On March 10th and 11th we went up to Schenchdaty to check out the GE Global Research Center. Over the two days we saw a kind of crazy amount of stuff, from nano coatings that are superhydrophobic to a scanner for use in pathology labs to a pulse detonation engine that’s been attached to what is in effect a giant horn to clean out super dirty spaces.
Building off the other nano posts, this video is a highlight reel of our conversation with the nanotechnology folks. Specifically, we spliced together a nice little summary of what and why nano from Margaret Blohm, who manages the nanotechnology department.
Also, here’s a longer version from the GE Reports YouTube channel:
Chalk is super easy to break (as any fourth grade can attest to), yet a shell, made of the same material, stays largely in tact when dropped from around five feet up (enjoy the slow motion video from the high speed camera we brought along below).
So why doesn’t it just crack? Turns out there are some crazy nanostructures at work … Here’s a peak at what’s under the surface (at the nano level):
And here’s a bit more information from the GE nano site:
Seashells are naturally self-assembled structures, growing gradually over the lifetime of the creatures that live inside them. By studying this behavior at the nano-scale, we can one day develop high-strength ceramics that are light yet also durable, and enhance the performance of our products, such as gas turbine blades.
Spending two days in the Global Research Center is like a candystore of science experiments. The interesting thing to me is that everything going on at GRC is applied science - there is at least one engineer on every science team, and their challenge is to take raw science and figure out the most useful thing to do with it. There is an objective.
One of the reasons I’m so excited to be working on this project is that I am a big nerd. I love science. I actually went to school for a bit for physics and engineering, and then the internet showed up and turned out to be my new favorite thing. So this is pretty much an ideal situation, science + internet = awesome.
The research lab is a treasure trove of interesting stuff going on and it seems like we could make a bunch of different episodic shows about whats going on at GE that will be actually interesting.
A few here:
Lighting Show – a competition reality show where different sorts of lighting and industrial designers spend a couple days with the OLED lighting guys and come up with crazy new lighting designs. Then maybe there is a touring show of the results. Could be anything from avante garde lighting to retail designs to home design.
Nano Cooking Show – I was at one of my favorite bars in new york talking to Cory the bartender about my fun trip and told him about the superhydrophobic materials I saw, and he said he wanted a honey spoon made of that material. Firstly, it was interesting that he knew about it, and secondly it got me thinking that it would be interesting to do a mixology/cooking show where expert chefs and bartenders used crazy technology to make interesting food and drink.
Student Films – What if we made a deal with a film school where we had student filmmakers come in and make a bunch of short documentaries about projects going on at GE ? Noah thinks it would be fun to have little kids come in and ask questions too.
UPDATE: from advice in the comments, here’s a video of Ferran Adria cooking with nitrogen
I know Yelp has doctor listings, but I wonder if there isn’t an opportunity to build one specifically around healthcare. Seems that more transparency would really help the system. One of the questions we got asked is if we knew what hospital was good for what and, as someone who has only been in the hospital twice (once for a fishhook in the ear and once for a broken wrist), I don’t.
Anyway, I’m sure there are sites out there that attempt this. Are any of them good? What are they? Could GE do something in this space?
During our chat with the folks working on the hospital of the future (who are focused on helping hospitals run a lot more smoothly), there was some talk about in-home health monitoring devices (some of which are in the photo below).
The idea of devices like these, at least in part, is to take some of the stress off the medical system by helping people more proactively manage/monitor their health. The only problem with this approach as I see it is that monitoring your health isn’t a particularly fun sounding pursuit. In thinking about devices like these, I wonder if there isn’t an opportunity to get them into the larger culture by offering them up as “life optimization” devices. If healthy people could constantly monitor themselves with the goal of finding opportunities to be more efficient (maybe something could tell you the best time to exercise or the optimal time to eat).
Basically, I think there’s an opportunity to make it feel a lot more like a game and a lot less like a chore. Not quite sure how to make that happen yet, but certainly seems like a worthwhile goal.
I was reading Metafilter this morning and came across this post about Playboy’s archive (a bunch of issues from the last however many years that you can browse in full). Anyway, something the poster wrote really struck me: “but hey, the advertisements alone are incredible.” Looking back on old ads is a pretty amazing thing as they almost perfectly capture the style, culture and consciousness of whatever time period they were made.
For a company as old as GE, I’m sure the ads are a goldmine (we saw a bunch at the Schenchdaty Museum). Take this one:
The caption explains, “Edison launched major campaigns to attract ‘admirers’ to his lamps and even today the bulb is often associated with the contemplation of new ideas.” How crazy is it to think that not only did the company at one point need to convince people that light bulbs were a good idea (another old sign in the museum explained, “The use of electricty for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep.”), but they also actively courted the association between the lightbulb and ideas.
Or take this ad, for GE refrigerators:
The first paragraph explains, “Really, you can’t blame her. Who wouldn’t drag her friends out into the kitchen to show off her new General Electric? There it stands, gleaming white, strong as a safe, incredibly quiet … the envy of all who see it.” It’s amazing to me, as someone that has never lived without a fridge, that at one point you had to sell people on the idea, not the brand.
All of this is a kind of long-winded way of getting at an idea: A giant database of GE ads for us all to peruse. With a good interface and some nice search engine, it would probably make for a great little history lesson.
Was just watching the Engadget Live from Apple’s iPhone 3.0 introduction and this photo piqued my interest:
Apple has added support for hardware on the iPhone. I got to thinking about what kind of devices GE could build to help people monitor/optimize their health (more to come on that idea soon). Making keeping yourself healthy seem more like a game seems like something GE should champion.
Ok. We should get this out of the way and fast.
Synergy.
I actually didn’t know until we were day 2 into this that GE invented that word. We were in the nanoparticles lab and they were showing ferrofluid (see below) and that outside of demonstrating magnetic waves they also use the nano iron particles in combination with another agent and inject you and the agent seeks out a tumor, and carries the ferrite particles, and then your tumor glows like crazy on an MRI.
Earlier we had seen a demonstration of an imaging agent that you can inject and it finds its way to a tumor and carries a special dye, and there is a companion overhead UV spectrum lighting rig, and when you are doing open surgery the dyed tumor (or veins or whatever they want to dye) will fluoresce like crazy on the monitors, so you either cut or avoid what you want.
I was being a good student and asked the nano folks ‘is that the same agent as the one they use for making tumors flourescent?’ and turns out yes, more or less, and because all the scientists and engineers at GE hang out together and talk about what they are up to, and, you know, find synergies.
I actually tried to comment on the synergy without using the word synergy, because the rest of the world has turned it into a lame-o business buzz word, and Noah was like ‘you know they invented that word right?’ and I was like ‘huh I guess they had to’.
Then we were talking about how we could do some interesting interactive representation of the interconnectedness of things so we didn’t have to use the s-word, and talked about a few different things and then realized that the internet has worked this out already. If we do a good job tagging and linking everything, then you can find your own synergies, ha.
UPDATE: So I had to edit this because I had been using the word “drug” instead of “agent” in the above examples, and terminology-wise, a drug is a thing that fixes a problem, but in this case they are not actually drugs, just chemicals that deliver things to certain places. Chemical deliverymen. Interesting.
One of our stops at the Global Research Center was a chat with the team working on Smart Grid stuff (which I plan on getting into deeper as soon as I finish dumping all the photos off my camera). A big part of the Smart Grid idea seems to be about giving consumers a more real-time peak into the costs around their power usage (with the hope that it will effect their behavior, of course).
Anyway, I was reading an old issue of Wired today and ran across this article about using ambient displays to help people monitor their electricity usage. (There is a company called Ambient Devices1 that sells some interesting stuff in this realm, including an umbrella whose handle glows when it’s going to rain.) As Clive Thompson explains,
Electricity is invisible. That’s why we waste so much of it in the home — leaving rechargers permanently plugged in and electronic devices idling in power-slurping “sleep” modes. We can’t see that our houses account for nearly a quarter of the nation’s energy appetite; we don’t know when the grid is nearing capacity and expensive to use.
So [Mark] Martinez [of Southern California Edison] hacked his customers’ perceptual apparatuses. He made energy visible.
Made me think a lot about what other types of displays could be developed to help consumers monitor their usage in a non-dollars-and-cents sort of way. Thompson even offers up his own ideas, “Here’s an even wilder idea: How about making our energy use visible to everyone? Imagine if your daily consumption were part of your Facebook page — and broadcast to your friends by RSS feed. That would trigger what Ambient Devices CEO David Rose calls the sentinel effect: You’d work harder to conserve so you don’t look like a jackass in front of your peers.” (Dopplr does this in an interesting way with your carbon display.) Seems like there’s a ton of opportunity to find really interesting ways to deliver this kind of information to consumers.
Both of the bottom two products (not the meter) are taken from the Ambient Devices website.
1Update (4/6/09): Rick noted this disclosure in the comment: “Full disclosure from an elder Barbarian – Noah may not know that Ambient Devices is actually an old client of ours, and we’re friends with David, as well as his former fellow executive Nabeel Hayatt, who’s over at Conduit Labs now!” Just wanted to clear it up. I had no idea.
In the process of looking for fan blade off videos I ran across this video that shows the full litany of tests that a GE engine goes through (not sure if this is really all the tests, but there are a lot of them). Here’s the list from the video: Icing certification, hailstorm testing (3/4 ton of hail in 30 seconds), water testing (4.5 tons per minute), 5.5lb bird ingestion, Mojave desert flight, FAA block test/triple redline operation (which seems to be about running the engine as hard as possible) and blade off. Here’s the full four minutes of testing (no clue when this video is actually from).
Update (3/19/09): GE asked us to take down this video since it was apparently a proprietary thing that was never supposed to make it on to YouTube. In exchange they’ve sent us a bunch of footage for us to digitize and post (which we’ll be doing shortly). Sorry about that.
Update (3/30/09): Here’s the new video.