Innovation Toronto » Economist

Smoothing Out the Wind

innovation2 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:15:12 +0000

A cunning plan to store energy underwater may help fulfil the promise of wind power

THE problem with wind power is that is cannot always be relied upon. The wind—and other transient, environmental energy sources such as solar—must either be used when it is harvested or stored expensively in batteries or specially designed hydroelectric schemes that use the resulting energy to pump water uphill. Alternatives would be extremely welcome. Alexander Slocum, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks he has one. Observing that the fashion among wind-power fans is to build turbines out at sea, where the wind blows strongest, he proposes a pumped-storage system that uses seawater.

Dr Slocum’s scheme involves anchoring a hexagonal array of hollow, 31-metre-diameter concrete spheres to the ocean floor at a depth of approximately 350 metres. Floating turbines would be tethered to these spheres and surplus power from these turbines, generated during periods of high wind and low electrical demand, would be used to pump water out of the spheres, evacuating the central chamber. When the wind faltered or the lights went back on, water forced into the central chamber by the pressure of the surrounding ocean would pass through a turbine and generate electricity. Each sphere would provide a five megawatt turbine with four hours of storage capacity.

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Wind Vs Conventional Electricity Economics (slideshare.net)

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Monitoring greenhouse gases

innovation2 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:03:46 +0000

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Highs and lows

You might think that measuring the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong.

IN NEGOTIATIONS on nuclear weapons the preferred stance is “Trust but verify”. In negotiations on climate change there seems little opportunity for either. Trust, as anyone who attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen can attest, is in the shortest of supplies. So, too, is verification.

Barack Obama was asked when he was in Copenhagen whether a provision by which countries could peek into each others’ assessment processes was strong enough to be sure there was no cheating. He answered reassuringly that “we can actually monitor a lot of what takes place through satellite imagery”. That statement conjured up thoughts of the sort of cold-war satellite system that America used to identify and count Russian missiles. But the president was being a bit previous; at the moment, no such system exists, because America’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite that would have fulfilled the role, was lost on launch this time last year. The purpose of OCO was to work out the fate of carbon dioxide that is emitted by industrial processes but does not then stay in the atmosphere—about 60% of the total.

America is planning to build a new OCO. In the meantime, however, a small group of scientists labours away on Earth, doing its best to monitor emissions at ground level. At the end of February a number of these researchers met at the Royal Society in London, to discuss what they were up to.

Measuring gas levels day in, day out can look a little humdrum to outsiders, including those who hold the purse strings. They tend to prefer scientists to experiment and test hypotheses, not just tally things. But that attitude galls the greenhouse-gas measurers, and not only because it denies them money. It also ignores the fact that careful measurement is a way of discovering new things, not just of checking the status quo. Monitoring is not just a necessary handmaiden of science—it is the real thing.

De bas en haut

Governments are required by treaty to inform the world about their greenhouse-gas emissions. To do this, they take a bottom-up approach, using data about how much of the relevant gases all sorts of activities, from steelmaking to dairy farming, are expected to produce and how much of each of those activities is going on. The researchers at the meeting work top down, looking directly at what is in the atmosphere, and how quickly it accumulates.

Ray Weiss of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, has been studying the difference between these approaches. In most cases, he has found that the top-down estimates are appreciably higher. In some, such as that of sulphur hexafluoride, a powerful greenhouse gas that is used as an insulator in high-voltage electronics, the trends as well as the values are different: bottom-up accounts say emissions are falling; top-down analysis says they are going up.

Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research and his colleagues have been looking at weather patterns to discover where some of these gases are emitted. The level of a gas seen at a particular monitoring station depends on where it came from and which way the wind was blowing, so if you have a number of stations and some data on how their readings change with wind directions, you can have a good guess at the source.

Among Dr Stohl’s conclusions is the positive one that China now seems to be emitting less HFC-23, a powerful greenhouse gas produced by the refrigeration industry, than it did in 2005. This suggests that the large amounts of money invested through carbon markets in reducing such emissions may be having an effect. More detailed studies might show precisely which industrial regions the gases are coming from, and thus reveal what is going on with specific HFC-23-mitigation projects.

For gases that are sometimes or always produced biologically, such as carbon dioxide and methane, a less geographic way of assigning sources is possible. Living things treat carbon atoms of different weights slightly differently, and these differences show up in the weights of the gases they churn out. So it is possible to distinguish, for example, between methane that has been stored in permafrost and methane that is made by rotting vegetation.

Read more . . .

IMF proposes global climate change fund (guardian.co.uk)
Concerns mount over vague Japanese climate bill (businessgreen.com)
Black Carbon: A Visible but Overlooked Factor in Warming (time.com)

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A quantum leap for lighting

innovation2 — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:05:29 +0000

HOW many inventions does it take to change a light bulb? More than you might think. Around the world, many people are switching from traditional incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs, which require less energy to produce a given amount of light, and therefore save money and reduce carbon emissions. But CFLs themselves may soon be overhauled by light emitting diodes (LEDs), which are even more energy efficient and have the further advantage that they come on instantly at full brightness, unlike CFLs, which can take a while to warm up. Advocates of LEDs note that the technology is versatile enough to work in almost any situation, from stadium lighting right down to the tiny light on your phone that flashes to indicate a new message.

But not even LEDs, it seems, are the end of the story. Yet another lighting technology is on the horizon that offers further advantages: even greater power efficiency and softer, warmer light, the colour of which can be precisely controlled. Even though it will be put to rather mundane uses, the technology in question has an exotic name: quantum-dot lighting.

Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconducting material just a few tens of atoms, or a few nanometres (billionths of a metre), across. They are typically made using some combination of zinc, cadmium, selenium and sulphur atoms. Their origins go back to work published in 1983 by Louis Brus, then at Bell Labs, in New Jersey, though it was several years before another physicist, Mark Reed at Yale University, described these tiny semiconductor clumps as “quantum dots”. When excited by light or electricity, a quantum dot emits light of a colour determined by the dot’s size and the material from which it is made. Light of a particular colour can therefore be produced by exciting dots of a specific size.

Seth Coe-Sullivan, co-founder and chief technology officer of QD Vision, a start-up spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, likens a quantum dot to a tuning fork: when it is struck, it oscillates at a specific, fixed frequency, producing a note of a particular pitch (or, in the case of a quantum dot, light of a particular colour). This has immediate applications in general lighting, but quantum dots can also be put to many other uses.

Shine a light

In lighting, quantum dots allow the colour of the light from a light source to be precisely controlled, says Jason Hartlove, the chief executive of Nanosys, based in Palo Alto, California—one of a handful of companies making quantum dots and selling lighting components based on them. The first products to come to market use quantum dots to produce warm, white light from blue LEDs. In essence, quantum dots are used to change the colour of the light. The advantage of this approach is that blue LEDs are the brightest, most energy-efficient kind.

Read more . . .

How Quantum Dots Could Make LEDs as Warm as Candlelight [LEDs] (gizmodo.com)
LED lighting makes a giant leap in brightness and efficiency (dvice.com)
Nanofiber lighting promises to be better, safer than incandescent or CFL bulbs (engadget.com)
LED Illumination Direct Adds New Green Products to Market for Commercial, Industrial and Residential Uses (eon.businesswire.com)
Concept: Draw The Lights On Your Ceiling (ubergizmo.com)

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Data, data everywhere

innovation2 — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:54:42 +0000

: Image by ldodds via Flickr

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier, but also big headaches

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.

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A machine that prints organs is coming to market

innovation2 — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:58:55 +0000

: Image by TheDeepFryedBoot via Flickr

Making a bit of me

THE great hope of transplant surgeons is that they will, one day, be able to order replacement body parts on demand. At the moment, a patient may wait months, sometimes years, for an organ from a suitable donor. During that time his condition may worsen. He may even die. The ability to make organs as they are needed would not only relieve suffering but also save lives. And that possibility may be closer with the arrival of the first commercial 3D bio-printer for manufacturing human tissue and organs.

The new machine, which costs around $200,000, has been developed by Organovo, a company in San Diego that specialises in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia. One of Organovo’s founders, Gabor Forgacs of the University of Missouri, developed the prototype on which the new 3D bio-printer is based. The first production models will soon be delivered to research groups which, like Dr Forgacs’s, are studying ways to produce tissue and organs for repair and replacement. At present much of this work is done by hand or by adapting existing instruments and devices.

To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made, says Keith Murphy, Organovo’s chief executive, and these will be for research purposes. Mr Murphy says, however, that the company expects that within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts.

Read more . . .

San Diego’s Organovo Develops Bio-Printer Technology to Engineer New Organs (xconomy.com)
Bio-Printer Will (One Day) Print Organs for Transplant (neatorama.com)

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A touchless touch-screen may soon reach the market

innovation2 — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:44:53 +0000

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

THE popularity of touch-screens on mobile phones means that a swipe, tap or a flick comes as naturally these days as the click of a mouse. But existing touch-screens have their limits. Those relying on changes in electrical resistance tend to have poorer resolution than is needed for modern applications, while those that rely on capacitance require an ungloved finger.

Consequently, a new generation of touch-screens, known as optical liquid crystal displays, is emerging. Optical LCDs embed tiny light sensors next to many of the screen’s pixels. In the brief moments between each successive screen image, the backlight is turned off. In these periods of darkness, undetectable to the human eye, sensors are able to pick up light coming from outside the device.

Although such sensors are designed to detect only the presence or absence of a finger touching the screen, Ramesh Raskar, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wondered whether this new type of device could be turned into not a touch, but a touchless screen by using the sensors to detect more distant objects as well.

His idea was to treat each sensor as if it were a pinhole camera. He (or, rather, his software) would then stitch the two-dimensional images from each pinhole together to obtain a three-dimensional picture. This could then be used to determine which bit of the screen a distant finger is pointing at.

Read more . . .

MIT’s Thin LCD Lets Your Fingers Do the Talking (gigaom.com)
The Next Touchscreens Will Be Very Sensitive About How Hard You Poke Them [Touchscreens] (gizmodo.com)
Gesture Cube – The First Commercial 3D Capacitive Touch Interface? (touchuserinterface.com)
Samsung to mass produce 3.3-inch touch-embedded AMOLED panels (engadget.com)
Is this the ultimate touch sensor? (ubergizmo.com)

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The faster the internet becomes, the slower it loads pages

innovation2 — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:55:20 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

World Wide Wait

EVER noticed how long it takes for web pages to load these days? You click on a link and wait and wait, and then wait some more, for the content to trickle in. If nothing has happened after ten seconds or so, your impatient correspondent hits the browser’s stop button followed by the reload key. In desperation, he sometimes loads the link into a second or even a third browser tab as well, and bombards the website’s server with multiple requests for the page. If that fails, he gives up in disgust and reads a newspaper instead.

Back in the early days of the internet, when most web users relied on dial-up connections, browsers were crude and web graphics were clumsy GIF files, eight seconds was considered the maximum people would stick around for a page to load. To increase “stickiness”, web designers pared their HTML code to the bone, collated their style-sheet data and JavaScripts into single files for more efficient caching elsewhere on the web, used fewer graphics and embraced the PNG and JPEG picture formats, with their smaller file sizes, as soon as they became available. Compared with text, pictures really were the equivalent of 1,000 words, at least when it came to the time taken to transmit them.

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Tiny microphones provide a new way to eliminate background noise

innovation2 — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 04:19:54 +0000

: Image by visual.dichotomy via Flickr

Opting for the quiet life

MANY of those who talk loudly into their mobile phones are just inconsiderate show-offs for whom no punishment is too evil. Sometimes, however, there is an excuse. Noise in the background can make it hard for your interlocutor to hear what you are saying. Raised voices are an inevitable consequence.

Soon, though, this excuse will vanish. Thanks to advances in manufacturing techniques, which allow miniature mechanical components to be built into electronic chips, it is now possible to add better noise-cancelling features to phones, and also to other products, such as the small “earbuds” used to listen to music players.

The idea behind active noise-cancellation goes back to the 1950s. Sound is a pressure wave in the air. By making an identical but inverted version of that wave and playing it through a loudspeaker, peak should fall on trough, and trough on peak. The two waves should thus, in theory, cancel each other out—leaving silence.

But the practice is hard. Unless the sources of the noise and the antinoise coincide, the wave patterns will not overlap properly and the effect will be lost. A good approximation to perfect overlap can, however, be made by playing the anti-noise as close to the ear as possible, so that the part of the noise which is actually doing the irritating, namely that going into the listener’s head, gets cancelled, even if the rest does not. The problem with this approach is that you have to pick up the incoming soundwave with a microphone, work out in an instant what the antisoundwave needs to look like, and then get ahead of the original soundwave by sending a signal to a loudspeaker that will broadcast the antisoundwave at precisely the moment the soundwave arrives.

Read more . . .

Nexus One Ushering In Age Of ANC, MEMS Mics? (phandroid.com)
Able Planet noise-cancelling headphones* (theplussizemommy.com)
Ask Engadget: Best noise cancelling Bluetooth headset? (engadget.com)

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An end to frivolous patents may finally be in sight

innovation2 — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:19:04 +0000

: Image by jontintinjordan via Flickr

Patent nonsense

DO PATENTS help or hinder innovation? Instinctively, they would seem a blessing, especially for backroom tinkerers. Patenting an idea gives its inventor a 20-year monopoly to exploit the fruit of his labour in the marketplace, in exchange for publishing a full account of how the new product, process or material works for all and sundry to see. For the inventor, that may be a reasonable trade-off. For society, however, the loss of competition through the granting sole rights to an individual or organisation is justified only if it stimulates the economy and delivers goods that change people’s lives for the better.

Invention, though, is not innovation. It may take a couple of enthusiasts working evenings and weekends for a year or two—not to mention tens of thousands of dollars of their savings—to get a pet idea to the patenting stage. But that is just the beginning. Innovations based on patented inventions or discoveries can take teams of researchers, engineers and marketing experts a decade or more, and tens of millions of dollars, to transfer to the marketplace. And for every bright idea that goes on to become a commercial winner, literally thousands fall by the wayside.

Most economists would argue that, without a patent system, even fewer inventions would lead to successful innovations, and those that did would be kept secret for far longer in order to maximise returns. But what if patents actually discourage the combining and recombining of inventions to yield new products and processes—as has happened in biotechnology, genetics and other disciplines?

Or what about those ludicrous business-process patents, like Amazon.com’s “one-click” patent or the “name-your-price” auction patent assigned to Priceline.com? Instead of stimulating innovation, such patents seem more about extracting “rents” from innocent bystanders going about their business. One thing has become clear since business-process patents took off in America during the 1990s: the quality of patents has deteriorated markedly. And with sloppier patenting standards, litigation has increased. The result is higher transaction costs all round.

It is not simply a failure of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to scrutinise applications more rigorously. The Federal Circuit (America’s centralised court of appeal, established in 1982 to hear, among numerous other things, patent disputes) has been responsible for a number of bizarre rulings. Because of its diverse responsibilities, the Federal Circuit—unlike its counterparts in Europe and Japan—has never really acquired adequate expertise in patent jurisprudence.

To be eligible for a patent, an invention must not just be novel, but also useful and non-obvious. Anything that relies on natural phenomena, abstract ideas or the laws of nature does not qualify. The USPTO has taken to requiring a working prototype of anything that purportedly breaches the laws of physics. So, no more perpetual-motion machines, please.

Read more . . .

Check out Techdirt.com

USPTO To Review Controversial VoIP Patent (yro.slashdot.org)
The Economist Notices That The Patent System Is Hindering Innovation And Needs To Be Fixed (techdirt.com)
USPTO Rejects Submission Because It Was Faxed ‘Upside Down’ (techdirt.com)
Yet Another Study Shows That Patents Lead To Sub-Optimal Innovation (techdirt.com)
Who Owns Science? The Manchester Manifesto (mt-soft.com.ar)

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Big Oil is being forced to rethink its future

innovation2 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:44:13 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

ON THE face of it the world’s big and publicly quoted oil companies should be celebrating some pleasing results this week. Royal Dutch Shell unveiled its results on Thursday February 4th, reporting that it had made $9.8 billion in 2009. Two days earlier BP boasted profits of $14 billion for the same year. Yet these billions are a disappointment compared with the bonanza of previous years (Shell, for example, raked in $31.4 billion in 2008 alone) when soaring oil prices pulled profits ever higher.

In the long term, however, the firms’ success depends on sustaining reserves. The big western oil companies are trying to expand through acquisitions and investment, but the opportunities do so are becoming scarcer. The firms are spending where they can. Exxon Mobil, the biggest listed oil company, says that exploration and capital spending hit $27.1 billion in 2009, 4% higher than in 2008. The company expects to spend $25 billion to $30 billion annually to the same end over the next five years. BP intends to spend some $20 billion this year on investment in new projects and drilling, roughly the same level as last year.

But there are limits to what money can buy. State-controlled rivals—in the Middle East, Russia and beyond—jealously guard oil reserves on their home patches. Few new big fields of oil, at least those that are easy to reach and cheap to exploit, have been discovered in recent years. And where new opportunities emerge, such as in Iraq, Western oil giants are scrambling to pay big sums at auctions for drilling rights in territory where the local government tightly limits their returns. Even then, competition from Chinese, Russian and other state-run oil firms can be severe. National oil companies will often pay prices that would alarm shareholders in the big listed oil companies.

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Innovation Toronto » Economist

Smoothing Out the Wind

A cunning plan to store energy underwater may help fulfil the promise of wind power

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Monitoring greenhouse gases

Highs and lows

De bas en haut

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A quantum leap for lighting

Shine a light

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Data, data everywhere

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier, but also big headaches

A machine that prints organs is coming to market

Making a bit of me

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A touchless touch-screen may soon reach the market

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The faster the internet becomes, the slower it loads pages

World Wide Wait

Tiny microphones provide a new way to eliminate background noise

Opting for the quiet life

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An end to frivolous patents may finally be in sight

Patent nonsense

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Big Oil is being forced to rethink its future