Starting in the late 1980s, the Pentagon launched a top-secret constellation of two-dozen navigation satellites designed to guide U.S. nuclear missiles precisely to their targets. Then the Cold War ended, the technology shed the uniform, and put on civilian clothes. We know it as the Global Positioning System (GPS), and millions of drivers, hikers and bikers use it daily to find their bearings and map their workout routines.

Today, a similar transformation is taking place in the “drone” space. To be sure, military and intelligence agencies keep investing in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), but a swarm of startups are already busy developing civilian applications for drones ranging from agriculture surveillance to mining and search-and-rescue, not to mention Amazon’s plans for delivering packages. “There are already over 600 companies in this field,” says Jonathan Downey, founder and CEO of Airware. “But there are still few standardized building blocks. For the industry to take off, you need more than just an autopilot.”

Top GIFs: Users control drones from the screen of a portable tablet. Image credit: Airware

Downey started Airware three years ago with an idea to fix the problem. His company is developing a suite of hardware, software,  and cloud services he calls the Aerial Information Platform. Drones equipped with the technology already took part in an anti-poaching exercise in a northern white rhino wildlife preserve in Kenya.

“We want to make it easy for customers to build drones for any commercial application and operate them in a safe and reliable manner,” Downey says. “This is something the industry as well as regulators have been asking for.”

Investors are paying attention. Airware has raised $40 million from an A-list roster of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Andreessen Horowitz, and now also GE Ventures. “We’re big believers in ecosystems and we know that there is one quickly emerging and evolving in the commercial UAV space,” says Alex Tepper, managing director at GE Ventures. “Airware is at the heart of this movement. We want to be part of it and help it grow.”

Tepper says that GE’s customers could use drones for pipeline and power line surveillance, railroad monitoring and many other applications.

Airware’s office is filled with drone models. Image credit: Airware

Downey comes from a flying family. His father and grandfather were both pilots and his great uncle was shot down over Europe flying bomber sorties during World War II. “If you don’t fly, I think you pretty much get kicked out of the family,” he laughs.

Downey, who learned to fly from his father, spent a summer working as a commercial pilot for Grand Canyon Airlines, flying tourists in a twin-engine turboprop. His first brush with UAVs was at MIT, where he studied electrical engineering and computer science. He started a drone club, but he quickly realized that all of the underlying hardware and software had been designed for surveillance. “There were rigid black-box solutions and some open source projects that lacked reliability,” he says. “We ultimately had to build everything from scratch.”

But Downey wasn’t deterred. After graduation, he got a job at Boeing and joined a team building the A160T “Hummingbird,” one of the first autonomous helicopters (pictured below). “During that timeframe, I started to hear from a lot of companies who were looking for UAVs that could address commercial applications and inexpensively collect, manage and analyze aerial information,” Downey says.

After flying for the commercial airline, Downey started Airware in 2011. Instead of building drones for a single task, Airware says its integrated platform can be easily customized for a variety of missions. It includes autonomous flight control and ground control software, which connect to compatible sensors and payloads.

The platform streams the collected data to a cloud platform for storage, analysis, reporting and distribution. Customers can use the technology on Airware-enabled vehicles made by partners like Delta Drone and Cyber Technology, or install the system on their own vehicles. The standardized approach also allows Airware’s clients to automatically meet safety standards and regulations.

The platform also works with third-party hardware like multi-spectral cameras, transponders and image processing software, and operators can control and track the drones from a handheld device. Says Downey: “Our technology makes this ecosystem work.”

Not too long ago, passenger jets were made mostly from aluminum and steel. But over the last two decades, they started putting on  lighter frocks made from high-tech materials called composite. Airbus’ latest plane, the A350 “Extra Wide Body” jet, is perhaps the most fashion-forward aircraft in this space. More than half of the plane’s airframe and skin is made from composite.

Some of those composite parts are being manufactured at a GE factory in Hamble-le-Rice near Southampton, England. The place has a rich history, having supported the world’s main aircraft manufacturers for over 78 years. But it also has an ambitious future. GE is building new composite facility in Hamble, as part of a $50 million investment focused on developing new composites manufacturing technologies.

Top image: A winglet of an Airbus A350 (above). Images credit: Joao Carlos Medau

A composite part looks like a high-tech sandwich with alternating layers of carbon fiber sheets and resin. It can be as strong as steel or aluminum but much lighter.

Traditionally, workers stack the layers at a workstation and move the part to an industrial pressure cooker called an autoclave.  They fill the autoclave with inert nitrogen gas and apply heat and pressure to “cure” the part. The pressure squeezes out air bubbles from voids between the layers and the heat makes it tough.

 The new method used by workers at Hamble partially skips the pressure cooker step and allows workers to speed up production. (It’s actually called out-of-autoclave.) They use vacuum to suck out air bubbles between the layers before they toughen the part up with heat.

 The A350 XWB is the first civilian plane with parts made by this new method. John Savage, a principal engineer at GE Aviation, called it  “a major technological breakthrough” . He said that it would help GE meet “the demand for a rapid ramp up and high volume production.”

The new composite plant will open next year, but workers in Hamble are already making wing parts for the A350 XWB, including the longest version of the plane, the A350-1000, which is three quarters of a football field long from nose to tail and can ferry around 400 passengers.

 The components are part of the wing fixed trailing edge package. Each package comprises of some 3,000 items such as structural composite panels and complex machined parts.

 The Hamble plant is getting busy. The first A350 plane flew in 2013 and Airbus already has 750 orders.

Top image: Airbus, which assembles its aircraft  in Toulouse, France, expanded its oversize Beluga fleet to prepare for the A350 XWB production ramp-up. The Belugas transport aircraft parts to Toulouse from all over Europe. Image credit: Airbus

GE scientists are working on a wearable, high-resolution imaging “helmet” that would allow doctors to observe the brain on the cellular level. The portable device could also allow doctors to study motor activity in the brain, since patients will be able to move around as their brains are being imaged.

“If successful, this effort would represent a monumental advancement in imaging technology that will enhance the understanding of brain function both in normal and diseased states,” says Nadeem Ishaque, global technology director for diagnostics and biomedical technologies at GE Global Research (GRC).

The project is part of President Obama’s Brain Initiative, which he launched in April 2013. Its goals range from developing new ways to image the brain and study its function, to uncovering, treating and preventing brain disease and disorders like Alzheimer’s, autism and concussions.

In September, the National Institutes of Health announced that a group of businesses, universities, foundations and federal agencies would share $46 million from the program to “revolutionize our understanding of the human brain.”

The group includes GE,  as well as Google, the Simmons Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to The New York Times.

“The human brain is the most complicated biological structure in the known universe,” said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “We’ve only just scratched the surface in understanding how it works or, unfortunately, doesn’t quite work when disorders and disease occur.”

The “helmet” PET scanner will use a new class of detectors called silicon photo multipliers (right). They will replace bulky detectors currently used in PET scanners (left). Top image: The new detectors will allow scientists to build a lightweight, high-resolution, high-sensitivity scanner that fits around the head of the subject. Image credit: GE Global Research 

GE is developing the helmet in partnership with the West Virginia University, the University of Washington, and the University of California-Davis. It will use positron emission tomography (PET) to reach down to the level of individual cells, and look for misfolded proteins and other signs of neurological disorders. “Today, many important classes of neurons and glial cells remain undetectable by imaging techniques because of their very low concentration,” Ishaque says. “This device could help us understand how brain circuits and networks work, and how they are organized.”

Unlike X-ray scanners and MRI machines, which image physical structures like bones and organs, PET detectors study the body’s functions. Doctors first inject patients with special tracer molecules that attach themselves to target tissues. Since the tracers contain radioactive isotopes, physicians can listen for their signals and measure their distribution. “You can spot cancer cells dividing this way,” says Ravindra Manjeshwar, who runs the functional imaging laboratory at the GRC. Indeed, PET is now mostly used to monitor the spread of cancer and response to cancer treatment.

But GE scientists have developed new classes of tracers that can zero in on neuroinflamation, which can be present during concussion, and amyloid plaque and tau proteins, which are thought to be associated with Alzheimer’s.

They plan to leverage the helmet’s super-sensitive hardware and software to reduce the amount of tracers needed for imaging. Ishaque says that such “micro-doses” would “reduce radiation exposure to patients to only about as much radiation as a cross-country flight, while still delivering high-resolution images.”

Manjeshwar says that the new technology could help scientists make “a quantum leap” in what they can detect in the brain. “We still know very little about the brain, and PET images are still very fuzzy and blobby,” he says. “But this technology could improve our molecular sensitivity by a couple of orders of magnitude.”

(GE is also pursuing brain research with the NFL as part of the Head Health Initiative. See here for more information.)

One day last year, Gary Sarkis brought to work a bee’s leg. The leg was part of his daughter’s science project and Sarkis, who builds scientific microscopes at GE Healthcare Life Sciences, wanted to take a look with a brand new imaging machine developed by him and his colleagues. “My daughter and I observed the leg at home with her toy microscope,” Sarkis said. “We spent a lot of quality time together moving it around and getting it in focus. But when we were done, we had nothing more to take away than the memory of what the bee’s leg looked like.”

A slice of the India rubber plant (Ficus elastica). Top image: A mosquito head.

The new machine, called Cytell, is a relatively inexpensive and intuitive imaging system that combines the microscope with the cell analyzer. It fits on a lab bench and allows researchers to quickly analyze and visualize routine samples, from insect limbs down to cells. “It’s similar to the point-and-shoot camera,” Sarkis says. “It helps take a lot of the microscopist out of getting the perfect shot. It wasn’t until Cytell that I felt I could spend 5 minutes on the microscope and get a great image that I could show my friends.”

An image of lingual papillae, hair-like structures located on the top of the tongue.

When Sarkis looked at his daughter’s sample in his lab with Cytell, “an amazingly detailed hairy leg popped right up on my computer screen,” he says. For fun, he also imaged the leg in fluorescent light and  saw that it was “very auto-flourescent,” and generated its own light.

Diatomaceous earth.

The colors added new details to the black and white hairy leg, and when Sarkis showed the photographs to his daughter, the response was predictable. “She wanted the machine for the home,” he says.

The bee leg that started it all.

It’s clear that Sarkis himself also caught the Cytell bug. After the first leg, he imaged the rest of his daughter’s collection with the machine. After that, he acquired more school samples on Ebay, sold by parents whose kids had lost interest.  “To me, these are hidden treasures which have led to some amazing images,” he says.

The leg of a praying mantis.

To date, Sarkis has taken over 2,000 pictures with Cytell and assembled a “best of” list (a sampling illustrates this story). He even put them on several water bottles and on his walls. “My wife turned a pair into canvas portraits to hang in our house,” he says.

A cross section of a pine needle.

Cytell, which is about a year old, builds on technology used by high-end instruments like the DeltaVision microscope and the IN Cell analyzer.

A cross-section of  bracken, a type of fern common in Ireland.

Sarkis says that Cytell is “essentially an automated hybrid of the microscope, the cell counter and the cytometer” (a device used for measuring cells). It has a tablet-like user interface powered by software that lets researchers quickly navigate its functions. “It allows them to simply set up very specific kinds of experiments and automatically receive data in the form of graphs, charts and reports to see if they worked,” he says. Even if they didn’t, they have pretty pictures to hang on their walls.

The proboscis of a mosquito.

A close-up of the Rhizopus fungus.

The tip of an onion root.

An ant’s head.

An image of a corn stem.

A mosquito larva.

An image of the Pittosporum glabratum plant.

A slice of the Tilia tree.

A bee’s mouth.

A mouse knuckle.

One of Sarkis’ water bottles.

Images courtesy of Gary Sarkis and GE Healthcare Life Sciences

Norman Rockwell didn’t invent Thanksgiving, but there are few things more American than his art. He put scenes from the lives of ordinary Americans on covers of The Saturday Evening Post, once the most widely circulated magazine in the U.S., and painted portraits of American presidents. Today, his paintings hang in the White House and many museums.

Seven Rockwell oil paintings are also on display at GE Lighting’s Nela Park historical campus in East Cleveland, Ohio. GE’s Edison Light Works commissioned the paintings, which range in style from Dutch masters to impressionism, for a 1920s advertising campaign.

What a Difference Light Makes - 1925. Top image: Good Housekeeping - 1925

These are no ordinary Rockwells. They captured Americans discovering the electric light and putting it in their homes. Michael J. P. Collins, former president of the Rockwell Society of America, wrote that the “Light Campaign marked a major turning point in [Rockwell’s] career. It required something more of him than mere talent: to capture the profound change which the new electric light brought to American life, he had to explore its impact on a whole range of traditional family activities.”

GE founder Thomas Edison had invented the first practical incandescent light bulb four decades earlier at the Menlo Park Laboratory in NewJersey. It used a carbonized bamboo filament and lasted 600 hours. (Things have changed since. Users can control GE’s new Link LED light bulb, which it makes in partnership with Quirky, from their smartphones. Its lifetime is more than 22 years.)

All Right with the Light – 1921

GE used Rockwell’s Light Campaign series as advertising art in magazines like the Post, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and as calendar art. “In the 1920s and 1930s, most of the light bulb dealers were electrical shops that specialized in all kinds of appliances and lighting fixtures,” says Mary Beth Gotti, who manages GE’s Lighting Institute in Ohio. “GE provided them with merchandising materials including signs, display stands, posters, blotters – and calendars.  These calendars featured the works of many noted artists, including Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish.”

Old Man Playing Solitaire - 1921

GE’s Rockwell collection was initially twice its present size, but the company had given some of the paintings away as retirement gifts to executives.

The practice ended in the 1960s. Today, everyone can enjoy online the company of another artist: Jeff Goldblum.

Grandpa’s Treasure Chest - 1920

What a Protection Electric Light is - 1925

And The Symbol of Welcome is Light - 1920

Image credits: GE Lighting Institute

Tetranychus urticae, also known as the red spider mite, loves to feast on flowers, and especially roses. But this dietary preference makes it also the flower farmer’s favorite enemy. Although many farmers are using pesticides to kill the mites, the Gorge Farm in Kenya will soon start deploying a homegrown weapon of choice: bugs that eat the spider mite for lunch.

The good bugs will breed inside a nearby greenhouse that will be kept cozy with excess heat from a unique new power plant serving the farm. “We’re rethinking the whole agriculture-energy nexus,” says Mike Mason, chairman of Tropical Power, the company that built the plant. “Gorge Farm’s system is the first step in that process.”

A plant infested with red spider mites. Image credit: Aleksey Gnilenkov Top image: A close-up image of a red spider mite. Image credit: Giles San Martin

The biological pest control is not the only unusual feature of the power plant, whose beating heart is made from two GE Jenbacher gas engines. (They came from Clarke Energy, the global distributor for the Jenbachers.) The engine also burn biogas made from the farm’s agricultural waste and helps the farm manufacture fertilizer from dead plant matter. In a country with a patchy grid and frequent power outages, the Jenbachers will supply the 1,730-acre farm with enough reliable, off-grid power to ship 50 tons of flowers and vegetables to European markets every night.

Gorge Farm is located outside the town of Naivasha, some 60 miles northwest of Nairobi. When the power plant comes on-line in the next few weeks, its output will likely exceed the farm’s needs, make the farm fully energy-independent, and provide new revenues from selling surplus electricity and hot water to the grid and its neighbors.

GE’s Distributed Power business makes its Jenbacher engines in the Austrian Alpine town of Jenbach. Image credit: GE Distributed Power

At the core of the sustainable energy project, the largest of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa, is a huge metal gut called an anaerobic digester. It will consume the bulk of the 45,000 tons of plant material and other agricultural waste the farm produces every year.

Inside this industrial belly, bacteria and archaea will convert the waste into methane, which will then power two of Jenbacher J420 gas engines. They are specially equipped to burn biogas and produce together around 2.4 megawatts of electricity.

That amount of power is about double what the farm needs. It will sell excess power (approximately 1.2 megawatts) back into the national electric grid to help stabilize it and power up to 6,000 Kenyan homes.

The inside of a Jenbacher engine, which can burn a wide variety of fuels, from natural gas to landfill gas. Image credit: GE Distributed Power

There are other benefits as well. Along with methane, the anaerobic digester will convert plant matter into high quality natural liquid and solid fertilizers, which help displace synthetic options.

The gas engines can also recover waste heat generated by the burning of the biogas. The heat will produce a stream of hot water, a valuable commodity in the farm’s location some 2,000 feet above sea level.

Tropical Power’s Mason says the farm will pipe some of the hot water to a neighboring farm, where it will heat greenhouses growing Amblyseius californicus, a predatory mite used as a biological control against the red red spider mite.

Kenya’s Gorge Farm will soon start using off-grid electricity generated from biogas by GE engines. Image credit: Gorge Farm

“This power system brings a new dimension to agriculture because it doesn’t just produce food,” Mason says. “It also produces electricity, heat, fertilizer, compost and, indirectly, pest control for the crops growing in the field. All of these benefits are coming off the land in a closed loop.”

George Njenga, business leader for GE’s Distributed Power in Sub Sahara Africa,  sees the impact of Tropical Power’s plant at the Gorge Farm reach far beyond farming. “It helps to power local businesses, hospitals and the mobile phone network,” he says. “It can make a real difference in people’s lives.”

The mind has a language of its own, and Jeff Ashe is trying to figure out what exactly it is saying.

Ashe and his team at GE Global Research in upstate New York are working with scientists, engineers, and physicians at Brown University to better understand the electrical signals generated by the brain’s neurons. The research could one day yield miniscule implants that could help patients regain lost body functions caused by traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, and disease.

“We’re looking at trying to decode the signals the brain sends and receives in controlling limb movement,” Ashe says. “If you can understand the brain’s language, you’ll be able to understand the nature of how one particular disease has affected a certain function.”

Worldwide, there are over 450 million people living with neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative illnesses. The costs of caring for 14 million Alzheimer’s victims will likely exceed $1 trillion in the US annually over the next 40 years.

Ashe, an electrical engineer, reached out to Brown because of the university’s decades-long experience with brain implants. His team is contributing expertise in microelectronics and non-invasive, wearable and wireless medical devices. “Our sensor designs will be tiny, and they will be able to record the electrical signals coming from the individual neurons,” Ashe says. “Being able to record and separate the signals from the individual neurons, we can then interpret the information the neurons are creating and the functions their circuits should be producing.”

A scientist works with a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) wafer in the cleanroom at GE Global Research in upstate N.Y.  GE innovations in micro-electronic design and fabrication has led to the development of tiny switches that could be a key component of implantable devices for the brain. Implants could benefit patients suffering from neurodegenerative disease as well as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and even depression. Image Credit: GE Global Research

Ashe believes that scientists are on the cusp of understanding how groups of neurons work together to control brain function. “We know a lot about individual neurons, how they function and how they carry electrical and chemical signals, but we don’t know how they are all interconnected,” Ashe says.

The team will develop sensors that will allow scientists to record more neurons from more parts of the brain than ever before. They strive to develop a more complete understanding of how the brain communicates and, ultimately, devise improved ways to correct lost function. “We want to take that outside the body via an external device that can mimic these signals and restore motor control,” Ashe says.

GE has been working with universities, hospitals as well as the National Football League to better understand the brain.

For example, GE and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai are developing technologies that blend neuroscience with new biomarkers and bio signatures. The objective is to eventually detect underlying cellular changes that lead to degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, so diagnoses happen earlier and treatments can be developed more effectively.

In March 2013, GE, the NFL and Under Armour launched a $40 million drive to speed diagnosis and improve treatment for mild traumatic brain injuries. It set aside as much as $20 million for two open innovation challenges. The winners of the first challenge, which looked at improving the diagnosis and prognosis of traumatic brain injuries, were announced in the January 2014. The  winners of the second challenge, who were exploring innovative ways for identifying and preventing brain injury, were announced last month.

Top Image: Diffusion tractography of the brain. Image Credit: Luca Marinelli, Ek Tsoon Tan, GE Global Research

Thomas Edison’s light bulb patent was 16 years old when his colleague and GE co-founder Elihu Thomson modified his electric lamp technology and developed an early X-ray machine that allowed doctors to diagnose bone fractures and locate “foreign objects in the body.” The machine, which Thomson built just one year after Wilhelm Roentgen discovered and tested X-rays on his wife, launched GE into the healthcare business.

Elihu Thomson’s X-ray machine from 1896. Image Credit: GE. Top Image: The latest GE imaging systems like the Revolution CT can produce detailed images of the vascular system. Image Credit: GE Healthcare.

Today, GE Healthcare, which generated $18 billion in 2013 revenues, makes everything from magnetic resonance imaging machines (MRIs) to "4D" ultrasound scanners, super-resolution microscopes and bioreactors. Some of the technology is currently on display at the 100^th annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), the industry’s “Grand Slam” gathering and tradeshow drawing some 55,000 visitors and exhibitors every year. GE is the only company that attended the inaugural meeting in 1914 and also the centennial this week.

This year, GE arrived with a new 3D mammography system called SenoClaire. 3D breast screening technology helps clinicians uncover small cancers, which can be a limiting factor in standard 2D mammography. There is also no increase in dose from a 2D standard mammogram to a 3D view, which means there is no increased radiation to patients during a SenoClaire breast exam.

A Revolution CT machine produced this image of a shoulder with multiple screws. Image credit: GE Healthcare

The company also brought its fast Revolution CT machine, which can image the heart in just one heartbeat. The system uses high-resolution and motion correcting technology similar to the image stabilization features in personal cameras. The blend of speed and clarity allows doctors to retrieve sharper images with higher resolution at lower radiation doses.

These machines draw on decades of research and commercial development starting with Thomson’s fluoroscope, the world’s first commercially available X-ray machine. In 1932, GE’s Irving Langmuir won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work that led to early coronary artery imaging. In 1973, his colleague Ivar Giaever received the Nobel Prize in Physics for research that led to the first GE MRI machine a decade later.

GE also employed Charles Gros and  Emile Gabbay, who in the 1960s developed a mammography machine and an X-ray tube that made it possible to image soft tissue with higher resolution.

Take a look at GE’s medical imaging history:

An Edison X-ray ad from 1897. Image credit: GE

GE’s William Coolidge invented what is considered the modern X-ray tube. He also developed an early portable X-ray machine. Coolidge’s X-ray machine (shown here in 1918) was used in military hospitals during World War I. Image credit: GE

In 1939, GE medical scanners produced X-ray images of mummies for the New York World’s Fair (above). Image courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Nobel winner Ivar Giaever poses with his superconductive tunneling experiment. Image credit: GE

John Schenck (standing) and Bill Edelstein  testing an early GE MRI machine in 1983. Image credit: GE Global Research

Trifon Laskaris sliced the MRI machine in half. The design allowed doctors to perform brain surgery inside.

Workers at GE labs in Brazil, China, Hungary, Japan, Korea and the United States have imaged 100 everyday objects with X-rays, computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This MRI of a pineapple was one result. Image credit: GE Healthcare

This image shows complex patterns of connectivity of the human cortex measured in vivo with MRI via diffusion of water molecules in axons in the white matter. The colors depict average directional anisotropy of white matter voxels (fractional anisotropy of a diffusion tensor model) -  blue: more anisotropic, yellow: less anisotropic. The data was acquired and processed on a GE MRI scanner at 3 Tesla  (MR750), using diffusion spectrum imagingaccelerated with compressed sensing, a technique developed at GE Global Research. Image Credit: Luca Marinelli, Ek Tsoon Tan

Diffusion tractography of the brain, displaying some of the long white matter bundles (red: left-right, green: anterior-posterior, blue: head-foot).  Visible are the cortico-spinal tract fanning out in the corona radiata (blue/purple), the long cortico-cortical association bundles (green), and ponto-cerebellar fibers (orange/red). The data was acquired and processed on a GE MRI scanner at 3 Tesla (MR750), using diffusion spectrum imaging accelerated with compressed sensing, a technique developed at GE Global Research. Image Credit: Luca Marinelli, Ek Tsoon Tan

In 1965, French radiologist Charles Gros built the first X-ray machine dedicated to screening breasts and effectively launched mammography as a viable breast cancer test. The machine, which was built by Thomson CGR, used a special X-ray tube developed by his colleague Emile Gabbay. It was made from molybdenum and emitted low-energy radiation that produced uniform images and contrast that allowed doctors to see breast tissue in greater detail.

GE acquired Thomson CGR in 1987, and mammography machines that followed Gros’  original “Senographe” device remain the standard of care for breast cancer screening. 

But they can’t see everything. Some 40 percent of women in the U.S. have what physicians call “dense breast tissue,” which can mask the visibility of tumors on a traditional mammogram. “Breast density is almost the perfect storm,” says Dr. Rachel Brem, a radiology professor and director of breast imaging at the George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “You can be perky-dense or you can be saggy-dense, it’s really only something that you can see on the mammogram.”

Brem says that women with dense breasts have a “substantially higher risk of developing breast cancer.” She says that mammography can help clinicians find breast cancer in 85 percent of women, but in women who have dense breast tissue a third of breast cancers are not seen. “Although imperfect, mammography resulted in a 30 percent decrease in breast cancer,” Brem says. “We are trying to improve the imperfections.” 

The U.S. Federal Drug Administration recently approved two GE systems that complement traditional mammography machines. The automated breast ultrasound exam (ABUS) has become the first technology for screening women with dense breasts approved by the FDA. While both dense breast tissue and cancer appear white on a mammogram, ultrasound displays tumors as dark (see image below). It’s also faster. Compared to a traditional ultrasound test, which takes about 20 minutes, a technician can complete an ABUS exam in approximately 15 minutes.

A comparison of a mammography image (right) and ABUS images (top and bottom on the left). Photo credit: GE Healthcare

The other system, SenoClaire*, is a low-dose, 3D X-ray system that allows doctors to image the breast in 1 millimeter slices (see top image), inspect each, and potentially reduce the amount of false positives. It uses the same amount of radiation like a traditional 2D mammogram.

Both Dr. Jacob and Dr. Brem were discussing breast health during an online Google Hangout organized by GE Healthcare and held at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago on Monday. They were joined by Dr. Kathy Schilling, medical director for breast imaging and intervention at the Center for Breast Care at the Boca Raton Community Hospital.

Schilling said that the new technologies complement mammography and allow doctors to be more effective in detecting breast cancer early. Her hospital is using an algorithm that weighs risk factors such as personal and family history, age, breast density and others to pick the best screening protocol. “It’s all about personalized care,” she said.

For her part, Brem believes that technologies like automated breast ultrasound, 3Dmammography  bring breast cancer screening “on the threshold of an incredible exciting stage.” 

*Trademark of General Electric Company

The father of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz, once wondered whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. He called the possibility the Butterfly Effect.

Scientists at GE Global Research have also butterflies on their minds. But rather than studying tornadoes in Texas, they are looking the wings themselves and their chaos of colors.

Radislav Potyrailo, the principal scientist who leads the program, and his team are using the science of the very small, nanotechnology, and the science of light, called photonics, to mimic the properties of the jagged, forest-like scales on the wings of butterflies from the Morpho genus. The scales’  complex interplay with light gives the wings their vibrant blue and green sheen.

Top and above: Scientists at GE Global Research imaged Morpho butterfly wings with an electron scanning microscope. Image credit: GE Global Research

Researchers have observed that Morpho wings change their color when they come into contact with heat, gases and chemicals. Potyrailo’s team wants to know why and use their findings to develop fast, ultra-sensitive thermal and chemical imaging sensors. They could have applications in night vision goggles, super-sensitive surveillance cameras, handheld and wearable medical diagnostic devices, and even everyday objects.

Morpho butterfly wings change their natural color (A) after exposure to ethanol (top B) and toluene (bottom B). Image credit: GE Global Research

The idea of imitating nature and cribbing its most successful ideas is called biomimetics. Swiss engineer George de Mestro invented Velcro after his dog came home covered with thistle burrs, Speedo learned from sharkskin to make faster swimsuits, and chemical companies designed self-cleaning paint after studying lotus leaves.

Image credit: GE Global Research

The GE team started by looking at Morpho wings with a powerful electron scanning microscope. They saw a layer of tiny scales just tens of micrometers across. In turn, each of the scales had arrays of ridges a few hundred nanometers wide (see above). These complex structures absorb and bend light and give the butterflies their trademark shimmering coat.

The team found that when infrared radiation, i.e. heat, hits the wing, the nanostructures on the wing warm up and expand, causing iridescence and color to change.

Morpho butterfly wings could inspire the next generation of thermal imaging sensors. Image credit: GE Global Research

 Working with DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced research projects arm, the scientists discovered that the nanostructures were also behind the Morpho’s “extraordinary vapor-response selectivity,” says Potyrailo.

Detectors based on the team’s research could one day they help doctors create visual heat maps of internal organs, assess wound healing, test food and water safety, monitor power plant emissions and detect explosives. 

“These future nano-fabricated, bio-inspired sensors should provide an enhanced response to heat and chemicals,” Potyrailo says. “We could use them to detect smaller levels of medical, environmental, or homeland security problems, and act on these early signs.”

He says that “depending on application scenarios, the sensors could be stationary or mobile, and inside handheld and wearable devices. They could be woven into sports apparel or embedded in industrial protective clothing.”

Scientists at GE Global Research discovered that the nanostructures on the wing scales of Morpho butterflies have excellent sensing capabilities. They could allow them to build sensors that can detect heat and also as many as 1,000 different chemicals. Image credit: GE Global Research

Meanwhile, the team is already improving on evolution. They added tiny carbon nanotubes to the wings, and were able to increase the amount of radiation the wings can absorb and increase their heat sensitivity.

“This new class of thermal imaging sensors promises significant improvements over existing detectors in their image quality, speed, sensitivity, size, power requirements and cost,” Potyrailo says.

He and his team are starting to untangle the chaos of colors.

The scales’  complex interplay with light gives the wings their iridescent sheen. Image credit: GE Global Research

Treating an infectious disease like the Ebola virus is fraught with dangers for both victims and their caretakers. Ebola’s fatality rate can reach 70 percent and an errant drop of blood, vomit or other bodily fluid can turn a nurse or a doctor into a patient.

That’s why engineers and technologists started looking for ways that would allow hospital staff to limit their exposure to the virus when treating the sick.  

“If you look at the intensive care unit environment, there is danger to health care workers just entering the room,” says Dr. Julian M. Goldman, MD, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, and the medical director of Partners Biomedical Engineering. “Ventilators currently require a worker to come in to adjust them, and the same goes for infusion pumps. That means personnel are exposed to danger while they also have to take valuable time to be properly outfitted in protective gear.”

Scanning electron micrograph of Ebola virus budding from the surface of a VERO cell (African green monkey kidney epithelial cell line). Top image: Colorized scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles (green) attached to and budding from a chronically infected VERO E6 cell (blue) (25,000x magnification). Images credit: NIAID

 In October, Goldman, who also heads MGH’s Medical Device Plug-and-Play program (it’s seeking to develop an interoperability platform that can connect different hospital devices) received a call from a White House official. Medical personnel safety is a national issue and the Obama administration is working on a better national strategy to address infectious disease, including looking for ways to improve treatment and diminish transmission risk to health care workers.

 Goldman decided to hold a “hack-a-thon” seminar at his hospital where researchers, engineers and representatives from industry, the government, regulatory agencies such as the FDA, and other organizations could participate in a challenge aimed at protecting health care workers from Ebola and improving patient outcomes.

Technologists from companies like GE Healthcare, Qualcomm, Intel and others brought ideas and equipment to Boston in early November. Over the course of three days, in response to the challenge, they devised software code, modified existing medical devices, and presented hospital robots. (GE Foundation is also supporting efforts to fight Ebola at the source, in rural villages in Liberia and Sierra Leone.)

Some figured out how to take data from patient monitors and analyze them to see if a patient’s condition is improving or worsening. Others retooled ventilators and drug pumps so a doctor or nurse could monitor and adjust the devices from outside the room, a major deviation for devices that are normally blocked from two-way communication for safety concerns.

“Many companies had never worked together, and in three days they had working, interoperating prototypes,” Goldman says. “They were surprised at how much they could work together to make new things when their technologists got together in the same room.”

Dr. Goldman, center above the mannequin, at the hack-a-thon. Image credit: Massachusetts General Hospital

The participants said that the work done over the three days could outline the future of technologies used inside the intensive care unit.

Mike Foulis, the anesthesia products manager for GE Healthcare, says his company’s therapeutic devices are currently walled off from the outside world for security purposes.

The reality of how devices and protocols are evolving, he says, means they will need to investigate expanding access to hospital networks for remote control and data analysis.

Goldman says this future is the Medical Internet of Things, where connected machines and instruments talk to each other and Big Data analytics could make health care much more effective and efficient.

At the end of the hack-a-thon, GE Healthcare showed a standard ventilator that had been reworked to be monitored and adjusted remotely through a cable and display that could be positioned outside a patient’s room.

“We took one of our existing devices, connected one of our test tools to it, and developed a makeshift remote control,” says Tim Knor, a lead software engineer at GE Healthcare who took part in the Boston event.

“This was a demonstration prototype was developed solely in response to this hack-a-thon challenge, of course, and not how we’d actually implement any potential solution,” Knor says. “But we proved that it may be achievable.”

Says Knor: “I’ve never done something like this—interacting with different companies and seeing what they’re figuring out to fix the problem.”

‘Tis the season when shoppers flock to online deal sites and use their price comparison software to hunt for the best bargains. They are not alone. Shipping companies could soon start using similar algorithms to cheaply and efficiently charge their electric trucks to get those same orders delivered.

A recent pilot project in New York City looked for an intelligent way to charge large numbers of electric delivery trucks at the lowest cost without straining the local grid and infrastructure. “The price and demand for electricity goes up and down, and our software is using diverse streams of data to help to fill the valleys and smooth the peaks,” says Jigar Shah, a controls engineer at GE Global Research who contributed to the system’s architecture, design and algorithms.

Top Image: FedEx’s electric delivery trucks. Above: Jigar Shah and his plug-in hybrid. Image credits: Jigar Shah

The project was funded by GE’s ecomagination program. It included Shah’s colleagues from GE Global Research, as well as scientists and engineers from the Columbia University Center for Computational Learning Systems, ConEdison and FedEx.

Switching trucks from diesel to electricity seems like a no-brainer. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that transportation accounts for 28 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and despite the recent drop in oil prices, fossil fuels remain pricey. GE estimates that driving an electric truck costs nearly 70 percent less per mile than burning diesel. But charge it at the wrong time, near peak load, and those savings could quickly vanish. Plug in a lot of EVs in the same garage at the same time, and your infrastructure will start to groan.

Sure, you can beef up your garage’s wiring and electrical systems with expensive upgrades. But you can also learn from data and get smarter with software.

The partners took the latter road. Their system combines elements of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and helps users figure how much electricity their EVs need and where and how fast they can get it without becoming stranded.

The system learns from huge amounts of data about electricity use such as grid load for the previous day and week, seasonal data about the time of the year and days of the week. It also ingests information about environmental factors like temperature, humidity and dew point. “You need to know all of this and more to correctly predict how much electricity your fleet will need,” Shah says. “Just look at the weather. I drive a plug-in hybrid and I run through my charge in the winter much faster than when it’s warm and dry.”

The data is processed in Columbia’s machine learning system and then travels to a series of GE software modules such as the EV profile builder and the power profile optimizer, which estimate the amounts of electricity available and needed to power the fleet now, but also in the near future.

The software checks the system every five minutes and can slow down or speed up charging, depending on current demand. “Our algorithms figure out the optimum peak power at which charging is allowed,” Shah says. “This minimizes the costly demand charges passed on by the utility.”

Shah says that without the system, a fleet of 12 or more electric trucks could start seeing its savings dwindle. But the new technology can preserve that 70 percent reduction in fuel costs up to 56 vehicles. The number could go even higher with more data coming in from the vehicles.

GE calculated that the system could save a fleet of 100 electric trucks $11,500 per month in electricity charges. “That’s on top of normal fuel and maintenance savings,” Shah says.

GE Global Research has already deployed a scaled-down version of the system around its headquarters in Niskayuna, N.Y. Shah and his colleagues are now working on a version that is more scalable and stores the data in the cloud. “You don’t need to install as much hardware at the customer location,” Shah says. “Anybody with fleet of EVs could use this.”

Santa, are you listening?

What is the most disruptive idea since the Wall Street Crash of 1929? Bloomberg Businessweek, which turned 85 this fall, picked one idea for every year it’s been publishing, and the jet engine soared to the top of the list, above “The Pill,” Google search, television, e-mail and microchips.

The first jet engines were built by Britain’s Frank Whittle and Germany’s Hans von Ohain in the 1930s. Like many important breakthroughs, including radar, GPS and the Internet, the jet engine started out as a military project powering experimental aircraft. The two jets that saw combat during the waning months of World War II were the Royal Air Force’s Gloster Meteor and the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt Me 262. (Sir Frank - he was knighted for his effort - and Von Ohain didn’t meet until 1966.)

A Messerschmitt Me 262 wearing American colors. Image credit: USAF

The jet engine really took off after the war. “By the 1960s this one invention had shrunk the world,” Bloomberg Businessweek wrote. “For the first time the entire surface of the planet was reachable—or at least viewable—and its wonders opened up.”

The Hush-Hush Boys with Sir Frank’s modified jet engine. Image credit: GE Aviation

A top-secret group of GE engineers called the Hush-Hush Boys, working in a small shack near Boston, did some of that shrinking. Starting in 1941, they re-engineered Sir Frank’s jet engine and used it to power America’s first military jet, the P-59 Airacomet. “We could only run it for a short while,” Joseph Sorota, one of the original Hush-Hush Boys, told GE Reports. “We took it apart, put it together again, and ran more tests. We went on with designing.”

The J79 engine, developed by GE in the 1950s, powered a number of military aircraft. GE later modified its design and used it as a gas turbine to generate electricity on ships and in remote locations. Image credit: GE Aviation

All that testing and research eventually led to GE’s J47 engine, which in 1947 became the first jet engine certified for commercial aviation in the U.S. It cost $340,000 in 2014 dollars. The list price of GE’s latest engines like the GEnx tops $20 million.

Engines must pass rigorous tests before they are certified to fly. GE used to test jet engines in icy conditions of top of Mt. Washington, N.H. Image credit: GE Aviation 

Top image and above: Today, engines like the GEnx power through ice, simulated blizzards and extreme cold at a new testing facility in Winnipeg, Canada. Image credits: Noah Kalina

In the 1960s, GE built the world’s first high-bypass turbofan engine, the grandfather of the GEnx and the vast majority of jet engines powering commercial aircraft around the world.

GE’s TF39 engine was the world’s first high-bypass turbofan. Most passenger jet engines today use similar design. Image credit: ILA-boy

Today, GE Aviation is a $22 billion business (2013 revenues). Every two seconds, a commercial jet powered by engines made by GE or its joint-venture partners takes off somewhere in the world. There are 34,000 GE commercial engines flying and 25,000 GE military engines in service.

The latest generation of GE jet engines, such as the GE9X, the largest jet engine ever built, have 3D printed parts and components made from new light and heat-resistant materials called ceramic matrix composites (CMCs).

But these are technologies for some future most disruptive idea list.

The new LEAP engine made by CFM International, a GE joint venture with France’s Safran (Snecma), has 3-D printed fuel nozzles and parts from CMCs. The engine’s unique design and materials make it 15 percent more fuel efficient than comparable CFM engines already powering thousands of Boeing and Airbus planes. Image credit: CFM International

The machines are talking, and the conversation is getting bigger and more complex. That’s why last October, GE said it would open to developers its new software platform for the Industrial Internet, called Predix. Today, the Japanese telecom giant and the country’s third largest mobile carrier, SoftBank Telecom, said it would take a license to build Predix apps for shipping, manufacturing and other industries.

SoftBank says there is a $12 billion data analytics market in Japan that can benefit from the apps. A revenue sharing agreement between the partners has the potential to yield $200 million over the next five years in Japan alone.

GE has spent more that $1 billion to launch its global software center in San Ramon, Calif. The company estimates that the convergence of machines, data and analytics will become a $200 billion global industry over the next three years.

GE, its customers, and partners like SoftBank will use Predix to capture a share of that market. “It’s more than just cool new technology,” says Bill Ruh, vice president of GE Global Software. “It’s a foundational platform for building the technology infrastructure of tomorrow. Imagine a world in which there is no unplanned downtime, a world in which you know with reasonable certainty when critical parts of a machine will fail, and you can replace those parts before they fail.”

GE believes that the Industrial Internet could add $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP in efficiency gains over the next two decades. That’s the about the current size of the U.S. economy.

Ruh says that Predix quickens the spread of the Industrial Internet, a digital network connecting, collecting and analyzing data from billions of sensors installed in locomotives, jet engines, blowout preventers and other intelligent machines. He says the software platform provides a stable environment for writing apps for these machine-to-machine networks, standardizes big data software development, and accelerates the “time to value” cycle. “Predix will allow SoftBank to write its own Industrial Internet applications,” Ruh says. “It will spare them the expense of reinventing the wheel.”

GE, which is already using Predix apps to monitor aircraft, power plants and railroads, expects to earn $1 billion in revenue from the platform this year. “A software platform becomes more powerful the more people use it,” says Dave Barlett, chief technology officer of GE Aviation. “GE will continue using it, but making it available externally will also allow our customers and business partners to write their own software and become more successful. We want Predix to become the Android or iOS of the machine world. We want it to become the language of the Industrial Internet.”

It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when GE still needed to sell the general public on the value of artificial illumination. So it made sense for the company to devote an episode of the General Electric Fantasy Hour to a show about a little reindeer who saves the day with his bright red nose. 

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, still a staple of holiday TV, was brought to the screen half a century ago by GE executive William Sahloff. He likely didn’t know that, just a couple of years earlier, a GE engineer had invented the red LED in the company’s labs.

Sahloff was the vice president of the company’s Housewares division and saw the TV special as a chance to hawk the company’s wares — note that the elves are wrapping up GE hair driers, vacuum cleaners, can openers and other household goods.

But he also wanted to promote the work of a friend.

Before he joined GE, Sahloff was a marketing executive with the mail order catalog Montgomery Ward. One of his copy writers, Robert May, came up with the Rudolph character and Sahloff started using him in Montgomery Ward’s Christmas brochures from 1939 until 1946.

The company also gave May a copyright to Rudolph and Sahloff encouraged the writer to promote the story in print and on records.

Rudolph’s big TV breakthrough came on December 6, 1964. Sahloff, who had moved to GE, created the Christmas Spectacular to celebrate the reindeer’s 25^th anniversary.

He was so adamant about the show’s potential that he convinced Rankin Bass, the show’s producer, to bump the General Electric College Bowl football game from prime time until after the premiere. The rest is history.

GE agreed to sell its appliances division to Electrolux this year. But like Rudolph’s nose, the company’s LEDs are shining bright.

For millennia, sick people swallowed simple chemicals to get better. From botanical remedies used by people in ancient Mesopotamia, to penicillin, most common drugs are built from molecules with a few dozen atoms that are relatively easy to make.

But a new class of medicines made from strings of complex proteins is now leading the charge against disease. They are called biologics, or biopharmaceuticals, and they comprise seven of the top ten best-selling drugs in 2013.

Their poster boy, the hormone insulin, was discovered in the pancreas a century ago. Its synthetic version is best known for treating diabetes, but drug companies have developed biologics that can be used to treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and other disease. The group also includes many vaccines.

Synthetic insulin was first made in the lab in the 1960s, and biologics have since become the fastest growing class of drugs. With a market size of about $100 billion, they account for a quarter of all spending on medicines. They are also hard to make.

That’s why earlier this year GE Healthcare Life Sciences acquired for $1 billion three subsidiaries of Thermo Fisher Scientific to boost its presence in the industry and round out its product portfolio (see video below). The $4 billion business (2013 revenues) is already making super-resolution microscopes that can observe how the HIV virus jumps between cells, and tools that help researchers hunt for genes in junk DNA.

“At GE Healthcare Life Sciences we help researchers with the discovery and manufacturing of new medicines and therapies, even going so far as building complete new factories for them,” says spokesman Conor McKechnie. “The acquisitions from Thermo Fisher allow us to be even better at helping drug companies bring new biologics to patients all around the world.”

Microscopes from GE Healthcare Life Sciences help researchers come up with new treatment. Top picture: An image of lingual papillae, hair-like structures located on the top of the tongue. Above: A close-up of the Rhizopus fungus. Image credit: GE Healthcare Life Sciences

Making biopharmaceuticals is not easy. Biotech companies do it by expressing snippets of DNA inside host cells. These cells live and multiply in special vessels called bioreactors.

“Because of that chemical and structural complexity, you need to invest a lot of effort in manufacturing,” says Nigel Darby, vice president of biotechnologies and chief technology officer at GE Healthcare Life Sciences. “Once you express your protein, it swims in a mixture of hundreds if not thousands of other proteins. Your second challenge is to find the incredibly complicated molecule and make it into a single, well-characterized pure product so that you get a safe drug.”

The GE unit makes the technologies that pull the right strands out of the protein soup, the “downstream” part of biopharmaceuticals production. The acquisitions from Thermo Fisher have helped it to boost its presence in the “upstream” part of the industry: developing and manufacturing the media and sera in which the cells grow, and aid with protein analysis and biomedical drug discovery.

“Traditionally, we’ve been absent from that upstream part of the market,” Darby says. “But over the last six years we’ve acquired a number of companies that work in bioreactor technology and cell culture. If you get everything right, offering the upstream and the downstream from a single technology portfolio will enable our customers to get their drugs to the patient in a quicker and more cost effective manner.”

A bank of GE bioreactors. Image credit: GE Healthcare Life Sciences

Darby says that biopharmaceuticals are “a very important class of molecules,” which is getting increasingly refined to hit precise targets in the body.

One new way to attack cancer has been antibody therapy, which mimics the immune system response and uses molecules precisely designed to hit cancer’s weak spots. “This is the story of increased refinement through molecular medicine, in terms of how you find targets, and the types of molecules you use to do it,” Darby says.

All of the largest pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Amgen, GFK and Merck, are already working in the field, in addition to many small and medium companies. Several bestselling drugs like Abbvie’s Humira for rheumatoid arthritis and Roche’s Herceptin for breast cancer are biopharmaceuticals.

 GE Healthcare Life Sciences employs 10,000 people in the U.S. and Europe. In 2013, the unit generated $1 billion in cash from $4 billion in revenues. Image credit: GE Healthcare Life Sciences

Darby is quick to stress that we should not think of biopharmaceuticals as medicines restricted to the US and European markets. “If you look today, some of the biggest sources of growth we see both in use and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and vaccines is in places like India, Korea, and China,” Darby says.

“There is a lot of vibrancy in terms of demand for these products from the growth markets. This correlates with the best growth opportunities.”

There are many luxuries that separate first class fliers from their fellow travelers going coach in the back of the plane, but in-flight entertainment isn’t one of them. The personal multiple-choice video screen standard on most long-haul flights has democratized the passenger deck and allowed anyone to binge on Big Bang Theory, European art house flicks, and video games. The same is true for Wi-Fi and personal power outlets.

They are the harbingers of the radical aircraft design changes taking place out of sight of travelers as well as most crew. Electrical motors and actuators have replaced wires, pulleys and hydraulics once required to fly the plane. They listen to digital commands coming from powerful on-board computers and avionics systems that monitor everything from the plane’s lavatories to its flight path, and help the pilots operate the aircraft. “The modern aircraft is part flying computer and part power plant,” says Vic Bonneau, president of electrical power systems at GE Aviation. “Not so long ago, we all watched the same movie on an overhead screen. But this big and growing appetite for electricity can be a challenge.”

 Top and above: Boeing’s 777X jet will use GE engines as well as avionics and power systems. The plane has power generators on each jet engine. There is also an auxiliary power unit in the back of the plane. Illustrations credit: Boeing

GE Aviation has spent the last two decades developing smarter, lighter and more efficient electrical and computer systems for military and passenger planes. The business unit just won a major order to supply electrical power technology and avionics systems to Boeing’s family of new 777X wide-body aircraft, which is currently in development.

Bonneau’s unit has developed a new electrical power system for the 777X that will handle 30 percent more power than the technology currently working on 777 planes, without taking more space or adding weight. Each 777X plane will also have two GE backup generators that will be able to produce nearly 80 percent more power than the current design. “The system can handle enough electricity to power 30 American homes,” Bonneau says. “That’s huge.”

Bonneau says that GE Aviation engineers working at two new research labs in Cheltenham, U.K., and Dayton, Ohio, used 3D printing to fast-track the development of prototypes for new circuit boards, and prove to Boeing that they would do the job and fit inside the plane.  He said that such rapid prototyping cuts development time from 18 months to just a few weeks. “We built these centers specifically for programs like the 777X,” Bonneau says. “They allow us to speed up design, and quickly test and mature new products.” 

GE spent a combined $80 million on the two research centers, which opened in 2012 and 2013. Bonneau says that the Ohio lab alone will employ 200 people by the end of next year, twice as many as originally projected. “The investment is paying off,” he says. “We already worry that we might run out of space.”

The order also includes the latest “common core” avionics system developed by another GE Aviation business called Avionics & Digital Systems. If Bonneau’s power system helps supply the plane with its lifeblood electricity, the avionics is the aircraft’s brain and central nervous system.

GE developed avionics for the F18 fighter jet, Image credit: GE Aviation

The “brain’s” open architecture allows Boeing to easily incorporate and upgrade software and technology developed by dozens of different suppliers. “This saves Boeing money and speeds things up when the plane maker wants to add a new feature or upgrade existing technology,” says GE’s avionics leader George Kiefer. “They don’t have to recertify the entire system with the [U.S. Federal Aviation Administration], but just the new addition.  With the 787 and now the 777X, we have made future aircraft programs more affordable by doing away with escalating software development costs.”

GE is supplying the “common core” system for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner planes, and similar technology for Gulfstream’s latest line of business jets.

GE Aviation, which booked $22 billion in 2013 revenues, is also developing a jet engine called GE9X to power the 777X. With 11 feet in fan diameter, it will be the largest jet engine ever built.

Although the 777X won’t enter service until the end of the decade, the plane has already become one of Boeing’s fastest-selling planes. Lufthansa, Etihad, Qatar, Emirates and Cathay Pacific have all already placed orders for the wide-body jet. GE has received orders and commitments for the GE9X engine valued at $26 billion (U.S. list price).

The 777X will enter service by the end of the decade.

Each December, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt gives investors insight into what the New Year will look like.

In some ways, it will resemble 2014. His goal is to keep steering the company to a place where 75 percent of earnings come from GE’s core industrial businesses and 25 percent from its financial arm, GE Capital. Over the last year, GE has advanced along this course by seeking to acquire the power and grid businesses from France’s Alstom, spinning off non-core assets like the retail finance unit Synchrony, and agreeing to sell its appliances business to Electrolux. (Just four years ago, about half of GE’s earnings came from GE Capital. Today, that figure stands at about 30 percent.)

Top image: GE’s Direct Write technology can print sensors directly on machine parts, collecting data that can be shared over the Industrial Internet. Above: GE Locomotives contain almost 7 miles of wiring. Image credits: GE

Immelt sees the strongest growth from GE businesses like Aviation, which builds jet engines and benefits from a global boom in travel, and Power & Water, focused on building out infrastructure in the developed world but also parts of Asia and Africa, where blackouts and no power at all are common. 

Despite the drop in oil prices, Immelt also sees long-term growth at GE’s Oil & Gas unit. The business has diversified beyond surface and subsea drilling  (about 40% of its portfolio) into compressors and turbines pushing oil through pipelines and technology boosting refinery production (60% percent of portfolio). This technology, unlike surface drilling, is less prone to cyclical changes.

The company is also building up its services business and expanding its software offerings for the Industrial Internet, connecting machines to machines and people. Today, the offerings monitor everything from blowout prevents to patient records.

GE has spent more that $1 billion to launch its global software center in San Ramon, Calif. The company estimates that the convergence of machines, data and analytics will become a $200 billion global industry over the next three years. GE, which is already using Predix apps to monitor aircraft, power plants and railroads, expects to earn $1 billion in revenue from the platform this year.

In December, GE licensed its Predix software platform to Japan’s Softbank Telecom. SoftBank says there is a $12 billion data analytics market in Japan that can benefit from the apps. A revenue sharing agreement between the partners has the potential to yield $200 million over the next five years in Japan alone.

Take a look at Immelt’s presentation to investors.

Click here to download.

Mark Frontera’s cellphone wouldn’t stop ringing. It was Thursday afternoon, Oct. 11, 2012, and the engineer was in a meeting with a manager. Whoever it was on the other end could wait, so he sent the caller to voicemail.

A moment passed, and again it rang. He looked at the caller ID. It was Tara, his wife. He excused himself and answered. He could hear the panic as her voice trembled in hysterics.

The pediatrician called with the results of an ultrasound taken earlier that day, Tara told him. The two of them must get to Albany Medical Center, she said.  A pediatric oncologist needed to speak with them immediately.

“Nothing rattles your cage like a phone call like that,” says Frontera, the manager of the High Energy Physics Laboratory at GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, N.Y.

With little else to go on, he rushed out of the building into a fall day and jumped into his Toyota Matrix. On the drive over, his head swam with what he might hear.

More than a month before, Frontera’s four-year-old son, Adam, had started to experience extreme pain when he walked. He woke up at night in agony because of the pain in  his stomach and bones. The family did their rounds with the doctors every week, hoping to find an answer to their boy’s unknown malady. At first, they thought it was the flu. Then they questioned whether Adam suffered from food allergies. The Fronteras grew more and more frustrated, finally compelling their physicians to do an ultrasound.

Now, on this cool, overcast Thursday, the Fronteras got their answer: Adam had a solid tumor sitting on his adrenal glands. “The mass was the size of a grapefruit in the body of this little 40 pound, four-year-old kid, if you can imagine,” Frontera says.  As well as the mass on his adrenal gland, the cancer had spread throughout his bones.

Top image: Mark Frontera with Adam. Above: The Fronteras in 2014 (Joshua, Tara, Adam, and Mark). Image credits: Ashley Brown Photography

Adam’s body was overtaken with stage IV high-risk neuroblastoma, a cancer that starts in the nervous system and occurs most often in infants and children younger than 10 years old. According to the American Cancer Society, there are roughly 700 new cases of neuroblastoma in the U.S. every year. The average age of children when they are diagnosed with the disease is one to two years old.

Struck with the news, Frontera felt an unusual sensation—helplessness. Engineers, after all, solve problems; they don’t get stuck in them. “It’s a life-changing moment—all of a sudden, you’re on a different life trajectory,” he says. “There’s a saying in this community that goes, ‘You’re not a parent of a kid with cancer until you are.’ You just don’t consider something like this until it’s you who is dealing with it.”

The survival rate for those like Adam in the high-risk group has risen from nearly certain death a few decades ago to around 50 percent today. While the word “luck” shouldn’t be used within 10 feet of a child suffering from his disease, at least Adam had the better fortune of being born in a time when he and his parents could nurture an ember of hope.

Within 48 hours of receiving the diagnosis, Adam’s doctors had him on chemotherapy. “That started a two-year journey that included a massive number of therapies, some still in clinical trials,” Frontera says. “The good thing is that there has been breakthrough after breakthrough in the last decade to fight this cancer.”

Those breakthroughs mean Adam might have a shot at beating neuroblastoma. Therapeutic cocktails countered the cancer’s advance and, slowly, sent it into remission. He officially ended treatment on August 28, 2014. Advanced imaging with X-rays and isotopic tracers found the disease before it was too late and now monitor Adam every three months for signs that it is still being held at bay.

It just so happens that Frontera is on the frontlines of improving one of the devices that is helping Adam survive. Since graduating with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 2002, he has been on a team improving an advanced medical imaging machine called a computed tomography (CT) scanner, which produces virtual slices of patient tissue using X-rays. When pieced together, these slices give doctors a three-dimensional look inside the body without performing surgery. The CT scanner that his manager’s team had developed several years ago was the one that diagnosed, monitored and helped doctors treat Adam’s cancer.

Frontera’s development group is now working to make a step change in diagnostic capabilities while also lowering the dose of radiation a patient must receive to get CT imagery. His work, he says, has taken on new urgency. His family’s private battle has not only changed everything in their personal lives, but has fundamentally altered how he looks at what he does for a living.

“Before Adam got diagnosed, of course I knew that these CT scanners we work on were important for people, but it was a very generic feeling,” he says. “But when you enter the world where your four-year-old is getting scanned every week, or you sit in the waiting room and see all these other families doing the same thing, you see it directly. You know these families and your own kid is counting on this machine.”

Adam, left, with his 8-year-old brother Joshua. Image credit: Ashley Brown Photography

Even though Adam, now 6, is cancer-free, the treatment course has been tough on him. The powerful drugs caused him to lose some of his hearing, and he now wears hearing aids in school.   The drugs made it unlikely that he’ll be able to have children.  His heart, kidney, and liver will be monitored closely to look for potential long term effects.  He also has problems with his teeth due to decay from the chemotherapy, though thankfully he hasn’t yet sprouted his adult set.

Adam’s parents are still holding their breath. The five-year survival rate of children with high-risk neuroblastoma hovers at 40 to 50 percent. Even if it stays away, six-year-old Adam will need to be monitored for recurrence for the rest of his life.

“Medical science has at least gotten to the point where kids like Adam have a chance. He’s now in the first grade,” says Frontera. “He sat in a hospital bed for two years, and now he’s making up for lost time—he’s got so much energy that we can’t keep pace with him. He’s a phenomenal little guy.”

Go to the family’s Facebook page, Aces For Adam, to keep up with Adam’s fight. The Fronteras are also raising funds to continue advanced research on neuroblastoma at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. 

A warehouse full of lettuce might not be the first place you would expect to find the next Industrial Revolution. But follow the LED lights and you’ll discover a glimpse of the future of agriculture — industrial-scale, indoor farming.

Advances in LED technology are helping to create an environment where vegetables can be produced at scale, with higher yields and shorter grow cycles, no matter what climate.

“There will be a revolution,” says Cary Mitchell, horticulture professor at Purdue University. “I think that in a decades time, LED will become the de facto lighting source for controlled-environment agriculture.”

Farming in a controlled environment, whether a greenhouse or warehouse, has long allowed growers to manipulate lighting, temperature and water to boost yields. What LED lighting brings to the equation is a cooler and more energy-efficient way to optimize conditions than the high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps traditionally found in greenhouses.

Top and above: Shigeharu Shimamura’s Mirai farm in Japan grows 10,000 heads of lettuce per day and sells them in local supermarkets. Image credit: GE Lighting

Mitchell’s team has found that LEDs can surpass 50 percent efficiency — converting about half of their energy into plant-usable light — versus just 30 percent for HPS lamps. That translates into significant energy savings: it cost four times more to produce the same amount of fruit with HPS lamps than LEDs.

“The fact that these [LED] emitters are so cool — literally cool — and you can put them so close, there’s a tremendous energy savings potential,” Mitchell says.

Enterprising Indoor Farmers

Shigeharu Shimamura was able to capitalize on such efficiencies when he converted a former Sony semiconductor factory into what might be the world’s largest indoor farm powered by LEDs. With the help of GE fixtures designed to emit light at wavelengths optimal for plant growth, he was able to achieve a 100-fold gain in productivity per square foot over outdoor farming for his lettuce crop.

“By effectively controlling photorespiration and photosynthesis, we not only control night and day, but also provide a better `sleeping’ environment for vegetable’s growth and increase the effectiveness of light,” Shimamura says.

Shimamura got his initial inspiration for launching the indoor farming company Mirai (“future” in Japanese) as a teenager, while visiting a “vegetable factory” at a world’s fair being held in Japan. The technology has come a long way since then, he says. “I believe this marks the beginning of agricultural industrialization.”

Indeed, a whole crop of indoor farming startups has emerged to reap the benefits of the technological revolution, with a focus as much on sustainability as productivity. Chicago-based FarmedHere and Green Sense Farms of Portage, Ind. — two of the largest indoor vertical farms in the U.S. — highlight their role in providing healthy local produce that also benefits the planet.

“With sustainable agriculture and trying to leave a much shallower carbon and environmental footprint, people want to start producing healthy food locally,” says Purdue’s Mitchell. “Bring local revenue in, make jobs available locally year-around and have a more flavorful, healthy product.”

Innovation-LED Farming

Still, many vertical farmers haven’t completely converted to LEDs given the price tag, he says, even if they can make up for some of the upfront cost with longer-term energy savings. The economics will likely become more attractive as the technology continues to advance, Mitchell predicts.

One key area of focus is in experimenting with bands of wavelengths — corresponding to different colors — to optimize growing conditions for different plants. Since LEDs produce light from narrow bands within the color spectrum, they can be manipulated to give plants a higher dose of, say, blue light.

“It’s kind of like we’re rediscovering the value of white light — putting back together the solar spectrum, but in a way we can manipulate the crop better,” says Mitchell.

For example, a team of University of Florida researchers is working on a set of LED-based prescriptions for different crops. Kevin Folta, chairman of the university’s horticultural sciences department, says the goal is that “every single plant will have a set of rules for light that will allow you to maximize the presence of the compounds you want.”

While LEDs focusing on specific wavebands aren’t yet cost-effective for commercial use, Mitchell expects growing demand for the technological benefits of the lighting to lead to a greater range of affordable options for indoor farming.

“When economies of scale get to a certain point and mass production starts bringing costs down, this will really catch on,” he says. “This isn’t a flash in the pan — there’s a real trend in this new industry of indoor agriculture.”

This story originally appeared on Ideas Lab.