The Airbus A321neo passenger plane has become the third next-generation aircraft to complete a maiden flight with LEAP engines on wing. The LEAP is the first engine that includes both 3D-printed parts and components from advanced ceramic materials that can handle higher temperatures than even the most advanced alloys but weigh just one-third what steel does. These and other new technologies will make it 15 percent more fuel-efficient, quieter and easier to maintain compared to current engines made by CFM International, the company that developed the LEAP.

CFM has received orders for more than 10,000 LEAP engines, valued at $140 billion. Top image: The first LEAP-powered A321neo is landing in Hamburg. Image credit: Airbus Above: The Boeing 737 MAX during its maiden flight: Image credit: Boeing

CFM is a 50-50 joint company between GE and France’s Snecma (Safran), and the LEAP is the best-selling jet engine in its history. CFM has received orders for more than 10,000 engines, valued at $140 billion.

The plane took off from Hamburg, Germany, and landed five and a half hours later. “We have confirmed that the engine is meeting its performance specifications,” said Jean-Paul Ebanga, president and CEO of CFM.

CFM started developing the LEAP in the last decade specifically for the single-aisle-aircraft market. Boeing estimates this will be by far the largest and fastest-growing market, expanding from 14,100 planes today to 30,600 in 2034.

The first Airbus A320neo powered by LEAP engines completed its maiden flight in May 2015. Image credit: Airbus

There are three versions of the LEAP engine: LEAP-1A for the Airbus A320neo family (which also includes A319neo and A321neo), LEAP-1B for Boeing 737 MAX and LEAP-1C for the COMAC C919.

The first Boeing 737 MAX flight took place two weeks ago. The first Airbus A320neo powered by LEAP engines completed its maiden flight in May 2015.

The LEAP-1A received joint U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and European Aviation Safety Agency certification in November 2015, and the first LEAP is scheduled to enter commercial service later this year.

There are currently more than 30 LEAP engines (all three models) going through tests at GE and Snecma testing facilities in Peebles, Ohio; Victorville, California; and elsewhere in Europe and around the world. The testing program has logged a total of more than 8,400 certification test hours and 18,100 test cycles.

In 2015, the FAA certified the first 3D-printed part for a GE jet engine — a casing that houses the compressor inlet temperature sensor.

New solar and wind energy farms added a whopping 68 percent of new power generation capacity in the United States last year, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. When combined with hydropower, renewables now make up a fifth of America’s electricity generation capacity, more than double what it was in 2008. “The power sector continued to de-carbonize and add near-record amounts of clean energy as policy activity at the global, national and state levels set the country on track for further emissions abatement,” the study found.

This is good news for the environment and consumers but also for companies like GE and their shareholders and customers. GE greatly expanded its renewables portfolio with hydropower, offshore wind systems and power distribution technologies when it acquired Alstom’s energy and grid business last year.

Americans will get their first taste of the combination later this year, when Deepwater Wind turns on the country’s first offshore wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean near Block Island, Rhode Island. But the United States is just one market for the technologies. Take a look at a some of the recent projects.

Top: GE acquired with Alstom’s energy and grid business the Haliade offshore wind turbine. “With a rotor diameter spanning one and a half football fields (150 meters), the turbine can generate 6 megawatts. Image credit: GE Power Above: America’s first offshore wind farm will open later this year near Block Island. We completed installation of the five jacket foundations in November,” says Deepwater Wind’s Stacy Tingley. “Our focus this winter and spring now turns to turbine assembly and submarine cable installation work.” Image credit: Deepwater Wind

A partially assembled Haliade rotor is motoring to its installation site in the North Sea. Image credit: GE Power

GE started connecting wind turbines to the Industrial Internet and also began modeling wind flows to make wind farms more efficient. GIF credit: GE Power

The world’s first wind turbine  produced just 12 kilowatts, enough to supply three modern American homes. Inventor Charles Brush built it behind his mansion, in the middle of a 5-acre backyard running along Cleveland’s fashionable Euclid Avenue. Brush’s business later became part of GE.

GE is testing its latest wind turbine design, the Ecorotr, in the Mojave Desert in California. The shield attached to the nose of the turbine is designed to push wind on the blades and make the turbine more efficient. Image credit: GE Reports

The Alstom acquisition gave GE access to hydropower technology, including systems working inside the Itaipu Dam on the Parana River in Brazil. The dam supplies Brazil with a quarter of its power and Paraguay with 90 percent of its electricity. Image credit: GE Power

A worker is finishing the rotor of a Francis water turbine. Image credit: GE Power

The Francis turbine bears the name of its inventor, James Francis. It’s the most common water turbine today. One of them can generate as much as 800 megawatts. The turbine, which is immersed in water, spins the generator, which is the silver wheel near the top. Image credit: GE Power

This Francis turbine will travel to Brazil. Image credit: GE Power

There are several ways to generate electricity from water. This submarinelike bulb turbine channels water flow along its body to the wheel (see below). Image credit: GE Power

The bulb turbine at work at the Srepok hydropower plant in Vietnam. Image credit: GE Power

The Kaplan turbine was developed by Czech engineer Viktor Kaplan. Unlike the Francis turbine, it has movable blades that allow it to remain efficient if the flow of water changes. Image credit: GE Power

Kaplan turbines can generate as much as 200 megawatts. Image credit: GE Power

Variable speed hydro generators like the one above allow operators to change output, absorb spikes in demand and help utilities stabilize the grid. Image credit: GE Power

The Pelton turbine, invented by Allan Pelton, is attached to a horizontal shaft and extracts energy from a jet of water. It can generate up to 350 megawatts. Image credit: GE Power

GE also has solar technology in its portfolio. It recently built the world’s first smart solar grid near Nice on the French Riviera. Image credit: GE Power

GE engineers also recently used silicon carbide chips like the one above to build one of the most efficient utility-scale inverters in the world and improve its output by 50 percent. The inverter can process power from solar installations generating 4 megawatts, instead of the typical 1-megawatt machine. Image credit: GE Global Research

Giving snowballs a chance in the hell of a steel foundry, catching lightning in a bottle and making a wall talk: Thomas Edison did none of these seemingly impossible things. But then, he never had the opportunity.

This year, GE is celebrating Edison’s birthday, which President Reagan proclaimed as National Inventors Day, by taking on the impossible challenges of lore. On Feb. 11, the company is showing that these feats are “unimpossible.”

Sara Underwood, a mechanical engineer at GE Global Research, was part of a team that made the Berlin Wall talk last fall. Listen to her story.

GE Reports: Tell us about the mission?

Sara Underwood: I am part of a team of researchers who work on projects for GE’s Power, Aviation, and Oil & Gas businesses. Our team specializes in vibration and noise measurement and mitigation. Our goal was to identify a sensor sensitive enough to detect the vibration in the concrete wall caused by a man reading a story on one side of the wall, filter and transport the vibrations to a speaker 160 yards away on the other side of the wall, and play the story back to a group of kids.

GER: What did you think when you joined the team?

SU: I thought the task would be much more challenging than it turned out to be.

GER: Really?

SU: We initially talked about the Great Wall of China, but decided that it wouldn’t be a good option because it’s not a consistent medium. It’s made from rocks and bricks, which makes it harder to carry vibrations. With concrete, the limiting factors were its thickness and ambient noise.

GER: How did you handle the challenge?

SU: The average human voice at close range is about 60 to 70 decibels and causes the wall to vibrate. We had to figure out how those vibrations would fade as they traveled through the wall. We were dealing with at least six inches of concrete, so there was some loss, but not so much that we wouldn’t be able to pick it up on the other side. We picked some sensors from our lab, attached those to a wall and gave it try.

GER: What type of sensors?

SU: We grabbed laser vibrometers and accelerometers, for example, which we use regularly to measure vibrations in jet engine blades, locomotive engines and MRI machines. The sensors can measure vibrations that can tell us things about the components like material properties and structural health. It was mostly off the shelf technology.

GER: What happened when you got to Berlin?

SU: We were there for a week and spent a lot of time at the Berlin Wall. But we only had one day to run the experiment when we had permits to work at the wall and attach anything to it. It was a pretty neat experience.

GER: How was it different from your lab tests?

SU: It was much harder. We were there in December and the day we did the experiment was cold and rainy. We planned to use commercial wax to attach the accelerometer to the wall but the cold made the wax rigid. We had to get a hair dryer to soften the wax, which is not something I’m used to doing at work.

The other big issue was background noise. There are streetcars, cars and people walking right by the wall. The wall goes deep into the ground and when a train went by, it generated more vibrations than our sensor could handle.

GER: How did you deal with it?

SU: We had to wait for a quiet moment for the speaker to read the story. We also used the same data acquisition software that we use in our lab to filter the measured vibrations to take the background noise out.

GER: How did the kids respond?

SU: I feel like they should have been more impressed than they were. I don’t think they grasped what we were doing. We also had an oscilloscope at the wall that was showing the vibrations as the speaker was reading. They were thrilled watching that.

Giving snowballs a chance in the hell of a foundry, catching lightning in a bottle and making a wall talk: Thomas Edison did none of these seemingly impossible things.

But then, he never had the opportunity.

This year, GE is celebrating Edison’s birthday, which President Reagan proclaimed as National Inventors Day, by taking on the impossible challenges of lore. On Feb. 11, the company will release videos that prove these tasks are “unimpossible.”

Jeffrey Sullivan leads the dielectrics lab at GE Global Research. That’s a fancy way of saying that he deals a lot with electrical insulators. Last fall he was part of team that caught an artificial bolt of lightning in a bottle and then use the charge to start a car. Take a look.

GE Reports: What do you do in your lab?

Jeffrey Sullivan: We work on all kinds of insulation that goes inside aircraft engines, turbines, medical imaging machines, the grid and other technology.

GER: How did that help you with catching a lightning in a bottle?

JS: It was an unusual assignment because nobody’s ever done it before, right. But all this diverse knowledge, we call it the GE Store, allowed us to move fast.

GER: Where did you start?

JS: We pulled the team together. There were about five people from our high voltage and power conversion labs and also an expert in lightning.

GER: That’s a real job?

JS: You would be surprised. We make so many machines that have to survive lighting strikes, everything from jet engines to wind turbines and the electrical grid.

We broke the problem into three parts: we had to make the lightning, we had to capture it in a bottle, and then, to prove we succeeded, use the energy to start a car.

GER: What was the hardest part?

JS: Oddly, it was actually the manufacturing of the lightning. We had to go to a special lab in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and we didn’t know the parameters of their power supply. Also, artificial lightning is a different beast from lightning bolts you see in nature.

GER: How so?

JS: Each lightning bolt has multiple components. First there’s the flash, but it doesn’t really have that much energy. The energy arrives after the initial impulse. In nature it all happens pretty much at the same time, but in the lab they tend to break those components apart. We had to engineer the lightning. We kind of hybridized it to take advantage of both the natural and the artificial. We engineered gaps in the apparatus that allowed us to obtain a high voltage flash and then to lower the voltage and get much higher current and energy. We basically simplified the lightning to its bare minimum.

GER: What does bare minimum lightning look like?

JS: The pulse generator at the lab can go to 2.4 million volts. I think we were getting about a million.

GER: What about the vessel?

JS: We built it in our lab. It contained a standard supercapacitor from machine catalog. We knew it could hold enough charge to start a car. We had used the vessel to start my Camry and my colleague’s Civic. But these capacitors are limited by how quickly they can absorb the energy. If you start throwing energy at it too quickly, the voltage can build up dangerously high across the device, and you could actually cause it to arc across the device. We call it flashover. To keep that from happening, we put a device called an inductor between the last receiving electrode for the lighting and the capacitor. This slowed down that initial peak and the delivery of the energy in a way that prevented the flashover. Once we got past that challenge, it was pretty straightforward to dump the current into the capacitor.

GER: Did you catch enough of the lighting to start a car?

JS: We figured we needed about 5,000 joules to start the car. To put that into a perspective, it’s just enough to run a hairdryer for 5 seconds. But the filmmakers showed up with an old Fiat 600. It has a small two-cylinder engine that was actually pretty easy to turn. We removed the battery and attached the jumper cables to the vessel. In the end, I don’t think we needed more than 1,000 joules.

A number of people, including reportedly Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams, have had their corpses frozen in the hope that they can be revived in the future. This process, called cryopreservation, presents many challenges, chief among them keeping the delicate structure of the brain intact. But that may be changing. Our haul this week includes that story, plus tales of the world’s fastest data line, gravity waves and more.

A Homerun For Ted Williams?

A group of researchers from 21st Century Medicine, a biomedical company, used a combination of “ultrafast chemical fixation” and bone-chilling minus 135 degrees Celsius to freeze and recover a rabbit brain, including its neurons and synapses. “It is the first demonstration that near-perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain is achievable,” the Brain Preservation Foundation reported.

Scientists were able to freeze and recover a rabbit brain with its structure intact. Image credit: Brain Preservation Foundation

These Gravity Waves Are Rocking Physics

Scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) listening to the noise of two colliding black holes confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, ripples in space and time that were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 but never previously observed.

Top: An artist’s rendition of two colliding black holes. Image credit: LIGO Above: Einstein predicted that massive objects warped spacetime. Image credit: LIGO

Faster Than You Can Say Lannister

Researchers at University College London reportedly set a new world record for data transmission, zipping information through their “superfast” optical broadband network at 1.125 terabits per second. That’s allegedly enough to download the entire Game of Thrones series in HD in less than a second.

A fiberoptic cable at UCL carried data 50,000 times faster that a typical broadband connection. Image credit: Getty Images

Vital Attraction

Astronomers at Australia’s Parkes radio telescope are redrawing the map of our cosmic neighborhood. They discovered a group of previously unknown galaxies hiding behind the Milky Way. The finding could help us get to the bottom of other riddles, including the mysterious Great Attractor, a powerful gravity anomaly. “We don’t actually understand what’s causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it’s coming from,” said University of Western Australia professor Lister Staveley-Smith, the lead author of the study.

Scientists found a group of galaxies hiding behind the Milky Way. the discovery could help explain the Great Attractor mystery. Image credit: CSIRO

Straight From The Horse’s Face

Scientists in England have shown that horses, like dogs, can recognize human emotions and detect whether a person is happy or angry just by looking at photographs. Angry faces induced responses suggesting an understanding of the stimuli: “Horses displayed a left-gaze bias (a lateralization generally associated with stimuli perceived as negative) and a quicker increase in heart rate (HR) towards these photographs,” the team reported.

New research shows that horses, like dogs, can read human emotions even from photographs. Image credit: Getty images

Data privacy and security don’t have come at the expense of innovation or economic growth — they’re instrumental in driving both.

How can we maximize the good that can come from the responsible use of data, while minimizing the inherent risks of data to privacy and security? This is one of the central questions of our time in an age increasingly driven by big data.

More and more of our world today runs on the free flow of data — through smartphones, cloud computing, chip cards, biometrics, sensors and more. Data is driving more of our economies, growth, and productivity. According to McKinsey & Company’s “Global Flows in a Digital Age,” GDP growth increases between $250 billion and $450 billion annually — approximately equivalent to the GDP of Finland or Norway — when data flows freely. And countries that support cross-border data flows are reaping a 40 percent economic benefit over less connected countries.

The free flow of data helps healthcare experts track and contain the spread of deadly diseases across the globe. In the fight against the Ebola virus in West Africa, as one professor put it, “it would be tragic if, during a crisis like this, data was not being adequately shared with the public health community.”

There is tremendous good that data sharing brings about. But data sharing raises legitimate concerns about economic and national security, citizen and consumer privacy, and loss of intellectual property. Proper and effective safeguards are absolutely mission critical. It’s more vital than ever that everyone play their part in protecting the information under their control. I want to underscore that privacy and security don’t have to come at the expense of innovation or economic progress. In fact, privacy and security are instrumental in driving both. A balanced approach helps ensure the use of data is free-flowing, responsible, and secure. It’s a balanced approach that I’m advocating.

Mounting efforts to create security and safeguards in the extreme are not the answer. I’m talking specifically about what some have called data nationalization — the requirement of data to be physically stored or processed inside a nation’s borders. These restrictions often confuse concerns about access to data for national security and law enforcement purposes with commercial use of data. The outcome is the fragmentation of data that creates a “splinternet” — one that risks not only stifling economic growth but reversing it as well.

To operate effectively and efficiently, economies need reliable, continuous and affordable access to data. Laws restricting the flow of data have a chilling effect on industry and block consumer access. People can’t get products and services from other markets. Domestic economies become isolated from the growth potential associated with the rest of the global digital economy.

Data nationalization laws often create additional burdens. Increased infrastructure costs can ripple throughout the value chain, with a disproportionate impact placed on smaller businesses that cannot easily afford the additional investments. And by duplicating infrastructure, data systems can become fractured and increasingly vulnerable — an ironic unintended consequence to these laws.

Less access to data also has an unintended consequence of less access to ideas and innovation. Why? Because extreme restrictions can result in limiting access to information that can enable a simple idea to evolve into the next digital discovery — one that could in turn evolve into a game-changing innovation that creates new growth and jobs or a global solution to a public problem or challenge.

So, what do we do? The answer I believe lies in our combined leadership across public, private and civil society sectors — leadership that forgoes the easy route of saying “no” in favor of forging the harder path of saying “yes, if…” We can get to “yes, if…” by taking steps like codifying agreed-upon global principles around privacy and security that local jurisdictions can adopt; by updating existing surveillance treaties and agreements to reflect the Big Data age; and by creating standards that enable the pooling of public and private sector data to address global challenges. It’s not enough to challenge data nationalization with arguments — we have to come up with viable answers.

Just as steam powered much of the First Industrial Revolution, the free flow of data will be fundamental to powering what the World Economic Forum and others are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In fact, during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last month, one session in particular — Internet without Borders — focused on how to avert a future of data fragmentation. This was a timely session that grappled with a key issue of the 21st century: the responsible use, protection and sharing of data. How this is addressed is the challenge and opportunity all of us share.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

This piece first appeared in the World Economic Forum blog.

Ajay Banga is CEO of Mastercard.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Thomas Edison lost much of his hearing when he was still a child. “I have not heard a bird sing since I was 12 years old,” he once remarked. But that did not stop him from inventing the phonograph in 1877, a device that for the first time recorded sounds and played them back. He was just 29 years old and the lightbulb was still in his future.

The phonograph created a whole new way of experiencing the world through sound. In 1958, when the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was thinking about naming their music industry awards, one suggestion was the Eddie to honor Edison’s contribution. The Academy eventually decided on Grammy, after the gramophone. The 2016 Grammy Awards will take place in Los Angeles on Monday.

Above: A drawing from 1878 of Edison speaking into the sound collector of his tinfoil phonogram, the first device that could record and also play back sounds. The frenchman Éduoard Léon-Scott made the phonoautogram, the first recording-only machine in 1857. Top image: Edison with his phonogram. Images credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

Edison came up with the device by drawing on his knowledge of the telegraph and the telephone. “I was experimenting on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking machine of today,” Edison told a biographer. “From my experiments on the telephone I knew the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations. Instead of using a disk, I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was placed tin foil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm.” He recorded the movements of the diaphragm with a needle.

As was his habit with new inventions, Edison immediately estimated the price people would pay for the machine. He guessed $18 – the equivalent of $390 today. He then asked a worker named John Kruesi to make it from his sketch. “I did not have much faith that it would work, expecting I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope for the future of the idea,“ Edison told a biographer. “Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking and then have the machine talk back. He thought it was absurd. After it was finished the foil was put on. I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb, etc.’ I adjusted the reproducer and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken back in my life. ”

Copies of the original sketches Edison made for his employee John Kruesi. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

The device made Edison immediately famous and sealed his reputation as the “Inventor of the Age” and led to his nickname “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” On April 18, 1878, he even traveled to the White House at the request of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who wanted to see the machine. Many of Edison’s recordings have survived and have been digitized as mp3 files. You can listen to them online.

Edison’s close associates Sigmund Bergmann (left) and Charles Batchelor pose with Edison (seated) and his tinfoil phonograph 1878. Image credit: Museum Innovation and Science Schenectady

Edison’s first phonograph from 1877. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

The mouthpiece used for recording voice. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

A sketch of a woman speaking into a phonograph. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

An early phonograph drawing. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Edison with his wax cylinder machine. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Edison later switched to wax cylinders. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

The invention also allowed Edison to crack the toy market and start selling talking dolls. Image credit: Robin and Joan Rolfs

Giving snowballs a chance in the hell of a foundry, catching lightning in a bottle and making a wall talk: Thomas Edison did none of these seemingly impossible things. But then, he never had the opportunity.

This year, GE is celebrating Edison’s birthday, which President Reagan proclaimed as National Inventors Day, by taking on the impossible challenges of lore. On Feb. 11, the company will release videos that prove these feats are “unimpossible.”

Steve Buresh, a materials processing engineer at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York, was part of the snowball team. Buresh has spent a decade at GE, working on everything from nuclear reactors to medical imaging machines. He talked to GE Reports about the project.

GE Reports: You task was to send a snowball to hell and bring it back. How did you do it?

Steve Buresh: We pulled together materials scientists, mechanical engineers, physicists and even some chemists. Most of the folks work on jet engines and gas turbines, but others specialize in oil and gas, healthcare and even lighting. In medicine, they are exploring materials for X-ray targets that must take a lot of heat. Their insights were very helpful.

GER: Where did you start?

SB: We pretty quickly agreed that we would build a vessel that could hold the insulation and the snowballs. We focused on a nickel-based super alloy that’s normally used to build gas turbine shrouds and shields and can handle as much as 1,300 degrees Celsius. The wall of the vessel was about an eighth of an inch thick and we lined it with 2 inches of fibrous insulation made from alumina-silicate that’s normally on the outside of things like a jet engine.

GER: That was enough to keep the snow from melting?

SB: That’s not all. We filled the inside of the vessel with dry ice and a 3D-printed plastic sphere divided in the middle. The sphere would sit in the dry ice and hold the snowball. We ran the calculations and estimated we had enough to lower the temperature from 1,100 degrees Celsius on the outside to minus 100 degrees on the inside.

GER: Did you use ordinary plastic for the sphere?

SB: Yes, ABS plastic, the same stuff you might use in your MakerBot. Its main function was to prevent the snowball from getting crushed. The insulation, which was a bit like a blanket, also helped to keep the snowballs from breaking.

GER: What was the most difficult part?

SB: We really didn’t know how the vessel, which weighed more than 50 pounds, would react with the molten metal and whether it would hold. The foundry was in a remote location and we couldn’t bring the tools with us to measure the temperature of the slag we immersed it in. We designed a cage from a cobalt alloy to support it. The vessel was also lighter than the slag and tended to float. We had to hold it under the molten slag.

GER: What happened when you opened it?

SB: Waiting for the vessel to cool down seemed like forever. We lost some of the dry ice and there was a slag and oxide layer on the outside of the vessel, but the snowball were intact. We were elated. When we work with materials in our labs, we make them fail in a controlled way. It’s a graceful failure. Here we were outside our comfort zone.

GER: What’s your one takeaway from the project?

SB: I was involved in making and testing the vessel and designing insulation scheme. We worked on the project just for a few weeks and it was amazing that we pulled it off. It’s really the power of the GE Store, the idea that we have so many experts of different disciplines and can bring them together to leverage that knowledge and experience. I saw it happen.

How deep is your love? Stanford neuroscientist Melina Uncapher has a system in her lab that can supply the answer.

In 2013, Dr. Uncapher and her friend the filmmaker Brent Hoff invited seven men and women ranging in ages from 10 to 75 to engage in a “love competition” that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the strength of their brain signals associated with love. “We chose them for their diversity, because we wanted to highlight the different experiences of love,“ Dr. Uncapher says. “There may be familial love that a boy can feel for his cousin, romantic love among young lovers, and bonding love between a couple that has been beautifully married for 50 years.” Hoff made a short film about the project.

Love contestants Kent and Marylin Pelz . Image credit: Brent Hoff

Kent Pelz with his results. Image credit: Brent Hoff.

Dr. Uncapher, whose specialty is the cognitive neuroscience of memory and attention, focused on a pea-size area of the brain called nucleus accumbens, located deep in the center of the brain. “It’s the place where the pathways of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and vasopressin – the neurotrasmitters and hormones thought to be involved in love – converge. It seemed to be the lowest hanging fruit in terms of detecting a signal indicative of whether we are experiencing love.”

Dr. Uncapher focused on a pea-size area of the brain called nucleus accumbens. Image credit: Brent Hoff

Each love contestant climbed into a magnetic resonance imaging machine, the GE-built Discovery MR750, for about fifteen minutes. After a few quick calibration scans, Dr. Uncapher asked them to think about someone or something they love. “When you are using your muscles, they get pumped full of oxygenated blood,” she says. “The brain works in a similar way. By visualizing possible changes in the blood flow to various parts of the brain, we can start making educated guesses as to which parts may be responding to the experience.”

The competitors thought about their family, romantic partners, spouses and former lovers. Who won? The answer is in Hoff’s film.

The digitization of manufacturing is transforming entire industries. Here are five takeaways from a workshop on how U.S. regional economies can support the development of an ecosystem that brings together hardware and software.

It’s been five years since the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen quipped that “software is eating the world,” meaning that all of the digital tools and platforms needed to transform industries through software finally worked and were doing that. To prove his point, Andreessen ticked off a long list of mostly consumer-facing service industries like bookselling, music, telecom and air travel that were being productively disrupted. Though he noted that the global economy would soon be “fully digitally wired,” he didn’t have as much to say about the manufacturing sector.

However, waves of digitization have been coursing through the manufacturing sector as well, creating new opportunities. Digital technologies are rapidly transforming the design, production, operation, and use of items as diverse as cars, workout clothes, and light bulbs. The changes have huge implications for industries and places, workers and entrepreneurs.

To explore these implications, the Metro Program, in partnership with the city of Fremont, Calif., convened its second advanced industries regional workshop last week in Silicon Valley — the world focal point for the digitization of everything.

Such digitization is now so ubiquitous as to practically define the nation’s critical advanced industries sector, including manufacturing.

Therefore, the session brought together two dozen industry executives, entrepreneurs, investors, scholars, and economic development officials to tour an emblematic factory (Tesla Motors); discuss the latest trends in the Silicon Valley manufacturing ecosystem; and parse their implications for companies, regions and the U.S. economy. Many, many trends were raised and assessed during the day’s discussions on the campus of Seagate Technology, in the former Solyndra solar factory, but a short list of compelling conclusions with broad implications came into focus.

Here are five takeaways:

1. The digitization of everything is potentially very good for U.S. manufacturing.

Sure, the software genie is worldwide in scope. Shenzhen-based factories are wired too, and Germany is in every conversation. However, the fact remains that most of the IT technologies revolutionizing manufacturing and advanced industries today reflect American competencies, ranging from increasingly powerful visualization software; computer assisted design (CAD), 3-D printing, and rapid prototyping tools; and key forms of automation and machine learning to the cloud, the Internet of things (IoT) and data analytics. Most notably, the fact that software underlies all of these technologies and that eight of the largest 10 global software companies are American suggests that current trends play heavily to America’s strengths.

“You need to have a software culture now [to be a manufacturer] and the Valley and the U.S. have that,” said Helmuth Ludwig, the chief manufacturing officer of Siemens PLM Software, “U.S. dominance in software is a huge advantage given where things are going.” Added Russ Fadel, the founder of ThingWorx, an IoT firm: “The cloud makes software more central, and that opens up new production opportunities for our companies.” That “the modern technology stack can be delivered instantly,” as observed Dan Levin, the chief operating officer of Box, a cloud storage provider, means that “IT is ready to enable every positive trend.”

2. “A hardware startup is no longer a contradiction in terms.”
Some of the same trends (and others) are also changing the game for entrepreneurs. Conventional wisdom has long been that software startups are the American way (think Microsoft, Facebook, What’sApp) but that manufacturing startups are too hard, given the costs and complexities of design, equipment, production, materials and distribution. Now, though, that is changing, said multiple workshop attendees.

TechShop founder Mark Hatch noted that entrepreneurs around the Midwest, as well as in the Bay Area, are “getting a feel” for how to reduce the costs of hardware startups using cloud-based digital tools and physical ones provided in “maker spaces” like TechShop. Likewise, Ben Einstein, the co-founder of the hardware-oriented venture capital firm Bolt, noted that “a hardware startup is no longer a contradiction in terms,” now that more VCs will provide funding, or, like Bolt, help incubate and accelerate startups at the “intersection of hardware and software.” And for that matter CEO Scott Miller described how his company Dragon Innovation functions “like a Match.com of manufacturing” that helps would-be manufacturers connect with contract factories to produce sizable production runs. Increasingly, it seems a suite of tools and supports like the ones that have fostered so many software startups are in place to support hardware startups.

3. In fact, productive new connections can now be imagined between the “maker” movement and industry.

The increasing feasibility of serious hardware startups noted by Hatch, Einstein, and Miller also stirred up dialogue about more convergences of the smaller-scale makercommunity and larger-scale advanced manufacturing. Kate Sofis, executive director of the non-profit SFMade, stressed that the two communities are now bifurcated and that there’s a need to find some middle ground between hobbyist prototyping and scale. With that on the table, several speakers said they thought some of that middle group was coming into focus.

“A lot of lifestyle businesses used to not be able to get started in manufacturing which was a pitfall for any small-scale renaissance,” said Hatch. “Now, access to tools, capital, and other supports is making manufacturable products like the [Oru] collapsible kayak possible,” continued Hatch. Coming from the industry side, CEO Nat Mani of the contract manufacturer Bestronics reported that his company is increasingly working with small startups as a form of “business development” and to track new technology development. In Fremont, it seemed possible to imagine a near future in which small-scale makers (empowered by cloud-based platforms and tools) become meaningful participants in regional manufacturing ecosystems.

4. With all of that said, the convergence economy is bringing new challenges.

Leave aside the looming land-use problems facing Silicon Valley, summarized by one executive as: “We’re running out of land!” Beyond that, the valley offers an extreme case of multiple finance, training and network issues that are critical across the country. Einstein and Mike Abbott, a general partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, each acknowledged that VCs are still very much on the sidelines of hardware investment.

Several voices named the limited supply of middle-skill technical workers — including ones with a feel for design and especially coding — as the biggest impediment to software-powered manufacturing growth. Brookings Trustee Antoine Van Agtmael said flatly that, “It sounds like the region is out to lunch on job training.” And Levin, for his part, was blunt about efforts to intensify the matching and linking of the region’s software/manufacturing cluster. Declared Levin: “We do a horrible job of nurturing the networks effects that could be huge here. There is no formalization and matching of the assets here.”

5. States and metropolitan areas need to focus.

Ultimately, many in the group agreed that states and localities have key roles to play if U.S. metropolitan areas are going to monetize the digitization of manufacturing. With federal processes gridlocked, multiple workshop attendees agreed with City Innovate Foundation Board Chairman Peter Hirshberg that linking software and hardware and startup and industry communities is “a distributed problem” that will be worked out city by city, ecosystem by ecosystem.

In that vein, multiple attendees agreed that that states and localities are the natural leaders of bottom-up initiatives to develop much better training and apprenticeship initiatives that leverage true public/private partnerships, as opposed to public systems that simply solicit input. Others stressed the need for regional maker communities and industry networks to link up more. And others stressed the need to shape urban innovation districts such as the emerging Warm Springs area in Fremont to foment collaboration.

In the end, it was clear that both Silicon Valley and other regions can benefit if their advanced industry communities can become meetups of software and hardware competency. Given U.S. software dominance, digitization looks set to revolutionize more industries and give them a new shot at competitiveness. Shouldn’t ensuring that that happens rapidly and successfully be part of U.S. and local strategies for advanced industry leadership?

(Top GIF: Video courtesy of GE)

This piece first appeared in Brookings Institution’s Advanced Industries Series.

Mark Muro is a Senior Fellow and Policy Director in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

Kelly Kline is Economic Development Director and Chief Innovation Officer of the City of Fremont, CA.

Bruce J. Katz is the inaugural cross-disciplinary Centennial Scholar at the Brookings Institution, where he focuses on the challenges and opportunities of global urbanization and leads the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking.

All views expressed are those of the authors.

Scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) eavesdropping on two colliding black holes half a universe away heard enough to confirm the existence of gravitational waves. These ripples in spacetime were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915, but never previously observed.

The sound, which science writer Dennis Overbye described as a “simple chirp, which rose to the note of middle C before abruptly stopping,” vindicates Einstein’s theory of general relativity: 10 equations published a century ago that rocked the foundations of physics and changed how we view the universe.

The equations upended our intuitive understanding of space and time and redrew the Cosmos as a funhouse where two parallel lines can intersect and time can run at different speeds. “Einstein’s theory, and the intervening century of experimentation, provided a way to satisfy one of the most fundamental yearnings: to understand what is out there in the universe, how it all began and humanity’s place in it,” The Economist wrote on the anniversary.

But it wasn’t always obvious that he would sit in the pantheon of great geniuses. When Einstein visited GE in 1921, the GE-produced newspaper Schenectady Works News described him as the “noted German scientist who has the world guessing with his theory of relativity.” Even when Einstein received his Nobel Prize in physics later the same year, it wasn’t for relativity but for explaining the photoelectric effect.

Einstein outside the RCA broadcast center in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Einstein and Steinmetz (in white suit) stand in the center. GE’s Irving Langmuir is third to the right from Steinmetz. In 1932, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work that led to early coronary artery imaging. All images credit: Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady

Einstein, Steinmetz and their entourage of more than a dozen scientists and executives then toured a high-power transoceanic radio station in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was operated by the Radio Corporation of America, which was co-founded by GE and featured a high-frequency alternator designed by GE engineer Ernst Alexanderson in 1918.

The machine was so powerful that the U.S. military took charge of it during World War I. American commanders used it to communicate with their allies and the American Expeditionary Forces in France. “It became a vital national security tool, especially after failures in the transatlantic cables,” says Chris Hunter, a historian at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady.

Einstein reportedly “expressed great surprise and interest at the high perfection” of American radio development. “To demonstrate the efficiency of radio communication, Prof. Einstein was asked to send a message to the station at Nauen, Germany,” the Works News wrote. “He did and in exactly six minutes received the following reply: Many thanks and reciprocations. Most hearty greetings to the great German scientist. Officer in charge POZ.”

The moment endures in a classic photograph of the scientists, including Einstein, Steinmetz and GE researcher and Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir, standing in front of the RCA radio station.

The Alexanderson high frequency alternator at the New Brunswick radio station during military inspection. The machine,  developed by GE engineer Ernst Alexanderson, was a valuable communication tool during World War I. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

GE engineer Charles Steinmetz at his Wendell Av. home laboratory in Schenectady, New York. When he died suddenly in 1923, then Secretary of Commerce and future U.S. President Herbert Hoover wrote that “his mathematical reasoning broke the path for many of the advances in electrical engineering in recent years and solved problems that were vital to the progress of the industry.” Steinmetz also was the first person to create artificial lightning. A friend described the creative freedom Steinmetz enjoyed at GE to the writer of the engineer’s New York Times obituary: “He was allowed to try to generate electricity out of the square root of minus one.” Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Advances in LED technology are making lighting cheaper and smarter.

The LED is finally getting its day in the spotlight. More than 40 years after GE engineer Nick Holonyak invented the first LED light, innovations have transformed the technology from a humble source of lighting to a driver of energy efficiency and analytics.

Thanks in large part to continuing price declines, LED shipments in the United States climbed three-fold last year, accounting for 15 percent of the market in the third quarter. GE expects more than half of light sockets in the country to be using LEDs by 2020.

GE has even announced a public break up with compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), which had previously been a popular energy-saving lighting source, with plans to stop making CFLs in the U.S. by the end of the year.

Walmart, which is participating in the “break up” campaign, certainly understands the benefits of LED — as an early adopter of the lighting technology more than a decade ago. The world’s largest retailer has been installing LEDs in everything from signs and ceiling fixtures to freezer cases in its bid to cut energy use in its buildings by 20 percent by 2020, and it’s working to educate its customers on how to benefit from the technology, as well.

“We’re excited about LED technology and what the future can hold with even more innovation around the intelligent lighting,” says Laura Phillips, senior vice president of sustainability at Walmart. “We’re leveraging LEDs to help customers save money so they can live better.”

In the interview, Phillips discusses the how LED technology can bring about energy savings and help unlock the potential of “intelligent” lighting, as well as the challenges of creating a more sustainable business model:

What’s driving the market shift toward LEDs? Are consumers just falling in love with the energy savings?

Our customers are definitely value-conscious — they love saving money.

Over the past 10 years that we’ve been working on sustainability, we’ve seen that when we talk with customers about energy savings and what they can save with purchasing new technology – they really gravitate to that. When customers understand the value of what they’re saving on energy, we see a great response.

We see this within Walmart too. As we looked at our own footprint and our own energy use, LED lighting has been a really key part of helping us to achieve energy savings. That began all the way back in 2003, when we began testing some LED signage. Since then, we’ve had a lot of really neat innovative projects with LED lighting, such as: freezer cases that help energy consumption, parking lot lighting that not only saves energy but also emits great light for safety, and retrofitting stores with sales floor lighting with LED.

So innovative LED technology has certainly been a key component to help us reduce our energy consumption. And we will continue to invest this year, using LED lighting in different areas of our stores.

Are there any lessons learned from Walmart’s LED rollout that other companies — as well as consumers — could benefit from?

These commitments do take time, and they require an investment – sometimes upfront. It also requires change management, new ways of working and really making sure that we’re investing for the long term.

Since it requires an upfront investment, for us it was about making sure we’re working across business segments and talking about the full benefits of an LED installation — from how the customer benefits from improved lighting to a reduction in energy expense. Being able to communicate that is really important.

LED technology has the added benefit of enabling “intelligent lighting” because of its integration and application of software and analytics. How can you see this improving people’s lives?

I think we’re still on the edge of really doing that, building great capabilities in data analytics. Big Data plays a role. At Walmart, it helps us understand what customers want to buy and making sure we get products to them — whenever, wherever they want to buy the product.

And Big Data can also help in our sustainability efforts. Today, we leverage data to monitor our stores’ temperature, lighting and heating around the world. We leverage that data and monitor it centrally to optimize operations — whether it’s our freezer cooler, protecting our products or making sure our stores are comfortable. I think there’s even more to do there —certainly with the innovation around LED and smart applications. We’re excited about seeing what’s next.

We also use data in sustainability — to help make decisions in our supply chain. We leverage the sustainability index with our suppliers to help us manage hot spots in our product categories. We can look at certain commodities in product categories and see if there are hot spots for them in climate or water or energy. Then we work with those suppliers in leveraging that data.

(Top GIF: Video courtesy of GE)

Laura Phillips is Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Walmart.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Few airlines demonstrate the latest trends in air transportation better than does Indonesia’s Lion Air. The fast-growing carrier opened for business in 2000, flying to domestic destinations and nearby foreign airports in Singapore and Vietnam. Today, its fleet consists almost entirely of single-aisle aircraft like the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, with hundreds of the next-generation versions of the planes on order.

Airbus estimates the single-aisle market will be by far the largest and fastest-growing aviation segment, adding 22,900 new planes by 2034, or 70 percent of all new passenger jets. Much of that growth — 39 percent — will take place in Asian countries like Indonesia, it predicts.

Many of the new jets will be powered by CFM International’s  LEAP jet engine, the first engine with 3D printed parts and components made from advanced ceramics that GE originally developed for powerful gas turbines. The company calls this internal know-how exchange the GE Store. These components help make the LEAP engine quieter, easier to maintain and 15 percent more fuel efficient than current engines made by CFM. Lion Air recently announced it will use 348 LEAP engines valued at $4.9 billion to power its fleet of 174 new Airbus A320neo planes.

Top image: Jet engines must endure a number of ordeals during development and testing. This LEAP-1A is powering through a hail test. Above. Another LEAP-1A is going through testing on GE’s flying test bed above Victorville, California. Image credits: CFM

“In addition to the world-class operating economics and reliability that the LEAP engine will bring to our fleet, LEAP’s strong footprint in Asia and the impressive strides it has made in North America and Europe augments well with our strategic growth objectives,” said John Duffy, chief operating officer of Transportation Partners, Lion Air’s leasing arm.

CFM is a 50-50 joint company between GE and France’s Snecma (Safran), and the LEAP is the fastest-selling jet engine in its history. CFM has received orders for more than 10,000 of the engines valued at $145 billion, including the Lion Air order.

This LEAP-1A is going through ice testing in Winnipeg, Canada. Image credit: CFM

Lion Air will use two versions of the LEAP, the LEAP-1A on the Airbus A320neo family and the LEAP-1B for Boeing’s new 737 MAX planes. Both aircraft have already completed their first flights with the engine. CFM also makes a third version of the engine, LEAP-1C, for China’s COMAC C919.

Airbus is expected to dispatch the first commercial LEAP-powered A320neo later this year.

The LEAP-1A on a test stand at a testing facility in Peebles, Ohio. Image credit: CFM

The Airbus A321neo passenger plane has become the third next-generation aircraft to complete a maiden flight with LEAP engines on wing. The LEAP is the first engine that includes both 3D-printed parts and components from advanced ceramic materials that can handle higher temperatures than even the most advanced alloys but weigh just one-third what steel does. These and other new technologies will make it 15 percent more fuel-efficient, quieter and easier to maintain compared to current engines made by CFM International, the company that developed the LEAP.

CFM has received orders for more than 10,000 LEAP engines, valued at $140 billion. Top image: The first LEAP-powered A321neo is landing in Hamburg. Image credit: Airbus Above: The Boeing 737 MAX during its maiden flight: Image credit: Boeing

CFM is a 50-50 joint company between GE and France’s Snecma (Safran), and the LEAP is the best-selling jet engine in its history. CFM has received orders for more than 10,000 engines, valued at $140 billion.

The plane took off from Hamburg, Germany, and landed five and a half hours later. “We have confirmed that the engine is meeting its performance specifications,” said Jean-Paul Ebanga, president and CEO of CFM.

CFM started developing the LEAP in the last decade specifically for the single-aisle-aircraft market. Boeing estimates this will be by far the largest and fastest-growing market, expanding from 14,100 planes today to 30,600 in 2034.

The first Airbus A320neo powered by LEAP engines completed its maiden flight in May 2015. Image credit: Airbus

There are three versions of the LEAP engine: LEAP-1A for the Airbus A320neo family (which also includes A319neo and A321neo), LEAP-1B for Boeing 737 MAX and LEAP-1C for the COMAC C919.

The first Boeing 737 MAX flight took place two weeks ago. The first Airbus A320neo powered by LEAP engines completed its maiden flight in May 2015.

The LEAP-1A received joint U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and European Aviation Safety Agency certification in November 2015, and the first LEAP is scheduled to enter commercial service later this year.

There are currently more than 30 LEAP engines (all three models) going through tests at GE and Snecma testing facilities in Peebles, Ohio; Victorville, California; and elsewhere in Europe and around the world. The testing program has logged a total of more than 8,400 certification test hours and 18,100 test cycles.

In 2015, the FAA certified the first 3D-printed part for a GE jet engine — a casing that houses the compressor inlet temperature sensor.

This week, we’ve learned how scientists are gathering insights from sharks on regenerating human teeth, using cotton candy machines to spin out artificial tissue and teaching a man to wiggle prosthetic fingers solely with the power of his thoughts. Take a look.

Running Will Shrink Your Gut And Grow Your Brain

Researchers studying mice reported that running “has been found to double or even triple the number of new neurons that appear afterward in the animals’ hippocampus, a key area of the brain for learning and memory, compared to the brains of animals that remain sedentary.” according to the New York Times. The story says that “scientists believe that exercise has similar impacts on the human hippocampus.

Man Wiggles Prosthetic Fingers With His Mind

A young epilepsy patient at Johns Hopkins University with an implanted brain electrode was able to wiggle the fingers on a prosthetic arm with his mind. “We believe this is the first time a person using a mind-controlled prosthesis has immediately performed individual digit movements without extensive training,” said Nathan Crone, senior author of the study and professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

MIT Scientists Reverse Autism-Like Symptoms In Mice

Scientists at MIT reversed autism-like symptoms in mice by switching on a gene that can restore typical behavior in the animals later in their lives. “This suggests that even in the adult brain we have profound plasticity to some degree,” Guoping Feng, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences told MIT News. “There is more and more evidence showing that some of the defects are indeed reversible, giving hope that we can develop treatment for autistic patients in the future.”

Sharks May Help Humans Grow New Teeth

Scientists at the University of Sheffield studying how sharks generate their fearsome rows of teeth say their research could also help humans. “The study has identified a network of genes that enables sharks to develop and regenerate their teeth throughout their lifetime,” they reported. “The genes also allow sharks to replace rows of their teeth using a conveyer belt-like system.” The team wrote that humans also possessed the set of cells that facilitate the production of replacement teeth, but we lose the ability only after taking two turns. “The Jaws films taught us that it’s not always safe to go into the water, but this study shows that perhaps we need to in order to develop therapies that might help humans with tooth loss,” they wrote.

Scientists Spin Out Artificial Tissue From Cotton Candy Machine

 Scientists at Vanderbilt University made artificial tissue with a cotton candy machine. They used it to “spin out networks of tiny threads comparable in size, density and complexity to the patterns formed by capillaries – the tiny, thin-walled vessels that deliver oxygen and nutrients to cells and carry away waste.”

“Some people in the field think this approach is a little crazy,” said Leon Bellan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt, who was involved in the project. “But now we’ve shown we can use this simple technique to make microfluidic networks that mimic the three-dimensional capillary system in the human body in a cell-friendly fashion.”

Banking is about to get brighter. In a deal amounting to the largest single installation of LED lights in history, some 5,000 Chase branches will replace indoor light bulbs and fluorescent tubes and outdoor lamps with over 1.4 million energy-efficient LEDs. The project will cover a projected 25 million square feet of retail banking space in total, an area nearly 40 times the size of the Louvre. The work will begin in the coming months and is expected to finish by the end of 2017.

Current, the digital distributed energy startup created by GE that will supply and install the technology, estimates the LEDs will lower the branches’ lighting-related energy use by half. “The world is moving to LEDs,” said Jaime Irick, chief commercial officer at Current. “Chase sees us as trusted advisors helping make that move.”

Chase’s parent company, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Current announced the deal today at the New York Stock Exchange. They rang the closing bell along with other Current customers.

“Doing this LED retrofit made sense because the payback on lighting is pretty swift compared to other interventions you could make,” says Granville Martin, JPMorgan Chase’s managing director of sustainable finance. “We’re really excited about this project with Current. It’s a great step for the bank. It makes enormous environmental and economic sense for us.”

The project represents a major milestone for Current, which GE launched in October 2015. The startup’s ultimate goal is to reduce electricity costs and increase grid stability by deploying smart LEDs, on-site power production, advanced batteries and other technologies. These separate components will talk to one another through Predix, GE’s cloud-based predictive analytics software platform.

“We’re future-proofing Chase’s LED system so that it could eventually use automated controls coupled with sensors to drive new outcomes,” Irick says. “In Current, we’re linking energy-saving and energy-producing technology with the unprecedented power of software and predictive analytics to transform the distributed energy sector. Chase and our other customers recognize this need within their organizations and see us as a one-stop shop that can eventually connect it all together.”

For the bank, the deal comes down to economics. The price of LEDs is rapidly dropping, and they use much less energy than incandescent light bulbs. The fact that they can last up to 50,000 hours also reduces maintenance costs over much shorter-lived lighting. As a result, usage of LEDs is expected to grow from 28 percent today to 95 percent by 2025.

So far, a number of big-name customers are trying out some of Current’s technologies, including Hilton, Walgreens, and Simon Properties. Intelligent city pilot projects in San Diego, Calif., and Jacksonville, Fla., have also deployed thousands of sensor-carrying LED streetlights in their neighborhoods. Those lower-energy lights are already saving hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by using less electricity.

Because the streetlights are also outfitted with transceivers that connect them to one another and to the cloud, they could soon start relaying to drivers information such as real-time parking availability and weather alerts. Onboard vibration sensors, meanwhile, can detect and communicate shootings, earthquakes and other emergencies.

JPMorgan Chase’s Martin says big energy cost reductions help his bank win over customers by showing that it is attuned to their desires. “Customers want to feel like they are coming to a company that is trying to manage its environmental footprint effectively,” he says.

Spending on trade facilitation needs to focus on megacities.

As corporations have built giant global supply chains around the world, governments have done their share, reducing tariffs and other trade barriers impeding market access of goods and services. Although the implementation of the WTO’s historic Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) will significantly help undo bottlenecks at national borders — promising to free up more than $1 trillion in global GDP — a growing challenge in the movement of trade remains: cities.

Trade is boon for economic growth and development, but many obstacles complicate moving trade, adding to costs and dampening its benefits. In Latin America, importers of products spend 190 hours in border procedures and handling paperwork costing $793 per shipment, according to the World Bank’s 2016 Doing Business index, as opposed to 36 hours and $257 in the logistics wunderkind Singapore.

World Economic Forum research shows that if every country improved border administration and transport and communications infrastructure even halfway to Singapore’s level, world trade would increase by 15 percent and world GDP increase by 5 percent.

The TFA does help unlock these gains. However, it won’t help where trade now flows: cities. As the world urbanizes — in 2030, the world’s top 750 cities will make up 61 percent of global economic activity, up from 57 percent today— and as door-to-delivery ecommerce expands, trade facilitation will need to move to cities.

Already, urban congestions costs billions. According to Texas A&M’s renowned urban mobility scorecard, the congestion “invoice” for the cost of time and fuel in American cities was 6.9 billion hours and 3.1 billion gallons of fuel in 2014, for a total cost of $160 billion — four times 1982 figure. Trucks accounted for $28 billion of the cost, not including any value for the goods being transported.

The problem spans the globe. In the TomTom index of urban logistics, Istanbul, Mexico City, Rio, and Moscow are most congested; 10 of 30 worst congested urban areas area in China.

Congestion is increasing last-mile delivery charges — to the point where the fixed cost of shipping a low-value shipment absorbs all foreseeable profits, risking to freeze trade in smaller shipments, whether by microentrepreneurs or ecommerce giants like Nike. As megacities become key nodes in global supply chains, importing raw materials and inputs and exporting final products, congestion also hurts cities’ economic competitiveness and appeal to foreign direct investors.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce, which makes up only a tenth of global ecommerce, is expected to increase more than four-fold to $1 trillion in 2020. China will lead much of the trend, becoming the largest cross-border B2C market by 2020, with $245 billion in ecommerce imports. In India, ecommerce is expected to rise 15-fold by 2030.

One solution is to get next to the end consumer — Amazon, Walmart and other retailers and property developers are building large-scale, highly efficient warehouses near urban centers in China, India, the U.S. and Europe. However, last-mile delivery will still need to get done. The cheapest alternative, emerging market postal systems, are neither reliable nor fast..

The 2015 Global City Teams Challenge Expo shows that cities around the world are getting smarter — using new technologies to improve transport, healthcare, education, disaster management, and so on. But very little attention is paid to the movement of exports and imports through cities. Now is the time: cities are where the rubber is hitting the road for trade facilitation.

Ensuring that trade of the future flows not only across borders, but also through cities, requires a set of solutions:

1. The international trade community has a great opportunity to partner with urban economists to decongest cities for world commerce. Multilateral development banks’ lending strategies to facilitate trade have long focused on modernizing customs and upgrading road, air, port and rail infrastructures. The next frontier of these investments is cities.

2. Trade facilitation experts and city planners should encourage 3D printing as the premier decongester and decarbonizer. 3D printing will enable congested cities overcome the physical constraints to the movement of goods. Everything from industrial parts to toys, clothes and food can now arrive to the buyer, as designs in the cloud are printed right on site, with no physical movement taking place.

3. Smart city analytics should be applied to address the urban logistics challenge. Innovative companies can use Big Data analytics to rationalize deliveries; intelligent traffic systems can direct flows; new types of vehicles (nimble and green) and shared delivery services (Uber delivery) can be used for urban freight. To connect all key players, cities can draw on the example of the Port of Hamburg, where Internet of Things applications enable the coordination of every aspect — ships, port authority, trucks, drawbridges, etc. —to efficiently move 9 billion containers annually.

As the world digitizes and urbanizes, facilitating trade requires entirely new approaches. For the international trade community to fuel corporate supply chains and unlock opportunities for small businesses to engage in ecommerce, trade facilitation in cities must get to the top of the list.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

Kati Suominen is the Founder and CEO of Nextrade Group, LLC and TradeUp Capital Fund. She is also Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Adjunct Professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is authoring her 10th book, Globalization 4.0: How Disruptive Technologies Reshape Business and Policy in the Hyperconnected World.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Fast Company included GE in its annual list of the most innovative companies. GE is the top-ranked industrial company on the list, which includes many digital darlings like BuzzFeed (ranked at the very top), Uber and Alphabet.

The magazine recognized Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt for transforming GE into a digital-industrial company connecting machines and businesses to the cloud with Predix, its operating system for the Industrial Internet. Predix has quickly grown into a $5 billion business with $6 billion in additional orders expected in 2016, the editors noted. “The program has about 4,000 developers today, and GE is hoping for 20,000 in 2016,” the editors wrote. “And products like Brilliant Factory and Digital Power Plant are designed to drive more efficiencies in factories and power plants by using big data to help save money.”

Take a look at some of the latest breakthroughs from GE.

Digital Twin

Last year GE unveiled the digital twin, a cloud-based simulation of physical assets that allows engineers to optimize machines based on data analytics and predict problems before they happen. There can be digital twins not only of power plants and wind turbines but also of the human body.

Additive Manufacturing

GE is innovating new manufacturing methods like 3D printing that add material to parts rather than cut it away. This allows engineers to create designs they couldn’t manufacture before. GE is using additive manufacturing for everything from ultrasound probes to gas turbines and jet engines including the LEAP, whose order total now stands at $145 billion. GE calls this cross-pollination of technologies across different industries the GE Store. Most recently, GE engineers shrunk a giant steam turbine (see above) and used a 3D-printed mini version of the machine to efficiently desalinate water.

Ceramic Matrix Composites

Scientists at GE Global Research spent the last two decades developing a new kind of ultra-light and super-tough material called ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). It allows jet engines and gas turbines to operate at higher temperatures, making them more efficient. The CMCs were originally developed for the power industry, but like 3D printing, they have applications in other businesses.

Cancer Research

Scientist Fiona Ginty is leading a team that found a new way to help medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies better understand tumors so they can develop new drugs and therapies. “I liken the process to Google Maps,” Ginty says. “At the 30,000-foot view, you can tell there is a town. But as you zoom in, you can start to see streets, rivers, stores and other finer details. Our technology gives similar information about tumors, such as how the tumor is organized, where the blood supply is and what the pockets of cells are doing.”

Brain Research

Engineer Jeff Ashe (see top image) is developing tiny brain implants that could one day improve the lives of people suffering from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or Crohn’s disease. “We’re building tiny machines using semiconductor processing,” Ashe says. “The main one is a MEMS switch. Even though it is so small, it has movable parts inside of it. We can build things that are very small and very strong so they can withstand stress inside the body.”

For the oil & gas industry, collaboration means competitiveness in tomorrow’s low-carbon reality.

The future of energy is heavily dependent on the collective ability — and determination — of the oil and gas industry itself to evolve and stay competitive in tomorrow’s low-carbon reality.

And to stay competitive — over the longer term — we need to drive simplification, standardization and productivity, but also radical innovation. The challenge is too large for any one company to tackle alone.

Big, new ideas do not come easy. Industry players will need to draw on each other to drive cost reduction and invent new commercial technologies to deliver efficiency, increase margins and reduce the environmental footprint of energy production.

For decades, Statoil has demonstrated the value of close collaboration with suppliers, institutions and academia. It is in our DNA to learn, share and collaborate.

Technology — A Key to Remaining Competitive in a Low-Margin, Low-Carbon Reality

Together with partners in the industry, we are innovating the way we work and applying existing technologies in new ways. Optimization, however, is not sufficient to increase our competitiveness. More targeted and radical technology development will be essential to secure opportunities in both the short and long term.

It was in this spirit that we established the Powering Collaboration program with GE, a concrete industrial response to accelerate the development and implementation of more economically and environmentally sustainable solutions.

Powering Collaboration brings together our brightest minds to address real industry challenges with concrete commercial solutions. It draws on Statoil’s and GE’s collective competence, blending GE’s broad industrial and digital capabilities — ranging from oil & gas to power & water to renewables — with Statoil’s deep operational insight and global experience as an oil and gas producer. This partnership was recently awarded the Petroleum Economist’s Cleaner Energy Initiative award.

GE and Statoil — Triggering Broader Collaboration

Our ambition with Powering Collaboration is that, together with GE, we can also trigger broader collaboration and innovation — to bring solutions from other industries to our operations.

Having just announced the water challenge winners at the GE Oil & Gas Annual Meeting in Florence, I am reflecting on the first year of this collaboration. We are facing some of the industry’s biggest challenges head on. We are working together on more than 20 concrete projects deeply rooted in today’s changing realities and continue hunting for the low-cost and low-carbon solutions.

Business as usual is not an option — we need to create a company and an industry that is competitive, at all times. Shaping the future of energy is up to us, and the best way to predict the future is to shape it ourselves.

(Top image: A Statoil hydraulic fracturing pad near Williston, ND. Courtesy of Tom Paine AP/Statoil)

Elisabeth B. Kvalheim is Chief Technology Officer at Statoil.

All views expressed are those of the author.

The electrons that brew your first cup of coffee in the morning have many different parents. Some were born on a wind farm, while others came from a gas-fired power plant or a water turbine buried deep inside a massive dam. Some even took a brief vacation in a battery.

As different as their sources are, they are starting to get connected to a giant virtual power reservoir that will always keep your home supplied with the right amount of the cheapest electricity generated in the most efficient manner.

The idea of such “intelligent” energy is sorely needed. Today, there are wind farms that must shut down their turbines when it is windy because the grid is too full to take their power, as well as power plants that sit idle and only crank up their turbines to meet peak demand during summer heat waves. There are more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable ways to run the energy system.

But things are changing. GE has been making and shipping electrons for more than a century, ever since GE founder Thomas Edison opened the first central power plant in Manhattan. Today, GE technology captures energy from wind, oil, gas and other resources, converts it into electricity in turbines and generators and sends it to customers over electrical grid on every populated continent. The company also helps energy businesses get fuel like natural gas efficiently out of the ground and deliver it to power plants.

But GE now also makes software and analytics tools. Predix, the cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet, is the connective tissue designed to keep the intelligent power reservoir always connected to the right energy sources and filled with the right amount of electricity. Predix is beginning to allow utilities to reduce power output from natural gas when the wind starts blowing and store solar energy in batteries and release it when it’s needed the most. GE software also helps energy companies and utilities maximize their efficiency in everything from wind farms and gas turbines to subsea blowout preventers.

There’s more. Once the power gets to customers, efficient LED lights and other connected systems made by Current, a GE startup developing a holistic energy-as-a-service product, can help them optimize their power consumption. They are already working in Jacksonville, Fla., and San Diego, and customers like Chase bank will soon start using them all over the United States. In Germany, a “hybrid” GE factory is using a combination of software, gas engines, solar panels and batteries to produce and manage its own electricity and sell some of it back into the grid. EV and homeowners with the right technology might be soon able do the same thing.

The energy ecosystem is getting smarter. This should give you a jolt if your coffee won’t. Take a look at our infographic.