For those of us who were unable to attend the TED conference back in February (my couch cushions just couldn’t quite turn up the $6,000 price of admission), we are in luck! Today, Nathan Myhrvold’s talk was released for the world to see. Check out our founder highlighting several of our malaria projects, along with cameo appearances by 3ric Johanson and Pablos Holman.
You can image that preparing a TED talk is no small task. However, a demonstration as ambitious and technical as shooting mosquitoes with lasers proved to be quite a feat.
Between enhancing and cleaning up the software, assembling and mounting all the components, and just making sure everything looked nice and polished, we had a half dozen people occupied for over a month. During the last minute scrabble, some valuable lessons were learned. First, when the shipping company delivers the wrong crate to TED, effectively losing the world’s only Photonic Fence, it helps not to panic. Also, we now know that hotel water glasses are great places to grow extra mosquitoes when you’re running low.
Getting ready for TED was a lot of work, but nevertheless fun and surreal. We are excited about the enthusiastic response following Nathan’s talk, and can’t wait to share our next big idea with you.
Today Bill Gates talked about our nuclear reactor project, TerraPower, at TED 2010. As an investor in several promising energy projects, Gates said it is our responsibility to pursue technologies that achieve cheap energy with “zero carbon” emissions.
TerraPower determined a new type of traveling-wave reactor would be the best approach to meeting the world’s energy demand. Our team decided to pursue nuclear energy after investigating many different technologies and solutions. With advances in computing power in just the past few years, we are able to make radical contributions to science that weren’t possible a few years ago. We believe the traveling-wave reactor concept provides the kind of innovation that society needs.
This video explains the traveling-wave reactor and how it works.
