2008 January February 25 Ideas on the Verge
No.5 Are We There Yet?
Remote medicine The big idea: Ever since women started having their babies in hospitals, they’ve been asking their doctors, their Lamaze instructors, and especially their poor, clueless husbands, “How will I know when it’s time to go?” Remote contraction tracking and fetal heart rate monitoring may soon take the guesswork out. Developed by GE Healthcare in […]
No.4 Genes Genie
Experimental Man Getting your genes tested is all the rage these days, but few really know what the results mean. So David Ewing Duncan, a science journalist and a visiting researcher at the Graduate School of Journalism, sent 14 vials of blood to a lab in Canada, which analyzed his genetic markers. Out of 317,000 genetic […]
No.3 Building Muscle in the Lab
Two-step cellular development For nearly 30 years, scientists thought cells develop into specific cell types nerve, skin, or liver cells, for instance in exactly the same way. But researchers Robert Tjian of Berkeley and Maria Divina E. Deato of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, working with skeletal muscle cells, are throwing this basic premise into doubt. Traditional […]
No.25 Everybody’s Going Low-Carb
Low-carbon fuel standard The big idea: The term “low-carb” took on new meaning when California adopted the Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), the world’s first greenhouse gas standard for transportation fuels. In a state where transportation accounts for 41 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (compared to a national average of 32 percent), the commitment to reduce carbon […]
No.24 Plug and Away
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) are more than just a tricked-out version of your conventional hybrid. “We have the opportunity to completely run our entire society renewably with plug-in hybrids,” says Andrew Frank, a professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering at UC Davis and the guru of the PHEV economy. The key is syncing PHEVs […]
No.23 More Power to Ya
In the race to create cleaner energy, one of the dark horses is heat conversion: capturing heat that we expend in making energy, and making it into more energy. It’s made possible by a loophole in the second law of thermodynamics that says you can derive energy from a situation where there is a large […]
No.22 Dirt-Cheap Energy
The big idea: Ethanol radically altered our notion of fuel. No longer did we need to dig for oil. But ethanol requires enormous energy to produce and is usually made from corn, which is grown on arable land. That puts it in competition with land for food production. Berkeley energy expert Alex Farrell suggests creating […]
No.21 Your Chances of Having a Decent Wine Cellar Just Got Better
The big idea: Disaster-resistant grapevines. For centuries, growing grapes has been a crapshoot. Drought, frost, pests, and disease regularly destroy crops, and with scarcity comes expense. But now that the grape genome has been sequenced by French researchers, the mysteries of grape behavior, including locating their immune systems, may be solved. “Now that we have […]
No.20 If These Walls Could Talk
The big idea: What if buildings and bridges could monitor their own structural “health?” That’s smart infrastructure, a broad term referring to power networks, water systems, telecommunications operations, and public transportation systems that make use of “intelligent” materials (sensor-laden concrete) or devices (tiny cameras) to be responsive to conditions and, ultimately, safer. The players: Bozidar […]
No.2 All Work, All Play
The big idea: Exploiting the pleasure principle for educational and commercial purposes through online gaming. In less threatening terms, game-based learning (GBL) is an innovative way of encouraging people to pick up new skills, such as forming Chinese calligraphy figures or solving mathematical problems, through play. The players: Carnegie Mellon University’s Luis von Ahn, an […]
No.19 Holy Carbonation!
Carbon sequestration The big idea: Finding ways to pull the by-products of energy consumption out of the air and put them where they can’t hurt us. For now, policymakers and scientists use the generic term “carbon sequestration” to describe the process of removing greenhouse gasses from the air. But there are few ways to do this. […]
No.18 Powered by Paint
The big idea: What if you could charge your car by driving in the sunlight instead of stopping at a gas station? Thanks to associate professor of chemistry Peidong Yang, we may soon channel sunlight to power everything from houses to laptops. The technology is solar paint, an external coating made from layers of nanoparticle […]
No.17 Money for Nothing, Pics for Free
We’ve grown used to the ultra-rich paying astronomical prices for art, and this knowledge does add a certain frisson to the Sunday museum visit. So imagine a museum giving away its art to anyone who asks. Now further imagine that the museum allows you to cut up, remix, collage, or remake the artwork. Welcome to […]
No.16 Label Me if You Must
The big idea: An eye-pleasing, data-rich tag that tells consumers how much CO2 and other pollutants were emitted during the production, packaging, and transportation of the product. The players: “This goes way beyond tracking how much CO2 you emit when you drive your car one mile,” says Daniel Kammen, a professor in the Energy and […]
No.15 My Pants Have Ideas of Their Own
The big idea: “Smart clothing” is the catchphrase for a genre of clothing that directly integrates computer technology with fabric. For instance, Levi Strauss & Co., based in San Francisco, is working on a jacket that will play music. Levi already features a few garments that host gadgets such as iPods attached to the outside. […]
No.14 Waste Not, Want Not
Demand sensors The big idea: “Most forms of energy, coming in and going out, are invisible to the eye. So it’s hard to get people to change their behavior because they don’t recognize how much they’re using,” says Pritesh Gandhi, founder of Ambient Devices. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company makes a device called the Ambient Orb that […]
No.13 Keep Your Dirty Goods to Yourself
Carbon calculators Now, to help you better green-shop, Chris Jones, a researcher at Berkeley Institute of the Environment, together with Daniel Kammen and Arpad Horvath, is developing an online carbon-tracking calculator called LEAPS (Lifecycle Environmental Assessment of Products and Services). Consumers input information about the cars they drive, the food they eat, the city they live […]
No.12 Beam Us Up. For real.
Quantum teleportation The big idea: When scientists demonstrated that teleportation was possible in practice as well as theory, pop science writers immediately began musing about human transporters. Technology forecaster Paul Saffo also started thinking. “It’s like when [Berkeley professor Charles] Townes invented the laser,” he says. “Everyone thought it was going to turn into a ray […]
No.11 Making Sense of it All
The big idea: If you’ve ever played air guitar along with your old Beatles or Jimi Hendrix albums and imagined what your wicked licks would sound like, Kris Pister, M.S. ’89, Ph.D. ’92, has great news for you. Over the past 15 years Pister, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has taken the […]
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