio computers for info access to reduce poverty, sewing projects, gardening projects, foody makery, ceramics, a robot that clears large areas of weeds on a steep inline, alternate histories, redesigned clothing, web apps, movies, self-replicating Reprap 3D printers, news, music, friends, smiles and stuff, backyard crucibles, laser light plane touch surface, drones, free enterprise, modeled computers, 3D objects & 3D objects that make 3D objects, metalwork, sustainable design, sculpture, housing, fashion, electronics, embedded CPU projects, trouble, RC aircraft…then crashing them…then re-making them, ATM prototypes, 3ric, anything original or wicked fun, software, cardboard creatures with electric eyes, simulations of societies, AI stuff, coin-shrinkers, fulgurites, wood carvings, wooden things, books, knives, motorcycles, theramin, machines to learn, soldered pysanky, yarn, block prints, costumes, handicrafts, kinetic LED sculptures for “still” photography, lego robots, Craft Robo paper cut art, electronics for scientific computing, clothes, gadgets, clothes with gadgets, FPGA boards, edible sound, magnetic art, new and infeasible ideas, shiny photos, random thing driven by microcontrollers, making people jump (parkour), skin/skeleton/guts electronics, mobile robots, dangerous toys, cupcakes, new and amazing hacking tools, concrete structures,  projBox kit, video games, companies, making people ride bikes to power the entire Seattle Bicycle Music Festival.

The most popular things people like to make according to this very formal and controlled study are robots and trouble.  Needless to say, Make Magazine caters to a hands-on and creative, though unmistakeably diverse, crowd.  Find the latest issue covering our mosquito laser on newsstands everywhere.

For photos from the event: Read more…

Bike-to-Work Day is a national event that began in 1956 and is part of Bike-to-Work Week, which is in turn part of National Bike Month.

This year, Intellectual Ventures had five teams participate in Bike Month.   Here at the lab, 10 bike commuters  enlisted, dubbing ourselves the LABicyclists.   Last Friday morning,  for Bike-to-Work Day, we rounded up a posse in Seattle to tackle the long trek to the Eastside.  The group met on the Burke Gilman trail in front of the University of Washington, hopped buses over the pedestrian-prohibited 520 bridge, then proceeded through the mean Bellevue backstreets.  [Check out our route.]  We took a detour over to the Lincoln campus where Top Pot doughnuts and other tasty treats were being served to all of the company’s cyclists.

LABicyclists flashing their gang signs

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.

We’ve been seeing more and more visitors from the media around here. The most recent journalist to peruse the lab was Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, who was looking for the lowdown on our malaria work. Although the Photonic Fence, a.k.a. the mosquito laser system, has gotten most of the press lately due to Nathan Myhrvold’s TED talk, we have several other malaria projects that are starting to turn heads as well.

The meat of the article follows Karima Nigmatulina, Ph.D. and Philip Eckhoff, Ph.D. (pictured above) and their disease modeling software. A few other projects got shout-outs as well. These include malaria detection tools headed by Michael Hegg, Ph.D. and Ben Wilson Ph.D. (pictured below), the artificial mosquito diet of Barcin Acar Ph.D. and Emma Mullen, and of course 3ric Johanson’s Photonic Fence. Even TerraPower managed to sneak in there.

Dan was a machine, bolting from group to group and scrawling endless notes in the process; we watched him fill up three whole pads of paper! The result is “Short-Circuiting Malaria,” which can be found on Newsweek‘s website and will be in print any day now. We appreciate the coverage and are excited that more of our projects are being recognized.

Check out the Newsweek article here.

Our hard work has created quite a buzz. We are still exploring options for aspects of the TWR technology, but want to acknowledge all the interest generated from recent media coverage.

The reality is that we are sharing information about our Traveling-Wave Reactor (TWR) design with a variety of U.S. and international organizations and governments to listen, learn and discuss future options for the design. But we have not entered into agreements with any companies to build or operate the TWR at this time.

The Traveling Wave Reactor design is still in the research and development (R&D) phase. Today’s energy and climate problems require more R&D than any one nation can provide.  We cannot succeed without collaborative technology development. That’s why TerraPower researchers are learning from demonstrated technologies and best engineering practices worldwide. To be clear, the TerraPower team’s information sharing complies with U.S. regulation.

We’re excited to see enthusiasm for the prospects of our technology. As the R&D effort progresses, we’ll be posting our relevant results here on the blog.

To read our full statement, take a look at the pdf.

On January 14, 2010, Philip Eckhoff was honored by the Hertz Foundation.  He was nominated for contributions in the field of disease eradication modeling, which he worked on in his spare time while completing his doctorate at Princeton.  The prize is not regularly awarded, but offered only in the midst of noteworthy accomplishment related to applied science and engineering.  Jay Davis, the foundation’s president, presented a certificate of recognition.  Also expressing words of acknowledgment and appreciation were the foundation’s chairman, David Galas,  funder of the epidemiological modeling project, Bill Gates, and Intellectual Ventures CEO, Nathan Myhrvold.

The Hertz Foundation inducts some 15 promising grad students as fellows each year.  Generous thesis funding and support have made the Hertz Fellowship one of the most sought after and prestigious award of its kind.  In 2004, Philip successfully underwent the rigorous application and interview process that would jumpstart his Ph.D. research in Applied and Computational Mathematics.  The foundation also continues to recognize outstanding accomplishments of its alumni, for which was the purpose of this event.

Philip has been hard at work with a team at Intellectual Ventures Lab developing an original computer model that calculates how malaria spreads, as well as how it responds to various methods of suppression. The goal of this ambitious and unprecedented model is not just to understand and control the disease but to stamp it out completely.

Although the software tool can be readily expanded to simulate infectious diseases beyond malaria, enough laboratory and epidemiological data is not available in some cases to create a truly reliable eradication model today. However, our infectious disease model is an exciting step toward providing a tool for both greater understanding and more effective action against these diseases, and hope for a healthier humanity.

We are proud of Philip’s ground breaking work, congratulate him on receiving this high honor and offer him the best of luck in his continued research.

We are inventors.  We look at hard problems facing the world and brainstorm whether new ideas and new technologies could help.  Climate and energy are big problem areas with lots of room for improvement.

Global warming needs attention.  Nobody yet knows how we will solve these problems.  We work on whole spectrum of energy and climate-related inventions.  By putting new possibilities on the table, humanity as a whole can make better choices about our future.

We can’t wait until it’s too late.  We don’t believe that climate technologies are a substitute for reducing emissions, but we can’t wait to explore such crucial and complex possibilities until we might need them.  We are not advocating deployment, we are advocating further exploration.

Please read more about this work on our Climate Science page.

“When you read the actual scientists’ reasoning for how [geoengineering] could work, and might need to work, it’s really hard not to come to the conclusion that it’s idiotic to discount it. Not to say it’s a slam dunk to do it, but idiotic to discount it entirely.”

A great quote from Stephen Dubner in this Guardian interview with him and Steven Levitt. We’re big fans of Freakonomics and delighted to have some of our climate science inventions featured in their upcoming sequel – Superfreakonomics. The new book is already starting to make some headlines even though it’s not due out until October 20.

Another U.K. paper, The Independent, also published a review that mentions our “hose-to-the-sky” concept.  This is an idea for pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool the planet.  The Independent calls it “the outer limits of freakonomics.”

We’ll post a lot more about our climate science projects soon.