Here’s an idea for a smarter business suit, if your business is fighting Ebola or some other deadly infectious disease.

The suit, designed by a team of experts, students and volunteers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., allows doctors, nurses and other medical workers to shed it in a few simple steps, and better protect themselves from infected blood, vomit, diarrhea and other bodily fluids. It also keeps them cooler and more comfortable, allowing them to work longer without needing to remove the garment.

“The reduction in the number of steps and their complexity was a key criteria for the suit,” says Richard Lamporte, vice president for development at Jhpiego [Jah-Pie-Go], a Johns Hopkins-affiliated nonprofit working on international health problems that was involved in the effort. “We are able to get it down from the average of 20 existing steps to at least seven, and as low as five.”

The Ebola epidemic has so far infected more than 18,600 people and killed 6,900. Among them were 649 healthcare workers who caught virus and 349 who died as of Dec. 14, according to the World Health Organization.

This hurts on multiple levels. Although all nations need more qualified health workers, the shortage is especially acute in West Africa. The medical personnel deaths mean that Ebola will likely leave its fingerprints on the region for years after the outbreak will have passed.

Ever since the world began mobilizing against Ebola earlier this year, responders have struggled with properly donning and doffing their personal protective equipment.

The new suit makes the process easier. Its hood, face shield and gloves are fully integrated into the rest of the suit. There is also an air intake system that reduces shield fogging and dries the air being sucked in to keep the wearer cooler. The suit has zippers that curl outward to help keep potentially contaminated outer surfaces away from the wearer, and tabs that help the wearer slip out of the garment more easily and without making contact with outer coverings.

Lamporte says that hood was one of the most important elements. “That’s the first thing that you want to take off,” he says. “There have been many iterations.  It is designed to allow workers to stay in the hot zone longer without the risk of fainting.”

The suit is made from Tychem, a heavy-duty version of DuPont’s Tyvek “house wrapping” material. It comes with a compression base layer made from a technical material that wicks moisture from the body and tricks it into sweating less. “This reduces dehydration, hopefully cutting the time it takes to recover from a 40 minute shift, which currently stands between 2 and 3 hours,” Lamporte says.

Existing suits, including models made in China, can cost around $30. Lamporte says Hopkins team aims to achieve a similar price range by using “frugal engineering” to achieve a combination of the lowest cost and the highest performance. It will help if workers will be able to use the suits longer and cut the number of times they need to change suits.

The cross-disciplinary team that designed the suit first got together in Baltimore in October to brainstorm innovations. It included engineers, medical and public health specialists, an architect and a fashion and costume designer.

The suit has already earned a spot among the five finalists of the “Grand Challenge” competition to fight Ebola organized by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The team will use USAID funding to move the prototype closer to mass production.

“If ever there was a public health crisis that merits the finest science, medicine and innovation the world has to offer, it is this one,” said Leslie Mancuso, Jhpiego’s head.

The GE Foundation has provided funding for Jhpiego, which is working with Hopkins’ CBID on projects related to Ebola. It is also supporting the suit development. The foundation is also backing other Ebola initiatives both in the U.S. and in Africa.

Click here for higher resolution.

GIFs created from Youtube video courtesy of Johns Hopkins University. Graphic courtesy of JHU.

When Sigmund Freud outlined his theory of the structure of the mind more than 100 years ago, he explored an unconscious part of the “ego” dealing with procedural memory.  Several neuroscientists and psychologists have since proposed that it might be this type of unconscious memory, which is concerned with habits and motor skills rather than survival instincts and conflicts like the unconscious “id,” that helps artists and other creative people come up with unusual, breakthrough solutions.

The neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel writes in his book The Age if Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain that “studies of voluntary action, decision making, and creativity… have led to a view of unconscious activity that is even richer and more varied than Freud could have imagined a century ago. What is more, as we understand the biology of conscious and unconscious processes better, we are likely, in the near future, to see further important advances in the dialogue between art and brain science.”

The rapper and producer Nas was perhaps verbalizing this interplay of the conscious and unconscious when he said recently that as a kid, he found rhythm in the bouncing of a ball or in the movement of washing machine. “Rhythm seemed to be a friend of mine,” Nas said. “It seemed to be kind of like a guide to measure things by. Whether it’s how many knocks someone does on the door, [or] how many steps it takes me to answer the door, it seemed like math.”

Nas talked about rhythm with neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and film director Adam Sjoberg. Their discussion is one segment of a four-part video collection called “Brilliant Rhythm.” The project, which explores the juncture of art and brain science, was commissioned by GE. It will be available online on the streaming platform Vevo, starting Dec. 24.

The collection includes the world premiere of Sjoberg’s short film called Shake the Dust. It features Nas as well as a collection of breakdancers and street dancers from around the world.

Another segment takes viewers “inside the head” of Greateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and explores his “brain on music.”

There is also a music video featuring an electronic track produced by DJ Matthew Dear, who built it from sampled sounds of GE machines and lab equipment. The “animation dancer” Marquese “Nonstop” Scott used the track to choreograph an original dance performance.

Gazzaley, who runs a cognitive neuroscience research lab at the University of California San Francisco, says that rhythm is the underlying principle of the whole universe. “Our brain activity oscillates and has its own natural rhythms,” he says. “It’s the core of how our brain operates, how we pay attention” and much more.

Don’t miss it!

Lighting the modern Christmas tree is an event infused with tradition as well as electricity. But it wasn’t always so. Going back centuries, people used wax candles to illuminate their pines, spruces and firs, with many a family keeping an emergency bucket of water at the ready.

The person who snuffed out their warm, flickering glow (and probably prevented plenty of house fires) was Thomas Edison, one of the world’s most prolific inventors. Keep him in mind as you struggle to untangle the lights from your tree’s brittle, needle-shedding branches in the coming weeks.

Electric Christmas lights probably prevented many holiday dramas. Image credit: The Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science.

The history of Edison’s Christmas lights goes back to the winter of 1880, when Edison strung a line of electric lights outside his Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey, enchanting travelers on passing trains. Just two years later, Edward H. Johnson, his partner in the Edison Illumination Company, hung the first string of 80 red, white and blue electric Christmas lights from a revolving tree in the parlor of his New York City home.

Top image: There are more than 60,000 LEDs on the 2014 National Christmas Tree at President’s Park in Washington, D.C. Photo credit: Paul Morigi for the National Park Foundation, 2014 National Christmas Tree Lighting. Above: A box of Christmas tree lights from 1905. Image credit: The Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science.

Electric lights ceased being a novelty item and became more mainstream in 1895, when President Grover Cleveland had the White House family Christmas tree decorated with hundreds of multi-colored electric light bulbs, for the first time. However, it wasn’t until 1903 that GE began selling pre-assembled kits of Christmas lights to the general public. By then, electricity got cheaper and more ubiquitous and the market for electric lighting took off.

President Coolidge at the first National Christmas Tree in 1923. Image credit: Library of Congress

The clincher that settled the matter arrived in 1923, when President Calvin Coolidge lit the first electric National Christmas tree in President’s Park in Washington, D.C. He started a tradition, but it wasn’t until 1963 that GE began providing lighting for the national tree every year.

 Christmas lights circa 1910. Image credit: The Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science.

Today, the tradition has remained pretty much unchanged, but the technology has evolved. GE now drapes the tree with LED lights, which have “roughly 80 percent energy savings compared to the incandescents,” says Jim Riccio, a senior facilities technician at GE’s global headquarters in Fairfield, CT.

There’s a spruce nearly identical to the National Christmas Tree growing outside the main entrance to GE’s Fairfield campus. Every fall, it provides Riccio and his team with the perfect testing ground for the lighting display in Washington.

For the past 15 years, Riccio and his colleagues have strung hundreds of thousands of Christmas lights on this tree. They begin setting up after Columbus Day, working for five to six weeks to hang tens of thousands LED lights, hundreds of feet of red ribbon, and a blizzard of snowflake ornaments on the tree, which is lit the Monday after Thanksgiving. The decorations weigh 1,000 pounds, and arrive from GE Lighting in Cleveland on three wooden packing skids in mid-October.

Just as Edison delighted passersby with his string of lights, crowds in Fairfield today come to see the display. “It’s a big community draw,” Riccio says. “You get folks out here driving by, taking pictures, even when I’m out working on it. The community really looks forward to it getting done.”

          Like most Americans, Riccio starts taking down the lights after the New Year, a process that takes about two weeks. The lights are then shipped back to Cleveland, and the team at Fairfield awaits the following October, when a newly designed lighting display will mark another year passing.

Not everything Thomas Edison touched became raging success. His “monster doll” turned out to be an outright dud.

In 1877, Edison made the first recording device that could play back sound, and from there it was just a short leap of imagination to the “talking doll.” The doll, which held inside its tin body a miniature phonograph, gave owners the option to listen to popular nursery rhymes. Unfortunately, the recordings also produced copious amounts of spooky crackling and hissing sounds. Even Edison called the dolls “little monsters.”

“To operate the doll you had to turn the crank by hand, turning at the perfect pace to keep the right count,” said Robin Rolfs, a collector of Edison dolls and co-author of “Phonograph Dolls & Toys.” Credit: Courtesy of Robin and Joan Rolfs.

Last year, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, recovered a 123-year-old recording of an unidentified woman reciting “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”. It was recorded on a foil cylinder tucked inside a doll, and has not been heard since Edison’s lifetime (listen below).

Edison’s doll factory. Credit: Courtesy of Robin and Joan Rolfs

The doll was reportedly a “dismal failure,” but the setback did not stop Edison from pursuing other spooky ideas. In 1920 he announced that he had been working on the “spirit phone.” In theory, the machine would allow callers to speak with dead people.

The news generated a lot of media attention, but he spirit phone never materialized. (The project may have been Edison’s prank on credulous reporters.)

Edison died a few years later, but it seems his playful spirit took permanent residence inside GE labs. During World War II, GE scientist James Wright and his team were working on a new kind of silicon rubber for the military when someone accidentally mislabeled a chemical bottle in their lab. The mistake resulted in a chemical reaction that led to a gooey compound that became known as Silly Putty, one of the most popular toys in history.

Unlike the monster doll, Silly Putty was a keeper. In 2001 it entered the National Toy Hall of Fame.

James Wright and his team at GE were working on a new kind of silicon rubber for the military when someone accidentally mislabeled a chemical bottle in their lab. The mistake resulted in a chemical reaction that led to a gooey compound that became known as Silly Putty.

2014 was in many respects a pivotal year for GE, in which the company delivered on plans to bulk up its industrial core and grow its services by connecting machines to the Industrial Internet. By 2016, GE plans to reap 75 percent of earnings from industrial businesses, with the rest coming from GE Capital, its financial arm. Here are the year’s milestones.

In February, GE launched new Distributed Power business. The unit is already helping companies, regions as well as entire countries move from reliance on centralized power to localized power generation. 

In March, GE Healthcare Life Sciences acquired for $1 billion three subsidiaries of Thermo Fisher Scientific to become a one-stop shop for development and manufacturing of biologics, the fastest growing segment of the drug industry.

In April, GE launched its largest acquisition in history, a $13.5 billion bid to acquire the thermal power, renewable energy and electricity grid businesses of the French engineering company Alstom. The deal, which was approved by Alstom’s shareholders in December, is expected to close in 2015. Alstom’s expertise in steam technology will allow GE to build more efficient combined-cycle power plants, and expand its installed turbine base by 35 percent. 

In July, GE sold to the public shares of Synchrony Financial, its North American retail finance business. “This is a good transaction for GE shareholders,” said Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO. “The IPO furthers our strategy to position GE Capital as a smaller, safer, specialty finance leader, and achieve 75 percent of our earnings from our Industrial businesses by 2016.”

In September, GE agreed to sell its Appliances division to Sweden’s Electrolux. Like the Alstom and Synchrony deals, the $3.3 billion all-cash sale was part of GE’s plan to center the company’s core around its industrial units.

In October, GE opened its Predix software platform for the Industrial Internet to software developers. In December, Japan’s SoftBank became the first company to license Predix. 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’s industrial businesses released a number of new products, including Harriet, the world’s largest most efficient gas turbine, the first locomotive that meets tough Tier 4 environmental standards, and the next-generation LEAP jet engine with 3D-printed parts, which GE makes in a joint-venture with France’s Snecma (Safran).

GE has also delivered on simplification and FastWorks, a set of tools and principles designed to transform GE culture into a leaner and faster company working close to customers. In 2014, the strategy yielded a new power plant for power-hungry Africa and other technology.

Looking out to 2015, Immelt told investors in December that he saw 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. Despite the drop in oil prices, Immelt also sees long-term growth at GE’s Oil & Gas unit.

Every year, GE sends dozens of talented photographers, filmmakers and visual artists to its labs and factories to document how it makes its machines, and to the field to show how they work.  Others comb through archives and look for forgotten visual gems. Below is a selection of some of 2014’s best images.

In 1964, Isaac Asimov took a trip to the GE pavilion at New York’s World’s Fair. He imagined what the world would look like in 2014 and got a few things right.

But Asimov didn’t think of a “4D” ultrasound machine. It can monitor the fetus in the mother’s belly with startling clarity in the three dimensions and over time. “In the past, you could see a flat two-dimensional image of the fetal profile,” says Barbara Del Prince, a global managing director for ultrasound products at GE Healthcare. “But today you can watch their movements in 3D, see a smile or a grimace, glimpse their personality.”

Forget the iron horse, here comes the iron snake. More than 180 GE locomotives are helping Rio Tinto haul iron ore across 900 miles of Western Australia’s Mars-like landscape to port. The trains weigh upwards of 26,000 tons and stretch 1.4 miles.

When a GE engineer met a boy who was missing a hand and whose family could not afford a prosthesis, he decided to build one for him.

Scientists at GE Global Research are developing magnetic resonance methods to image the brain’s white matter tissue and study the organ’s structural connectivity. (Also top image.)

When Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon, his boots were made from special silicon rubber developed by GE. The company decided to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the first manned moon landing last summer by launching a limited edition of a moon boot sneaker called The Missions. Aldrin tried them on, but this time on Earth. 

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. 

A Japanese farmer is using GE LED lights to illuminate an indoor farm where he grows 10,000 heads of lettuce per day. The idea could one day revolutionize agriculture.

U.S. and allies landed in Normandy 70 years ago this summer. GE’s “Copper Man" and electric blankets gave birth to a WWII high-altitude flying suit used by their comrades flying sorties over occupied France and Germany. GIF animation: Kevin Weir at flux machine.

GE scientists are using supercomputers normally employed to explore the birth of the universe to model fuel flow and design better fuel nozzles.

In the 1960s, GE set out to create Hardiman, a mechanical exoskeleton that could give its user the ability to lift up to 1,500 pounds. Unfortunately, the suit’s size, weight, stability and power-supply issues prevented it from ever leaving the laboratory. GIF animation: Kevin Weir at flux machine.

Spinning blades on a gas turbine at GE’s Greenville, SC, facility, where the company manufactures, tests and repairs gas turbines. 

A GE wind turbine starts up at the GDF Suez Energy site in Galati, Romania. This year, GE installed its 25,000th wind turbine.

At GE Global Research, a tube of almost pure quartz is heated to temperatures of around 1,700 degrees Celsius to create custom laboratory glassware.

GE scientists are developing superhydrophobic surfaces to keep ice off surfaces and equipment. The Slow Mo Guys captured this footage with their Phantom Flex camera on a trip to GE Global Research.

In the 1960s, GE engineers developed the Cybernetic Anthropmorophous Machine, or Walking Truck. In 1966, the US Army awarded GE a contract for building the experimental vehicle. However, its hand and foot controls not only fatigued operators, but were impractical for prolonged use on the battlefield, so the project was discontinued. Artist Kevin Weir reanimated the Walking Truck so the mechanical beast could gallop once more. GIF animation: Kevin Weir at flux machine.

In 2014, GE made the largest acquisition bid in its history when it made a binding offer to buy the thermal power, renewable energy and electricity grid businesses of the French engineering company Alstom for $13.5 billion. But this was not the first time the two companies met. In 1892, financier J.P. Morgan organized a merger between Thomas Edison’s Edison General Electric Company and Elihu Thomson’s (above) Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form GE. Thomson-Houston’s French subsidiary was also at the birth of Alstom.

This image of HeLa cancer cells, created for cancer research, was a finalists in GE Healthcare’s cell imaging competition.

"Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless." - Thomas Edison 

GIF animation: Kevin Weir at flux machine.

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When GE opened its first research center in 1900, it employed three people and fit inside a barn behind the chief engineer’s house in Schenectady, N.Y.

It burned down a year later.

The lab then relocated to “safer premises” and become a dynamo, powering GE’s innovation, gathering thousands of patents and even employing several Nobel laureates. Today, the upstate New York lab is part of a global GE research network of some 3,000 scientists stretching from New York to Brazil, China, Germany, India, and China. Take a look at some of their projects that could one day shape the world.

Radislav Potyrailo, a principal scientist at GE Global Research, and his team are using the science of the very small, nanotechnology, and the science of light, photonics, to mimic the properties of the jagged, tree-like scales on the wings of butterflies from the Morpho genus (see top image). They want to use their findings to develop fast, ultra-sensitive thermal and chemical imaging sensors that could have applications in night vision goggles, super-sensitive surveillance cameras, and handheld and wearable medical diagnostic devices.

Potyrailo’s colleague Grigorii Soloveichik is working on electric flow batteries that could hold tens of kilowatt-hours of power. Besides cars, flow batteries could be used as backup power for wind farms and other renewable sources of energy, power entire neighborhoods, and also support the grid. “They can store energy from wind, for example, so power companies can use it when they need it,” Soloveichik says.

Engineer James Yang and his team are working on a technology called Direct Write, also known as 3D Inking. Big Data is the lifeblood of the Industrial Internet, and Direct Write allows machine designers to use special “inks” to print miniature data gathering sensors directly inside jet engines, gas turbines and other hot, harsh and hard to reach places. “We can use it to print sensors on 3D surfaces,” says Yang. “One day they could be anywhere.”

Not far from Schenectady, GE opened a new manufacturing and development facility exploring solid oxide fuel cell technology. Its fuel cells works like a battery, using a simple chemical reaction to unlock energy from hydrogen molecules abundant in natural gas and oxygen in ordinary air. The new system’s power generation efficiency can reach 65 percent, a holy grail of this technology. Its overall efficiency can grow even further: to 95 percent when the system is configured to capture waste heat produced by the process. “The cost challenges associated with the technology have stumped a lot of people for a long time,” says Johanna Wellington, advanced technology leader at GE Global Research and the head of GE’s fuel cell business. “But we made it work, and we made it work economically. It’s a game-changer.”

Sweat carries a trove of valuable information about how our bodies are feeling. Scientists at several labs are now trying to decode it with nanotechnology and develop flexible, Band-Aid-like wireless sensors sensitive enough to detect a single drop of biomolecules found in sweat in 2.5 million gallons of water (that’s enough to fill 50,000 bathtubs). The Air Force is interested in using the sensors to monitor pilots, and understand and improve their performance. But the technology could have much broader civilian applications. “Physical and mental fatigue is a factor for air traffic controllers, fire fighters, heavy-equipment operators, and many other professions,” says Scott Miller, lab manager for nanostructures and surfaces at GE Global Research.

Miller’s colleague Matt Webster is working on a universal calorie counter that could detect the amount of energy stored in any food. The GE team together with researchers at Baylor University’s Department Electrical and Computer Engineering is now testing the system on simple mixtures of oil, water and sugar. They have built a prototype, but the big prize is a push-button device that could be in every kitchen. One day the team could link the device with a smartphone app or a workout wristband.

GE is also working on machines that could study the brain in a greater detail. One group of researchers is looking at imaging the mobility of water molecules in the brain to better understand how the organ is wired, as well as the health and function of these connections, sort of a wiring diagram of the brain. In the future, medical scanners could be used to study diseases ranging from stroke to Alzheimer’s and clinical depression.

LED lights developed by engineers at GE Lighting could one day revolutionize agriculture and move farming indoors. One such farm is also working in Japan.

Scientists working in GE labs have developed tiny electrical switches thinner than a human hair that can transmit kilowatts of power. They are called micro-electro-mechanical systems, or MEMS. MEMS could help reduce waste heat and power consumption in medical devices, aviation systems and other industrial products. But the researchers are also working on miniaturized applications for smartphones and tablets using the next-generation LTE-Advanced, or “True 4G,” wireless standard. The new standard could allow users to receive data as fast as 3 gigabits per second, 10 times faster than existing 4G networks.

GE Ventures recently invested in Airware, a technology company developing a suite of hardware, software, and cloud services for commercial drone applications. 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,” says Jonathan Downey, founder and CEO of Airware. “This is something the industry as well as regulators have been asking for.”

GE researchers have used a special magnetic material to achieve temperatures cold enough to freeze water (and chill beer). The breakthrough system, which is projected to be 20 percent more efficient than current refrigeration technology, could be inside your fridge by the end of the decade. 

The system is using a water-based fluid flowing through a series of magnets to transfer heat, rather than a chemical refrigerant and a compressor. This significantly lowers any harm to the environment and makes the recycling of old refrigerators simpler. “This is a big deal,” says Venkat Venkatakrishnan, a leader of the research team. “We are on the cusp of the next refrigeration revolution.”

It’s not quite the North Pole, but the Christmas season seems to be always on at the Bridge of Don plant in Aberdeen, Scotland, where GE builds massive machines for subsea oil and gas exploration. That’s because workers at the plant make Christmas trees, an industry nickname for huge mechanical systems that control the flow of oil and gas from subsea wells.

The machines, which can weigh north of 100 tons, got their name because they come “decorated” with a variety of valves, spools, and fittings. But that’s where resemblance to any real Christmas tree ends. Painted bright yellow so they could be easily located in the sea bottom murk, each Christmas tree is precisely tailored for the specific site where it’s going to work. “Depending on the field, there will be different conditions, different temperatures, different pressures of gas or oil coming out,” says Graham Atkinson, Engineering, Procurement and Construction project director at GE Oil & Gas’ Bridge of Don facility.

Top image: A Christmas tree arrives for testing in Jandakot, Australia. Above: The machines are painted bright yellow so they could be easily located in the subsea murk. Image credits: GE Oil & Gas

Unlike their living room namesakes, workers in Aberdeen make subsea trees that last over two decades and work more than a mile under the surface of the ocean. They must handle operating temperatures ranging from freezing to nearly 350 degrees Fahrenheit. While the outside casings and structure are made from extremely strong steel, the insides hold extraordinarily precise components where the allowed deviation in size in some valves is just two microns.

The Scottish plant is currently working on a batch of 22 trees that will help control the flow of gas from the huge INPEX-operated Ichthys LNG Project in the Browse Basin located more than 120 miles off the coast of Western Australia.

Christmas trees will be part of subsea factories processing oil and gas on the ocean floor. Image credit: GE Oil & Gas

One cold and misty Scottish Saturday morning last September, workers at the GE plant dispatched the first of their trees for Australia. “Christmas trees are a common sight on the streets of Aberdeen,” Atkinson says. “But we’ve got to move them at unsociable hours, and only on the weekends, to make sure we don’t have too much traffic being disrupted.”

It took the team several hours to move the tree from the plant to the harbor and load it aboard of the Australia-bound MV Schokland.

Forty-three days later, the ship arrived in sunny Perth. By then, the tree had already gotten its first taste of the rough seas around the notoriously stormy Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. “You just can’t mitigate for bad weather,” Atkinson says.

Once in Australia, the Christmas tree traveled overland for testing to GE’s technology center in Jandakot, just south of Perth. First step was to position the multi-ton Christmas tree precisely on the bed of the truck. “I know it sounds silly, but as little as one degree off on the loading and the trees could have fallen over,” says Paul Iredale, regional logistics leader for GE Oil & Gas Australia.

GE equipped the Jandakot facility with special 20-foot-deep testing bunkers designed to mimic the intense operational pressures the Christmas trees will experience in the open ocean. “We test them up to operational pressures of 15,000 pounds per square inch,” said Martin Birse, a technician at the site. “That’s 500 times greater than a car tire, or 1,020 times greater than the pressure of air at sea level.”

The team at Jandakot will also customize each tree to suit the depth, water pressure and contours of the floor at the site the well where it will be working. “From the outside, the trees look similar, but they can be very different on the inside,” Birse says. “Once they’re in place, you don’t want to have to bring them back to the surface for repair.”

Subsea oil and gas deposits off the coast of Brazil exist in a world of extremes. They are locked more than four miles beneath the ocean’s surface, the same distance as 16 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. Layers of near freezing water, salt and rock squeeze them with pressure equal to six really big dinosaurs balanced on a single chair.

This unwelcoming world has long been off limits to humans, save the few brave souls who explore the watery depths in custom-built submarines. But that’s changing. Energy companies are planning to place entire industrial plants processing oil and gas on the seabed. These subsea robotic factories, serviced by remotely operated vehicles, could one day replace manned floating platforms, which are quite expensive to operate.

In November, when GE opened its new research center in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, anyone who came in got a chance to see what a subsea factory looks like from the comfort and safety of an armchair.

Researchers at the center will be working on deep sea technologies, and GE teamed up with virtual reality company Oculus Rift to design an immersive 3D virtual reality tour of one such installation.

The Oculus Rift headset looks like a pair of ski goggles with a really thick lens. When users put it on, they were whisked away into the pilot’s seat of the virtual Nautilus 1 submersible vessel. The submarine took them more then a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, above the oil deposits.

The subsea factory is a concept that might be difficult to grasp even for seasoned mariners, but the headset made it easy to understand. Users could watch an undersea rover working as it connected a deepwater Christmas tree - an assembly of valves and fittings attached to the seafloor that controls oil and gas flowing out of the Earth - to a manifold that directs the petroleum up to a floating platform above.

“The Oculus Rift experience provided an opportunity for us to take viewers into otherworldly territory that we wouldn’t normally be able to visit,” said Katrina Craigwell, GE’s head of global digital programming. “Traveling a mile down to the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Brazil, the experience highlights the extreme environment that subsea technology must withstand, and a vision for how a subsea factory will work in the future.” 

Quartz glassware is the secret ingredient to many scientific experiments. It handles heat and cold without cracking, remains inert to most chemicals and does not interact with light, a quality that makes it perfectly transparent. It doesn’t change shape and remains hard when cold, but becomes flexible when hot.

“Fused quartz implies crystals, but it’s a misnomer,” says Thomas McNulty, a material scientist at GE Global Research and a quartz expert. “Even though it has distinct properties like crystalline solids, the material is actually amorphous.”

McNulty says that producers manufacture fused quartz by heating ultra pure silica sand to temperatures exceeding 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than the melting point of steel. “The silica looks like bright, white beach sand,” McNulty says. “There are only a few places in the world where you can get it, including here in the U.S. in North Carolina.”

Because of the material’s high melting point, workers use furnaces made from tungsten and graphite. The resulting mass of fused quartz contains amorphous chains of pure silica molecules which give the material its prized properties. Like a faithful couple, “silicon and oxygen really like to be bonded to each other,” McNulty says. “Because they are so strongly bonded, they have low reactivity with most other elements.”

Fused quartz was recently used to produce one of the most perfect spheres made by humans. The sphere was part of a space experiment designed to measure spacetime curvature around Earth. Image Credit: NASA

McNulty says that the amorphous structure also allows the material to keep its shape even when it’s exposed to thermal shocks. Fused quartz’s so-called “thermal expansion coefficient” is 100 times smaller than in most metals. “You can keep one end cold and another hot and it won’t crack,” McNulty says.

Glass workers initially shape the material into tubes and other basic forms and ship them to labs for further processing. GE Global Research labs in upstate New York employ two full-time employees who shape the tubes into custom reactors for chemists, muffle tubes for clean room furnaces, beakers and other lab ware designed for specific experiments.

The wonder material does have an Achilles heel. “Anytime you nick its surface, it loses its mechanical properties rather quickly,” McNulty says. “It’s a technical, not structural material. We need lots and lots of tubes.”

That’s where Bill Jones (above) comes in. He has been making bespoke glassware at GE for 33 years. Jones straps the quartz tubes inside graphite chucks on a special glass lathe, heats them with a semi-circle of gas torches to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit where the materials becomes viscous like caramel, and shapes it with graphite paddles to the desired form. “There is no school for this,” McNulty says. “You learn it in the shop environment. It’s a bit of art.”

GIF credits: Chris New

Computed Tomography (CT) scanners are often the first imaging technology many patients encounter when doctors suspect serious disease or injury. The machines use a narrow beam of X-rays processed by a computer to create slices of the body and assemble them into detailed 3D images.

Top image:  A high-definition image of the skull and the Circle of Willis, which supplies blood to the brain. Above: A high-definition musculoskeletal image of a foot and ankle reinforced with plates and screws.

In 2013, GE introduced a new, superfast scanner called Revolution CT that allowed doctors to routinely obtain clear images of the beating heart, lungs, liver and other organs.

An image of the abdomen and the aorta.

Starting in September 2014, the West Kendall Baptist Hospital in Florida became the first medical facility in the U.S. to use the machine. Its combination of low-dose exposure, organ-wide coverage and motion correction technology allows doctors to reduce radiation and still obtain high-resolution images of blood vessels, soft tissue, organs and bones.

The whole aorta and kidneys.

The team at West Kendall Baptist Hospital recently completed the world’s first six-month clinical trial of the Revolution CT machine. Local doctors said they were able to diagnose even the most challenging cardiac patients with erratic or high heartbeats and reduce the radiation dose for pediatric patients.

“According to our physicians, patient feedback about their experience with the Revolution CT has been uniformly positive,” said West Kendall Baptist Hospital CEO Javier Hernández-Lichtl. “The advanced design definitely makes for a less intimidating, more comfortable patient experience, while yielding amazingly accurate and detailed images.”

A high-definition image of the skull and the Circle of Willis. 

The Revolution CT was developed by scientists and engineers at GE Healthcare and GE Global Research, who were working closely with physicians in the field. “A core component of our strategy at GE Healthcare is to partner with customers to understand their clinical and operational needs, and in turn develop next-generation technology that deliver the necessary outcomes,” said Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO, who came to West Kendall to see the results.

Take a look at some of the images obtained by the machine.

The Circle of Willis.

A high-definition image of the skull and the Circle of Willis. 

The skull and carotid arteries.

An image of the abdomen and pelvis.

The rib cage, the heart and the chest cavity. The Revolution CT can image the heart in a single heartbeat.

An image of the human heart with stents typically used to treat narrow or weak arteries.

The chest cavity with a side view of the heart.

The pelvis and the aorta.

The whole aorta and kidneys.

A high-definition musculoskeletal image of a foot with a screw.

A foot reinforced with screws.

Image Credits: GE Healthcare

The big unifying theme of this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has been the Internet of Things (IoT). From BMW’s self-driving car to Quirky’s and GE’s connected light bulbs, smart door locks and bells, and Wi-Fi tea pots, there were hundreds of exhibitors who presented their IoT-ready technology.

The IoT is ultimately about connecting devices to people, and allowing them to remotely control and monitor their thermostats, lighting, air conditioners and other appliances. 

But there’s another, arguably deeper change taking place: the Industrial Internet. It’s less about remote control and more about machine intelligence and allowing things like wind turbines, locomotives and jet engines to talk and understand each other. This dialogue will allow these “brilliant machines” to work better together, optimize production and reduce unplanned downtime.

Click on the infographic to explore the growth of the Industrial Internet.

GE has been developing Industrial Internet software and applications for several years, and spent more that $1 billion to launch its global software center in San Ramon, Calif.

Last fall, GE opened Predix, its software platform for the Industrial Internet, to outside developers like Japan’s SoftBank Telecom, which took the first license in December.

GE believes the Industrial Internet could add $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP in efficiency gains over the next two decades. The company also estimates that convergence of machines, data and analytics will become a $200 billion global industry over the next three years.

The Industrial Internet is already powering an American railroad as well as a South African platinum smelter. Take a look at a handful of examples.

American pipeline operators are investing up to $40 billion every year to maintain, modernize and expand their networks. Intelligent Pipeline Solution combines GE software and hardware with Accenture’s data integration expertise to allow customers to monitor their networks in almost real time and streamline their operations. 

GE engineers and scientists are working with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Southern California Edison on a software system that could simulate and control the grid in real time, and predict and reduce outages.

GE’s Mine Performance system is helping the South African platinum smelter Lomnin to monitor and evaluate production. The gathered data allowed Lonmin to increase throughput in the section that feeds the furnaces with raw material by 10 percent.

GE’s SeaLytics BOP Advisor allows drilling crews to monitor the health of the components of blowout preventers siting atop new subsea wells and determine how many cycles they have gone through, what needs to be fixed and when. “When there is a problem, the drilling contractor will know within seconds,” Judge says.

The acidic bowels of Yellowstone’s hot springs, roiling subsea volcanic vents, and many other deadly and inhospitable places hide colonies of microorganisms that have for centuries eluded scientists. The microbes are now helping researchers shed light on the very beginning of life on Earth, and improve everything from gold extraction and sewage treatment to cancer drugs.

Biologists had long believed that all life evolved from just two types of organisms differentiated by their cells: eukaryotes, creatures like plants and animals whose cells contain a nucleus and membrane-enclosed mitochondria, and bacteria, which have neither mitochondria nor a membrane surrounding their genetic material. But in 1977, American microbiologist Carl Woese discovered that one subset of heat- and salt-tolerant bacteria was actually a “third domain” of life. He called this group archaea.

Scientists now estimate that archaea, which flourish in temperatures approaching 180 degrees Fahrenheit, make up to 20 percent of the Earth’s biomass. But they are only beginning to reveal their secrets.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Technology Sydney’s ithree institute have just published a paper in the journal Nature, illuminating some of evolution’s early steps 2.5 billion years ago. “Archaea and bacteria joined forces early in evolution, resulting in all other complex life we see around us today,” says Iain Duggin, a researcher at the ithree institute.

Top image: Hot springs like Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring have colonies of heat-loving archaea bacteria living in their bowels. Image credit: Jim Peaco, National Park Service Above:  Dr. Iain Duggin

Dr. Duggin and his team studied a strain of salt-tolerant archaea from the Dead Sea. “Contrary to its name, the place is actually teeming with life,” he laughs.

They were looking for similarities between proteins produced by eukaryotes and archaea. “We were retracing steps taken by evolution,” Dr. Duggin says. “We wanted to know why the function of certain proteins was conserved.”

The team identified and then deleted individual genes one by one, and observed what happened. “It’s reverse genetics,” Duggin says. 

They soon noticed that some genes affected the microbe’s ability to control its shape by changing from a disc to a tube. But Dr. Duggin wanted to dig deeper and document the physical changes taking place inside the microbe.

His archaea were tiny, no more than 2 microns across, 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Their innards are basically invisible. The team attacked the problem with the Delta Vision OMX super-resolution microscope from GE Healthcare Life Sciences. The device can observe living organisms in 3D even beyond Ernst Abbe’s diffraction barrier, which for a long time stood as the final frontier for microscopic resolution. “The microscope allowed us to see inside the walls,” Dr. Duggin says. “We were able to resolve details we couldn’t see before.”

Super-resolution microscopy (3D-SIM) illuminates the CetZ protein in archaeal cells. The CetZ protein concentrates in areas on the envelope of the cell, revealing its outline. The cells are approximately 2 microns wide, yet the location of CetZ at different regions on the cell envelop can be resolved with remarkable clarity compared with diffraction-limited microscopy. Image credit: Dr. Iain Duggin

The team studied the family of proteins, called CetZ, and found that they act  like a miniature skeletal system for the archaea cells to control their shape and movement. This “cytoskeleton” allows the cells to transform itself from a plate shape into a torpedo-like structure for faster swimming. The research suggests that this feature did not evolve with more complex organisms, but may have been inherited from archaea.

This is not just some idle journey into the past. The team wrote that CetZ is “related to a protein in humans that is the target of several major cancer treatments and, in bacteria, the related protein is crucial for cell division and multiplication.”

The human protein is called tubulin and the bacterial version’s name is FtsZ. “While tubulin is a key target in cancer drug development, we believe that FtsZ could be an important target for the development of new antibiotics, potentially enabling the design of anti-infective drugs that inhibit bacterial cell division and growth, with fewer side effects,” Dr. Duggin says.

CetZ molecules stick together in a regular pattern to form sheets inside cells. This appears to provide a scaffolding to control cell shape. Remarkably, the overall structure of this sheet is the same in archaeal and human tubulin proteins. Image credit: Dr. Iain Duggin

The archaeal proteins could also illuminate an even older protein ancestor of the tubulin-FtsZ “superfamily” common to the microbial ancestor of all life, including archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes.

Archaea are most likely one of the oldest life forms on Earth. The organisms can survive in extreme cold, heat and salinity, and exist in the soil, sewage, oceans and even oil wells. They make up an estimated 10 percent of the microbial population found within the human gut and are also responsible for biological methane produced by cattle, a major greenhouse gas.

Professor Ian Charles, director of the ithree institute, said in a news release that it was crucial to better understand the function of archaea in nature, and to potentially exploit their properties for industrial and medical applications. “A new type of potentially useful antibiotic called Archaeocin has recently been described that is derived from the archaea,” Charles said. ”Archaea provide an untapped source of novel compounds at a time when alternatives are urgently needed given the rapid rise of resistance to existing antibiotics.”

When the Czech writer Karel Capek started working on his science fiction play R.U.R., he asked his brother Josef what he should call the human-like machines at the center of the play. Josef, who was a poet, thought of robota, the Czech word for forced labor, and told Karel to call them robots.

Since Josef Capek coined it in 1920, robot has become one of the hottest words in any language that adopted it. Yet despite all the talk about robotics, robots today can automate only a small fraction - about 5 percent - of the dull, monotonous work they could be used for. “There are robots welding cars and helping with other repetitive tasks, but manufacturers still can’t economically or practically automate most tasks in an assembly line,” says Jim Lawton, chief marketing officer of Rethink Robotics.

Baxter at work at Du-Co Ceramics. Image credit: Rethink Robotics

Rethink Robotics and Baxter, its smart collaborative robot that can easily work with humans and adapt to real-world variability and imperfections, want to change that reality. “We want to help companies build the factories of the future by revolutionizing how automation is deployed and freeing workers to use their minds for more interesting work,” Lawton says.

Baxter got several big backers last week. GE Ventures, GE’s venture capital arm, Goldman Sachs, Bezos Expeditions and a group of other big names have invested $26.6 million in the company to fund new research and growth. This new investment round brings the company’s total funding to more than $100 million since it was founded by the Australian roboticist, iRobot co-founder and former MIT professor Rodney Brooks in 2008.

"Advanced manufacturing is an important area of focus for GE, both as an investor and a manufacturer,” says GE Ventures CEO Sue Siegel. “Rethink Robotics is paving the way for a new era of manufacturing in which robots work safely with humans and help companies to improve their production."

Manufacturing robots aren’t typically the friendliest of fellows. Powerful electromechanical arms lift, spin and weld partially built car bodies. Precise robotic lathes and drills effortlessly transform metal blocks into complex parts. It’s an awe-inspiring thing to see a modern automated manufacturing facility in full swing. There’s only one thing—don’t get in the robots’ way or you could be seriously injured .

That’s why Rethink Robotics introduced Baxter in 2012. Baxter is leading a new category of smart, collaborative robots designed to safely and intelligently work right next to people. “Freeing the robot from its cage was just the beginning of a major leap forward in how manufacturers use automation,” Lawton says.

Baxter at work at Walnut Creek Planing. Image credit: Rethink Robotics

The real breakthrough with Baxter lies in how it tackles tasks. The red robot is 3 feet tall without its pedestal and weighs some 165 pounds. Workers can wheel it around the shop to where it is needed. Baxter has two agile arms and animated eyes, which indicate to nearby humans where it is working. When one of its two swinging arms encounters and unexpected object, say a person’s hand, the machine immediately stops moving.

Unlike traditional robots, it learns by training, not by programming. Workers can switch Baxter’s arms to a “zero G” mode (see below), grab the robot by its wrists and simulate the task Baxter will be doing. “The team at Rethink Robotics really simplified the human-machine interface so anyone can program the robot,” says Roland Menassa, the Advanced Manufacturing Center leader at GE Global Research. “This is fundamental for advanced, flexible manufacturing. With Baxter, automation can be as re-deployable as sending an email.”

A working a training Baxter to perform a new task. Image credit: Rethink Robotics

GE is exploring Baxter’s applications in healthcare. But there are already hundreds of them working in American factories. Menassa says that the majority of repetitive assembly line jobs are composed of tasks that add little value. “People are walking back and forth to grab parts and put them inside a product,” he says. “With Baxter stepping in, they can apply their brain and their time to more useful and interesting work.”

One company that already embraced Baxter is Vanguard Plastics Corp., a family-owned custom injection plastics company with 30 employees based in Connecticut. The robot’s job is simple and mind-numbing. It picks up plastic medicine cups coming from injection molders on a conveyor belt and drops them into a bagger.

Baxter is helping workers at Praxis Packaging box products. Image credit: Rethink Robotics

Baxter has bagged over 800,000 cups in a month and a half, but he could be soon helping out elsewhere. “You can teach somebody to program Baxter in about 15 minutes,” says Chris Budnick, Vanguard’s president.

GE’s Menassa says that the ease of programming combined with Baxter’s mobility allows manufacturers, from mom-and-pops to GE, to embrace advanced, automated manufacturing and quickly retool and react to market demand. “Baxter allows you to introduce automation at a very low entry point,” he says. “If a traditional big robot that is bolted to the floor fails, the whole system stops. But if Baxter fails, a human can step in and you never incur downtime.”

Vanguard’s Budnick says that advanced manufacturing is key to his company’s future. Most of Vanguard’s human workforce has been around for more than 10 years. “I have a personal responsibility that we continue to exist and that they have jobs,” he says. “If we are not driving our productivity, our jobs will be taken by Asia or Mexico.”

Mildred Martinez, Vanguard’s shipping manager, says that when she “saw Baxter for the first time, I got scared. I said, oh my God, this robot is going to take away an operator.  But after I worked with him, I said well, maybe he is going to help us.”

Eight hundred thousand cups later, Martinez doesn’t see Baxter as a robot. “I see him as a person,” she says. “I feel good with Baxter here, I’m very happy. He’s doing a good job.” 

Wild elephant grass, also know as Napier grass, is one of those wonder plants that needs little water and few nutrients to produce copious crops on fallow lands. Since it can be used for grazing, it has allowed farmers from Africa to Asia to amp up food supplies for their cattle herds.

But Philippine farmers in Bacolor, Pampanga, just north of the capital Manila, have now gone a step further. They are using the grass to produce renewable electricity for their meat factory. “Everything we need is on-hand,” says Bacolor Mayor Jomar Hizon.

The town has plenty of land to graze cattle and grow grass, but its processed meat factory, Pampanga’s Best, needs electricity. Hizon says that that the grass-powered power plant is “like a three-point shot.”

Top: Philippine farmers are harvesting elephant grass. Above: GE’s Jenbacher gas engine fits inside the green shipping container. Image credits: Advanced Energy Technologies

The sod growing in Pampanga is the so-called “Super Napier” grass, which is packed with energy. It can produce several crops per year and local experts estimate that an area smaller than a fifth of New York’s Central Park, or about 150 acres, could yield 1 megawatt in grass power per day. “The Philippines is a very appropriate place for a project such as this, where we have farmers in one community, and a power plant a few kilometers away that can provide up to perhaps 10 megawatts,” says West Stewart, managing director of Advanced Energy Technologies, which builds distributed power plants across southeast Asia.  Stewart says that the elephant grass power plant could help power towns and villages facing electricity shortages and lacking links to the electric grid.

The farmers, of course, are not burning the grass itself. That would be too inefficient. They “gassify” the cellulose in the grass blades by exposing it to very high heat, and break it down into energy-rich synthetic gas, or syngas, which contains methane, hydrogen and carbon monoxide. They use the syngas as fuel for massive Jenbacher gas engines, which GE manufactures in Austria. “This can be replicated in other areas in the country,” says John Alcordo, GE’s regional general manager for Distributed Power in ASEAN. “We believe that in an island grid such as [in Bacolor], and in a land where feedstock for biomass gasification can grow well, the opportunities will be significant.”

Jenbacher gas engines are omnivorous machines. They do not actually ingest waste, as shown in this illustration, but burn biogas produced by the waste. Image credit: GE

The shift to distributed power is the latest trend in energy generation and distribution, akin to going from landlines to cell phones, a move that revolutionized telecommunications two decades ago. It gives people and businesses predictable and reliable access to electricity, regardless of whether the grid is working or whether it reaches their town.

GE’s Distributed Power business, the company’s newest unit, has already rolled out dozens of similar Jenbacher applications around the world. The gas engines are munching on everything from cheese whey and whisky mash to discarded school lunches and rice hulls.

Click here to download.

The revolutionary year of 1848 brought political unrest to many European capitals. But the Old World was out of synch in a more fundamental way: cities, towns and villages all had ornate clock towers but their clocks didn’t show the same time. What time was it in Vienna when it was midnight in Berlin? Not even the Kaiser knew.

“Finding local time on the spot was a matter of watching the sky, then setting a clock by the moment when the sun passed its highest point,” writes Peter Gallison in his book Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps. It was not until the arrival of telegraph and train time that clocks started beating in unison.

In Bern, Switzerland, the old train station was one of the first buildings in the city to have coordinated clocks. It stood across the street from the patent office where an employee named Albert Einstein was trying to answer a cosmic question that had nothing to do with intellectual property: When we say that two events happen at the same time, what does it actually mean? The answer eventually led him to his general theory of relativity.

Synchronization has since expanded from town clocks and train schedules to many other industries. One of the latest to embrace both precise time keeping and relativity is power distribution. “When it comes to the modern grid, timing is everything,” says Rich Hunt, senior product manager at GE Digital Energy. “Without it relays would trip and power lines could go out.”

The grid is now getting digitized and connected to the Industrial Internet to better predict outages and improve maintenance. But there’s a hitch. The digital signals controlling grid get slightly delayed by the network’s hardware and, like Einstein’s trains, don’t arrive exactly at the same time.

In the past, companies used expensive and complex analog copper wire systems to deal with the problem. But GE engineers now found a clever way to turn the digital network that’s causing the delays into the solution.

Like Einstein, they are “accounting for the relativistic effects of the network,” Hunt says. “We time-stamp the signals as they leave the control room. The devices at their destination have their own clocks. They use the stamps to figure out the delays and account for it. We are essentially synchronizing their clocks over the network.”

The system can do this because the devices on the network use clocks connected to the Global Positioning System (GPS). They can be synchronized to 100 millionths of a second, or 100 nanoseconds. That’s well within the accuracy requirements.

Which brings us back to Einstein again. GPS satellites fly so high and fast that their clocks run slightly slower compared to ours and we must include relativity to make the system work. Without Einstein, GPS would give readings that are off the mark by as much as 7 miles a day. Many drivers, hikers and transmission towers would quickly get lost.

“Our industry may be the last adopter of the technology,” Hunts says. “But with the GPS clocks, we can make synchronous real-time remote measurements of multiple points on the grid.”

Center Image: The universe as Einstein saw it. This illustration, which is based on data provided by a NASA supercomputer, shows a three-dimensional simulation of merging black holes. The simulation provides the foundation to explore the universe in an entirely new way, through the detection of gravitational waves. Image credits: NASA

One of the biggest headlines coming out of this week’s 2015 Detroit Auto Show was GM’s Chevrolet Bolt, a long-range, all-electric concept car that can travel 200 miles on a single charge and will reportedly cost around $30,000, after rebates. That range is nipping at the wheels of Tesla’s Model S sedans, but at half the price. (Though Tesla’s more affordable Model 3 could cost less.)  GM says the Bolt’s lithium-ion battery could reach 80 percent charge in less than 45 minutes with DC fast-charging technology.

The car also echoes one of the big themes of last week’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where seemingly every device was connected to the Internet of Things. The Bolt Connect app will allow drivers to tell their Bolts to park themselves and then summon them to their location when they are done running errands, Batmobile-style.

Top image: Chevrolet Bolt concept car. Image credit: GM Above: QUANT e-sportlimousine. Image credit: nanoFlowcell

If the Bolt represents the new affordable end of the EV spectrum, nanoFlowcell’s QUANT e-Sportlimousine stands for the electric car industry’s luxury future. The company will bring the latest version of the car, the QUANT F, to the 2015 Geneva Motor Show, which starts in March. The QUANT’s projected range is between 250 and 370 miles, and the car can go as fast as 236 mph.

Rather than using lithium-ion batteries, the vehicle carries energy-dense electrolytic fluids that course through an innovative flow cell. The cell converts the charge stored in the electrolytes into electricity that powers the car. One benefit of such “flow battery” design is that it allows drivers to quickly recharge by replacing spent electrolytes in the holding tanks, like pumping gasoline at a filling station.

GE is also working on a version of the flow battery. “The QUANT’s driving range certainly turns heads,” said Grigorii Soloveichik, a chemist who has been developing water-based flow batteries at GE Global Research. Dr. Soloveichik, who published a piece on flow batteries in the journal Nature last year, said the technology excels in safety and reusability, among other things. The positively and negatively charged electrolytes are stored in separate tanks in the car and come into close proximity only during power generation. This reduces the chance of fire. 

GE scientists also have their eyes on the big picture. Dr. Soloveichik told GE Reports that flow batteries could hold “tens of kilowatt-hours and up” of energy, since it is the size of the tank that determines how much power the batteries can store. Besides cars, flow batteries could be used as backup power for commercial and residential systems, store electricity from renewable sources of energy, and also support the power grid. “They can store energy from wind, for example, so power companies can use it when they need it,” Dr. Soloveichik said.

Where does the human end and the machine begin? In the era of neuroprosthetics, tiny electronic devices embedded in the body that stimulate the brain and other parts of the nervous system to improve their function, this question may soon get harder to answer.

Last week, for example, researchers at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, introduced a flexible neural implant that delivers electric and chemical pokes directly to the nervous system. In early trials, it allowed paralyzed rats to walk again with fewer side effects than other treatments.

The device, called e-Dura, is made from a material that mimics the dura matter, the thick membrane that protects the brain and the spinal cord. It could become the first long-term neuroprosthetic implant that could stay inside the human body for as long as 10 years. “This opens up new therapeutic possibilities for patients suffering from neurological trauma or disorders, particularly individuals who have become paralyzed following spinal cord injury,” says Stéphanie Lacour, the electrical engineer who led the work. The research was reported last week in the journal Science.

The neural implant mimics the dura, flexible matter protecting the brain. Image credits: GIF created from an EPFL video.

Lacour is not alone exploring the limits of neuroprosthetics. “I’m encouraged by the work of Lacour and the opportunities for material science to help enable long-term viability” of implants, says Jeff Ashe, electrical engineer at GE Global Research who is involved in GE’s brain research. “One of the keys to future success of brain-machine interfaces is the ability for such devices to be compatible with the human body for decades or more.”

Ashe is working with neuroscientist John Donoghue and his team at Brown University on decoding the signals used by the brain to control the body. “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,” he says.

Implants could benefit patients with depression and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Image credit: GE Healthcare

The partners are developing tiny sensors that will be able to pickup electrical signals produced by individual neurons. He believes that scientists will soon know how groups of neurons work together to control brain function. “We want to take that outside the body via an external device that can mimic these signals and restore motor control,” Ashe told GE Reports.

The work is part of a broader push by GE to see the brain more clearly, which includes the company’s medical imaging as well as software and analytics businesses.

The global market for neuroprosthetics could reach $14 billion by 2020, growing at a compound annual rate of 15 percent, according to the data from Research and Markets. The fastest growing segments will include retinal implants, and devices helping patients manage symptoms of Parkinson’s, epilepsy and overactive bladder syndrome.

Research and Markets reported that a majority of patients with “debilitating” cognitive and psychological disorders were “unamenable to any form of treatment as first line (drug) and second line (invasive surgeries) treatments fail.” But neuroprosthetics offer a solution. 

A manufacturing robot is hardly chummy chap. Set off from its flesh-and-blood coworkers inside a safety cage, its powerful metal biceps easily lift, weld and shape massive machine parts. People can watch it in awe from a distance, but they better keep away or risk injury.

That’s why, despite the appeal robots have for the human imagination, the machines are still automating only a thin slice of the manufacturing process. “If we want to move on, we have to start asking different questions about automation,” says Jim Lawton, chief marketing officer of Rethink Robotics. His Boston-based company developed a fix for the problem: Baxter, a collaborative robot, or Cobot, which works with people. “We need to free robots from their cages,” Lawton says.

There are Baxters already working at a number of American factories. Images courtesy of Rethink Robotics.

That’s a message that appeals to Greg Heinz, who leads GE Healthcare’s Automation Center of Excellence in Waukesha, Wis. “This technology is a lower cost alternative to traditional fixed automation, which tends to be very expensive,” Heinz says. “It’s a new paradigm in manufacturing.”

 Last summer, Heinz organized a “Cobot Challenge” looking for applications that addressed what he calls the four Ds: dirty, difficult, dangerous, and dull tasks that could be done by robots like Baxter. “Using Baxter to complement human labor with scalable automation relieves operators from stressful and monotonous duties and frees them up to do higher level tasks,” he says.

Greg Heinz with a Baxter at GE Healthcare’s Advanced Manufacturing Center in Wisconsin. Image credit: Greg Heinz

Out of more that 30 ideas from over 20 GE Healthcare sites from around the world, Heinz picked four locations – one each in Sweden and China, and two in the U.S.  A GE factory in Wuxi, near Shanghai in China, for example, found a highly repetitive task on a production line making ultrasound probes. “The workers stand in a cell where they have to wear masks to protect themselves from fumes,” Heinz says. “They pick up the part, dip it in a chemical primer solution, dry it with a wind gun, and then place the finished part onto a tray. It’s the perfect place for a Cobot.” 

Rethink Robotic’s Lawton says Baxter is built for this kind of work. It’s different from common production robots because it combines easy movement-based learning with machine arms that mimic the “springiness” of the human version. These two qualities allow Baxter to recognize its position and adjust its grip as needed. “The robot interacts in a way that it doesn’t destroy anything,” Lawton says. When one of its swinging arms encounters an unexpected obstacle, say a person’s hand, the machine immediately stops moving. 

Baxter has three cameras, one in its head and two in its two arms, which constantly check their positions and the location of nearby objects. “The cameras make it possible for Baxter to work as a human does, completing tasks in spite of their variability,” Lawton says. “Just as humans are undeterred by imprecision, Baxter can pick up parts even if they are not exactly at the same place every time.”

Last fall, the GE team in Wuxi unpacked their Baxter, equipped it with custom-made 3D-printed grippers that fit snugly around the ultrasound probe, and started testing. The machine will allow the factory to re-deploy the operator, improve the quality of the process and speed up production.

In Sweden, meanwhile, Baxter will improve the handling of metal pump heads coming down a conveyor belt from a computerized milling machine. The pumps are made to work inside chromatographs, instruments that measure the presence of biomolecules and must meet high quality standards.

Deploying Baxter will allow the facility to shrink and streamline the production line from five to two steps, boost required product control to 100 percent without stopping the line, and eliminate potential health hazards. Where workers once needed to walk 164,000 feet per year to complete all the steps in producing the pump heads - the equivalent of finishing a marathon plus five extra miles - they will now cover only 60,000 feet, just over a third of the distance, with Baxter helping them out.

The trials have gone so well that GE Ventures, GE’s venture capital arm, invested in Rethink Robotics this January. Heinz, who works with a Baxter located at GE Healthcare’s Advanced Manufacturing Center in Wisconsin, is already looking for new jobs for the robot. For example, he and his team 3D-printed special grippers for Baxter that allowed the team to study long-term twist and wear of wires inside GE’s new Revolution CT scanner (see below). “We went through a couple of renditions of the gripper, and it only took me about 5 minutes to program the robot,” Heinz says. “There was no other easy way to do that.”

A new report released this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos estimates that members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will need to invest more than $7.6 trillion over the next 25 years to meet their energy policy goals, further reduce emissions and create a more sustainable system for producing electricity from renewables and cleaner fuels such as natural gas.

They will also need to invest heavily in modernizing, expanding and decentralizing their power grids to make them more robust and resilient. “The electricity sector is at a cross-roads,” says Julian Critchlow, partner at Bain & Company who co-wrote the Future of Electricity report. “We are entering a period of unprecedented investment to meet our energy policy goals, but decreasing returns and increasing risk are raising questions over future investment.” 

Top image: A GE wind turbine starts up at the GDF Suez Energy site in Galati, Romania. Image credit:  @seenewphoto. Above: GE is currently testing the world’s most powerful gas turbine. Image credit: GE Power & Water

The report calls for a coordinated effort by policymakers, regulators and businesses to ensure the power sector can continue to attract the investments needed to build a more secure, sustainable electricity sector. “This unprecedented transformation in the global power industry toward a low-carbon environment raises significant challenges for countries seeking to balance the need for sustainability, energy security and competitiveness,” says Steve Bolze, president and CEO of GE Power & Water and co-chair of the WEF Energy Utilities & Energy Technology community.  “Yet it also raises tremendous opportunities for investing in innovative technologies that can help bring about more sustainable economic growth for countries and a higher standard of living for their people.” (Read Bolze’s opinion piece here.)

For example, Europe’s industrial dynamo, Germany, will lose as much as fifth of its electricity generation capacity over the next decade as the country pulls the plug on nuclear reactors. A process called Energiewende will replace nuclear power with a combination of electricity from natural gas and renewables.

But it won’t be easy. Nuclear plants feed the electrical grid with crucial “base load power,” the minimum amount of electricity that must flow through the grid for the country to run. Unlike wind or solar electricity, which ebb and flow with the whims of the weather, base load power must remain reliable and always on. 

Innovation is playing a key role in the transition. The latest flexible gas turbines and gas engines are already converting natural gas into electricity at a low cost and allow operators to blend in intermittent renewable power like solar and wind power into the grid.

Big Data and the Industrial Internet will also allow utilities to boost efficiency. “Energy builds and supports modern economies, and is fundamental to our daily lives,” says Bolze. “We have an obligation to future generations to address the current limitations impacting the electricity sector, and provide a sound foundation for future economic investment, progress and quality of life improvements.”