When GE Aviation bought the storied but obscure Czech turboprop builder Walter Aircraft Engines in 2008, the American company hadn’t developed a new propeller engine in decades. Companies like Pratt & Whitney Canada dominated the market, while GE focused chiefly on making engines for passenger and military jets.

But engineers in both Prague and the U.S. spent the last seven years working on a new advanced turboprop engine (ATP) that could unlock the lucrative space. The bet paid off last fall when Textron Aviation, the world’s largest maker of business propeller planes, announced it would use the new engine for a brand-new plane it has been developing.

GE turboprop engines power planes all over the world, including the Himalayas (top) and in African near Mt. Kilimanjaro (above). Images credit: GE Aviation

The 1,300 shaft-horsepower turboprop, which burns 20 percent less fuel and produces 10 percent more power compared to engines in its class, may be new but it has deep roots. “Over time, we leveraged our technical strength to produce [the] all-new engine design,” Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO, wrote in his annual letter to shareowners, published in February. “This will lead to $40 billion in revenue over 25 years, a long-lasting competitive win.”

Immelt said the fulcrum of that technical strength was the GE Store, which “captures our ability to share knowledge, technology and capabilities across the GE businesses,” Immelt wrote. “The Store allows GE to innovate at scale, investing more than our peers and spreading the innovation across more businesses.”

China’s Caiga AG300 engine is using a GE turboprop. Image credit: GE Aviation

To develop the new engine, engineers built on Walter and GE turboprop engines, which have flown for nearly 20 million hours and served on 30 different types of aircraft. But they added in the mix jet engine technologies that have logged more than 1 billion flight-hours, but have never been used inside a turboprop of this size.

For example, the engine’s designers drew on variable stator vanes, a technology that was originally developed by GE engineer and aviation legend Gerhard Neumann for supersonic jet engines. The design also makes gas turbines used for power generation more efficient. The new engine will also include 3D-printed parts (which debuted inside the LEAP jet engine), cooled turbine blades and integrated propulsion control that manages both the engine and propeller as a single system to lessen pilot workload.

American-made Thrush crop dusters use GE turboprops. The image above shows a spraying map of a large field in the Philippines. Image credit: GE Aviation

Brad Mottier, who spearheaded the Walter acquisition and led the new turboprop development, says that packaged together, the new technologies will improve aircraft performance and can extend time between engine overhauls by more than 30 percent.

GE Aviation said in January it would use a portion of its $400 million investment in Europe to build a new turboprop development, test and engine-production headquarters in the Czech Republic. The center, which will employ more than 500 workers and engineers, will make the new engine for Textron and new customers beginning in 2020.

This week GE Reports visited GE Aviation’s existing Prague plant (you can see it on our Periscope channel), which makes and services the H-series turboprop engines powering everything from American crop dusters to passenger aircraft flying to remote Himalayan airports. Take a look.

H-series engines also power planes over frozen Russian plains. Image credit: GE Aviation

A drawing of GE’s new advanced turboprop engine. Image credit: GE Aviation

A GE H80 engine inside a test cell in Prague. Image credit: GE Aviation

A GE M81 turboprop engine: Image credit: GE Aviation

The H-series engines use blisks made from a single piece for the engine’s two axial compressor stages reduces component weight and part complexity while enhancing compression performance. Image credit: GE Aviation

The H-series’ 3D aero blade design increases the efficiency of the engine compressor at each stage, boosts the engines’ overall pressure ratio and reduces the power required to drive the compressor. Image credit: GE Aviation

The engines must operate like a clockwork and require a finishing touch by highly-trained humans to achieve necessary precision. Here a worker is finishing a turbine blade. Image credit: GE Aviation

This tool allows workers to precisely position diffuser blades before assembly (below). Image credit: GE Aviation

A worker is finishing an impeller for GE’s H80 engine. Image credit: GE Aviation

The production floor at GE Aviation’s plant in Prague. Image credit: GE Aviation

A cut-out drawing of the H80 engine. Image credit: GE Aviation

An H-series engine on wing of an L410 passenger aircraft, the same kind that can service the world’s most remote airports like the one in Lukla, Nepal. Image credit: GE Aviation

In this week’s haul of news about scientific discoveries, we found stories about a pregnant dinosaur, the oldest decoded “ancient human” DNA and how selfless driving could lead to fewer traffic jams. Take a look.

Scientists Find a “Pregnant” T-Rex

Top and above: T-Rex. Images credit: Getty Images

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found a Tyrannosaurus Rex in Montana with a medullary bone, which indicates that the predator was about to lay an egg. The remains, which are 68 million years old, could still hold DNA and help scientists better understand the evolution of birds and reptiles and also gender differences between dinosaurs. Could it also lead to a real-life Jurassic Park? “We have some evidence that fragments of DNA might be preserved in dinosaur fossils, but this remains to be further tested,” the university’s Dr. Lindsay Zanno told Discovery News. The paper was published in the journal Nature.

Good Luck to Future Fossil Hunters

Fossil fish. Image credit: Getty Images

Fossils are helping us piece together Earth’s past, but our descendants may come up empty-handed. According to a report in the journal Science, “most species that will disappear today will leave no fossil record.” Scientists estimate that some 500 vertebrate species have gone extinct over the last century. The research could help them gauge “how severe the current extinction crisis is.” “What they’ve done is to actually quantify it,” Seth Finnegan, a paleobiologist at UC Berkeley, told the journal. “And to show that the effect is potentially very big.”

Scientists Decode Oldest “Ancient Human” DNA

Human predecessors split from Neanderthals more than 430,000 years ago. Image credit: Getty Images

Biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany have sequenced the oldest “ancient human” genome. The DNA comes from the 430,000-year-old bones of “early Neanderthals” found in a Spanish cave. The discovery “has pushed back estimates of the time at which the ancient predecessors of humans must have split from those of Neanderthals,” according to the journal Nature. “It’s wonderful news to have mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from something that is 430,000 years old,” Maria Martinón-Torres, a paleoanthropologist at University College London, told the journal. “It’s like science fiction. It’s an amazing opportunity.”

Scientists Develop Very-Early-Stage Human Stem Cells for the First Time

Naive pluripotent stem cell stem cells can develop into all human tissue other than the placenta. Illustration credit: Getty Images

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed for the first time so-called naive pluripotent stem cells from a human embryo. These “flexible” cells can develop into all human tissue other than the placenta. “Until now it hasn’t been possible to isolate these naive stem cells, even though we’ve had the technology to do it in mice for 30 years — leading some people to doubt it would be possible,” the study’s first author, Ge Guo, said in a news release. “But we’ve managed to extract the cells and grow them individually in culture. Naive stem cells have many potential applications, from regenerative medicine to modeling human disorders.”

“Selfless Driving” Could Reduce Rush Hour Jams

Take a detour from your routine to arrive on time. Image credit: Getty Images

Analysis of massive amounts of smartphone data collected during peak-hour travel suggests that “selfless driving” could lead to fewer traffic jams. The results reveal “how strategic route changes by a relatively small number of motorists could reduce the time lost to congestion by as much as 30 percent,” The Conversation reported.

New wind farms added more than a quarter of total new power generation capacity in the United States between 2010 and 2014, reaching 75,000 megawatts at the end of last year. No other country with the exception of China has more. But the race is on.

Despite America’s abundance of coastline, its wind farms spin exclusively on shore. But that’s about the change. America’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, GE, just finished the installation of the platforms that will support the first offshore wind farm in the United States. The wind farm, built by Deepwater Wind and located three miles off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, is scheduled to come online at the end of 2016 and generate 125,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. That’s enough to meet 90 percent of Block Island’s power needs.

On Friday, GE will celebrate the milestone at a plant in the Port of Providence, where it will assemble the towers for the wind turbines. Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, Deepwater CEO Jeffrey Grybowski and Anders Soe-Jensen, CEO of GE Renewable Energy’s Offshore Wind Activity will be present.

Top: An offshore wind farm with a Haliade wind turbine in the North Sea. Above: Parts of a Haliade rotor are heading out to sea in Europe. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy

But a lot of the action is already taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. The wind farm will use five huge Haliade wind turbines, which GE acquired with Alstom last fall and manufactures inside a new plant at the mouth of the Loire River in Saint-Nazaire, France. Each Haliade can generate 6 megawatts, enough to power 5,000 American homes and save 21,000 tons of CO2 during the turbine’s life cycle. The turbine has a 150-meter diameter rotor that sweeps over an area large enough to fit nearly two Airbus A380 double-decker passenger jets.

The Saint-Nazaire factory opened in 2014 and currently employs 170 people. Besides the Haliades, they also make turbine nacelles – the casings that shelter the power generation equipment on top of the tower – and generators.

The first Haliade produced by GE has just left the factory for Denmark, where it will be installed on the Osterild site operated by the utility EDF EN. The utility will use 238 GE offshore wind turbines for its three French wind fields in Saint-Nazaire, Courseulles-sur-Mer and Fécamp in total.

Workers in Saint-Nazaire will also make the five Haliades for the Block Island wind farm in the U.S., as well as 66 Haliades for the Merkur, a large offshore wind project in Germany.

The first GE Haliade nacelle left St. Nazaire this week. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy

But there is more. GE is also offering wind farm operators access to the “GE Store,” which allows the company to quickly share knowledge, technology and innovation across its businesses. Deepwater Wind, for example, is pursuing battery storage from Current, a startup “powered by GE,” for its proposed 90MW, 15-turbine Deepwater ONE – South Fork project for Long Island, New York. The battery solution will stabilize the grid and maximize utilization of the energy provided by the offshore wind turbines.

The Haliade generator at GE’s factory in St. Nazaire, France. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy

Batteries solve one of the key challenges currently facing renewable energy producers. It allows them to store excess power generated when it’s really windy and release it during peak demand. “This solution will help the South Fork meet its energy needs in an affordable and sustainable way,” says Pratima Rangarajan, general manager of storage for Current.

Power transmission from the sea onshore presents another hurdle. That’s where GE’s Energy Connections business comes in. Connecting offshore wind farms to the grid requires the installation of an offshore electrical substation. The unit’s high voltage direct current (HVDC) lines can efficiently transmit power over long distances of 50km or more. 

The 900 MW DolWin3 HVDC project in the German North Sea is a great example of this. As part of this project, GE recently installed a pair of advanced transformers manufactured at its Mönchengladbach, Germany, for use in the onshore substation. Each transformer, equipped with a tap changer, allows the operators to level out voltage fluctuations and keep power flowing even if one transformer goes off-line.

Take a look at the list of offshore technologies in our infographic:

Three years into the U.S. Power Africa initiative, a roadmap is in place to connect 60 million to electricity by 2030 — and empower people across the continent.

Africa boasts some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, but its growth potential is limited by poor energy infrastructure, with only a third of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa having access to power.

To help address this problem, the U.S. launched the Power Africa initiative a few years ago to bring power to 60 million businesses and homes by 2030. Working with the World Bank, African Development Bank and other countries inside and outside of Africa to attract private-sector investment, the program recently released a roadmap on how it will achieve its goals.

“We want to make sure that we are all working together to try to figure out what are the sticking points and how can we overcome them,” says Andrew M. Herscowitz, the coordinator for President Obama’s Power Africa and Trade Africa initiatives.

In an interview, he discusses lessons learned since the 2013 launch, the importance of a partnership approach, and his optimistic outlook on power Africa’s future:

With more than 600 million living without power in Africa, how important is it to improve access to electricity for the continent to realize its potential?

There are a lot of exciting things happening in Africa. You look at this massive energy deficit, but I also see it as a massive opportunity for building out markets in ways that we can’t anywhere else in the world.

When Power Africa first launched, we were focusing heavily on grid-level projects. But you look at the roadmap we just launched, only a portion of the connections are on grid, with plans to connect 25 million 30 million of homes and businesses through our Beyond the Grid initiative.

Companies are creating systems that are beyond just two light bulbs and cellphone charger — they’re creating these super-efficient appliances. They’ve become appliance-leasing companies, allowing people who are living off the grid to approximate what life is like living on the grid by using DC-powered fans, televisions, clothing irons, and electric razors. As the quality of those products improve and they become more and more efficient, it’s going to create opportunities for people who otherwise couldn’t be connected to the grid. At same time, the demand for these super-efficient appliances is creating a market for appliances that have a very low carbon impact.

What do you see as the potential for Africa to “leapfrog” to a more sustainable power sector?

That’s what happening in this off-grid space. The companies that are leading the rooftop solar market — like Mobisol and M-Kopa— have business models that are driving the market and creating micro-economies, as well. They have hundreds of people working for them, and they’re also reaching out to some of the most impoverished people who are now making mobile payments — essentially banking the previously unbanked. And the value of the data that they have of people’s payments will likely lead to a whole different market for that data for advertising or otherwise.

So it’s a whole micro-economy that is going to boom. The role of Power Africa — along with our partners like the UK’s Energy Africa and the African Development Bank’s New Deal on Energy for Africa— is determine how to harness what those companies are doing and get them into markets all over the continent. So that you’re cutting out the utility — and you’re cutting out us and the governments — and people are dealing directly with companies and are not waiting a month, a year or 10 years to be connected to the grid.

With Power Africa is now in its third year, how would you rate what has been accomplished so far, and what is your message be to communities in Africa who are eager to start seeing the results?  

We’re doing well. We took a very analytical approach to our Roadmap. We could have gone out and said, we have 45,000 MW of projects in the pipeline, so we’re going to blow past our goal. But we didn’t do that.

We looked realistically at what percentage of deals get past the finish line and we adjusted down significantly. Then we looked at the gaps that we need to fill and we asked, “What have we learned so far, where should we be focusing our efforts?” So we have a very realistic path of what we need to do, based on what we’ve learned over the past three years.

Obviously for the big, grid-level projects, flipping the switch doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why we’ve have grid rollout as a priority — an opportunity to get people connected who live close to the grid. We want to figure out how to get a significant number of people across the continent actually connected to the grid. Where that can’t work, we have Beyond the Grid.

The actual impact we have had on some specific projects has been significant, as well. Ethiopia, for example, just issued a request for qualification for its first-ever solar tender. All of the capacity-building went that went into negotiating the Corbetti geothermal deal— which is still not across the finish line yet — gave the government a comfort level to proceed with the solar tender. We now have all of these lessons learned in Ethiopia and elsewhere that are incredibly useful.

Our Roadmap has us achieving our goals though 2030. If we can achieve those goals sooner, that would be fantastic. But there’s no one silver bullet that’s going to solve the problem immediately. It requires partnerships among all these different groups, and we’ve built trust amongst all of the 120 private- and public-sector partners.

(Top image: Power Africa officials from various US Government agencies, other donors, financiers and Reykjavik Geothermal staff talk with the villagers inside the Corbetti Caldera where villagers collect water from steam emanating from the rocks. Courtesy of Nena Terrell, USAID Ethiopia.)

Andrew M. Herscowitz is the coordinator for President Barack Obama’s Power Africa and Trade Africa initiative.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Big Data shows how “selfless” driving could ease traffic congestion.

It’s easy to see why motor cars are such a popular form of transport: they’re private, comfortable and convenient. But the popularity of cars can also be one of their biggest drawbacks. When there are too many of them and not enough road space, streets become congested and as a result, journey times become unpredictable, air pollution increases and we lose out on some of the economic benefits of city living.

Now, a new study suggests that the personal benefits we get from having a car could be improved by collective thinking. Researchers at MIT and Birmingham University used big data from five cities – Rio de Janeiro, Boston, San Francisco, Lisbon and Porto – to show how strategic route changes by a relatively small number of motorists could reduce the time lost to congestion by as much as 30%.
Crunching the numbers
The authors crunched massive amounts of mobile phone data to identify travel patterns during peak morning commuting times in each of these cities. They confirmed that the time lost due to congestion in each city reflects a high demand for road travel, relative to the supply of road infrastructure. They found that the density and distribution of the population played a role in congestion levels, too. No surprises here.

But by modeling this data, the authors were also able to measure the potential benefits of optimizing the system as a whole. This is where it gets interesting. The researchers calculated the detrimental effects of “selfish routing” – where individuals set out to minimize their own travel time – by comparing this approach with the travel times resulting from a “socially optimal” solution.

They modeled a scenario where drivers were equipped with an app which gave them the option to take a longer route for the good of all. The authors found that overall, it only took a relatively small number of motorists to choose longer travel times, to create significant benefits for others. By giving drivers the option to take a socially optimal approach, rather than a “selfish” one, the total time lost to congestion could be reduced by between 15% and 30%.

One of the main problems with congestion is that it makes it difficult to accurately anticipate journey times. By giving drivers the option to pick their route with a predicted journey time, drivers who need to be at their destination at a particular time will know when to set out while drivers who are more flexible can avoid the worst congestion. It’s a “win-win” situation.

A social solution?
Even so, the actual time savings for individual motorists were found to be marginal – a few minutes at most. The authors of the study said that “in the best case scenario, time savings would be imperceptible for the majority of the drivers”. Rather, the optimized routing would help cities to function better as a whole.

This offers a crucial insight for urban leaders looking to grow their city’s wealth and population. The research demonstrates that there’s limited scope for road-based solutions to the issues arising from urban congestion. Routine commutes to and from work make it difficult for drivers to be flexible, even if there were some incentive to take a longer, more socially beneficial route. The authors’ proposal may work better on the road networks between cities, where trips are longer and fewer drivers are inflexible when it comes to timing.

Ultimately, city authorities should recognise that offering alternative modes of transport will do a lot more to reduce congestion than giving motorists the option to be socially responsible drivers. For instance, rail in its various forms provides speedy and reliable travel for daily commuters, as well as tackling all the economic and environmental issues caused by congestion.

(Top image: Courtesy of Shutterstock)

This article first appeared on The Conversation. Read the original article.

David Metz is an Honorary Professor of Transport Studies, UCL. He was formerly Chief Scientist at the U.K. Department for Transport.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Sara AbdulAziz al-Omran is climbing the corporate ladder in a country where many women used to stay home. She leaves her parents’ home early every morning to head to her job at the All-Women Business Process Services and IT Centre. In just two years, al-Omran has gone from trainee to team leader, with three other women working directly under her. “It’s good to feel independent and achieve something in your career,” al-Omran says.

The young Riyadh native’s team processes corporate invoices and payments at Saudi Arabia’s first business-process outsourcing center, a joint venture of Tata Consultancy Services, GE and Saudi Aramco. With several government agencies among its clients, the two-year-old center is part of the government’s program to expand the Saudi economy from energy into knowledge work. It’s also unique among GE’s five global service centers: Only women work there. It now has nearly 1,000 employees and within two years, the center will have 3,000 women workers.

The center sits at the intersection of demographics and business in Saudi Arabia’s capital. Previously, 80 percent of the country’s workforce was in the public sector; now the government is trying to stimulate private enterprise, and international companies have set up shop.

The two-year-old All-Women Business Process Services and IT Centre is part of the Saudi government’s program to expand the Saudi economy from energy into knowledge work. Image credit: All-Women Business Process Services and IT Centre

The women-only facility is part of the National Transformation Initiative of King Salman and his son the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and taps an unused resource, says Dr. Amal Fatani, the Saudi-born pharmacology and toxicology professor who heads the center. “We are utilizing one of the most important treasures we have in this country: our daughters,” says Fatani, a mother of four herself, who worked for decades setting up and running women’s departments at Saudi Arabia’s first university, King Saud University, as well as at the Ministry of Higher Education.

Although the government has embarked on a campaign to integrate women more fully into private enterprises, the workforce participation rate of the kingdom’s women is still comparatively low. Just 13 percent of Saudi workers are female, although women account for 51 percent of university graduates, according to reported Saudi government statistics. (The number is higher in education and healthcare, where women account for around 40 percent of workers.)

Fatani says that Saudi women prefer to work with other women. She say that “it has been a great challenge convincing them to work in the private sector, as it’s mainly a mixed environment.” At the TCS center, everyone — from executives to janitors — is female.

“We are utilizing one of the most important treasures we have in this country: our daughters,” says Dr. Amal Fatani. Image credit: All-Women Business Process Services and IT Centre

In addition to recruiting candidates, the center also has to convince clients that Saudi women can do the work. That requires changing some incorrect stereotypes, says Deepa Vincent, the Tata manager sent to Saudi Arabia to head human resources for the center. Neither the requirement to wear the abaya nor the restrictions put on women’s participation in society means that women are subservient or less talented in business, she says: “A Saudi woman knows exactly what she wants.”

The initial efforts seem to be working. Clients include businesses in Turkey and North Africa, as well as in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, the U.S. and India. They include the Saudi government, as well as sponsors Saudi Aramco and GE, which has promised to invest $1 billion in the country.

For college students, the center is a sought-after place to work amid a dearth of options. Al-Omran is driven, studious and bilingual in Arabic and English, but Saudi Arabia is a tough place for a woman to be an accountant.

Clients include businesses in Turkey and North Africa, as well as in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, the U.S. and India. Image credit: All-Women Business Process Services and IT Centre

So when al-Omran, about to get her bachelor’s degree in accounting with a diploma in financial modeling from Riyadh’s King Saud University, heard about a new local company that was hiring female graduates, she applied. After she received her offer, her father, who works in the aircraft industry, visited the center and interviewed her new bosses to make sure it was an acceptable situation. With his support, al-Omran started as a trainee in January 2014.

In the future, TCS plans to open additional outsourcing centers with women workers in cities outside of Riyadh. Says Vincent, “If this isn’t proof of what women can do, I don’t know what is.”

The cover story in the new issue of Bloomberg Businessweek takes stock of GE’s transformation into a digital-industrial company and explains how “GE became a 124-year-old startup.” The magazine writes that a decade after he took over, the long bet GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt took “on the Internet of Really Big Things seems to be paying off.”

The story tracks GE’s digital transformation from its inception after the financial crisis in 2008. It started with a broad idea. “I said, ‘Look, we need to start building analytic capability, big data capability, and let’s do it in California,’” Immelt told the magazine. “That was as sophisticated as my original thinking was.”

In 2011, Immelt hired Bill Ruh from Cisco to become his digital lieutenant. According to the magazine, Ruh was “impressed by Immelt’s vision and his willingness to admit that he didn’t fully know what he was doing.”

“Basically, Jeff said, ‘Look, we’re on Step 1 of a 50-step process, and I just need you to help me figure out what to do because I can only see out one or two steps,’” Ruh, who now runs GE Digital, told Bloomberg Businessweek.

Immelt has invested $1 billion in software and Ruh and his brand-new team moved quickly to develop Predix, GE’s cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet. In 2015, GE earned $5 billion in software revenue.

“The company developed applications for Predix enabling it to ingest and analyze vast amounts of data from sensor-equipped machines much like Amazon.com, Facebook, and Google do with information generated by their human customers,” Bloomberg Businessweek wrote. “Immelt wanted to speed Predix’s development and use it on GE’s own equipment. That meant the entire company had to embrace the new operating system, even the power division, which usually took years to design turbines.”

The magazine noted that customers like Pitney Bowes and Toshiba have also already started using Predix, an important step for GE to become one of the top 10 software companies. “The Industrial Internet is going to be the dark matter of the Internet,” Harel Kodesh, chief technology officer for GE Digital, told Bloomberg Businessweek. “It’s something you don’t see, but it is actually the bulk of what’s happening on the Internet.”

The magazine also pointed out the cultural change that has been taking place inside GE. One key new idea, which GE calls FastWorks, came from the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup.” “I’m tired of hearing five-year plans,” Ries remembers Immelt telling him, according to the magazine. You can read the story here and watch a video with the author.

In this era of hyperconnectivity, transformation is happening faster and impacting every industry. To thrive in this environment, you need to understand these five things.

Someday, we will look back and realize that we live in one of the most fascinating periods in history, with technology having entered a new era of what I call “hyperconnectivity” — where the rate of change is accelerating in nearly every industry.

What are the trends that are driving this faster future, and how are smart businesses adapting to not only survive — but thrive — in a faster world? Here are 5 things to know about the accelerating future and to stay ahead.

1. Speed — Today’s is the slowest day of technology change for the rest of your life

Bill Gates once observed that most people tend to overestimate the rate of change in a two-year basis, but underestimate the rate in a 10-year basis.

Take 3D printing. Just a few years ago, I would speak about 3D printing as if it was science fiction — far away and entirely theoretical. Now it’s becoming a part of day-to-day operations for many businesses.

Consider, for example, what is happening with dental medical implants, where the idea of printing dental bridges or other implants is becoming ever more real. Now, people are talking about 3D printing surgical knee replacements.

2. Hyperconnectivity — and endless possibilities

Every industry is set to be transformed as an era of hyperconnectivity — powered by the Internet of Things (IoT) — becomes the new norm. The result: a reinvention of manufacturing, logistics, retail, healthcare and other industries because of consumers that are empowered, connected and enabled with a new form of lifestyle management that we’ve never witnessed before. The capability of achieving deep analytical insights into emerging trends in industries also presents an opportunity for massive business model disruption.

By the year 2020, there will be more than 50 billion devices connected to the Internet — roughly six devices per person. The IoT is happening everywhere and unfolding at a blistering pace. We’re in the era of connected thermostats that link to an intelligent energy grid; a connected trucking fleet that is self-diagnostic, predictive and built for zero down-time; and scales that record our body mass index, transmit it to a password-protected website and create custom charts on our health.

Imagine a world in which that 3D-printed knee replacement reports that it is malfunctioning by sending a message to your iPhone. Seem far fetched? Hyperconnectivity is a staggering trend, which means the possibilities are endless for growth and innovation.

3. Momentum and the potential for big wins

Add these trends of acceleration and hyperconnectivity together, and you’ve got the opportunity for major industry transformation.

Consider the lighting industry, which is in the era of revolutionary new opportunities for significant efficiency and cost savings through deep analytical insight into usage patterns. In addition, since we can now build energy systems in which each individual light bulb is accessible via the Internet, very sophisticated energy management solutions are emerging.

LED usage is accelerating, with the global market expected to grow from $7 billion in 2010 to $40 billion in 2016, according to industry reports. At the same time, the ability to control those intelligent light bulbs is changing is enabling a reimagination of lighting. People can easily set up a smart home where they control their lighting and other energy systems via an iPad. They can become energy-conscious consumers, responsible for their own personal energy infrastructure management. If we empower millions of people, some fascinating opportunities for energy usage reduction result.

There is so much momentum behind these changes because the potential for big wins are huge.

4. The connected generation

Meanwhile, the next generation of youth are starting to embrace every opportunity for hyperconnectivity and acceleration — whether in their homes or businesses.

Today’s younger generation — those under age 25 — have never known a world without a mobile device that puts incredible amounts of information at their fingertips. They are globally wired, entrepreneurial, collaborative — and they thrive on change. As a result, this generation is starting to drive rapid business model change and industry transformation as they move into executive positions.

About two-thirds of today’s children today will work in a career that has doesn’t yet exist, according to author Cathy Davidson, Think about titles like “water usage audit analysts,” “energy usage audit architects” and “location intelligence professionals.”

We are at the forefront of a remarkable time in history, as the next generation uses connectivity to advance some of the biggest energy successes.

5. The future belongs to those who are fast

So how should you deal with fast-paced technological change? As new technology and connected infrastructure emerge, keep in mind a phrase I often use when I’m on stage: “Think Big, Start Small and Scale Fast.” Take on a small-scale, experimental project in you municipality, industrial location or retail store. Test out a new technology with a target group of customers.

By starting small and learning to scale fast, you can adopt an innovation mantra and build a business plan that leads to success.

Jim Carroll is one of the world’s leading international futurists, trends and innovation experts, with a client list that ranges from Dupont to Johnson & Johnson; the Swiss Innovation Forum to the National Australia Bank; the Walt Disney Organization to NASA. His focus is on helping to transform growth- oriented organizations into high-velocity innovation heroes.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Offshore wind farms can tap into a bounty of wind that allows them to work twice as productively. But that efficiency comes at a cost. Like any sea-based technology, wind farms are difficult to build and expensive to maintain, with workers fighting against the same weather that makes the farms work so well. As a result, terrestrial turbines have been steadily gaining ground compared to turbines built at sea. But that may soon change.

Engineers at GE’s Power Conversion business in Nancy, France, designed an innovative 6-megawatt direct-drive generator — one of the largest ever built — equipped with a permanent magnet rotor. The design allows them to eliminate the gearbox and reduce the number of moving parts that could potentially break down, and leads to easier maintenance. The team also split the electrical drive train into three independent electrical channels. Even if two go offline, the turbine can still operate on one channel and produce electricity.

Low maintenance and redundancy are hugely important, especially for offshore installations where treacherous waters and high winds can delay a repair trip for days or weeks.

Top: A Haliade nacelle is leaving the St. Nazaire factory. The generator is located behid the hub, the pointy part up front. Above: GE builds the permanent magnet generators in the St. Nazaire plant.  Images credit: GE Renewable Energy

Support vessels cost upwards of $10,000 a day, sourcing spare parts can take time and trained engineers have to be found in a hurry, says Frederic Maenhaut, a renewables executive at GE Power Conversion. “Our direct-drive technology mitigates the main risk to the reliability of a wind turbine — the gearbox,” Maenhaut says. “When it comes to maintenance costs, that makes a big difference. We developed it to be ideal for an offshore setting.”

The generator weighs 150 tons, measures 7.6 meters in diameter and sits hundreds of feet above the waves. It draws rotational energy from a giant GE wind turbine called the Haliade and converts it into electricity. The turbine must be large to move the big magnet. In fact, its 150-meter-diameter rotor covers an area that would fit two double-decker Airbus A380 planes.

The combo’s very first commercial application will be at America’s first offshore wind farm that’s currently being built near Block Island, Rhode Island. Together they will produce enough electricity to power 5,000 American homes.

Each generator weighs 150 tons and measures 7.6 meters in diameter. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy

GE makes the generators in St. Nazaire in France, at the same factory that also produces the Haliades. (GE Reports is visiting the place on Tuesday so make sure to tune in for our Periscopes.) The first GE nacelle with the permanent magnet generator left the plant last week. The plant can make 100 of them per year.

The manufacturing process is in several ways as innovative as the generators themselves. The machines float down the manufacturing line on an air-cushion system that reduces the need for cranes inside the factory. The site also has its own test bench. Workers test every generator before it leaves the factory, rather than shipping it elsewhere for testing.

Maenhaut says the offshore wind market is expected to grow at a rate of 20 percent globally each year through 2020 and he wants to be ready. “Offshore wind is gaining increasing competitiveness in the power mix, and GE is well-positioned to serve this industry,” he says.

A Haliade wind turbine in the North Sea. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy

While Prius and Tesla cars might be thick on the ground in some well-off neighborhoods, the truth is that alternative fuel vehicles account for just about 5 percent of the automobiles on the road in the U.S.

The problem is they are still pretty pricey, with hybrids costing almost a fifth more than conventional cars. Drivers might make a lot of that cost up through gas savings, but when oil prices are cheap (like they are now) the math gets harder.

But it doesn’t have to be. GE Global Research partnered with Amphenol Advanced Sensors, Ford Motor Company and the University of Michigan to make more efficient batteries and take some of the cost out. The Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is sponsoring the project.

Battery packs used in automobiles are actually made up of bundles of smaller batteries called cells. Batteries inside hybrid cars typically hold 76 cells, which use lithium-ion technology to store electricity. The goal of the partnership is to shrink the battery size to 60 cells and shave production expenses by 15 percent, all while maintaining long-term reliability and life.

Getting the same amount of energy out of a smaller battery could lead to more efficient hybrids, and also hybrid trucks and SUVs. There are some secondary benefits, too. Removing cells lowers weight, which helps overall fuel economy. Smaller packs also mean you can put it in different places, giving carmakers new design options.

“Researchers are constantly looking to new materials and chemistries to improve performance,” says Dr. Aaron Knobloch, a senior scientist at GE Global Research and the principal investigator on the project. “We wanted to find ways, with controls and sensors, to improve performance using the cell chemistry we have today.”

The team is using a physics-based modeling approach called the digital twin to achieve its goal. It essentially creates a digital model of the operations of an asset — GE is building digital twins for wind turbines and jet engines, and also in the healthcare sector— and continually updates the performance model with feedback from actual operation conditions.

The digital twin essentially creates a digital model of the operations of an asset, say, a power plant and continually updates the performance model with feedback from real life operations. Image credit: GE Power

Lithium-ion batteries have been around since the ’70s, but scientists are still learning about of the chemical reactions and cell physics that take place when a battery charges and discharges.

Car batteries always include very basic sensors that measure things like temperature, current and voltage. But GE has developed new measurements that, along with new physics-based models from the University of Michigan, allow the digital twin to track the complex electrochemical changes and mechanical and thermal behavior of the cell.

The digital twin has already helped the group get a more in-depth look into what is happening to the battery during different driving conditions. For example, batteries actually swell and contract depending on how much charge they’re holding. Knobloch’s team has been able to find a correlation between the amount of expansion and the state of charge. This helps them get a better understanding of the amount of power available at any given time.

“By knowing the state of charge more accurately, we know how much juice is in the battery,” Knobloch says. “That’s valuable because you can then operate the battery more aggressively. It also allows us to reduce the size of the battery because you’re using more of the total battery capacity.”

The “ears” researchers used to listen to the battery. Pictured is one of the thin film sensors developed by GE scientists that were used to collect insights about the battery’s function and operation that formed the Digital Twin profile.

The team has been at this for three years and expects to have final results later this year. They have been testing their “digital” insights using an actual battery pack from a 2014 Ford Fusion Hybrid located at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. This pack is fitted with GE sensors and runs University of Michigan models and control algorithms. The team compares the results from this pack with a regular Ford pack to quantify the benefits of the sensors, models and algorithms.

The packs are inside what is basically a huge oven, where the temperature can be controlled to approximate the seasons, such as going down to minus 5 degrees Celsius in the “winter.” The batteries are hooked to a battery cycler, which simulates different power demands and driving conditions, like city versus highway driving. “We have been able to show with our models and sensors the ability to drive the batteries harder in these conditions,” Knobloch says. “Cells heat as you operate them and getting them warmer sooner improves the performance of the battery pack and consequently the car for the driver.”

The research is specifically focused on lithium-ion batteries for hybrid vehicles, but Knobloch believes the monitoring technology is cell agnostic and could be used with other cell chemistries. 

“What’s interesting about this project is we’re using new data to inform our models,” Knobloch says. “That’s really where the digital twin technology is going to go in the future — to tell us what are the key measurements we need and how we can make our models better by asking the right questions and having the right information.”

(Top image: A view of the car battery under its hood. As part of the ARPA-E program, GE scientists attached thin film sensors to different parts of the battery to create a digital profile or “Twin” of the battery itself. The insights gained from the “Twin” have enabled them to reduce the size of the battery by 16 cells and shave the cost by 15 percent.)

This week, a short novel written by an AI program did well in a Japanese literary contest, scientists spotted traces of a possible new particle that could shake the foundations of physics and a team of researchers discovered in the human genome a “nearly intact” genetic blueprint for a 700,000-year-old stowaway virus.

A Novel Written by AI Makes the Cut for a Literary Prize

A short novel written by a Japanese artificial intelligence software program passed the first screening round for the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. “The day a computer wrote a novel,” the program wrote near the end of the piece, “the computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.”

Nearly Intact Ancient Virus Found “Lurking” in Human Genome

Top and above: An illustration of a virus. Image credit: Getty Images

A team of scientists from Tufts University and the University of Michigan Health System has found a “nearly intact” genetic copy of an ancient virus that spliced itself into our DNA. The team doesn’t rule out the possibility that it could come alive again. “This one looks like it is capable of making infectious virus, which would be very exciting if true, as it would allow us to study a viral epidemic that took place long ago,” senior author and virologist John Coffin, Ph.D., of Tufts University School of Medicine, said about the sequence. The human genome carries many fragments of viruses our bodies have encountered during evolution — as much as 8 percent. Most of them don’t do anything. But some may cause disease and others help us, “such as one that helps pregnant women’s bodies build a cell layer around a developing fetus to protect it from toxins in the mother’s blood,” the team said in a press release. “This research provides important information necessary for understanding how retroviruses and humans have evolved together in relatively recent times,” Coffin said.

Saharan Dust Storms Could Cause More Powerful Hurricanes

Satellite view of dust plumes off Libya. Image Credit: Getty Images

A team of French and American researchers has created a model that shows how dust storms in the Sahara desert affect the weather over the Atlantic and in the Americas and could lead to more powerful hurricanes. “Such a dust feedback, which is not represented in climate models, may be of benefit to human and ecosystem health in West Africa via improved air quality and increased rainfall,” they wrote in the journal Nature. “This feedback may also enhance warming of the tropical North Atlantic, which would make the basin more suitable for hurricane formation and growth.”

Hints of a New Particle Could Rock the Foundations of Physics

Particle collision illustration. Image credit: Getty Images

Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are getting excited about “brief flashes of light spotted inside the LHC [that] might be the first glimpse of a new era of physics,” The Guardian newspaper reported. They believe the flashes could be clues left behind by a new type of subatomic particle so fundamental it could wreck the standard model of particle physics, the theory that explains how quarks, electrons, neutrons and other particles that are the building blocks of matter interact. “If this thing turns out to be real, it’s a ten on the Richter scale of particle physics,” John Ellis, professor of physics at King’s College London, and the former head of theory at CERN, told The Guardian.

World’s Largest Aircraft Set to Take Off

Airlander 10, the world’s largest aircraft, will reportedly fly again soon from Cardington Airfield, near Bedford, England. The company that built it, the U.K.’s Hybrid Air Vehicles, is preparing “an extensive flight test program consisting of 200 hours of test flights over a number of months, then a series of trials and demonstrations with prospective customers.” The Airlander 10 is 302 feet long, 143 feet wide and 85 feet high. It uses four 350-horsepower diesel engines for propulsion. The aircraft could have cargo, tourism and other applications. A U.S. military version of the dirigible-like vehicle first took off in 2012. But the flights of that prototype were kept largely secret.

From the Brink: As part of a regular series featuring content from BRINK, A. Michael Froomkin discusses the legal complexities and challenges of robotics.

Robots aren’t people. So whom do we blame — and how do we react — when they spy on, injure or even kill us? And how could robots undermine even our most trusted professionals?

University of Miami law professor A. Michael Froomkin has been writing about the intersection of technology and the law for 20 years. He’s the founder of “We Robot,” a conference on legal and policy issues related to robotics, now in its fifth year.

He’s also co-editor of Robot Law, a new book scheduled for release this month. BRINK spoke to him on the eve of the book’s release. Some answers have been condensed.

Why are you releasing this book now?

It goes back to my experience with the Internet. When I started writing about Internet law and policies in the mid-’90s, the basic standards were already in place. The engineers made a number of choices — about privacy, security, domain names and the like — which had hideous legal and practical consequences that they could never have imagined.

Now here, we have signs that robots will become a widespread and transformative technology, like the Internet had been before it. But the standards are not quite baked. My co-editors and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to get lawyers and policymakers involved in the conversation? We could design around as many of the problems we can identify, so we save people lots of time and money.

How are robot capabilities starting to push the boundaries of the law?

There are a couple of distinctions we make in the community. Some people say that a robot must be a physical thing. We say a robot could be a piece of software — like a program stock trader — that detects stimuli and responds in a way that affects the real world. The other distinction has to do with autonomy. Everyone agrees that a robot with no autonomy — a machine in an assembly line, for example — is still a robot. But where robots get interesting legally is when they have a degree of autonomy.

Currently, the degree of autonomy for robots varies dramatically. Drones are mostly under the direct control of a user, but it’s getting to the point where you can program a destination into a drone and it will go there and back. Others are programmed to come home autonomously if they lose a signal. Collision avoidance is a kind of autonomy. The question is, what happens when a robot in autonomous mode causes harm, like it runs into something?

If you don’t make rules now, it will be a very target-rich environment for litigators. It’s better to sort out as many issues as you can in advance so you know who’s responsible. They can buy insurance, they can make sure their engineers design as carefully as they can. Somebody needs to own the problem.

Drones are already creating legal issues. I’ve read two recent cases involving people who shot down their neighbors’ drones when they hovered over their property. In one case, the man was indicted on felony charges; in the other, the judge dismissed the case, saying he had the right to shoot down the drone.

Those cases were in different states, and a lot of these questions are decided by criminal law, which is a complicated patchwork of state laws and even municipal rules. In any case, if you’re in an inhabited area, it’s really dangerous to fire a gun in the air. In our paper on this question, we are asking it from a tort law perspective: If you suspect a drone is spying on you, can you disable it, and who do you sue?

The law is pretty clear that your property rights go beyond the walls of your house — typically to your sidewalk. The legal term is curtilage. But drones can go vertically, and the concept of vertical curtilage is not so well-developed. It’s probably trespassing up there as well. But it can be hard to tell what a drone is doing up there — does it have a camera, is it snooping your wifi, who owns it — and it’s hard to do something to stop it. The new FAA rules requires a drone to be traceable in case it crashes, but there’s very little in the rules about what to do if it’s in flight and then goes home again.

So, if you suspect a drone is spying on you, can you disable it? Now we get into the weeds of trespass law. The fundamental rule is reasonableness. The less threatening the drone is, the less right to self-defense you have. But how can you tell if it’s threatening? One of the worst things a drone can do right now is invade your privacy. Here, the law has a problem. We haven’t really cracked the problem of how to value privacy invasion, especially suspected privacy invasion. You see it all the time when there’s a data breach. Until you’ve proven the hacker has used your information, any damages are speculative, and you have very little claim against the card company.

The right to self-defense is actually a privilege. In this instance, it’s a defense against what would otherwise be a claim against you for damaging someone’s property. The law asks you to make a split-second decision—to the best of a normal person’s ability—about the value of the drone compared to the possible harm. Only if the value of the drone is in the neighborhood of the value of the harm can you damage it. Which means the fancier the drone looks, the less right you have to damage it!

In a recent paper with my colleague Zak Colangelo (Self-Defense Against Robots and Drones), we suggest some ways to reduce uncertainties about robots, including forbidding weaponized robots, requiring lights or markings that announce their capabilities and mandating RFID chips or serial numbers that identify the robot’s owner.

What about a self-driving car? What if someone hacks a self-driving car and there’s a crash? Who’s responsible then?

That’s easy — the hacker. It’s just a question of proof.

But what if Google failed to secure the car from hackers?

If you make a system really easy to break into, it could be seen as a product defect. On the other hand, the law does not go out of its way to blame people for the bad actions of others. When someone’s car is stolen, you don’t see a ton of suits against car manufacturers saying the locks weren’t good enough. There are things you can do with encryption and signatures that greatly reduce the threat of hacking.

OK, let’s say there’s no hack, but a self-driving car still crashes. What’s the driver’s responsibility?

On the self-driving cars that are being tested right now, the carmakers want the driver paying attention — and right now, they’re not doing it. They’re playing cards. That’s a little scary. And even if driver is well-intentioned, sitting there alert, it’s hard to stay alert for a long drive if you have nothing to do. This is the problem of “unintentional inattention,” and it goes well beyond cars.

Imagine you’ve got robot mall cops. There’s eight of them running around the mall and one guy in a room someplace looking at eight TV screens. He’s bored out of his mind, falling asleep. Then something happens, and it’s his fault because he’s asleep at the switch. Sometimes this is called the “human in the loop” problem. Autonomy seems dangerous, so you put a human in the loop. But that person’s job is very passive. It’s tough to do, and it may be a low-wage, low-status job. Then you blame the person who fails to monitor, even though the system sets them up for the fall. That’s not a good design, but I don’t know what the answer is.

And then there’s the related problem of the atrophy of human skills. If nearly all flights are on autopilot, won’t pilots eventually forget how to fly?

Absolutely. So far, pilots seem to be doing OK. But we’ll be having this conversation about medicine in 15 years, because we predict robots will get good at diagnosis. When they do, patients and hospitals will want the best diagnosis, the best track record, so they’ll go with the robot. Now you start deskilling the medical profession, and that would have terrible consequences.

So, if a robot doctor makes a dumb error, whom do you blame? The robot maker?

Robot doctors will be something like IBM’s Watson—they will get new data in real time, and be searching on a constantly improving database. So auditing its decisions will be next to impossible. When robots have a better track record than doctors, and a robot and a doctor disagree over the right course of action, which do you trust? How do we keep human skills sharp if humans are only used as a backup? Would you be willing to train and pay as many humans as you used to, and how would you train them?

These are really hard problems, and we’re trying to worry about them now before they become real problems.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

This piece first appeared in BRINK.

Michael Froomkin is the Laurie Silvers and Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law at University of Miami Law School.

All views expressed are those of the author.

The world may have just gotten an early warning alarm for Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers in Sweden have uncovered changes in the brain that foretell the development of the brain disorder up to two decades before symptoms occur.

A team at the Karolinska Institute watched brain cells called astrocytes, which protect and support the information-carrying neurons, increase in number years before people genetically predisposed to the disease showed any symptoms. Researchers believe this phenomenon is the body’s inflammatory response to the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, a form of dementia in which protein fragments called amyloid clump together in plaques that damage brain tissue.

Top image and above: These illustrations show neurons with amyloid plaques. Image credit: Getty Images

“Astrocytes are like soldiers — they see amyloid appear and they try to stop it,” says Agneta Nordberg, a medical doctor and neuroscientist at the institute. “That’s why we think the increase in astrocytes could be an indicator that pathological change is starting in the brain. They’re trying to remove the proteins, but amyloid accumulation is too strong for them.”

Since 2010, GE Healthcare has been supporting the research with a multiyear grant totaling some 400,000 euros.

Getting more insight into Alzheimer’s is critical for the growing number of people around the world who suffer from the progressively debilitating brain disease, which robs patients of their memories and the ability to perform even the most basic tasks. Last year, 5 million Americans and 47 million people worldwide were afflicted with it, and that number is projected to increase to 75 million globally by 2030.

Brain scan comparison. Left brain shows reduced activity. Image credit: Getty images

To uncover astrocytes’ previously hidden role, the team studied 52 people with mutations known to significantly increase the risk of acquiring Alzheimer’s. All of the participants underwent memory tests. They were then injected with radioactive tracers that highlight different features in the brain and scanned with a positron emission tomography (PET) machine. Half of the subjects were scanned again three years later so the team could identify brain changes over that time.

Putting that data into computer models, Nordberg and her colleagues saw an unexpected relationship. They observed the first deposits of a type of protein fragment called amyloid-β occurring some 17 years before the expected onset of symptoms.

At the same time, the number of astrocytes in the brain began increasing. Interestingly, the number of astrocytes spiked as amyloid began accumulating and then declined while plaque deposition increased over time. “Astrocyte activation peaks roughly 20 years before the expected symptoms and then goes into decline, in contrast to the accumulation of amyloid plaques, which increases constantly over time until clinical symptoms show,” Nordberg says. “The accumulation of amyloid plaque and the increase in number of astrocytes therefore display opposing patterns along the timeline.”

The work was revealed in papers published last year and in late January in the journals Nature Scientific Reports and Brain. The finding means that astrocytes could become a very early diagnostic marker of Alzheimer’s. Research in the cells could lead to new treatments for the disease.

The disorder is also associated with structural molecules called tau proteins, which normally help keep vital nutrients and other products flowing to neurons but can get tangled up and block proper cell functioning. Nordberg says the next steps for research should focus on how tau proteins relate to the astrocyte-amyloid relationship.

“To treat Alzheimer’s disease, we must first understand the course of its progression over time and develop diagnostic markers to detect it,” she says. “This line of research offers a new way to understand it, and it also raises the question, can we use this knowledge to develop new therapies?”

Nobody wants to be told they are going to die. Yet that’s the prognosis Wayne Eskridge received from his doctors in 2010. The diagnosis was a stage-four case of cirrhosis of the liver. As he and his family despaired over the future, he received another medical opinion, saying this time that he was fine with no liver disease. He was counting his blessings, but later the emotional rollercoaster took another dive when the diagnosis reversed once more. “Over a period of four years I was told I was seriously ill and then told I was not and later I was told that I had a progressive liver disease caused by iron,” Eskridge said from his home in Boise, Idaho. “I did not know where I stood, but I gave seven liters of blood to treat the iron problem. Later that diagnosis was judged to also be wrong. I felt the information I was getting was insufficient but didn’t know where to turn. It’s a journey that drove my wife and me crazy.”

Eskridge’s nightmare finally ended in 2014 when a new MRI scan aided the doctors in their diagnosis of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) – a “silent” liver disease afflicting people who drink little or no alcohol. Eskridge now knows he has stage-three/four cirrhosis — an advancing case of liver disease, but not necessarily a fatal diagnosis. He believes his prognosis would be better had he been diagnosed four years earlier.

Top and above: A 16 year old obese patient with elevated liver enzymes and fatty liver infiltration on ultrasound and MR. The MR elastography (MR Touch) was performed to evaluate tissue stiffness prior to a planned biopsy. The MRE showed normal liver stiffness, indicating the presence of simple steatosis, but no fibrosis or inflammation. The biopsy was cancelled. Image credit: GE Healthcare

Doctors performed an MRI scan with an imaging technique called MR-Touch. MR-Touch is a medical imaging technique that provides an elastogram – a color-coded anatomical image showing varying degrees of elasticity or stiffness in soft tissue which then aids the clinicians in their diagnosis of disease. In this case it was liver disease. GE developed MR-Touch in partnership with the Mayo Clinic. It can capture the image in just 14 seconds, a short time for most patients to hold their breath.

Eskridge’s liver trouble began in December 2010, after surgery to remove his gangrenous gallbladder. The initial diagnosis was based on obvious liver damage observed by his surgeon. A subsequent biopsy showed no liver disease, a finding that made little sense. That started Eskridge on his tortuous four-year journey of back-and-forth visits to primary care physicians, gastroenterologists and hematologists. He underwent a battery of tests, including blood draws, ultrasounds, biopsies and MRIs, and received diagnoses ranging from no liver disease to hemochromatosis — too much iron in the body resulting in stage 4 cirrhosis.

“We had several years of trying to figure out what was going on and not being successful,” he says. Frustrated, the 73-year-old engineer, who runs an online lighting business, went so far as to take a pathology course online at Tufts University to learn more about his liver.

MR Touch assesses the stiffness of a patient’s liver and is especially valuable in evaluating and assisting the clinician in their treatment plan for fatty liver disease. Image credit: GE Healthcare

In 2014, Eskridge’s liver mystery was solved when he and his wife, Rosemary, met Dr. Michael Charlton of Salt Lake City, who prescribed an MR-Touch scan that assisted the clinicians in their diagnosis of NASH and visualized the extent of the liver damage. NASH is difficult to detect because most patients are asymptomatic and don’t have high risk factors.

Eskridge believes that if he had not been diagnosed by his clinician using the MR-Touch imaging technique his disease likely would have progressed to a fatal stage-four case of cirrhosis. He now has hopes — and a fighting chance — of stopping the disease.

He’s keeping himself healthy through lifestyle changes, including increased exercise, weight loss and the elimination of harmful saturated fats. He instead consumes significant amounts of unsaturated fats in extra-virgin olive oil and liver-supportive supplements as part of a restricted Mediterranean diet — things he says he would have done earlier had doctors correctly diagnosed his illness. “Had I had the same counsel after my 2010 surgery, I probably would not be at stage-three/four cirrhosistoday,” he says.

At least 30 million people in the United States — one in 10 — have some form of liver disease. Medical imaging techniques like MR-Touch and new cloud-based software that precisely highlight what clinicians need to see for them to effectively treat liver disease could mean more precise care for patients and productivity for clinicians.

“Absent better diagnostic tools, my doctors did all that I could ask of them. My story is not unique as many people have silent liver disease. It’s a problem that may become more common as my generation, with our industrialized diet and poor habits, gets older,” Eskridge says.

Already the MR-Touch imaging technique and GE software called FlightPlan for Liver are helping doctors treat liver cancer. Previously, liver cancer was particularly difficult to deal with because the liver’s complex vascular structure made it hard for doctors to find which blood vessels fed a tumor. Using MR-Touch and the software, surgeons now have more detailed imaging to help them prepare for an embolization to surgically block blood vessels feeding a tumor.

How to cut through the global economic madness to assess real prospects for growth.

Looking at the global economy can feel like we have gone among the mad people:

• Some interest rates are negative  —  you have to pay in order to lend.
• Financial papers call for “helicopter money” in a Eurozone that is growing above potential.
• Innovation is moving at its fastest pace but productivity at its slowest.
• The drivers of many years of rising global prosperity  —  free circulation of goods and people   —  are vilified as ruinous.
• The fact that a key production input  —  energy   —  has become a lot cheaper is seen as a threat to global growth.
• The gloomiest economists keep giving us optimistic forecasts.
• There is a seemingly incurable pessimism even as global growth has held close to its historical norms.

I could go on. Nothing is what it seems. And nothing feels right.

My colleague Shlomi Kramer and I have just released a paper where we try to make sense of this madness and calibrate expectations of global economic growth in a way that can help business decisions.

We find that uncertainty and risks are indeed significant. Years of exceptional monetary easing have created distortions in financial markets. And populism and protectionism are on the rise nearly everywhere, fueled by broad discontent with growth and income distribution, and concerns about technology’s impact on jobs.

We are concerned that the widespread recurrent pessimism seems incurable. There is a negative feedback loop between widespread pessimism, popular discontent, and weak policy leadership in many countries. Breaking this vicious circle will be key to securing stronger and more stable global growth.

Still, the global economy is resilient and offers plenty of growth and business opportunities. We need to calibrate expectations  —  we are not going back to the bubbly pre-crisis growth  —  but neither have we entered a global terminal slump. We need to be aware of the real dangers, ignore the many imaginary ones, and focus on taking smarter risks.

We dig into these dynamics more deeply in the paper, but here are a few highlights from our analysis.

“I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it”- Alice

The optimism of pessimists has dominated the last few years: Predictions of doom and gloom have accompanied over-optimistic forecasts, setting the stage for repeated disappointments, which fuels further pessimism.

We feel that consensus forecasts and actual economic strength have now converged for advanced economies, but we see much more uncertainty on emerging markets.

“I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then” — Alice

A key source of uncertainty is China’s economic transformation. The policy strategy is the right one, and so far has been well executed. But there is no precedent of such a major economic transformation undertaken on such a scale. Our baseline is for a soft landing, where growth will average 5 percent per year through 2030, and 5.5–6 percent in the next five years.

As liberalization proceeds, though, policymakers will have less control of the economy and China will experience the business cycles typical of a market economy. The danger is that early episodes of volatility could slow or derail ongoing reforms. China has entered a more difficult phase of its complex economic transformation; the uncertainty and risks are higher.

“You’re not the same as you were before. You were much more …muchier … you’ve lost your muchness” — The Mad Hatter

The U.S. recovery is entrenched, and concerns of an impending recession are unjustified. The labor market is close to full employment and job creation continues at a robust pace. Household consumption remains a reliable growth engine. Headline inflation is rebounding towards the 2 percent level now that energy prices have stabilized (core inflation had always remained well anchored, and is now also rising).

The pace of growth, however, is lower than before the crisis by about 1 percentage point. This is partly due to population aging, which has slowed the growth of the labor force.

But productivity growth has also decelerated: over the last two years it has been running at about 0.5 percent annualized, a sharp fall from its 3 percent pace of 1995–2004 and its long-term average of over 2 percent.

There are divergent views on whether the US economy has settled onto a permanently lower path. Pessimistic theories, unsurprisingly, tend to be more popular: the “Secular stagnation” idea revived by Larry Summers and Robert Gordon’s view that innovation can no longer fuel growth stand out.

We believe that new waves of innovation can deliver major productivity gain. But we see two significant risks:

• Persistent uncertainty and pessimism, or continued growth-unfriendly policies could hold investment back.
• The normalization of US monetary policies could result in greater instability in financial markets with a sharp impact on economic activity.

“Where should I go?” — Alice.

“That depends on where you want to end up” — The Cheshire Cat

Emerging markets (EM) are set to recover as commodity prices stabilize in the next two years. We need to calibrate expectations, however: EM are not likely to go back to their all-time best performance. Both monetary and fiscal policy are constrained — the former by the prospect of higher U.S. interest rates, the latter by already high fiscal deficits.

This will shift the focus to fundamentals: infrastructure investment and a better business environment, together with sustainable macro policies, low indebtedness and low vulnerability to international capital flows

These factors will drive greater differentiation across regions and individual countries. Emerging Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and the Middle-East & North Africa (MENA) offer the greatest opportunities, but SSA and MENA also have some of the higher risks.

But overall, the global growth story of EM gradually catching up to advanced economies remains in place. There is often a temptation, sitting in advanced economies, to look at the EM slowdown and think, “I knew it, they will never catch up.” Such complacence is dangerously misguided.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

This piece first appeared on Medium.

Marco Annunziata is the Chief Economist and Executive Director of Global Market Insight at GE.

All views expressed are those of the author.

The world may have just gotten an early warning alarm for Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers in Sweden have uncovered changes in the brain that foretell the development of the brain disorder up to two decades before symptoms occur.

A team at the Karolinska Institute watched brain cells called astrocytes, which protect and support the information-carrying neurons, increase in number years before people genetically predisposed to the disease showed any symptoms. Researchers believe this phenomenon is the body’s inflammatory response to the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, a form of dementia in which protein fragments called amyloid clump together in plaques that damage brain tissue.

Top image and above: These illustrations show neurons with amyloid plaques. Image credit: Getty Images

“Astrocytes are like soldiers — they see amyloid appear and they try to stop it,” says Agneta Nordberg, a medical doctor and neuroscientist at the institute. “That’s why we think the increase in astrocytes could be an indicator that pathological change is starting in the brain. They’re trying to remove the proteins, but amyloid accumulation is too strong for them.”

Since 2010, GE Healthcare has been supporting the research with a multiyear grant totaling some 400,000 euros.

Getting more insight into Alzheimer’s is critical for the growing number of people around the world who suffer from the progressively debilitating brain disease, which robs patients of their memories and the ability to perform even the most basic tasks. Last year, 5 million Americans and 47 million people worldwide were afflicted with it, and that number is projected to increase to 75 million globally by 2030.

Brain scan comparison. Left brain shows reduced activity. Image credit: Getty images

To uncover astrocytes’ previously hidden role, the team studied 52 people with mutations known to significantly increase the risk of acquiring Alzheimer’s. All of the participants underwent memory tests. They were then injected with radioactive tracers that highlight different features in the brain and scanned with a positron emission tomography (PET) machine. Half of the subjects were scanned again three years later so the team could identify brain changes over that time.

Putting that data into computer models, Nordberg and her colleagues saw an unexpected relationship. They observed the first deposits of a type of protein fragment called amyloid-β occurring some 17 years before the expected onset of symptoms.

At the same time, the number of astrocytes in the brain began increasing. Interestingly, the number of astrocytes spiked as amyloid began accumulating and then declined while plaque deposition increased over time. “Astrocyte activation peaks roughly 20 years before the expected symptoms and then goes into decline, in contrast to the accumulation of amyloid plaques, which increases constantly over time until clinical symptoms show,” Nordberg says. “The accumulation of amyloid plaque and the increase in number of astrocytes therefore display opposing patterns along the timeline.”

The work was revealed in papers published last year and in late January in the journals Nature Scientific Reports and Brain. The finding means that astrocytes could become a very early diagnostic marker of Alzheimer’s. Research in the cells could lead to new treatments for the disease.

The disorder is also associated with structural molecules called tau proteins, which normally help keep vital nutrients and other products flowing to neurons but can get tangled up and block proper cell functioning. Nordberg says the next steps for research should focus on how tau proteins relate to the astrocyte-amyloid relationship.

“To treat Alzheimer’s disease, we must first understand the course of its progression over time and develop diagnostic markers to detect it,” she says. “This line of research offers a new way to understand it, and it also raises the question, can we use this knowledge to develop new therapies?”

GE Healthcare engineers in Finland have recently started working on a predictive software system that could one day collect human vital signs like blood pressure, temperature and breathing rate, and feed the data into a secure database for analysis. That information would be used to build individualized digital twins for each patient. The data would live in the cloud and could help spot health problems before they get out of hand.

The system, which runs on Predix, GE’s cloud-based system for the Industrial Internet, is still some years away, but its predictive analytics and the digital twin technology are already starting to have applications in many industries. The most recent is power generation.

Salt River Project (SRP), a utility serving over 1 million homes and businesses in and around Phoenix, Arizona, has connected its power plants and electrical grid to SmartSignal, GE software that can monitor turbines, generators and other machines and minimize unplanned downtime. “It’s like going to the doctor for a physical and they do the lab work, check your heart and your blood pressure. That’s effectively what this software does for our assets, in real time,” says May Millies, SRP’s former Power Generation Services manager, who now manages of operations and maintenance at the Desert Basin Generating Station.

Top Image: The Navajo Generating Station is one of the power plants in SRP’s portfolio. SRP, which serves nearly 1 million customers, has been in business since 1903. That makes it a decade older than its home state, Arizona. Above: The digital power plant is one of GE’s applications for the digital twin technology. Image credit: Getty Images

This is important because like an undiagnosed illness leading to hospitalization, unplanned downtime is expensive. The world’s power plants could save some $80 billion annually if they operated near their potential, according to a 2008 estimate by the World Energy Council. Millies says SmartSignal has been saving SRP as much as $400,000 a year by catching anomalies early.

SRP first tested SmartSignal offline, feeding it old equipment data. They wanted to know how the software would have dealt with a major failure that happened in the past. “We knew that the [historical] data showed a significant mechanical problem,” said Millies. “The question was, if we had had the GE software, would it have seen the problem in advance and caught the outage?”

The cybersnoop wasn’t fooled. “It read the data, found the anomaly and notified us on the software tool,” she says. “If we had the software at the time, it would have prevented that very costly outage.”

SRP has now connected almost all of its power stations to the Predix platform. When completed, the project will give them instant access to information of these critical assets. She wants to allow her team to make decisions that boost the utility’s overall efficiency and reliability even during normal operations. “We are able to manage our costs and ensure a reliable system because we are able to plan our outage activity,” Millies says. “Our assets are running predictably because we know what maintenance work we have to do and we are able to plan that work to get it done in a timely fashion.”

SRP is now considering how to apply SmartSignal to businesses well beyond its power plants.Says Millies: “We want to expand it across our assets.”

The forces of technological change and geopolitical decentralization are set to transform the world over the next five years. Here are the three biggest risks to watch.

We spend a significant amount of time looking at the year ahead at Eurasia Group. But given how quickly the world is changing — especially when the absence of global leadership means considerably more geopolitical conflict — I thought it would be useful to look further out on the horizon.

Here are the top three risks I see coming down the pike for the coming five years:

1. China

With all the attention to the conflicts in the Middle East, the political crises in Europe and the unfolding circus of the U.S. presidential elections, it’s easy to forget that by far the biggest structural change in the global system is the rise of China. That’s true if reform succeeds or fails.

While China’s economic and political stability hasn’t been in question in Eurasia Group’s annual top risks reports over the past several years (owing to a relatively high degree of stability so far), tough decisions will have to be taken in two areas:

• Economically: opening the financial system and dealing with bad loans, or reverting to top-down control
• Politically: allowing a decentralization of the political system, or determining that’s too much of a threat to the survival of the existing regime

Given how much greater China’s power and influence will be by 2021, its response to these two reform challenges will have critical importance for the future of the world order. If successful, China will be on track to create a large number of companies that are dominant across Asia and competitive around the world. A growing number of countries will be aligned with Chinese standards and architecture, as well as the yuan. Economies like Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics, Russia and a host of Sub-Saharan African countries will see China as their most important partner; while traditional American allies like Australia, European states and even Japan will hedge towards a more balanced Chinese relationship. U.S.-led institutions will erode, in many cases becoming weaker than competitors in China-led zones. The United States will either move towards bloc-building behavior or seek compromise, yet 2021 will be premature for that to succeed — leaving the world far more fragmented than today.

If the reform process sputters — provoking either internal disagreement or a hardline response by the government — China’s reach will be considerably diminished. Still, there will likely be greater tension over areas the Chinese see as “in their sphere,” such Taiwan, Hong Kong and the East and South China Seas. Cyber conflict and proxy fights will become more likely with the United States. While a more diffuse Washington-led consensus would hold in determining economic outcomes, a reversion to great power conflict geopolitically would create much higher risks across Asia and Europe.

Regardless, a rising China that doesn’t share American values or priorities — whether there are signs of succeeding or failing — is the world’s top risk for 2021.

2. Energy & the Middle East

“Lower for longer” is our mantra — a lower growth environment and an energy revolution driven by gains in efficiency and renewables, leading to depressed oil prices. With the money no longer there, there will be big challenges for countries seriously reliant on oil and gas — Venezuela, Russia and many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The risk of instability will rise in the Middle East in particular without economic reforms, as three factors behind the relatively frozen instability for the past decades will likely dissipate:

• The United States and allies spent significant diplomatic and economic efforts to support regional security.
• Despite poor governance, regional populations were relatively quiescent.
• There was plenty of cash to maintain loyalty and, failing that, order and discipline.

With this (highly imperfect) equilibrium now gone, the likely result will be a reversion in much of the Middle East to a pre-Westphalian state. Many of the region’s central states will no longer be able to enforce decisions in their territories, enabling sub-state actors to become the principal sources of governance.

The potential for serious instability in the region has major implications beyond its borders, most obviously for the “broader” Middle East — pockets of North, West and East Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Caucasus. In Europe, the costs of the terrorist and refugee threat will change policy priorities from fiscal responsibility to security, which will reduce growth and foster decentralization — a bigger long-term threat for the European Union. It’s also potentially a threat for the United States and globally, to the extent that asymmetric warfare becomes more challenging — particularly in cyber, but also in biosecurity and possibly even nuclear.

3. Technology & the State

Finally, on the implications of technology for governments — The transformative power of explosive technological growth will fundamentally alter the geopolitical landscape in several ways:

• Security and the potential for a true military-industrial-technological complex

New technologies pose a fundamental challenge to the traditional role of government to ensure stability and guarantee the enforcement of rules. Under one scenario, the state retains its current shape and becomes supplanted by the private sector and rogues, because the central government can no longer provide the services that ensure its authority. In another, the state becomes the key technological player in the sovereign space — as it currently is in the military space — shifting the privacy/security balance overwhelmingly toward the latter.

• Nature of employment

With the 4th Industrial Revolution, information technologies will likely dramatically change labor models in a wide range of industries by 2021 — particularly due to improvements in the fields of automation and artificial intelligence. The challenge will be particularly acute for emerging markets, where governments that can’t quickly evolve their social contracts to meet middle class expectations will see spiraling social instability.

• Rise of populism

The dramatic rise of anti-establishment political movements has been greatly impacted by information technologies that allow individuals to understand the world through an ever-narrower lens of beliefs and facts they already agree with. There’s increasingly little room for centrism and political compromise in that environment, making more likely the political success of extremist parties — even in relatively consolidated democracies and authoritarian regimes.

• The power of small

The growing capacity of technology to harness large movements is likely to lead to an equally powerful reaction toward local communities that feel kinship from proximity and human interaction. More effective models of governance will emerge at the local level — both in cities suitably cosmopolitan for local attachment to prove stronger and more durable than other forms of identity; and wealthier exurbs, where relative homogeneity allows for the avoidance of collective action problems otherwise bedeviling societies.

There’s a general decentralization theme in all three of these top risks. De-concentration of power will be one of the critical issues China must address to ensure success and stability. In the Middle East, the failure of the state means effective forms of governance will increasingly be found at the sub-state level. And the explosion of technology on the geopolitical stage means dystopia for some — and empowerment of smaller, more like-minded communities for others.

In a period in which we’ll be principally concerned with the implication of globalization’s discontents, much of what works will be local.

(Top image: Courtesy of Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Ian Bremmer is the President and Founder of Eurasia Group.

All views expressed are those of the author.

From space, America’s rail system looks like a slice of brain tissue, with brightly lit train hubs and spokes standing in for neurons. Bit by bit, it’s starting to behave like one.

Take GE’s newest locomotive, the Tier 4, which is essentially a rolling data center. It carries more than 200 sensors that collect gigabytes of information about engine performance, exhaust, the fuel mix and rail conditions. The locomotive uses software to analyze the data and applies the insights to get smarter and run more efficiently. “The trains still work the same way physically, but we are dramatically enhancing our ability to deliver better outcomes by adding the digital components,” says Seth Bodnar, chief digital officer of GE Transportation and the president of GE Transportation Digital Solutions, a new GE business unit based in Chicago.

Bodnar is quick to point out that the “brilliant” locomotive is just one piece of GE’s vision for the industry’s digital future. The company wants to connect all of its 21,000 locomotives, pulling freight and passengers in 50 countries, to Predix, its cloud-based software platform for the Industrial Internet. “We’re trying to weave a digital thread around the entire railroad operation,” Bodnar says. “The good news is small improvements can have a big impact. A 1 percent fuel efficiency improvement has a $100 million savings benefit for customers. An increase in velocity of just 1 mile per hour can drive over $2 billion in savings to customers.”

Top image: Ge’s Tier 4 locomotive is a data center on rails. Above: wants to connect all of its 21,000 locomotives, pulling freight and passengers in 50 countries, to Predix, its cloud-based software platform for the Industrial Internet. Images credit: GE Transportation

Predix is similar to iOS or Android, the software platforms that power smartphones, but built for machines. GE is already using it to optimize and link everything from X-ray machines to jet engines. Predix allows Bodnar’s coders to write railroad applications like GE Trip Optimizer, Yard Planner and Movement Planner, which make trains run faster, fuller, more efficiently and more often. Trip Optimizer is already inside more than 5,000 trains. They have collectively crossed more than 125 million miles on several continents. Bodnar says the app blends GPS data with track profile, rail conditions and other information to generate the most optimal plan for each trip. As the train departs, it can adjust the plan in real time as conditions change. Bodnar says that in just a few years, Trip Optimizer has saved the industry 90 million gallons of diesel fuel.

Yard Planner, on the other hand, is helping customers minimize the time railcars sit idle. Today the car utilization rate hovers between 40 and 60 percent. The app can visualize the yard in an intuitive way, track current inventory as well as inbound and outbound trains, and allow yardmasters to run their wagons more frequently.

Several large North American railroad customers have been using GE’s Movement Planner. It allows them to put more trains on the same rail and move them faster — by as much as 10 percent across a rail network. That’s because the app, like a skilled chess player, can look many moves ahead, analyze train and crew schedules, network congestion, weather and other factors and find the most optimal combination. “By next year, Movement Planner will handle over one-third of rail traffic in the United States,” Bodnar says.

GE Transportation is now extending its software to rail shippers who fill cars with freight. Cloud-based programs like ShipperConnect, Transportation Management Platform and RailConnect TMS give small- and medium-sized railroads critical “first-mile, last-mile” connectivity for their cargo, automate all aspects of train and switching operations, and handle smooth interchange of rail traffic.

Bodnar says that RailConnect already has more than 400 customers, who use it to track 8 million carloads annually. GE made the first locomotive more than a century ago, and Bodnar says the new software builds on this deep domain expertise. “A decade from now, these digital tools will take railroad productivity and efficiency to unprecedented levels,” he says. “The whole network will light up like a brain.”

By embracing “bottom-up” innovation, the U.S. government can help advanced manufacturing respond to the speed and complexity of technological change.

Gaining a national edge in the advanced manufacturing space typically isn’t a “top down” process, especially given the speed of technological change. Given that, one of the great strengths of the Obama administration’s National Network for Manufacturing Institutes (NNMI) initiative has been its vision of competitive, “bottom up” project selection and governance.

With the program, the Obama administration has adopted catalytic, as opposed to directive, government. That is, Washington has deployed its grant awards to spur industry-led collaboration to solve critical advanced manufacturing problems, but it has not dictated how. Instead, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced a series of all-comers competitions to solve critical manufacturing innovation topics such as lightweight materials or digital manufacturing and left much to the market. And by all indications, the approach has been effective.

Now, though, the NNMI initiative is going farther. Recently, NIST announced that the next manufacturing institute competition won’t even specify a particular topic. Instead, the agency declared that industry-laboratory-university consortia across the land can themselves now propose to create a new national manufacturing institute on whatever advanced manufacturing technology topic they deem critical. To the consortia with the best idea and the best design for solving its problem NIST will provide up to $70 million in federal money over a five-year period to match equal non-federal funds. The bottom line: One of the federal government’s more successful technology programs has now embraced the full ethos of “bottom-up” problem-solving.

This is extremely welcome — for governance in general but also for technology innovation specifically.

Given the increased complexity of problems in general and in technology specifically, it is clearer than ever that direct action by government itself is often going to be too slow and too obtuse and that direct action will need to give way more to catalytic government: government by incentive, government through partnership, government through alignments.

That’s what’s so appropriate about the new manufacturing institute solicitation. In the advanced manufacturing space, the speed of technology change will always tend to outstrip pre-set topics and models. Moreover, there are always more good ideas in a big nation of many regions than Washington technocrats can anticipate. And so it makes a ton of sense that NIST has now embraced the full vision of “bottom-up” catalytic governance by moving to incite industry and academic problem-solving by setting broad goals and latitude while measuring performance rather than by dictating the focus and limiting discretion. Here, “open-topic” advanced manufacturing problem-solving is akin to “open-source” software development.

To the extent, then, that NIST’s wide-open call for manufacturing innovation problem-solving pulls in even more industry engagement on the highest-yield problems the latest manufacturing institute solicitation could be a watershed.

(Top image: Courtesy of Heather Tackett, RapidTech, National Science Foundation)

Mark Muro is a Senior Fellow and Director of Policy for the Metropolitan Policy Programat Brookings.

All views expressed are those of the author.