• Air Force's X-51A hypersonic aircraft sets record during its final test

    U.S. Air Force

    The U.S. Air Force's sleek, light-colored X-51A Waverider hypersonic vehicle can be seen tucked under the wing of a B-52H Stratofortress for this week's test launch.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    The U.S. Air Force's $300 million, nine-year test program for a hypersonic plane ended on a high note this week, when the last of its X-51A Waverider vehicles made the longest flight of its kind. The success was made sweeter by the fact that it followed last year's high-profile failure.

    "I believe all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight," Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate, said in a news release.

    The 14-foot-long (4.3-meter-long), scramjet-powered vehicle hit a top speed of Mach 5.1 during just over six minutes of flight on May 1, the Air Force said. That's the longest of the Boeing-built X-51A's four test flights, and the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever.

    Hypersonic scramjet propulsion has been widely touted as eventually opening up the way for flights between London and New York in less than an hour. But in reality, the first application is more likely to come in the form of super-fast cruise missiles.

    Scramjet is a short way of saying "supersonic combustion ramjet." There have been many efforts through the years to perfect hypersonic aircraft — that is, vehicles that travel at speeds beyond Mach 5. But the Air Force says the X-51A is unique primarily because it used hydrocarbon fuel rather than hydrogen fuel. Without any moving parts, the fuel is injected into the scramjet's combustion chamber, where it mixes with the air rushing through the chamber. The fuel is ignited in a process that's been likened to lighting a match in a hurricane.      

    This week's experiment followed the flight profile used for the X-51A's earlier tests: A B-52H Stratofortress took off from California's Edwards Air Force Base, flew 50,000 feet over a Pacific test range, and then released a solid rocket booster with the plane attached. When the cruiser reached Mach 4.8, the X-51A separated from the booster and lit up its scramjet engine. The scramjet exhausted its fuel in 240 seconds. The sleek vehicle coasted for another couple of minutes and splashed down into the ocean as planned. The X-51 traveled more than 230 nautical miles and yielded 370 seconds of data, the Air Force said.

    "This success is the result of a lot of hard work by an incredible team.  The contributions of Boeing, Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, the 412th Test Wing at Edwards AFB, NASA Dryden and DARPA were all vital," Brink said.  

    From 2012: ITV's Lawrence McGinty talks about the X-51A Waverider hypersonic vehicle in advance of its third test. That test ended in failure, but this week's test was successful.

    All this is a huge improvement over the previous test, which ended in failure last August. During that flight, the X-51A veered off course less than a minute after launch and crashed, due to a problem with one of its control fins. The issue was resolved after a months-long investigation. The first X-51 test was successful in May 2010, resulting in a 200-second flight, but the second test in June 2011 was a disappointment. 

    There's no immediate successor to the X-51A, but the Air Force has pledged to continue with hypersonic research. It says the lessons learned during the X-51A program "will pay dividends to the High Speed Strike Weapon program" at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

    More about supersonic flight:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

     

  • Videos explore science of innovation

    NBC News' Ann Curry narrates a video about the process of innovation. Click to watch on Science360.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    After exploring the science of football, hockey and the Olympics, an Emmy-winning educational video effort is tackling the biggest game of all: innovation. The 11 videos in the "Science of Innovation" series are the latest fruits of a long-running partnership between the National Science Foundation and NBC Learn, the educational arm of NBC News.

    The "Science of Innovation" series, narrated by NBC's Ann Curry, delves into the sometimes-unpredictable process that results in better technologies and products — and highlights 10 frontiers of innovation, ranging from biofuels to micro-electronic health monitors that can be worn on the skin like tattoos.

    Monday's unveiling of the series was timed to coincide with the 165th birthday of Thomas Edison, one of America's best-known inventors. For this series, NSF and NBC have teamed up with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. All of the scientists and engineers featured in the videos have been funded by NSF and have received U.S. patents for aspects of their work.

    "America's unique system of funding innovative ideas helps them move from basic to applied research and, ultimately, into the marketplace," Judith Gan, NSF's director of legislative and public affairs, said in a news release. "NSF is proud to have participated in supporting innumerable scientific and technological innovations, which in turn have helped create millions of jobs that make our economy exceptionally competitive."

    The videos are being made available to NBC affiliates, and can be downloaded freely from NSF's Science360 portal as well as the NBCLearn website. They complement lesson plans produced by the National Science Teachers Association for middle-school and high-school classes.

    Teresa Stanek Rea, the patent and trademark office's acting director, said that "education is the key to encouraging today's children to become tomorrow's innovators."

    "These videos and lesson plans are great tools for teachers everywhere to help students learn about intellectual property, while inspiring them to connect the process of innovation with science, technology, engineering and mathematics education." she said.

    Soraya Gage, general manager of NBCLearn, said "our hope is that this special video series will engage and inspire our students to imagine the next great invention that will improve lives and transform the future."

    More from the 'Science Of...' series:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Photographer seeks hopeful 'Visions of Tomorrow' on frontiers of science

    (c) Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis

    Lasers fire at a fuel pellet inside a nuclear fusion experiment at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics. Covering the effort to develop fusion as a power source was one of the experiences that led photographer Roger Ressmeyer to move ahead with his "Visions of Tomorrow" film project.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    For decades, photographer Roger Ressmeyer has chronicled discoveries the frontiers of science, from nuclear fusion to the edges of the universe, and now he's working to distill all those discoveries into a hopeful film about the future, titled "Visions of Tomorrow."

    "This movie will be saying, 'Here's what we can do about humankind's biggest problems. ... The world's future looks a lot brighter than we're led to believe," Ressmeyer says. But in order to get that message onto the big screen, he's going to need a little help — and several million dollars.  That's why he's bringing his project to the Social Innovation Fast Pitch conference in Seattle this week.

    Ressmeyer is best-known as a visual storyteller, specializing in the wonders of space and science. It's that reputation that has earned him honors as 2012's PhotoMedia Photography Person of the Year. He has helped chronicle the space effort in magazine layouts and in coffee-table books such as "Orbit," and he has captured images from around the world that make the world's scientific landmarks look like the shrines they deserve to be.

    Through the years, Ressmeyer has come to believe that scientific wonders have a spiritual dimension as well. "Visions of Tomorrow" will tell that story, with the help of some of the best minds in science and technology.

    "A key spiritual truth is that 'thoughts become things,' as Mike Dooley says," Ressmeyer told me over the weekend. "What we're hoping to do on the spiritual level is to address the collective loss of hope, and create a movie that leaves people walking on air, letting go of fears, and getting behind a better future for the planet."

    Visions of Tomorrow

    Photographer Roger Ressmeyer is creating "Visions of Tomorrow."

    The project sounds a bit like some other science-plus-soul hybrids that have shown up in theaters or on DVD in recent years, ranging from "What the (Bleep) Do We Know" to "I AM" and "The Secret." But Ressmeyer insists that this film will be different.

    "There have been many 'new-agey' movies about the fact that humanity is one, and people everywhere are basically good. What makes this movie different is that it will present actual solutions under development by world-renowned scientists, engineers and futurists," he said.

    Setting an agenda
    So who are these scientists, engineers and futurists? For now, Ressmeyer is being cagey about that question. He's begun to use his network of contacts to recruit the folks that will be featured in the movie, and some filming has been done already. But he's holding back on the details until he assembles a core of executive producers to help shepherd the project — and assembles the financing for the next phase.

    He says his vision for "Visions of Tomorrow" aims to touch upon some of the top problems facing humanity, and how science and engineering can turn them around.

    "In my years of covering science, I learned how to dig really deep, and how to create images that bring ideas to life," Ressmeyer said. "We'll take the best ideas — the ones most likely to succeed, the ones covering the biggest challenges humanity faces, like resource depletion, climate change and global warming, overpopulation, the effects of war and social distress. In the movie, all of these things will come together in a beautiful, entertaining and inspirational view of what's possible for tomorrow."

    Nuclear fusion power seems certain to earn some screen time: Ressmeyer noted that his photo coverage of the fusion frontier was one of the factors that led to the "Visions of Tomorrow" project in the first place.

    "We don't expect that every one of these solutions will pan out," he told me, "but we do believe there are enough possibilities out there to produce virtually limitless energy, to address the population issue, climate change, and raise the planet's collective consciousness."

    The road ahead
    During the Seattle conference on Thursday, Ressmeyer will talk about the project and show a teaser video clip. "It's the perfect place to show that pre-production footage for the first time, and possibly the only time it will ever be shown in public," he said.

    If the backing comes together the way Ressmeyer hopes, filming would resume in early 2013, with the film's release set for 2014. Ressmeyer has also established a Visions of Tomorrow Foundation to move ahead with the agenda laid out in the movie, and he and his colleagues plan to use social-media crowdsourcing (and crowdsupporting) to keep hope alive.

    Ressmeyer says that reviving hope in the future is the driving force behind "Visions of Tomorrow." During our interview, the 58-year-old photographer recalled the despair that he felt when doctors told him he suffered from juvenile diabetes, back in the days when many people saw that disease as a "virtual death sentence."

    "My experience of being told at age 13 that I would be lucky to live 20 years led to a very, very major internal struggle between optimism and pessimism, idealism and cynicism, that in some ways continues to this day," he said. "All my life experiences have led to a vision and realization that hope is the force that drives planetary change — and there's a real shortage of that right now. 'Visions of Tomorrow' is designed to spread hope, to create confidence we can fix things."

    Ressmeyer still has to fill in a lot of the blank spots in his vision, but do you think he's on the right track? What issues would you want to see addressed in a vision of tomorrow, and what bright ideas can you contribute? Please feel free to weigh in with your questions and solutions in the comment space below. I have a feeling that Ressmeyer will be watching.

    More from Roger Ressmeyer:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Scientists work to build a better leaf

    Researchers are analyzing the molecular pathways that plants use for photosynthesis.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News




    Researchers have been trying for decades to improve upon Mother Nature's favorite solar-power trick — photosynthesis — but now they finally think they see the sunlight at the end of the tunnel.

    "We now understand photosynthesis much better than we did 20 years ago," said Richard Cogdell, a botanist at the University of Glasgow who has been doing research on bacterial photosynthesis for more than 30 years. He and three colleagues discussed their efforts to tweak the process that powers the world's plant life today in Vancouver, Canada, during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    The researchers are taking different approaches to the challenge, but what they have in common is their search for ways to get something extra out of the biochemical process that uses sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen. "You can really view photosynthesis as an assembly line with about 168 steps," said Steve Long, head of the University of Illinois' Photosynthesis and Atmospheric Change Laboratory.

    Revving up Rubisco
    Howard Griffiths, a plant physiologist at the University of Cambridge, just wants to make improvements in one section of that assembly line. His research focuses on ways to get more power out of the part of the process driven by an enzyme called Rubisco. He said he's trying to do what many auto mechanics have done to make their engines run more efficiently: "You turbocharge it."

    Some plants, such as sugar cane and corn, already have a turbocharged Rubisco engine, thanks to a molecular pathway known as C4. Geneticists believe the C4 pathway started playing a significant role in plant physiology in just the past 10 million years or so. Now Griffiths is looking into strategies to add the C4 turbocharger to rice, which ranks among the world's most widely planted staple crops.

    The new cellular machinery might be packaged in a micro-compartment that operates within the plant cell. That's the way biochemical turbochargers work in algae and cyanobacteria. Griffiths and his colleagues are looking at ways to create similar micro-compartments for higher plants. The payoff would come in the form of more efficient carbon dioxide conversion, with higher crop productivity as a result. "For a given amount of carbon gain, the plant uses less water," Griffiths said.

    Making the grid more efficient
    Anne K. Jones, a biochemist at Arizona State University, wants to make use of the power that goes to waste during photosynthesis. On a sunny day, a plant's molecular machinery generates more electrons than the Rubisco carbohydrate-producing engine can handle. "A lot of those electrons get thrown away," she said.

    In this sense, photosynthesis is like "a badly connected electrical grid," Jones said. She's studying ways to use biological nanowires to transfer the extra energy from the light-harvesting cell into another cell that's genetically engineered to produce fuel or food. The nanowires would be analogous to electrical transmission lines, distributing power from one part of the grid to another.

    Jones said filaments found on the surface of many bacterial species, known as pili, could be adapted for this purpose. Other researchers have already been looking into using those filaments as the basis for bioelectronic circuits.

    "Components in future systems need not even be biological, so long as they interface with the wires developed in this project, paving the way for hybrid biological/inorganic photosynthetic systems," Jones explained in an abstract for her presentation.

    Creating an artificial leaf
    Jones' research meshes with Cogdell's efforts to adapt the chemistry of photosynthesis ujsing synthetic biology. Cogdell's project, backed by Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is aimed at developing an artificial leaf that produces a dense, portable fuel you could put in your car.

    "We would aim to produce hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide," he said. His favorite candidate is terpene, the main ingredient in the plant resins that are today distilled into turpentine. Under the right conditions, terpene behaves "rather like octane," Cogdell said.

    He envisions a process in which carbon dioxide and water are chemically processed to produce a scummy sheen of terpene, which could be skimmed off and turned into fuel. Even though the end product is a hydrocarbon, the process would be carbon-neutral because of the CO2 capture, Cogdell said.

    "We can't do it yet, but we have a dream," he told me.

    Whether the future belongs to artificial leaves, or nanowired bacteria, or turbocharged rice, all these researchers believe that coming up with a better way to turn sunlight into energy is a crucial challenge for the next generation. They estimated that there was only a 30- to 50-year window for completing the transition from the fossil-fuel era to the age of total renewable energy.

    Griffiths said the next generation will need more food as well as more fuel. He referred to the "green revolution" that has transformed global agriculture over the past half-century, and added that "what we now need is a new green revolution for the next 50 years."

    Cogdell echoed that view: "This is one of the grand challenges that mankind faces," he said.

    Do you agree? Which path will lead us out of the energy crunch, the climate-change conundrum and the fuel-vs.-food debate we're dealing with today? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    More on the future of plants:

    More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

    Alan Boyle is science editor at msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding the Cosmic Log Google+ page to your circles. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Hoop-playing robot may push you out of a job

    This video is a demonstration of the new shooting capabilities of a universal jamming gripper that also utilizes positive pressure.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    If your job involves tasks such as sorting springs and screws or unloading dishwashers, a robot replacement may soon be on the way.

    For now, the granular-gripper robot demonstrated in the video above is perhaps best suited as a sidekick for bar games you might play while trying to grab the attention of a potential flesh-and-bone soul mate.

    That is, assuming the potential mate doesn't fall for the robot instead. After all, its barroom athleticism is tough to beat — able to sink mini-basketball shots with uncanny accuracy and hit the bull's eye on the dartboard time and time again.

    The tossing ability of jamming robot gripper is a new trick from roboticists working on the grasping technology at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. 

    The gripper itself is essentially a balloon filled with granular material, in this case coffee grounds. This squishy balloon hand conforms to whatever object it touches. When the air is sucked out of the balloon, a tight grip is created. To toss the object, the gripper is rapidly re-inflated with air. 

    While this all seems simple, anyone who's tried to consistently sink baskets on the court or in a bar knows that picking up balls and tossing them repeatedly through the hoop isn't nearly as easy as it seems.

    From the roboticists' perspective, the technology is an improvement over other throwing robots.

    "Certainly throwing has been demonstrated with robot arms before, but the momentum for throwing is typically provided by the arm motion while the gripper simply releases the object at the optimum time," the researchers write in a FAQ accompanying their paper to appear in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

    "Here, the entirety of the shooting function is provided by the gripper."

    While the shooting skill of the robot isn't good enough for it to go to work tossing together electronic components, which requires higher precision, it is good enough to pick up trash after a good house party.

    Other potential applications, the team notes, include picking up and quickly disposing of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). After all, the research is supported by DARPA.

    — Via IEEE

    More on throwing robots and the robotic workforce:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

    Ten years of war have given robot developers a chance to refine and improve their bots. Now the robots are finding all sorts of new jobs on the homefront.

     

  • Your heartbeat could be your password

    A woman fixes red heart-shaped balloons on a fence on Februray 14, 2012 in Berlin.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Think the love in your heart is unique? You might be right. It turns out that everyone's heart beats to its own rhythm. Scientists think they can take that uniqueness to protect your data. Isn't that lovely?

    To prove the point, researchers led by Ching-Kun Chen, an electrical engineer at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan, have developed an algorithm that turns an electrocardiograph (ECG) reading from your palm into an encryption key.

    "He says the goal is to build the system into external hard drives and other devices that can be decrypted and encrypted simply by touching them," reports New Scientist magazine.

    Findings were published online January 14 in Information Sciences. 

    More on encryption technology:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    To improve results for voice search, Google compiles huge databases of speech samples, so that computers can learn the language for themselves — and understand you're asking for.

     

  • Liquid batteries to pour on green energy?

    Liquid batteries that can store excess energy generated by sources such as wind turbines could accelerate adoption of the green technology.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Banks of scorching hot batteries filled with molten metals may be the long-sought silver bullet to make large-scale adoption of wind and solar energy a practical, purely green reality.

    Such a storage solution is needed because, as we know, the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine where and when it's needed.

    "Right now, if you run a solar farm or a wind farm and you want to deliver electricity when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn’t shining, the cheapest way is to get a gas-fired peaking unit," Donald Sadoway, a materials chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me Monday.

    Gas-fired peaking units are mini power plants that can be turned on and off quickly to meet demand for electricity when other sources are unavailable or maxed out.

    "Those things are cheap to buy, they are cheap to run, and the price of natural gas has been falling recently in the United States. So the way people have been looking at (shoring up) renewables is to turn to natural gas," Sadoway explained.

    "And that's fine. It's not illegal. There's nothing immoral about it," he added, "but it is not 100 percent green at this point."

    For the industry to adopt the greener battery technology, the cost of the battery has to be as cheap, efficient, and reliable as state-of-the art natural gas-fired peaking plants. 

    Sadoway and his colleagues are hard at work on a liquid battery they believe will meet these criteria. On Monday, they described their progress in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

    Metal cocktail
    The battery is a cocktail of metals that naturally settle into distinct layers because of their different densities, similar to a "black and tan" pint served at British pubs, where dark stout rests on top of denser pale ale.

    Batteries need three layers — positive and negative poles and a membrane between the charges. In the case of the liquid battery, molten metals on the top and bottom serve as the positive and negative poles and a layer of molten salt serves as the membrane.

    "The principle of the battery is an alloying reaction," Sadoway explained. 

    Alloys are metals made via the combination of two or more metallic elements. In the liquid battery, the top layer is magnesium and the bottom layer is antimony.

    "The driving force for current is the desire of magnesium to enter the antimony and form an alloy," Sadoway said. "In order to alloy, the magnesium has to first get across the molten salt and in order to do so, the magnesium has to lose two electrons and become a magnesium ion."

    Those two electrons are what escape to the wires to power our gadgets and appliances. 

    "When the magnesium ions get to the interface with the antimony, they acquire two electrons which have been pulled out of the external circuit and then that makes neutral magnesium which then alloys with the antimony," said Sadoway.

    To charge the battery, the process is reversed. 

    Sadoway and his colleagues have tweaked the recipe of this liquid cocktail for several years and gradually scaled up the size of the batteries. 

    The initial tests consisted of a battery about the size of a shot glass; then they went to a battery the size of a hockey puck and, now, the team reports a six-inch-wide version that has 200 times the storage capacity of the original.

    Keeping them hot
    To keep the metals in a liquid state requires a battery operating temperature of 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 degrees Fahrenheit).

    This heat comes at an energy cost — "we have to lose some of the energy we are storing in order to keep the battery at temperature," Sadoway explained.

    Tests show about 75 percent efficiency — that is, for every 100 units of electricity put in the battery, 75 units come out. The rest is spent keeping the battery hot and lost due to inefficiencies in power electronics and converting back and forth between AC and DC.

    A loss of 25 percent is actually quite reasonable, according to Sadoway. As long as more than a 25 percent spread between the price of electricity when the battery is charged and discharged, a utility can recoup its investment cost and make a buck.

    For example, a utility could charge up its battery in the middle of the night when the wind is blowing and rates are low and then sell it back to the grid in the afternoon when rates are high. 

    "In certain markets like California, there can be day-night price swings that can be not so many percent, but so many X," Sadoway noted. "In a market like that, this thing would do just fine."

    Battery vs battery
    According to Sadoway, who has started a company, Liquid Metal Battery Corp. to scale up and sell these batteries, the liquid approach is potentially better than competing technologies such as lithium ion batteries, which require the expansion and contraction of solid parts in order to work.

    All this swelling and contracting amounts to wear and tear, which is often why the lithium ion batteries in laptops, for example, go kaput after a few years.

    "Those kinds of failure mode are absent in this battery because it is all liquid and liquid can accommodate volume changes," Sadoway noted. 

    Lab tests, he said, show that the lifetime of the battery isn't limited by its capacity to hold a charge so much as by the lifetime of materials used to encase and insulate it.

    Current materials, he said, may begin to corrode after 10 to 15 years sufficiently to change the chemistry of the battery or permit the battery "to eat its way out of the case."

    Another advantage to the liquid technology, he added, is the abundance of the raw materials used to build it. Magnesium and antimony are abundant in the United States and low cost.

    As well, assembly of the battery is straightforward. Due to density differences, for example, the layers self assemble. "No clean rooms, no fancy nano-tech, nothing like that," Sadoway said.

    Daniel Kammen directs the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. He said the biggest challenge for the liquid battery is the high operating temperature.

    "Even if the waste heat can be harvested for an added benefit, systems operating at over 1,000 degrees are going to be a challenge for long-term maintenance," he told me in an email exchange on Tuesday. 

    Shipping-container-sized battery
    Sadoway's startup up is focused on scaling up the battery technology with the best chemistry that comes out of his lab at MIT. While the lab has reached a six-inch diameter cell, the company has cells that are 16-inches in diameter, he said.

    The idea is to take these cells, stack them about 20 high, and link the stacks together in rows about 20 deep that that fit inside a 40-foot shipping container. This shipping-container-sized battery would provide about 2 megawatt hours of juice.

    By the end of 2014, the goal is "to have something that can be readily shipped to a potential customer for testing," Sadoway said.

    While the utility companies may be interested in the batteries as an alternative to gas-fired peaker plants to make their solar and wind farms viable, the batteries also could ease transmission line congestion.

    This could be particularly useful in tech-heavy regions such as the Bay Area, where the energy demands of server farms are steadily climbing, noted Sadoway.

    On certain days of the year, for example during a heat wave in the middle of the summer, "you can't get enough electricity through the lines. The transmission lines are running at full capacity," he said.

    Instead of building additional transmission capacity — bringing more wires into the city, which is usually controversial and requires a drawn-out permitting process — companies could plop a battery in the basement of their buildings.

    "From midnight to 5 a.m., when the lines aren't congested [and rates are low] you could be shipping electricity into the center of the city and storing it in the basement of these buildings," Sadoway explained. 

    "Then, in the middle of the day, you just take it right out of the basement into the servers."

    Kammen, the University of California energy professor, said this is "exciting stuff and a welcome area of long-overdue innovation."

    Updated at 1:40 pm PT to reflect comments from Daniel Kammen.

    More on battery and storage technology:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

     

  • Help design the future of robotic cars

    Ford.com

    A screenshot from a Ford video shows how Active Park Assist works in the Flex model. Drivers just need to target a spot, and the car uses ultrasonic range finders to park itself.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Do you want a future where C-3P0 and his robotic pals do the driving as you text your friends the 411 on the next stop in a crosstown pub crawl? Minds capable of making this dream come true want your opinion.

    Students with Stanford University's Center for Automotive Research have prepared on online survey to find out your robotic car desires. After providing a few generic personal details, you can weigh in on questions such as:

    • How much control you're willing to give up to an automated self-driving technology? All? Some, like an airplane pilot? None at all?
    • Would you take a cab driven by a robot? Choices range from "Definitely not" to "Definitely would. There is no way a computer can drive worse than current human cab drivers :)".
    • What are your feelings about a car that could drive you without any input? Choices include: "Excitement – where can I get one," "Party time – I can go out partying without having to worry about drinking and driving," and "Fear – That's it. Run for the hills. The robots are taking over."

    To take the survey, click here. When the results are out this spring, we'll share the details.

    More on robotic cars:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

    For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    Ten years of war have given robot developers a chance to refine and improve their bots. Now the robots are finding all sorts of new jobs on the homefront.

  • What has NASA done for you lately? Lots

    NASA

    NASA technology developed to land the Phoenix Lander on Mars, shown here in an artist's rendering, has led to crash avoidance technology that may find its way into our cars within a decade.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Amid the storm brewing over cuts to NASA's budget for the coming year, the space agency has published its annual reminder that the things it builds to explore the universe also lead to amazing "spinoffs" — innovative technologies and products used here on Earth.

    The reminder is a booklet, itself called Spinoff, that reveals NASA's ties to everything from more efficient solar cells to software that makes data crunching a much speedier process to an online video game that's inspiring future engineers.

    Among the technologies with NASA smarts highlighted in this year's report include:

    • A firefighting system that was influenced by a NASA-derived rocket design that extinguishes fires more quickly than traditional systems, saving lives and property.
    • Software employing NASA-invented tools to help commercial airlines fly shorter routes and help save millions of gallons of fuel each year, reducing costs to airlines while benefiting the environment.
    • A fitness monitoring technology developed with NASA expertise that, when fitted in a strap or shirt, can be used to measure and record vital signs. The technology is now in use to monitor the health of professional athletes and members of the armed services.

    A central piece in the brewing budget battle for NASA concerns cuts that would end the space agency's involvement in two upcoming missions to Mars with the European Space Agency. 

    "To me, it's totally irrational and unjustified," Edward Weiler, who until September was NASA's associate administrator for science, told the Associated Press. "We are the only country on this planet that has the demonstrated ability to land on another planet, namely Mars. It is a national prestige issue."

    As pointed out in the Spinoff publication, the experience of landing on Mars has led, for example, to a so-called 3-D flash LIDAR camera technology sold by Advanced Scientific Concepts that is making for improved crash avoidance, navigation and object tracking for all kinds of vehicles, including cars and trucks.

    "When mounted on an automobile, the technology can show a driver how close or far away things are to assist in avoiding collisions," NASA explains in Spinoff. "A monitor on the car would distinguish how far away other cars, bicyclists or pedestrians are, as well as how fast they are moving."

    Within six to eight years, such technology could be standard on cars and trucks.

    You can learn about these technologies and many more by reading Spinoff 2011.

    Fun fact: Contary to popular belief, NASA does not claim to be the brains behind Tang. General Foods began to test market the the powdery drink mix in 1957, a year before the space agency was born. Tang did fly on all Gemini and Apollo missions, however, which boosted sales. 

    More on NASA spinoffs:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.

     

  • DARPA drone competition takes off in videos

    GremLion proof-of-flight video submitted for UAVForge Challenge.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    A competition that aims to harness the world's most creative engineering minds for building next-generation military drones is heating up with proof-of-flight videos of the contraptions posted online.

    There are plenty of quadcopters that will make kids stuck with off-the-shelf RC choppers drool. Top judging in the first round went to a Death Star-like ball on wheels called the GremLion. It's neat trick? A mid-section that pops open to reveal a pair of rotors.

    The GremLion was designed by a team at the National University of Singapore and is shown off in the awesomely narrated video above.

    The SwiftSight Unmanned Aerial System is controlled with a tablet computer.

    However, the video most liked by viewers, as of this writing, demonstrates a tablet-controlled quadcopter called SwiftFlight. The video's production includes Hollywood-esque on-screen pop-up explanations of the action.

    icarusLabs Milestone 2 UAVForge entry

    Another crowd pleaser is a video describing icarusLabs's entry, a winged aircraft that hovers inside an office before taking to the skies. It buzzes a park with sustained winds of 10 miles per hour, something we know thanks to the detailed reportage.

    The next phase of the competition will be live demonstration of the concepts later this month. A fly-off of the 10 top designs will be held this spring. The winner will receive a $100,000 prize, a subcontract with a manufacturer to develop the concept, and an opportunity to demonstrate it to the military. 

    For more videos and information on the competition, head on over to UAVforge.net.

    — via IEEE

    More on drones:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

    For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.

  • Research shows you'll want to tweet this post

    As Twitter becomes a dominant news source for millions of people, a new formula can predict a news story's popularity on the microblogging service.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    This is a blog post about the sexy social media technology Twitter. It mentions Justin Bieber. You'll want to tweet it. At least, my editors hope you do. My job might depend on it. 

    The Internet and social media have altered the face of journalism. Few media companies can survive selling ads in traditional newspapers and magazines that readers will see as they flip pages in search of content that tickles their fancy. 

    Online, which is where most of us get our news today, millions of readers click links on Twitter to go straight to the content they want. That means the specific article must sell the ad. In turn, the dollar (or cent) value of a story is measured in the eyeballs it attracts.

    Thus, in order for a media outlet to make a buck in this new world of journalism, editors and journalists must fine tune their story selection and writing style to maximize its spread on Twitter. Social media researchers at Hewlett Packard have developed an algorithm that does just that.

    "In principle, there is a formula, an algorithm, that you can apply to any news story you write [to maximize your exposure] on social media," Bernardo Huberman, a senior fellow and director of the social computing lab at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Calif., told me Wednesday.

    The formula is a mixture of three main characteristics: its source, subject matter and the popularity of the people mentioned. It predicts how many tweets a story will get with 84 percent accuracy.

    Huberman and his team created the formula after examining data on story content from the news aggregator Feedzilla during a week in August 2011 and studying how these stories spread on Twitter. Interestingly, they note, the level of subjectivity in an article isn't a big factor in its popularity.

    The most popular stories are those published by technology news sites, about gadgets and social media, and include gossip about well-known celebrities. By this reasoning, a scandal involving an iPhone and Justin Bieber posted on Mashable would do exceptionally well.

    The bias toward technology-related stories and sources, Huberman notes, may be because people who use Twitter "are very, very keen on technology."

    Overall, the formula matches what editors and journalists already intuitively know: Sex and scandals sell, especially scandals that involve somebody with name recognition. What surprised Huberman was the degree to which all of this is predictable by a computer.

    This predictability could lead to a software program loaded on journalists' computers that examines every story they write and tells them how well it will perform on Twitter. It could also recommend ways to improve a story's Twitter score.

    One of the concerns is that "if everyone starts using this algorithm, all news stories will start looking the same," Huberman said. Even more troubling is "stories that might be important but don't have these characteristics will drown. No one will notice them. That's sad."

    But it is also possible that journalists can use the formula to jazz up a story that would likely drown by highlighting or incorporating elements known to make it a Twitter success. 

    An argument can be made that the role of journalism isn't about success on social media. Huberman, for one, agrees with that sentiment. But he is interested in what he calls social attention — how to get people to pay attention to whatever you want them to pay attention to.

    "The success of a story, whatever the story is, depends on being attended to by people to read it and pass it on," he said. "You can have the most incredible thing in life, a story, or something to buy or sell, but if nobody notices it, you might not be able to do anything with it."

    Findings are to be published in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. A pre-print is available from arXiv.org.

    More stories on Twitter:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter.

    For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    To improve results for voice search, Google compiles huge databases of speech samples, so that computers can learn the language for themselves — and understand you're asking for.

     

  • Tiny sensors that measure amplitude are big step

    Vijay Kumar / Purdue University

    Researchers have learned how to improve the performance of sensors that use tiny vibrating "microcantilevers," like the one pictured here, to detect chemical and biological agents for applications from national security to food processing.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Anyone who watched the recent X-Games coverage heard commentators obsess about "amplitude" — how high snowboarders such as Shaun White soar above the lip of the superpipe to perform aerial tricks.

    Scientists more concerned with using vibrating sensors to detect harmful chemicals in the air we breathe and food we eat than White's frontside double cork 1260 share the love for amplitude.

    In their case, they've found that a change in the amplitude of a tiny sensor's vibration is a reliable indication that a chemical of interest has glommed onto it. 

    Sensors that measure shifts in frequency — how often a vibrating motion repeats itself — when a chemical of interest sticks to it have been around for a while, noted Jeffrey Rhoads, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

    "But when the devices get smaller, that can be harder to do due to noise," he explained to me Tuesday. That is, at small scales, scientists have a hard time detecting changes in frequency that are due to the chemical of interest from changes because of other factors.

    To get around this, Rhoads and colleagues found that they can measure changes in amplitude instead. The breakthrough, he said, could lead to applications everywhere from food safety and national security to, eventually, biomedical research.

    Proof-of-concept experiments showed that change in amplitude was a more reliable way to detect the presence of small quantities of methanol gas than the frequency approach.

    Applied to other gases this could be useful, for example, when attempting to determine the safety of food, Rhoads said. "If there's a little bit of something bad, the whole thing is shot."

    Looking to the future, the team hopes to apply these sensors to things like detecting the concentration of certain cells in a person's blood, for example.

    To get there will require improvements to measure not just the presence of a chemical, but also its concentration. Doing so will require better understanding of the chemistry of the chemicals of interest.

    Findings are detailed a paper appearing online this week in the Journal of Microelectromechancial Systems.

    More on sensor technology:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    The modernist kitchens of Grant Achatz are known for using experimental equipment to produce unusual cuisine, thanks to an unusual partnership with PolyScience, a lab equipment.

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