Breaking news about smartphone screens, programmable virus-like particles that doctors could one day use to fight disease, and clothes with memory — if this week’s roundup of discoveries is any indication, science is clearly in fashion.

No Chip on Their Shoulder

What is it? Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a smart fabric that can store passcodes and visual information. A person wearing gloves with the material can control a smartphone with gestures — Minority Report-style.

Why does it matter?“This is a completely electronic-free design, which means you can iron the smart fabric or put it in the washer and dryer,” said Shyam Gollakota, associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and the senior author of the paper describing the material. “You can think of the fabric as a hard disk — you’re actually doing this data storage on the clothes you’re wearing.”

How does it work? The team rubbed a magnet against a piece of fabric woven with off-the-shelf conductive thread. This aligned the poles in the thread, “which can correspond to the 1s and 0s in digital data,” according to the university. The approach allowed them to store data as well as “visual information like letters or numbers” in the material. They were able to decode the information with a magnetometer embedded in a phone. “We are using something that already exists on a smartphone and uses almost no power, so the cost of reading this type of data is negligible,” Gollakota said. The team also created smart gloves that allowed them to control their smartphones with gestures. “With this system, we can easily interact with smart devices without having to constantly take it out of our pockets,” said Justin Chan, a doctoral student at the school and the study’s lead author.

Breaking News

Brittle mobile phone screens might soon be a thing of the past. Image credit: University of Sussex.

What is it? A crack team of researchers at the University of Sussex found a way to make smartphone touchscreens that are less brittle than ones currently used.

Why does it matter?Digital Trends reported that half of the world’s smartphone users have had a cracked screen at least once, and as many as a fifth of U.S. owners had a cracked screen at the same time in 2015. The university said that the approach was also cheaper and more environmentally friendly than existing methods of making glass screens for smartphones, which use an oxide of indium, a rare and “ecologically damaging metal.”

How does it work? The team combined a sheet of the wonder material graphene, made from a single layer of carbon atoms, with silver nanowires. “We float the graphene particles on the surface of water, then pick them up with a rubber stamp, a bit like a potato stamp, and lay it on top of the silver nanowire film in whatever pattern we like,” said University of Sussex professor Alan Dalton. “It would be relatively simple to combine silver nanowires and graphene in this way on a large scale using spraying machines and patterned rollers,” Dalton said. “This means that brittle mobile phone screens might soon be a thing of the past.”

Viral Coding

Top and above: An illustration of the bacteriophage virus that infects and replicates within a bacterium. Image and caption credits: Getty Images.

What is it? Scientists at the Universities of Leeds and York have created an artificial “code” from RNA molecules that allows them to control how viruses assemble themselves and “create virus-like particles.” The instructions, which researchers say are “even better than those found in nature,” could lead to new ways to treat cancer or prime the immune system to fight infections.

Why does it matter? The approach could allow scientists to create “something that looks like a virus” and use it to “trick” the immune system and prime it to “act immediately if it were to encounter a real infection,” according to Reidun Twarock, a mathematical biologist and professor at the University of York. They also could use it to build “Trojan horses” carrying therapeutic cargo. “Such particles have a wide range of potential applications, including in the production of synthetic vaccines and systems to deliver genes to specific cells,” said Peter Stockley, a biological chemist and professor at the University of Leeds.

How does it work? The team first cracked the “hidden code” many simple viruses use to produce the proteins they need as building blocks during self-assembly. Next, they used RNA molecules to write their own assembly instructions for new viral proteins and made artificial “virus-like” particles.

True Blue

Photonic textile could be used as a wearable phototherapy device for newborns suffering from jaundice. Image credit: EMPA.

What is it? Scientists at the Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Switzerland (EMPA) designed “illuminated pajamas” to help treat babies suffering from neonatal jaundice, one of the most common ailments affecting newborns.

Why does it matter? Some 60 percent of babies born at term and 80 percent born prematurely develop jaundice in the first week of life, according to a study published by the National Institutes of Health. Nurses typically remove the babies’ clothes, place them in incubators and illuminate them with blue light. This “phototherapy” helps eliminate the buildup up bilirubin in the blood, which can make the baby’s skin and eyes appear yellow. Pajamas made from illuminating fabric allow mothers to hold the babies in their arms during treatment. The team wrote that its “photonic textile could be then used as a wearable phototherapy device, allowing continuous treatment at home, in the presence of the mother or caregiver.”

How does it work? The team wove flexible optical fibers with a diameter of 160 microns, somewhat larger than a human hair, into a satin material. The blue light comes from battery-powered LEDs. “The photonic textiles woven in this manner can be made into a romper or a sleeping bag so the little patient is clothed, and can be held and fed,” EMPA wrote in a blog post.

Cells From Gels

The ability to produce neural stem cells en masse could lead to “therapies to repair spinal cord injuries, counteract traumatic brain injury or cure some of the most severe degenerative disorders of the nervous system, like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases.” Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Scientists at Stanford University developed a special gel that allowed them to grow large quantities of neural stem cells. These cells can develop into neurons and other cells that form the central nervous systems.

Why does it matter? In theory, stem cells could be coaxed to form any tissue of the body. But they’ve been fiendishly difficult to multiply and mature. Stanford News reported that the ability to produce neural stem cells en masse could lead to “therapies to repair spinal cord injuries, counteract traumatic brain injury or cure some of the most severe degenerative disorders of the nervous system, like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases.”

How does it work? The team focused on finding “better materials in which to grow stem cells,” said Sarah Heilshorn, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford. They developed “polymer-based gels that that allow them to grow the cells in three dimensions instead of two,” reducing the need for lab space 100 times, and lowering the need for nutrients as well as energy. The gels also allow the stem cells to change the shape of the gels and “maintain physical contact with one another to preserve critical communication channels between cells,” according to the university. “There’s this convergence of biological knowledge and engineering principles in stem cell research that has me hopeful we might finally actually solve some big problems,” Heilshorn told the Stanford News.

The Guinness World Record for the biggest jigsaw puzzle belongs to the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The puzzle (an image of a lotus flower) was 48 feet by 76 feet (14.6 meters by 23.2 meters) and consisted of 551,232 pieces. A GE project in Finland might rival that record for size and complexity. In this case, it’s not a jigsaw puzzle that requires assembly, but a giant Foster Wheeler biomass boiler.

The machine, which weighs between 3,000 and 3,500 tonnes, consists of roughly 2,500 pieces. Languishing in a closed paper mill in Myllykoski, Finland, it is capable of producing 110 megawatts. Blue Energy Europe (BEE) needs to move the boiler 1,250 miles to Hürth, Germany, where it will provide steam for a different paper mill and send electricity to the grid.

But therein lies a significant logistics challenge, a first of its kind for GE: How do you move an object of this size. “It’s very exciting to be part of something like this,” says project manager Ravi Munjal.

BEE is moving the boiler instead of just building a new one because it will save the company time and help reduce the new mill’s impact on the environment. It will efficiently burn wood chips, forest residue, bio compost, industrial wood and other cheap waste materials, lowering operation costs as well as CO2 emissions.

But first it has to get there.

The challenge: Blue Energy Europe (BEE) needs to move a massive biomass boiler 1,250 miles to Hürth, Germany. The solution: disassemble its roughly 2,500 pieces, ship them in batches and put everything back together on-site. Images credit: GE Power.

The project, which is still in the planning phase, will require precise engineering and attention to detail. Munjal estimates it will take at least 15 months just to move the boiler. The job will entail breaking the boiler down into thousands of pieces and then reassembling them into a functioning boiler in Germany. It will take about 100 workers from GE four months just to take the boiler apart.

Workers will label and scan each piece into a database of parts. Engineers will then use computer-aided design and 3D modeling to make sure each piece is accounted for. “We have to make sure we can put every single piece back exactly where it was when we took it off,” Munjal says.

The individually packed boiler pieces will arrive in Germany in waves, as workers complete various stages of the disassembly. The first shipment is expected to leave Finland before May 2018. GE is exploring whether to transfer the parts on roads via truck, across the Baltic Sea by ship or through a combination of the two — whatever is cheaper and faster.

Once all the parts are in place in Hürth, it will take about nine months to reassemble the boiler. That time will include adding about 13 feet to the length of the boiler to bring it up to German code. After another four months of testing, it will be full steam ahead.

The state of Victoria, Australia, boasts some truly spectacular sites ranging from striking coastlines to the peaks of the Australian Alps, with acres of vineyards and the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Melbourne in between. Unfortunately, the area is also known for its pollution. “According to Environment Victoria, Victorians have the unenviable badge of being the most polluting people per capita on the planet,” says Tanya Jackson, asset management services manager for the renewable energy company RES Australia. “The brown coal the region uses [to generate heat and electricity] creates more pollution than black coal or natural gas.”

This reality clashes with a goal Australia has set for itself. The country wants to source 23.5 percent of the country’s energy needs from renewables by 2020. The state of Victoria, however, has introduced its own, more aggressive target of 25 percent by 2020 and 40 percent by 2025. Victoria is helping the country with a new wind farm in Ararat, an agricultural region about 180 kilometers (112 miles) northwest of Melbourne. Spread over more than 5,000 hectares of rolling green hills, Ararat Wind Farm, which started generating power to the grid in September last year, is the third-largest wind farm in Australia. The US$450 million development holds 75 GE wind turbines and has the capacity to generate enough energy to power 120,000 homes — or 6 percent of all Victoria households — per year.

This also “equates to 280,000 metric tonnes of savings in carbon dioxide annually,” Jackson says. “It’s the equivalent of 6,500 full of coal.” Her company, RES Australia, runs the wind farm, which GE Capital partially financed and which uses GE wind turbines.

Ararat is an example of what’s possible with GE solutions that benefit both the bottom line and the environment. GE says that since 2005, such technologies have reduced global carbon dioxide emissions by 5.5 gigatonnes and have provided costs savings of over $3.4 billion to GE and its customers. GE’s wind power alone has displaced 160 million tonnes of coal and avoided 600 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emission.

Here’s a look at how other GE technologies are helping make the world a greener place:

Gas Turbines

Renewable energy isn’t right for every market. Some countries are just trying to get consistent energy to their growing population, and some places need to upgrade, not replace, old power plants. The 9HA gas turbine has been named the world’s most efficient by Guinness World Records. Image credit: GE Power. Read more here. 

LED Lights

Businesses can find big saving through small changes — like exchanging old-fashioned lights for LEDs. Companies like GM and JPMorgan have started replacing all of their lights with GE’s smart LEDs, leading to savings of 6,400 gigawatt hours in the U.S. alone. Image credit: Jeffrey Sauger for General Motors. Read more here.

Evolution Locomotives

Railroads are critical for moving cargo, but trains emit 4.1 million metric tonnes of carbon annually in the U.S. GE’s Evolution Series locomotives conserve fuel and reduce the environmental impact of the trains. Image credit: GE Transportation. Read more here.

Hydropower

Hydropower, where turbines are spun from fast-moving water, is among the oldest forms of clean electricity generation, but it’s getting an upgrade. GE’s hydro turbines and generators represent 29 percent of all hydropower generation.Image credit: Caio Coronel/Itaipu Binacional. Read more here.

Battery-Gas Turbine Hybrid

Power grids often keep gas turbines running in standby mode so they can power up quickly if needed. GE’s LM6000 turbine offers a more environmentally friendly solution with an integrated battery that helps a turbine power up in 5 minutes. Image credit: GE Reports/GE Energy Connections. Read more here.

GEnx Commercial Airline Engine

Air travel is on the rise, which means more planes emitting more carbon into the air. To make air travel more efficient, GE’s newest jet engine is built using ceramic matrix composite materials that are tough as metal but one-third the weight. Image credit: GE Aviation. Read more here.

Jenbacher Gas Engines

This engine takes power-generating efficiency to the next level. The German engine is the most efficient GE has ever built, and by also supplying customers with heat and hot water, its thermal efficiency can reach 90 percent. Read more here.

In Markbygden forest in the northern Sweden, the temperature drops to minus 10 degrees Celsius in the winter and bitter winds blow. That makes this area 60 miles south of the arctic circle uncomfortable for humans, but the sparsely populated region, where real reindeer roam, is perfect for a wind farm.

Engineers there are now building the roads and preparing the land to erect some of the world’s largest wind turbines. When the project is complete, 179 GE turbines, each twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, will rise approximately 140 meters above the forest, where they will catch the nearly ceaseless wind to generate 650 megawatts of electricity. When complete in 2019, it will be the largest operating wind farm in Europe, increasing Sweden’s installed wind generation by 12 percent, says Thomas Thomsen of GE Renewables.

GE machines already power Europe’s largest operational wind farm in Fântânele-Cogealac in Romania, which can generate 600 megawatts. Earlier this year, the company partnered with Spain’s Forestalia Group to supply wind turbines for a planned 1,200-megawatt wind farm near Aragon. The company also will supply turbines for the planned 2,000-megawatt Wind Catcher in the Oklahoma Panhandle, which will be the largest wind farm in the U.S.

Most of the power produced at the Markbygden wind farm will be sold to an aluminum plant in Norway run by Norsk Hydro, one of the world’s biggest producers of the lightweight metal used to make soft-drink cans and airplane parts. Energy that the wind farm generates will help Norsk produce an estimated 100,000 tons of aluminum per year.

Norsk Hydro is getting the power from the Markbygden farm through the world’s largest power purchase agreement (PPA) involving wind. The unique deal, which GE negotiated along with its partner Green Investment Group (GIG), guarantees that Norsk Hydro will be able to buy power from the wind farm at a fixed price for 19 years. As part of the agreement, GE’s financing arm partnered with GIG and bought out the wind farm’s original developer, Svevind. Now, GE will provide the turbines and has guaranteed to deliver at least 1.65 terawatts of wind energy per year.

Above: GE machines already power Europe’s largest operational wind farm in Fântânele-Cogealac in Romania, which can generate 600 megawatts. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy/CEZ. Top: When the project is complete, 179 GE turbines, each twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, will rise approximately 140 meters above the forest, where they will catch the nearly ceaseless wind to generate 650 megawatts of electricity. Image credit: Svevind.

GE was able to structure this unique guarantee by bringing GE’s wind-turbine manufacturing division and representatives from the company’s financing division GE Energy Financial Services (GE EFS) to the negotiating table, says Steve Hunter, an executive from GE EFS who worked on the deal with Norsk Hydro. “It’s normally the investor in the project who negotiates the PPA,” Hunter says. But in this case, experts from GE Renewable Energy carried out a unique, in-depth analysis that allowed GE EFS, as project owner, to offer helpful guarantees to Norsk.

Thomsen and his team at GE Renewables did it by studying weather patterns around the Markbygden wind farm and correlated that with power price data to calculate the risks of promising constant energy based on what they knew about the turbines.

That included detailed knowledge of special devices developed by GE that, as Thomsen puts it, work like “big hair dryers” blowing warm air into the blades and allowing them to shed ice. Ice buildup changes the blade profile and weight, making the turbines less efficient. GE acquired the maker of the blades, LM Wind, last year.

The renewables team analyzed 960 different scenarios for the wind farm to determine that GE Capital could make the power delivery guarantee to Norsk Hydro — a guarantee that other operators might normally have deemed too risky.

“For them, knowing how much power they will be receiving in advance is a huge advantage,” Hunter says. “They have line of sight into this on an hourly basis.” Plus, a customer like Norsk Hydro “isn’t just talking to someone who is thinking about their investment, but a group that knows the details of how the turbines will be operated and maintained.” A guarantee like that can give a customer the confidence it needs to keep its operations running, no matter how cold it is.

Night reigned in Madrid, Spain, when medical staff wheeled four patients through the doors of Quirónsalud University Hospital. Stretched out on gurneys, their gaunt, desiccated bodies slid quietly through the still, empty corridors. The workers wanted to keep the visit under the wraps. Mummies, after all, can give the living the shivers.

Haunting, however, was not on the schedule. Archeologists from the Spanish National Museum of Archeology wanted to learn more about the mummies, and doctors at the hospital agreed to help by taking a closer look with their computed tomography (CT) machine. “For the first time in my career, I performed a CT scan on a mummy,” said Dr. Vicente Martínez de Vega, head of the radiology department at Quirónsalud Madrid. “It’s not often we get such opportunity as radiologists.”

Specifically, they wanted to know who these mummies were, how they died, and how they became mummified. The archeologists knew that of the four mummies, three were from Egypt and one was a member of the “Guanche,” an ancestral population from the Canary Islands located off the western coast of Morocco. Both places are known for their hot weather, and the people who lived there were known for burying their loved ones in caves, where the mix of low humidity and stable temperatures mummified their bodies.

Like many who are getting on in years, the mummies recently admitted for tests at Quirónsalud University Hospital in Madrid had brittle bones in need of a doctor’s assessment. Using a CT scanner developed by GE Healthcare, radiologists — at the behest of the Spanish National Museum of Archeology — looked for fractures and for clues about the mummies’ age, sex, height and clothing. GIF credit: GE Healthcare. Image credit: RTVE. 

It took a 15-person team eight hours and a special truck to move the mummies from museum to hospital. They had to solve challenges such as finding the smoothest, least bone-rattling roads to preserve their fragile skeletons intact.

Once inside the hospital, radiologists used a CT scanner developed by GE Healthcare to determine the mummies’ approximate age, sex, height and clothing, and even to look for broken bones.

CT and X-ray machines both rely on radiation to peer inside the body. But CT machines use a narrow, rotating beam of X-rays that images the body in series of thin slices that a computer can later assemble into detailed 3D images, kind of like rebuilding a sliced-up salami. The CT scan is so detailed it can identify amulets and figures placed inside the mummy.

Next, the team spent months analyzing the scans to learn more about their wards. One of the Egyptians was Nespamedu, the Pharaoh Imhotep’s high priest. The radiology study uncovered 25 hidden pieces of adornments and amulets under his bandages representing four sons of the powerful god Horus and Thoth, the god of knowledge, and many other things.

Researchers confirmed that the other two Egyptian mummies were female. One was 20 to 35 years old and pregnant; she lived between 7 and 9 B.C. The other was approximately 35 to 50 years old.

The study also revealed that the Guanche specimen was mummified in a different way than its Egyptian cousins: It still contained its bowels.

Researchers have been using GE CT and X-ray machines to virtually unwrap mummies for nearly 80 years. They allowed them to learn more about the people beneath the bandages, and even to determine fakes. As the technology gets better, scientists gain sharper insights. Recently an Egyptologist from Emory University scanned the 3,000-year-old remains of a “woman” and discovered that it was actually a male mummy named Ankhefenmut, a priest and sculptor at the Temple of Mut near Luxor, who lived between the years 1069 and 945 B.C.

For the doctors at the hospital in Madrid, it was an unforgettable opportunity. “It was certainly unusual to spend a whole night with mummies in an empty hospital,” de Vega said. “Mummies don’t move, so that makes them relatively cooperative patients.”

The original version of this story appears on GE Healthcare’s news site, The Pulse.

In the winter of 1994, Pat Bergin traveled from Almaty in Kazakhstan to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia to meet with a former Soviet minister who wanted to lease a fleet of aircraft. The trip wasn’t unusual for Bergin. His sales job at GE Capital Aviation Services took him to remote parts of the world all the time. What made the journey stand out was what happened after Bergin nixed the deal.

The minister had provided a limousine service to drive Bergin to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The meeting quickly went south when it became clear the government official wasn’t equipped to care for the expensive jets he wanted to lease from GECAS, the owner of one of the largest commercial aircraft fleets in the world. “We told him, ‘These can’t be maintained the same [way] as a Russian aircraft,’ but he insisted he would manage,” Bergin recalls. When Bergin asked the minister to prove his team had the expertise to care for the planes, the minister abruptly ended the meeting.

Then he told Bergin and his interpreter to find their own way out of the city where the civilian airport was temporarily closed. “We didn’t know if he was serious at first,” Bergin says.

The minister finally relented — a little. He loaned them a Russian-style army jeep with a canvas top and a driver. Wrapped up in overcoats, they spent the next six hours riding back across the frozen Tien Shan mountains to Almaty. “We weren’t really prepared for that,” Bergin says.

In his 45-year aviation career, Pat Bergin has seen GE Capital Aviation Services grow from a small aircraft leasing business to the owner of the world’s largest commercial fleet in just a few decades. Along the way, he’s had adventures (and at least one misadventure) in countries all over the globe. Images credit: Pat Bergin.

Bergin, now 60 and working a more comfortable job as senior vice president of marketing at GECAS, started his career in the aviation industry in September 1972, when he won an apprenticeship in aircraft maintenance at the Irish national carrier Aer Lingus in Dublin at the age of 15. “I grew up on a small farm in Ireland, and my parents didn’t have the ability to send me to college,” Bergin says. “I wanted off the farm, so the apprenticeship sounded good to me.”

He spent much of his time in hangars overhauling aircraft and engines. But Bergin realized his childhood on the farm made him dislike being indoors all the time. He also had a bit of wanderlust. So, he jumped at the chance to move over to Guinness Peat Aviation (GPA), a leasing company that had recently been set up by Dr. Tony Ryan (also founder of Ryanair) with Aer Lingus, among others. “I joined as a program manager, and within a week, I was in Singapore buying an engine,” he says. “You had to learn everything by the seat your pants.”

Bergin spent two years in Singapore, overseeing leasing agreements there and throughout Asia, including in the Philippines, Cambodia and Thailand. On behalf of GPA, Bergin had to provide not only aircraft, but also the crew, maintenance personnel and insurance to cover the planes. “Asia was one of my favorite places,” he says, noting that his two sons were born in Singapore.

Planes, yurts and automobiles — Bergin’s well-acquainted with them all thanks to his time with GECAS. “The best thing has been learning about so many different cultures by getting to know the people I worked with in all those countries,” he says. “It’s been fantastic.” Image credit: Pat Bergin.

As his scope extended to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Russia, he often found himself chasing history. “One of my first trips to Zimbabwe was just as Robert Mugabe had taken power, and you could see the country was slowly grinding to a halt,” Bergin says. The locals all complained about the lack of imported goods, and the buses, cars and bicycles all ran on bald tires. On a trip to Russia soon after the USSR collapsed, Bergin’s interpreter was thrilled to get out of Moscow and into a more rural area of the country. When they arrived, she stepped away from the job to fill her bags with meat and vegetables to bring home to her family. “It was total chaos back then, with severe food shortages in the cities,” Bergin says.

When GPA merged with GE in 1993, Bergin stayed on with the company, eventually running Shannon Engine, a joint venture between GE and French aircraft engine company Safran, running the JV’s engine leasing business (SES). After five years, Bergin moved back over to GECAS with responsibility for selling the company’s older aircraft. In most cases, smaller airlines or new leasing companies in emerging markets bought the planes.

“I grew up on a small farm in Ireland, and my parents didn’t have the ability to send me to college,” Bergin says. No matter — after an apprenticeship at age 15, his career was off and running. Today, he’s senior vice president of marketing at GECAS. Image credit: Pat Bergin. 

These days, Bergin is responsible for sales and marketing of GECAS Cargo aircraft program, where GECAS stock aircraft like Boeing’s 737, 767 and 747 planes are converted to cargo freighters. This extends the life of the aircraft and extracts maximum value for GECAS assets.

In his spare time, Bergin supports the running of a school in Zambia with his family and a newly established charity called Propel Education. It’s his way of giving back to a country he grew to love over his career.

The opportunity to travel has been exhilarating for a kid from a small Irish farm, Bergin says. “The best thing has been learning about so many different cultures by getting to know the people I worked with in all those countries,” he says. “It’s been fantastic.”

Chinese airline passengers are taking to the skies in record numbers, helping turn Asia into the fastest-growing aviation market. So much so that the International Air Transport Association now predicts that China will displace the United States as the world’s largest aviation market in 2022, two years faster than expected. This week GE signed two major deals with Chinese companies that will give the trend more lift.

Juneyao Airlines agreed to buy GE Aviation’s GEnx-1B engines to power 10 Boeing 787-9 aircrafts. Also known as Dreamliners, these planes can fly nonstop 7,600 miles from San Francisco to Singapore. The deal, valued at $1.4 billion, will help Juneyao expand its China-U.S. routes.

With more than 1,600 orders, the GEnx is the fastest-selling high-thrust jet engine in GE Aviation history. It uses new technologies and parts made from new materials like light carbon fiber composites.

In a separate deal, the leasing division of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICIB) agreed to buy 80 LEAP-1B engines for 40 next-generation Boeing 737Max planes. The $1.1 billion deal will add new aircraft to ICIB’s fleet of 555 jets and allow the bank to supply China’s growing domestic market with new planes.

The LEAP engine was developed by CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines. It is the best-selling engine in CFM’s history. The company has sold almost 14,000 of them valued at more than $200 billion (U.S. list price).

Top image: The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICIB) agreed to buy 80 LEAP-1B engines for 40 next-generation Boeing 737Max planes. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports. Above: CFM has sold 14,000 LEAP engines valued at more than $200 billion (U.S. list price). Image credit: CFM International.

The engine includes parts made from a space-age material called a ceramic matrix composite (CMC), 3D-printed fuel nozzles, and composite fan blades woven in 3D from carbon fibers. The technologies make the LEAP lighter than older CFM engines and more efficient.

In addition to the aviation deals, GE signed a $1 billion agreement with China Datang Group to supply the power company with gas turbines and other components for domestic projects. The deal sets the stage for future joint projects and helps China with its initiative to generate cleaner and more efficient power.

An origami-inspired cage could lead to safer drones, gene therapy gives a 7-year-old boy life-saving new skin, and machine learning could help doctors identify patients at risk of suicide. Another week, another set of inspiring stories about science making the world a better place.

A Drone In A Cage

What is it? Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have designed a lightweight drone in a foldable cage inspired by origami.

Why does it matter? Multicopter drones show tremendous promise in delivering packages to hard-to-reach places, but they’re often heavy and difficult to transport, and their whirling propellers could hurt people or property. EPFL’s caged prototype protects against propeller damage. Operators can fold the cage when not in use, which makes it easier to stow or move.

How does it work? A lightweight carbon-fiber cage encloses the multicopter and parcel during flight, and the propellers automatically halt when the cage is open. “With this new design, a recipient can easily and safely catch the approaching drone,” the drone’s creators wrote in a study. They say this prototype, which weighs 2.2 pounds and measures roughly 2 feet by 1.4 feet when deployed, “could scale up to fly 2 [kilogram] cargo over 15 [kilometers], which would cover 86 percent of the deliveries made by Amazon.com.”

New Skin, New Life

Scientists in Europe have used gene therapy to grow replacement skin for a 7-year-old boy . Image credit: Getty images.

What is it? Scientists in Europe have used gene therapy to grow replacement skin for a 7-year-old boy suffering from of a rare and painful genetic disease that had left 80 percent of his body without skin.

Why does it matter? Patients with junctional epidermolysis bullosa have skin that blisters and tears easily, which can lead to chronic wounds and infections and can carry an increased risk of skin cancer. Severe cases have a very high mortality rate. The boy in question had a “devastating, life-threatening form of JEB,” according to the scientists who treated him.

How does it work? Doctors at the Children’s Hospital at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, took a sample of the boy’s skin. Then, researchers at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Modena, Italy, used a virus to replace in his DNA a faulty version of the LAMB3 gene with the non-mutated form. Next they grew these engineered cells into multiple sheets of skin, which surgeons then grafted all over the boy’s body. “The regenerated epidermis remained robust and resistant to mechanical stress and did not develop blisters or  erosions during the 21-month follow-up,” according to the team’s paper, published in Nature. He can now lead a normal life, attending school and even play soccer with his dad.

A New Tool In Suicide Prevention?

“I can imagine a patient who doesn’t say anything to their therapist, but they happen to have a scan, and that scan indicates suicidal ideation,” said Marcel Just, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Image credit: Carnegie Mellon University.

What is it? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have taught a machine-learning algorithm to help identify patients with suicidal thoughts.

Why does it matter? More than 44,000 people commit suicide every year in the U.S. alone, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. This new technology could help identify at-risk patients so that they can get help before it’s too late. “I can imagine a patient who doesn’t say anything to their therapist, but they happen to have a scan, and that scan indicates suicidal ideation,” said Marcel Just, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the study’s lead author, in an interview. “Wouldn’t the therapist like to know that?”

How does it work? Researchers took two groups — one containing patients who’d expressed suicidal thoughts and one control group — and asked them to reflect on a series of words while an fMRI machine scanned their brains. They’d broken the words into three sets: positive, negative and suicide-associated. The scientists flagged the words that best discriminated between the two groups and then told a machine-learning program which of those words were correlated with suicidality. “Based on the brain representations of these six concepts, their program was able to identify with 91 percent accuracy whether a participant was from the control or suicidal group,” according to Carnegie Mellon.

What Ewe Lookin’ At?

What is it? Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. have taught sheep how to recognize four celebrity faces based only on two-dimensional images.

Why does it matter? Sheep are known, at least among experts, for their uncanny knack for recognizing faces (human and sheep alike). But specific details about their “holistic face-processing abilities” are sparse. Scientists say their research could unlock clues about face-perception problems in patients with conditions like Huntington’s disease.

How does it work? The team trained eight sheep to recognize four people — actors Emma Watson and Jake Gyllenhaal, TV journalist Fiona Bruce and former President Barack Obama —  by rewarding them with food when they chose their photos rather than a different image. They then showed the sheep a mix of photos that included the celebrities and unknown faces, and the sheep chose the pre-learned face 80 percent of the time. “These data show that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, comparable with those of humans and non-human primates,” the researchers conclude in their study. “Our face-recognition paradigm provides a means for measuring cognitive function and efficacy of therapeutic agents in sheep models of neurodegenerative diseases such as [Huntington’s disease] in which cognitive flexibility is impaired.”

Top image: Sheep are known, at least among experts, for their uncanny knack at recognizing faces. Image credit: Getty Images.

So Long, Suckers

“It’s a non-chemical way of dealing with mosquitoes, so from that perspective, you’d think it would have a lot of appeal,” University of Maryland entomologist David O’Brochta told Nature. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? The EPA given Kentucky-based biotech company MosquitoMate permission to release its lab-grown mosquitoes carrying a bacteria that prevents them from reproducing.

Why does it matter? The Asian tiger mosquito carries sometimes fatal diseases such as dengue, yellow fever and Zika. “It’s a non-chemical way of dealing with mosquitoes, so from that perspective, you’d think it would have a lot of appeal,” University of Maryland entomologist David O’Brochta told Nature.

How does it work? Mosquito eggs fertilized by males carrying the bacterium Wolbachia pipientis won’t hatch. The EPA says MosquitoMate can release infected males in 20 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., where they will in turn infect wild populations.

For most people, Thomas Edison is the man who came up with the first practical light bulb. But Edison was also an inveterate entrepreneur who parlayed his patents into new industries and enduring businesses. Take GE, the result of an 1892 merger between his Edison Electric Co. and Thomson-Houston Electric Co. It has since grown into an industrial giant with $148 billion in annual revenues making everything from MRI scanners to gas turbines and jet engines.

Although GE’s business units may seem very different, they often trace their origin to a point in history where Edison, light and electricity intersect. The light bulb led him into X-rays and the medical imaging business, and GE’s expertise in power generation and gas turbine engineering gave birth to the company’s aviation business. (This sharing is a two-way street. Aviation engineers are now helping their colleagues in power generation help build more efficient gas turbines with their jet engine know-how.)

It’s in part because of these synergies — GE call this cross-pollination “the GE store.” Take a look at GE Aviation’s and GE Power’s intertwined history.

Edison’s light bulb and the wave of electric devices that followed created a huge demand for electricity. Initially, companies were using piston engines to power generators, but they quickly switched to more efficient steam turbines. In 1903, GE engineers Charles Curtis and William Emmet built what was then the world’s most powerful steam turbine generator for a power plant in Newport, R.I. (see above). It required one-tenth the space and cost two-thirds as much as the equivalent piston engine generator. Top image: A GEnx engine for the Dreamliner. GE Aviation has its roots inside a power plant. Image credit: Adam Senatori/GE Reports

It was also in 1903 that GE hired young turbine engineer Sanford Moss (above). Moss had just received a doctorate in gas turbine research from Cornell University. At GE, he started building a revolutionary radial gas compressor using the centrifugal force to squeeze the air before it enters the gas turbine — the same force pushing riders up into the air on a swing carousel. Moss’s early experiments failed; his machine guzzled too much fuel and produced too little power. But his patent and his revolutionary compressor design were sound and found many applications, from supplying air to blast furnaces to powering pneumatic tube systems. He didn’t know it, but he had pointed the way to the jet engine before the Wright Brothers had even taken off.

In November 1917 – at the peak of World War I – GE President E.W. Rice received a note from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA, asking about Moss’s radial compressor. WWI was the first conflict that involved planes, and the agency wanted Moss to improve the performance of the Liberty aircraft engine. The engine was rated 354 horsepower at sea level, but its output dropped by half in thin air at high altitudes. Moss (at right in the picture above) believed that he could use his compressor to squeeze the air before it enters the engine, making it denser and recovering the engine’s lost power.

Using a mechanical device to fill the cylinders of a piston engine with more air than it would typically ingest is called supercharging. Moss designed a turbosupercharger that used the hot exhaust coming from the Liberty engine to spin his radial turbine and squeeze the air entering the engine. In 1918, when he tested the design at 14,000 feet on top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado, the engine delivered 352 horsepower, essentially its rated sea level output, and GE entered the aviation business.

The first Le Pere biplane powered by a turbosupercharged Liberty engine took off on July 12, 1919. “The General Electric superchargers thus far constructed have been designed to give sea-level absolute pressure at an altitude of 18,000 feet, which involves a compressor that doubles the absolute pressure of the air,” Moss said.

Planes equipped with Moss’s turbosupercharger set several world altitude records.

In 1937, as Hitler’s power was growing, GE received a large order from the Army Air Corps to build turbosuperchargers for Boeing B-17 and Consolidated B-24 bombers, P-38 fighter planes, Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and other planes. GE opened a dedicated Supercharger Department in Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1939, Moss proposed to build one of the first turboprop engines. He later joined the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

GE’s aviation business was just getting started. In 1941, the U.S. government asked GE to bring to production one of the first jet engines developed in England by Sir Frank Whittle. (He was knighted for his feat.) A group of GE engineers called the Hush Hush Boys designed new parts for the engine, redesigned others, tested the engine and delivered a top-secret working prototype called I-A. On Oct. 1, 1942, the first American jet plane, the Bell XP-59A, took off from Lake Muroc in California for a short flight. The jet age in the U.S. had begun. The demand for the first jet engines, called J33 and J35, was so high that GE had a hard a time meeting production numbers, and the Army outsourced manufacturing to General Motors and Allison Engineering.

GE decided to double down and invest in more jet engine research. The J33 and J35 engines used a radial — also called centrifugal — turbine to compress air, similar to the design that Moss developed for his turbosuperchargers. But GE engineers started working on an engine with an axial turbine that pushed air through the engine along its axis. (All jet engines use this design today.) The result was the J47 jet engine that powered everything from fighter jets like the F-86 Sabre to the giant Convair B-36 strategic bombers. GE made 35,000 J47 engines, making it the most-produced jet engine in history.

The J47 also found several off-label applications. The Spirit of America jet car used one, and a pair of them powered what is still the world’s fastest jet-propelled train. They also served on the railroad as heavy-duty snow blowers. In 1948, GE hired German war refugee and aviation pioneer Gerhard Neumann, who quickly went to work on improving the jet engine. He came up with a revolutionary innovation called the variable stator. It allowed pilots to change the pressure inside the turbine and make planes routinely fly faster than the speed of sound. When GE started testing the first jet engine with Neumann’s variable stator, the J79 (see below), engineers thought that their instruments were malfunctioning because of the amount of power it produced. In the 1960s, a GE-powered XB-70 Valkyrie aircraft was flying in excess of Mach 3, three times the speed of sound.

The improved performance made the aviation engineers realize that their variable vanes and other design innovations could also make power plants more efficient. Converting the engines for land use wasn’t difficult. In 1959, they turned a T58 helicopter engine into a turbine that produced 1,000 horsepower and could generate electricity on land and on boats. A similar machine built around the J79 jet generated 15,000 horsepower. In Cincinnati, where GE Aviation moved from Lynn in the 1950s, the local utility built a ring of 10 J79 jet engines to power a big electricity generator.

The first major application of such turbines, which GE calls “aeroderivatives” because of their aviation heritage, was as power plants for the Navy’s 76,000-ton Spruance-class destroyers. The turbines now also power the world’s fastest passenger ship, Francisco. It can carry 1,000 passengers, 150 cars and travel at 58 knots.

Today, there are thousands of aeroderivatives working all over the world. Most recently, they have been helping Egypt’s growing economy slake its thirst for electricity.

Neumann’s variable vanes (above) are also part of GE’s most advanced gas turbine: the 9HA Harriet, the world’s largest, most powerful and most efficient gas turbine. Two of them can generate the same amount of power as a small nuclear power plant.

At the same time, GE Aviation is working on the next-generation jet engine called ADVENT, or Adaptive Versatile Engine Technology (above). “To put it simply, the adaptive cycle engine is a new architecture that takes the best of a commercial engine and combines it with the best of a fighter engine,” says Jed Cox, who leads the ADVENT project for the U.S. Air Force Research Lab./em>

Nicole Gularte was 26 years old and straight out of graduate school when she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, also known as ALL, in 2010. This type of fast-moving blood cancer causes the bone marrow to produce too many immature white blood cells, called lymphocytes, which can spread the disease to other parts of the body. If left untreated, it can turn deadly within months.

Determined to keep fighting, Gularte decided to try a different tactic: enroll in an experimental treatment known as CAR-T therapy, which uses her own immune cells that have been reengineered to find and kill the cancer.

For CAR-T, doctors extract a patient’s T cells and send them to a lab where they’re carefully reengineered and multiplied so they can sniff out the cancer cells and mark them for destruction. Then the manipulated cells are shipped back to the patient’s treatment location, where they’re injected back into the patient’s bloodstream so they can do their work. The therapy, developed by doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, gained fame after it saved a young girl named Emily Whitehead in 2012. With guidance and encouragement from Emily, her family and the Emily Whitehead Foundation, Gularte received her own modified cells a year ago, and she’s now cancer-free. “I have officially survived acute lymphoblastic leukemia eight times,” she wrote on her blog.

The good news is that stories like Whitehead’s and Gularte’s could soon become more common. In August, the U.S. Food Drug Administration approved the first cell therapy in the United States for the treatment of pediatric and young-adult patients with a form of ALL. “We’re entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient’s own cells to attack a deadly cancer,” said FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

Top and above: “[If] these therapies move to a first-line treatment, then the number of patients will go up dramatically into the hundreds of thousands, if not more,” says GE Healthcare’s Phil Vanek. Images credit: CCRM.

Vanek’s business and others are racing to make that happen and deliver on cell therapy’s promise. He says that says that hundreds of patients have already benefited from CAR-T in clinical trials that have reported 80 percent success rates. Some 300,000 people could be receiving the treatment by 2024. A report by Roots Analysis estimates the T-cell therapy market, which includes CAR-T therapy, could read $30 billion by 2030.

Crucial to that race is a new cell therapy research and process-development facility called the Center for Advanced Therapeutic Cell Technologies (CATCT), which officially opened in Toronto in September. It’s designed to help pharma companies, university researchers and technology companies like GE to scale faster. “Right now, the technologies and production methodologies can support a few hundreds to a few thousands of patients, but it’s still a brute-force approach,” Vanek says. “The manufacturing process is not easy, it’s not automated, and it requires quite a bit of hands-on labor. It has to change to support the broader patient population, and it will.”

Led by Canada’s Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine, a leader in developing and commercializing cell and gene therapies and regenerative medicine technologies, the new Toronto center already employs more than 30 biologists, virologists, and biomedical and other engineers, including some from GE.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (leaning) toured CCRM’s labs in January 2016. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

GE’s Life Sciences business unit helped fund and equip the lab, and the researchers are using bioreactors to grow engineered cells and identify the optimum growing conditions for different cell types, laser-powered flow cytometers that can study the properties of individual cells, and even robots running production automation experiments.

One purpose of CATCT is to develop new processes that will enable pharma companies to offer cell therapy to millions of patients. Despite success stories like Whitehead’s and Gularte’s, the vast majority of new cancer patients still start with standard treatments like chemotherapy, and the FDA approved the first CAR-T treatment only for patients with “refractory,” or resistant, cancers, or those in second or later relapses. But “if these therapies move to a first-line treatment, then the number of patients will go up dramatically into the hundreds of thousands, if not more,” says Vanek.

Vanek says that CATCT will allow technology companies like GE to learn about new therapies in the pipeline. “This was our blind spot in the past,” he says. “You really need to walk in the shoes of our customers to understand where their pain points and challenges are.” He also said that partners working at the center — big companies as well as universities and startups — will have access to a “fee for service” process-development capability. “This makes the group not only self-sustaining by taking on client work,” he says. “It will also give us access to more customers who will come to us with their toughest challenges, and that’s where the learning happens.”

The Toronto center already employs more than 30 biologists, virologists, and biomedical and other engineers, including some from GE. Image credit: CCRM.

GE Aviation’s Paul Corkery became a leader of an engineering revolution three years ago when he and his team started building an aircraft engine from large sections that had been 3D printed as one piece. They used additive manufacturing methods, a catchall label that includes 3D printing, to combine 855 engine components into just a dozen parts. The simpler design reduced weight, improved fuel burn by as much as 20 percent and gave the engine 10 percent more power. The company will start testing the Advanced Turboprop, as the engine’s called, this fall to prepare it for its maiden flight in 2018.

The design was so successful that Corkery’s boss, Brad Mottier, who runs GE Aviation’s Business and General Aviation division, dispatched the engineer to spend part of the spring flying around in a succession of snazzy new HondaJets and other planes. But, this was no Christmas bonus. Both Corkery and Mottier are pilots and they wanted to test the Advanced Turboprop’s second groundbreaking innovation: the pilot’s ability to control a turboprop plane as if it were a jet. “We are the first in this class of engine,” says Corkery, who brought a mockup of the engine the EAA AirVenture fly-in, which took place in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in July. “No other engine can do this.”

Above: Textron Aviation will use the ATP engine for its new Cessna Denali plane. “It’s just goodness all around,” Textron’s Brad Thress said about the engine. Image credit: Textron Aviation. Top: GE’s Corkery and Mottier (imaged) are both pilots. The new engine will give pilots “more time to fly the plane, look out of the window and take in the experience, instead of monitoring and adjusting the engine all the time,” Corkery said. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

The design has several important benefits that excite plane makers like GE’s launch customer, Textron Aviation, which will use the ATP for a brand-new business 10-seater called Cessna Denali. Generally, pilots fly turboprop planes using three levers: one for fuel, another for controlling the pitch of the propeller, and a third for power. The ATP uses a full authority digital engine control (FADEC), which enables the reduction from three levers to one, thereby providing a more “jet-like” experience. ”This is a really big step in a positive direction for our customers,” says Brad Thress, senior vice president of engineering at Textron. “I would use the phrase revolutionary simplicity” to describe flying with FADEC, he said.

Thress said that “customers today in the turboprop category are used to manually controlling all the parameters of the engine, which requires a lot of the pilot’s attention, particularly during takeoff and climb. When you have an engine that employs FADEC the pilot workload is drastically reduced. It allows you to go from tweaking three knobs throughout the course of a flight to setting a single knob in the detent appropriate for the phase of flight,” he said.

The GE Aviation team responsible for building the ATP engine arrived in Oshkosh this weekend. From left to right: Mottier, Corkery, Norman Baker, president and executive director of GE Aviation Czech, and Gordie Follin, executive manager for the ATP engine program. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

Corkery has spent four hours flying on the Honda business jet, which uses a pair of FADEC-enabled engines, the HF120, jointly developed by GE Aviation and Honda Aero, to observe it in action. “Honda is known as best in class for pilot cockpit simplification in light jets and thus provides a great benchmark,” Corkery says.

He says that FADEC-enabled airplanes make flying more enjoyable for pilots because it enables them to spend more time flying the plane and less time monitoring the gauges. “You are essentially allowing the pilot to focus on higher-level tasks,” Corkery says. “The system can make flying as simple as pushing a lever and pilots love it. They have more time to fly the plane, look out of the window and take in the experience, instead of monitoring and adjusting the engine all the time.”

Textron’s Thress says that “turning over controls to FADEC” also allows pilots to “maximize the performance of the airplane every single time” without exceeding the engine’s limitations. “By protecting the engine, it also in a way protects the owners direct operating costs and the safety and everything else the owner would like,” Thress says. “It’s just goodness all around.

The digital engine does more than just make flying easier. A computer and sensors inside the engine collect performance data during flight and send it to the cloud after landing to enable a “digital twin” of the machine. The digital twin, a virtual simulation of the engine’s operation on each flight, further allows operators to add weather data, flight data and other factors and then analyze it to improve piloting and personalize maintenance. “Our insights tell us that airplanes need different times between overhauls depending on their operating environment,” Corkery says. “For instance, an airplane flying in a desert environment versus a more benign environment would require different intervals between overhaul.” Corkery says. The digital twin-enabled service offering will help lower the ownership costs.

GE Aviation is already using the digital twin on its commercial and military technology. This is significant, considering the scale: an aircraft powered with the company’s tech takes off somewhere in the world every 2 seconds. These planes ferry over 300,000 people at any given moment. However, the digital twin is not specific to aircraft engines. GE is already building digital doubles of power plants, wind farms, locomotives and other technologies.

But right now, there is no other civilian turboprop with its own digital twin or with the newer, easier controls like GE’s ATP. “Turboprop engines have been the same for a very long time,” Corkery says. “We are looking at the future, and the market is screaming for more capable aircraft with pilot cockpit simplification and personalized maintenance.”

The ATP engine will have its own “digital twin.”

Jet engines are large and complicated machines. But sometimes surprisingly small parts can make a big difference in how they work.

A decade ago, engineers at CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines, started designing a new, fuel-efficient jet engine for single-aisle passenger planes — the aircraft industry’s biggest market and one of its most lucrative.

The CFM team got to work and came up with a new engine that could dramatically reduce fuel consumption as well as emissions. A key to the breakthrough was the wildly complex interior of the of the engine’s fuel nozzles. Developed by GE Aviation, the nozzles’ tips spray fuel into the jet engine’s combustor and help determine how efficient it is. “I thought ‘Oh my God, this is fantastic,” recalls Mohammad Ehteshami, the former head of engineering at GE Aviation who now runs GE Additive, a new business focusing on the latest manufacturing techniques like 3D printing.

But there was a problem. The tips’ interior geometry was too complex. It had more than 20 parts that had to be welded and brazed together. It was almost impossible to make. “We tried to cast it eight times, and we failed every time,” Ehteshami recalls.

But Ehteshami, who rises before dawn for his daily run and is one of GE Aviation’s most seasoned engineers at age 61, doesn’t easily give up. Originally from Iran, he grew up on a dusty pistachio farm. His mother, the only literate woman in his desert village, pushed him to study science. When he received a visa to attend university in the U.S., he supported himself as a Boston taxi driver and a construction worker. At GE, he spent six grueling years developing the GE90 jet engine, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine in service. He had one last idea for getting the nozzle made.

Top and above: “I was excited but also disturbed,” says Mohammad Ehteshami after a vendor printed an complex part for a jet engine. “I knew that we found a solution, but I also saw that this technology could eliminate what we’ve done for years and years and put a lot of pressure on our financial model.” Images credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

Starting in the 1990s, GE Aviation engineers in Cincinnati have been working with a local company called Morris Technologies started by 3D printing pioneer Greg Morris. Morris was quietly changing how humans make things. Rather than cutting material away, he was using lasers to weld together hair-thin layers of a metal powder to print complex parts directly from a computer file. This family of manufacturing technologies is called “additive” because they add material to the part rather than cut it away.

For many years, GE engineers had been using the bespoke machines in Morris’ workshop to print prototypes of new engine parts and rapidly iterate new designs. But Ehteshami and others involved in the project now wanted to know whether Morris would be able to use 3D printing for mass production of a complex part, something nobody had tried before.

They swore Morris to secrecy and sent him the computer file with the drawing of the intricate nozzle tip. He printed it from a nickel alloy and invited the team over a few days later. “I remember that day like today,” Ehteshami says. “I was excited but also disturbed. I knew that we found a solution, but I also saw that this technology could eliminate what we’ve done for years and years and put a lot of pressure on our financial model.”

The nozzle met the team’s wildest expectations. Morris’ machine not only combined all 20 parts into a single unit, but it also weighed 25 percent less than an ordinary nozzle and was more than five times as durable. “The technology was incredible,” Ehteshami says. “In the design of jet engines, complexity used to be expensive. But additive allows you to get sophisticated and reduces costs at the same time. This is an engineer’s dream. I never imagined that this would be possible.”

Above: The 3D printed nozzle combined all 20 parts into a single unit, but it also weighed 25 percent less. “In the design of jet engines, complexity used to be expensive,” Ehteshami says. But additive allows you to get sophisticated and reduces costs at the same time. This is an engineer’s dream.” Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

GE Aviation acquired Morris’ company in 2012, and Ehteshami, Morris and their teams immediately started testing the technology’s limits and looking for new applications. They moved a few machines to a drab building away from the main campus across Interstate 75 and started experimenting in secret with printing pieces of an old commercial helicopter engine. “We took six engineers and told them go and see what portion of the total engine they can print,” Ehteshami says. “We hid them from our financial management, because we didn’t want them to cut our budget.”

The clandestine effort paid off. Within 18 months, the team was able to print half of the machine, reducing 900 separate components to just 16, including one segment that previously had different 300 parts. The printed parts were also 40 percent lighter and 60 percent cheaper. “To make these parts the ordinary way, you typically need 10 to 15 suppliers, you have tolerances, you have nuts, bolts, welds and braces,” Ehteshami says. “All of that went away.”

By then it was 2014 and the team felt they had a result they could share with the big boss, GE Aviation President and CEO David Joyce. Like Ehteshami, he had spent decades as an engineer at the company before rising to the top spot. Thinking that Joyce would be their toughest critic, they showed him their work, but still asked him to keep it secret. “No way,” Joyce told them. “I want to tell Jeff [Immelt, GE chairman and CEO], I want to tell the board.”

An Arcam 3D printer at GE’s Center for Additive Technologies Advancement. GE acquired a majority stake in Arcam last fall. The machine uses an electron beam, which is more powerful than laser. The beam enables the machines to print faster and fuse layers as thick at 100 microns, twice the width of what a laser can print. It also can grow parts from wonder materials like titanium aluminate (TiAl), which is 50 percent lighter than steel but very hard to shape. Image credit: Mark Trent for GE Reports

After the meeting with Joyce, things started to move briskly. One group focused on getting the 3D-printed nozzle ready for mass production. It would go inside the LEAP, one of the bestselling jet engines in CFM’s history. As of last month, CFM has received orders for LEAP 12,200 engines valued at $170 billion at list price. GE opened a 3D printing factory for the nozzles in Auburn, Alabama, and the first LEAP-powered Airbus A320neo started ferrying paying passengers last summer.

Meanwhile, GE’s engineers had already moved on to the next challenge. A different team decided to create a brand-new advance turboprop engine, or ATP. Using additive manufacturing, they consolidated 855 components into just a dozen parts. The simpler design reduced weight, improved fuel burn by as much as 20 percent and achieved 10 percent more power. Using 3D printing for rapid prototyping, the team was also able to cut development time by a third. Last summer, Textron Aviation picked the engine to power its new plane, the Cessna Denali.

In 2016, GE expanded its additive portfolio and spent more than $1 billion to buy controlling stakes in two leading manufacturers of industrial 3D printers: Sweden’s Arcam AB and Germany’s Concept Laser. While Concept Laser’s machines use lasers to shape components from metallic powder, Arcam uses an electron beam, which is more powerful. It enables the machines to print faster and fuse layers as thick at 100 microns, twice the width of what a laser can print. It also can grow parts from wonder materials like titanium aluminate (TiAl), which is 50 percent lighter than steel but very hard to shape. An additive factory in Cameri, Italy, is already printing TiAl turbine blades for the GE9X, a jet engine even larger than the GE90 (see video below).

But GE and Ehteshami are just getting started. GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt wrote in his annual letter to shareowners that the company believed “the long-term market potential for additive manufacturing [was] huge at about $75 billion. We plan to build a business with $1 billion of revenue in additive equipment and service by 2020, from $300 million today,” he said. The Arcam and Concept Laser investments are GE’s first steps to grow its 3D printing base outside GE and across multiple industries, Ehteshami says. He says that applications for Arcam and Concept Laser machines will include aerospace and the auto industry, as well as medical implants and jewelry.

Several GE businesses, including Aviation, Oil & Gas, Power and Healthcare, are already benefiting from additive manufacturing. Working closely with engineers at GE Global Research, who built one of the first laser-powered 3D printers in the early 1990s, GE Additive recently opened the Additive Training Center (ATC) near Cincinnati. The 130,000-square-foot facility holds some 30 machines that print metal and as many as 40 machines that print plastic. (GE has a similar facility, called the Center for Additive Technologies Advancement, near Pittsburgh).

Several times a year, the ATC holds a “manufacturing boot camp.” It trains hundreds of engineers, who then fan out across GE to spread the additive gospel. “We pay them to play with the machines,” Ehteshami says. “We give them a real problem and tell them ‘go figure it out and print it.’ ”

The ATC center helps manufacturing engineers master the machines, but it also trains materials specialists to reshape supply chains. “Today, there are hundreds of big planes flying between cities around the world and carrying machine components,” Ehteshami says. “Tomorrow, you won’t need to do all of that. You’ll just print what you need.”

Ehteshami calls his additive awakening an “epiphany of disruption.” Says Ehteshami: “Once you start thinking about it, you realize both intellectually and emotionally ‘Oh my God, if I don’t start moving, somebody else will.’ You are excited because you are an engineer, but you are also afraid because you are a human being. Both of these feelings start pulling at you to say: ‘I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go.’ And you start running.”

In 1993, a pair of engineers working at GE Global Research published a paper describing their prototype of a 3D metal printer using selective laser sintering (SLS), an approach similar to the one GE now uses to make the nozzle tips. The team included Bill Carter and Marshall Jones, a laser pioneer who will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame this spring. Although the SLS method had been patented by the University of Texas in Austin, Carter’s and Jones’ printer may have been the first such machine to sinter metal powder directly with laser. Image credit: GE Global Research

Justin Eggart and fellow engineers working inside GE Power’s Monitoring and Diagnostics Center in Atlanta were halfway through their shift a few months ago when they noticed something strange. The center, the largest of its kind in the world, looks a lot like a smaller version of NASA’s mission control center. It has banks of computers and a wall-to-wall, colorful LED screen flashing real-time operating conditions inside 5,000 turbines, generators and other equipment churning away at 900 power plants located in 60 countries and serving 350 million people.

Every day, 1 million sensors attached to the machines send 200 billion data points to the cloud and to computers sitting directly on the machines. Eggart and his team slice it and dice the data with sophisticated software and “digital twins” — virtual versions of the power plans — and look for anomalies. “Our algorithms can run analysis on data that to other people appears as noise,” he says. “Within that noise, we can start to see patterns that allow us to make predictions.”

That afternoon, one of the power stations tracked by the center signaled an alert, even though it seemed to operate normally. “The plant never felt it, never heard it, never saw anything,” says Eggart, the general manager for fleet management technology at GE’s Power Services unit. “But we were sure it was there.”

The GE engineers in Atlanta called the power plant operators, who remained incredulous because they didn’t see any issues on their end, and told them to take a close look at a turbine bearing during the next scheduled maintenance session coming in a few weeks. “They came back and said: ‘You know what, you were right,’” Eggart says. “The bearing wasn’t getting the right lube oil feed, and it was going to fail.”

Spotting a problem early can save a utility a lot of money. Power plants get fined $50,000 if they “trip” and abruptly disconnect from the grid in some cases. This expense is in addition to the money they’re not making while the plant is offline. The costs can spiral into millions of dollars in cases like the bum bearing, especially if operators have to dock their plants for days or weeks because they don’t have spares on hand.

The technology Eggart’s team is using is already smart enough to spot hundreds of similar problems every year. But as of this fall, it has a new brain running on Predix, the software platform GE Digital developed for the industrial internet. The brain is GE’s new Asset Performance Management (APM) software application, and it will make the center’s predictive powers even more formidable, by giving customers more advance warning of issues that might trigger an outage. The “brain” also makes it easier for GE engineers and their customers to compare notes in real time and spot problems before they happen. Customers with the software see exactly what GE’s experts see. As a result, they minimize downtime and optimize power plant performance and save utilities money. “In the past, we had to call plant operators or send them an email,” Eggart says. “Now, they can see the same data I see. It allows us to interact on our smartphones, tablets and PCs and be much more collaborative.”

Top GIF: “Our algorithms can run analysis on data that to other people appears as noise,” says GE’s Justin Eggart. “Within that noise, we can start to see patterns that allow us to make predictions.” Above: The M&D center monitors in real-time operating conditions inside 5,000 turbines, generators and other equipment churning away at 900 power plants located in 60 countries and serving 350 million people. GIF credits: GE Power.

GE started remotely monitoring power plants two decades ago and has amassed a treasure trove of unique operations data. Machines made by the company also generate a third of the world’s electricity, giving it detailed insights into how turbines and generators are built and work. This domain knowledge allows the team at the center to also monitor turbines made by Alstom, Mitsubishi, Siemens and other makers. “We believe we have more data than anybody, and we’ve seen more than anyone,” Eggart says. “We also designed a lot of the equipment and know where to look. We can tailor our algorithms right around that knowledge.”

The most powerful Predix algorithms live inside the cloud. Using information about vibrations, pressure, temperature and other factors, the software, in combination with the specific machine’s digital twin, can predict what might happen in the future and recommend the best time for maintenance or the most optimal ways to run the plant.

But another set of algorithms and digital twins lives in computers located directly on the machines in the power plant, or, as GE calls it, on the edge. “The edge tends to be focused on the here and now, and the cloud allows me to think forward,” Eggart says. “The edge is like me putting a finger on the machine and feeling the vibrations and heat right there. The cloud is the brain that helps me figure out what it all means and what I need to do.”

Still, it’s humans who ultimately divine meaning from the data and decide how to respond to it. “You’ve got your edge and your cloud running your predictive software,” Eggart says. “But they inform the people who provide the service. The relationship is collaborative, not competitive. The AI is not taking over.”

Predix can operate in large cloud environments like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Eggart says that this “makes it easy” to grow the system to whatever size he needs. “I can scale at the push of a button,” he says.

This is handy for solutions like the APM software, which can, say, monitor a gas turbine and run diagnostics, but also optimize maintenance strategy, manage safety and environmental compliance, handle reliability, among many other functions. “All of these pieces of software build upon each other,” Eggart says. “Customers can buy a license and choose whatever level of engagement they want to have.”

Right now, the M&D Center, as GE calls it, covers only thermal power plants, meaning those that use coal or gas as fuel to generate electricity. GE also has monitoring centers for renewable energy in places like New York, as well as globally. But in the future, a similar center could cover “the entire energy value network,” Eggart says. “There’s no reason why we cannot monitor transformers, inverters, power lines, batteries and other technology standing between the power plant and the consumer,” he says. “When it comes to Predix and the cloud, the sky is the limit.”

Speaking at GE’s investor update meeting in New York today, GE Chairman and CEO John Flannery announced actions being taken across GE to make the company simpler and stronger, drive growth, and create more value. Flannery emphasized that the GE of the future will be a highly focused industrial company with unmatched global scale and strength in technology, services, additive manufacturing, and the digitization of industry.

“Having undertaken a thorough, no-stone-unturned review of every major aspect of our company, it is crystal clear to me that GE has fundamentally strong, market-leading businesses that need to run better,” Flannery said. “Every day our people solve tough problems – we heal the sick, power the globe, and move people and goods safely and efficiently – but we need to raise the bar on operational excellence and hold each other accountable to deliver. The year ahead is all about focus and execution.”

He outlined the following actions that GE is taking to achieve this vision:

1. GE’s portfolio will focus on markets where we have strategic advantages.

GE’s businesses are fundamentally strong. Eighty-five percent of GE’s industrial profit comes from businesses with leading positions in complex industries that require scale and technological depth, such as power, flight and health. The company will invest in areas that play to its unique strengths, including differentiating Predix, GE’s software platform for the industrial internet, in the digital space, and will focus on cash generation and returns.

Top image: As large in diameter as the body of an entire Boeing 737, the GE9X is the biggest jet engine in the world. Images credit: GE Aviation. Above: CFM International, a 50/50 joint venture between GE and France’s Safran Aerospace, has sold 14,000 LEAP engines valued at more than $200 billion (U.S. list price). Image credit: CFM International. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports.

To support these investments, GE will exit $20 billion of non-core or smaller businesses, including the pending sale of Industrial Solutions and proposed sale of Lighting. Today, GE also announced that it is exploring strategic options around proposed sales of its Transportation and Current businesses, along with other smaller transactions.

2. GE is resetting its outlook and increasing capital allocation discipline, including reducing its dividend.

To strengthen the company for the long term, GE needs to improve its cash position. It is managing for total shareholder return by balancing an aggressive focus on costs with critical investments in long-term growth initiatives like investing in R&D.

We are reducing our dividend payout to be more aligned with the generation of free cash flow. Given GE’s 2018 outlook highlighted in the presentation, the board decided to lower the dividend to $.48, which is a 60-70% payout ratio on 2018 estimated free cash flow of $6-7B.

A power plant in France using GE’s HA gas turbine won the Guinness World Record for net efficiency at 62.22 percent in 2016. The company says that efficiency could reach 65 percent by the early 2020s. Image credit: GE Power.

3. GE is shifting what it measures and how it works.

GE is highly focused on driving a culture of candor, rigor and accountability. This change starts at the top, and to better align management with shareowners, GE is shifting executive compensation to a higher equity mix.

We are also improving our financial reporting by adopting new metrics to make it easier to interpret connections between earnings, growth and cash flow. GE’s performance metrics have historically prioritized top line growth and operating profit, and going forward, it will increase its focus on cash. The company will use several new metrics beginning in 2018 that are consistent with its industrial peers, including:

• Moving from industrial CFOA to industrial free cash flow
• Moving from industrial operating + verticals EPS to adjusted EPS

A team of female engineers and managers helped develop GE’s new mammography scanner, Senographe Pristina. “This is engineering by women for women,” says Laura Hernandez, global product manager for the Senographe Pristina. Images credit: GE Healthcare.

4. Leadership and governance changes will improve GE’s accountability.

GE has made significant changes to its leadership team. Since June, 40 percent of the GE leadership team are in new roles, blending together both fresh eyes and institutional memory.

After completing a self-assessment, GE’s board decided to reduce the number of directors to 12 from 18, and three of these directors will be new to the team. It is also adding a new Finance and Capital Allocation committee to the Board. Director incentives will be tied to performance via increased stock ownership.

GE has the technical expertise, global reach and installed base, and built-for-the-future capabilities to succeed in these markets as it continues to tackle the world’s biggest challenges – the essentials of modern life.

GE Global Research engineer Doug Hofer (left) is holding a 3D printed model of a compact and highly efficient CO2 turbine that fits on a conference table but can generate 10 megawatts (MW), enough to power 10,000 U.S. homes. Image credit: GE Global Research.

When Mohammad Ehteshami talks about 3D printing, he often mentions his “epiphany of disruption,” the moment he realized that additive manufacturing will upend how companies design and make things. “I remember that day like today,” Ehteshami said. “I was excited but also disturbed. I knew that we found a solution, but I also saw that this technology could eliminate what we’ve done for years and years and put a lot of pressure on our financial model.”

That was almost a decade ago. Today, Ehteshami runs GE Additive, a new GE business that builds and sells 3D printers, metal powders and consulting services. His team is now disrupting this new industry itself.

Ehteshami and his colleagues arrived at formnext — the world’s largest trade fair for additive manufacturers, which starts today in Frankfurt, Germany — with a beta version of the world’s largest 3D printer for metals, which uses a laser and a powder bed to make parts. It is capable of printing parts as large as 1 meter in diameter directly from a computer file by fusing together thin layers of metal powder with a 1-kilowatt laser. The machine has the potential to build even bigger parts, due to the nature of the scalable technology. Customers are already requesting machines with build volumes of more than 1 meter cubed, GE said.

GE announced the development effort — called Project ATLAS, for Additive Technology Large Area System — at the Paris Air Show last summer. “The machine can 3D print aviation parts suitable for making jet engine structural components and parts for single-aisle aircraft,” Ehteshami told GE Reports.

Ehteshami said his team already used the beta machine to print a jet engine combustor liner. “It’s sized for the CFM LEAP engine and the resolution and features of the part are amazing,” he said. “It can also be applicable for manufacturers in the automotive, power and space industries.”

Top and above: GE arrived at formnext — the world’s largest trade fair for additive manufacturers taking place in Frankfurt, Germany — with a beta version of the world’s largest 3D printer for metals, which uses a laser and a powder bed to make parts. Image credit: GE Additive. Above: GE’s Ehteshami unveiled the beta version of Project ATLAS at formnext on Tuesday morning. Image credit: GE Additive.

To build the yet-unnamed machine, GE is drawing on expertise from Concept Laser, a German maker of 3D printers for metals in which the company acquired a 75 percent stake in 2016. GE says that the new printer’s architecture and technology will allow users to save powder and costs while maintaining precision and quality.

The company says it will use proprietary technology to control powder dosing, reducing powder consumption by 69 percent compared to traditional machines “on its first attempt.” The machine will also print faster than today’s machines. GE can configure the design and allows customers to add more lasers.

The new printer will also take advantage of Predix, GE’s software platform for the industrial internet, to monitor the printing process and also the health of the machine. Concept Laser’s new M2 printers already come with data analytics using Predix to monitor machine utilization and production and look for potential problems before they occur.

Several GE businesses are already using additive manufacturing to make and develop new products. GE Aviation is printing fuel nozzles for the LEAP family of jet engines. The company is also building the Advanced Turboprop, the first commercial aircraft engine in history with a large portion of components made by additive manufacturing methods, which include 3D printing. The designers reduced 855 separate parts down to just 12. As a result, more than a third of the engine is 3D printed. GE Healthcare, GE Power and the oil- and gas-field services company Baker Hughes are also using the technology.

Says Ehteshami: “This is an engineer’s dream.”

People have used ceramics to protect their hands from hot liquids for ages. But as anyone who’s ever dropped a coffee mug on the kitchen floor knows, the material is fragile. “When you hit it, it fails catastrophically,” says GE materials scientist Krishan Luthra.

Still, Luthra couldn’t resist the idea that this heat-resistant material could shake up industry — if he could keep it intact. “I thought it would be the Holy Grail if we could get it inside machines, and get more power and savings out of our jet engines,” he says. “It could really make an impact.”

Engineers have long known that higher firing temperatures make their machines more efficient. They have devised special coatings and clever ways to “bleed” air through intricate cooling holes into jet engines and turbines running so hot they would otherwise melt the metal parts working inside them. But scientists like Luthra wanted something better.

He and teams across GE have spent the last three decades developing a special kind of heat-resistant ceramic that is as tough as steel. The material, called a ceramic matrix composite (CMC), can withstand temperatures approaching 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, where even the most advanced alloys grow soft.

Top image: A LEAP engine going through testing at GE Aviation’s test stand in Peebles, Ohio. It has CMC parts inside. CFM International, the 50-50 joint venture between GE and Safran Aircraft Engines that developed the LEAP engine, has sold almost 14,000 of them, valued at more than $200 billion (U.S. list price). Image credit: CFM International. Above: CMC components could make power plant’s with GE’s HA-class gas turbines 65 percent efficient, higher than the current world record. Image credit: GE Power.

GE’s Oil & Gas business, now part of Baker Hughes, a GE company, first tested parts from the material inside a gas turbine in Florence, Italy, in 2000. Next, GE Power studied similar parts inside its turbine a few years later, making them run for thousands of hours without a problem.

But the material truly took off when GE Aviation started using CMC parts inside efficient jet engines like the LEAP, which powers the latest Airbus, Boeing and Comac planes. CFM International, the 50-50 joint venture between GE and Safran Aircraft Engines that developed the LEAP engine, has sold almost 14,000 of them, valued at more than $200 billion (U.S. list price). The GE9X, the world’s largest jet engine, which GE developed for Boeing’s next-generation 777X plane, will also have CMC parts.

But the material is now also beginning to gain a foothold in the power industry. To be sure, the latest gas turbines from GE Power already work inside record-breaking power plants. Last year, a power station owned by the French utility EDF reached 62 percent efficiency, a feat so notable that Guinness World Records anointed the station as the world’s most efficient combined-cycle power plant. But that record won’t likely stand long, according to engineers like John Lammas, chief technology officer for GE Power’s gas turbine business. He says that CMCs will help push efficiency to 65 percent.

GE Aviation is testing rotating blades made from CMCs inside jet engines. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports.

Lammas isn’t chasing world records just for the sake of it. “Achieving just a 1 percent efficiency gain at the scale GE turbines work at is huge,” he told GE Reports. “To put it in perspective, a 1,000-megawatt power plant using a pair of GE’s HA turbines could save $50 million on fuel over 10 years.”

Lammas’ colleagues at GE Power’s Advanced Manufacturing Works (AMW) in Greenville, South Carolina, have already deployed these superceramics inside working power plants. They are now using the results to design new CMC “shrouds” that channel hot air through the high-pressure turbine. “When you can find a customer that’s willing to let us try something, we can get a jump on field experience,” says Kurt Goodwin, who runs AMW. “With CMCs, they can have a more efficient turbine. They get paid for the extra power they generate and they don’t have to pay as much for the fuel.”

Goodwin’s team is now studying shrouds that spent as long as seven years working in the field. He’s also collaborating closely with his colleagues at GE Aviation to get the design right and reduce production costs. Rick Kennedy, a spokesman for GE Aviation, said that the business unit “has created a vertically integrated CMC supply chain in the United States … to meeting dramatically growing demand.” It includes a new factory in Huntsville, Alabama, to produce CMC raw materials for GE Power, GE Aviation and the U.S. Department of Defense. “There’s always a few problems that we need to work through and it’s really very valuable for both of us to compare notes,” Goodwin says.

Making CMCs is a multistep and secret process. Engineers first cover tiny silicon carbide fibers — five times thinner than a human hair — with a special coating. Next, they embed the fibers in a silicon carbide matrix and further process it. The resulting parts are extremely tough, but also very hard to shape. The team has been experimenting with diamond burr bits, electrical discharge machining, cutters from hard carbide steel and other tools to machine the components. “Forming and cutting parts made with these materials is challenging to do economically and with quality,” says Eric Bell, ceramics technology manager for CMC shrouds at the AMW.

That’s another place where GE Power can scale GE Aviation’s experience. For example, the shrouds GE Power is working on are several times larger than their counterparts already working inside jet engines. “For the same industrial gas turbine hardware, we use on the order of six times the material,” Bell says.

GE has been sharing innovation among its labs and businesses since its inception 125 years ago. The best-selling LEAP jet engine entered service last year. GE Power hopes its efficient turbines will follow a similar path.

GE Aviation’s new factory in Asheville, North Carolina, is using ovens to process ceramic components. Image credit: GE Aviation.

A few years ago, scientists working in GE labs in upstate New York came up with a cool idea for fixing broken parts. Literally. Calling the approach “cold spray,” they shot tiny metal grains from a supersonic nozzle at aircraft engine blades to add new material to them without changing their properties.

Anteneh Kebbede, manager of the Coatings and Surface Lab at the GE Global Research Center, who helped developed cold spray, said the technology can build whole new parts with walls as thick as 1 inch or more. “For manufacturers, the potential benefits are enormous,” Kebbede says. “Imagine being able to restore an aging part to its original condition with a tool that looks like a spray gun.” It is “like a fountain of youth for machine parts.”

GE engineers have already taken a dip. Earlier this year, engineers at the GE Aviation subsidiary Avio Aero started testing the technology in Bari, Italy. Last month they used it to repair the first part: a gearbox from the world’s most powerful jet engine, the GE90.

The milestone was an important one. Cold spray, like 3D printing, is one of several additive manufacturing methods that build parts from the ground up by adding material to them, rather than cutting it away.

But even in the high-tech additive family, cold spray is a rare species. Most 3D printers for metals use lasers to heat up powdered titanium, and other metals, and fuse them to build new parts layer by layer. That technique works well for printing new components directly from a computer file. But heating up an existing part can alter its crystalline structure and mechanical properties. “When you heat up metal and then cool it again, it changes in the same way powder snow can become a sheet of ice after a warm spell,” said Gregorio Dimagli, repair development manager at Avio Aero.

Top and above: Cold spray, like 3D printing, is one of several additive manufacturing methods that build parts from the ground up by adding material to them, rather than cutting it away. Images credit: Avio Aero.

At Bari, the cold-spray process happens in a metal chamber the size of a walk-in refrigerator. The chamber holds a robotic arm with an attached supersonic nozzle that sprays metallic powder particles, as small as 5 microns, onto the piece that needs to be fixed. They hit the surface with so much energy they form a diffusion bond with the part. “Every single metal particle from the powder-charged gun attaches to the part of the component for reconstruction or repair due to the effect of the kinetics,” explains Giulio Longo, the lead repair development engineer in the Bari laboratory.

There are other differences. While traditional 3D printers build parts from computer files, the cold-spray machine uses digital scans of actual jet engine parts to accurately reconstruct the broken part.

The work happening at Bari is the result of a seven-year partnership between Avio Aero and the Polytechnic University of Bari. At the Apulia Repair Development Center, located on the Bari campus, GE engineers work with professors and experts in mechanical engineering to create new ways to build, maintain and repair aircraft parts.

As they develop best practices for these new technologies, expect to see additive manufacturing become a more important part of aircraft engine repair in the coming years.

Online retailers have been tracking their customers and their web habits with cookies for years. No wonder their brick-and-mortar rivals are looking for new ways to play the big-data game.

The French startup IRLYNX believes it can help them set sales on fire. The company developed small heat sensors, each just 1 centimeter in diameter, that retailers can place on walls, ceilings and even in light fixtures around a store to track customers.

Picking up customers’ body heat, each sensor can monitor movement as far as 15 meters away and within a 120-degree sweep. They can detect heat variances of less than 1 degree Fahrenheit, which helps them tell a human from, say, a hot computer or a fresh cup of coffee.

The sensors can also detect the size and postures of shoppers and distinguish an adult from a child or someone who is sitting down to try on a pair of shoes. The sensors are a big upgrade from the way stores typically track shoppers — with cameras. While the images on a camera may be clearer, it’s very difficult to use those images to track data about how people are using a store. “Video-analysis software can be easily confused by mirrors, photographs, televisions, posters — almost any images of humans,” says Guillaume Crozet, IRLYNX’s vice president for sales and marketing. Training algorithms to disregard these false images can be time-consuming and costly.

Cameras also create privacy issues. The IRLYNX system handles by rendering humans as 16- to 128-square-pixel thermal blobs. The system takes the data coming from sensors and sends it to the cloud, where it can be sorted and analyzed by apps running on Predix, GE’s software platform for the industrial internet. In fact, IRLYNX is one of the startups developing its technology inside the GE Digital Foundry in Paris.

Above: French startup IRLYNX has invented heat sensors to help retailers track customers’ behavior in stores. Image credit: GE Digital. Top image: Thermal imaging cameras use infrared light to detect an object’s or a person’s heat radiation. The sensors IRLYNX developed will have less resolution than thermal camera images (top), and render humans as 16- to 128-square-pixel thermal blobs. Image credit: Getty Images.

IRLYNX software can combine the feeds from overlapping sensors to create a total picture of the space and how people move through a store over time, Crozet says. The information can help the owner identify how shoppers walk around the store and where they congregate — showing, for example, that people rarely go deeper than the front half of the store, and when they do, they linger in certain areas.

Crozet says that retail is just one of the system’s applications. Earlier this year the company won GE’s Indoor Location Analytics challenge, which provides detailed information on space occupancy. During the challenge, IRLYNX was able to build a proof of concept in its own offices. The company deployed three sensors to track people moving through the entrance and reception area at the Foundry. The sensors collected real-time information about the number of people on the floor and how they were using the space.

The sensors could also help improve the safety of senior citizens living alone and alert caretakers if they detect unusual patterns of movement. The company can even program the system to recognize a distinctive hand gesture, so that users could call for help with a wave of the hand.

Eventually, Crozet says, the sensors can be integrated with GE’s smart LED lights, which use sensors to detect ambient temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide and occupancy, among other things. When connected to the Internet of Things, the sensors can help companies manage their heating and cooling systems, for example. IRLYNX’s sensors take that capacity one step further by tracking people to create a visual record of how people are using industrial spaces. “We want to be at the forefront of digital buildings,” says Crozet. “We want to be installed from the beginning to help companies.”

IRLYNX started working with GE through the company’s Digital Industry Program. You can find more information about the program here.

This week we watched a robot do a backflip, marveled about an implantable device that can help the brain form memories, and learned about an X-ray-reading AI that outperformed Stanford doctors in diagnosing pneumonia. We are starting to feel sorry for sci-fi writers.

Brain Memory Implants

Top and above: Scientists at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina are working on a brain implant that could improve memory. Images credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Scientists at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina are working on a brain implant that could improve memory. They already have tested it in humans suffering from epilepsy, “demonstrating successful implementation of a new neural prosthetic system for the restoration of damaged human memory,” the team reported this week.

Why does it matter? The researchers wrote in a January 2017 paper that such memory “prosthetics” could use implanted circuits to bypass damaged parts of the hippocampus, the area of the brain that encodes memory, and “then stimulate the appropriate effectors, downstream from the site of injury,” i.e. help form memories. The device has “the potential to restore function in diseases such as Alzheimer’s,” the team wrote. The New Scientist wrote that the device could “boost performance on memory tests by up to 30 percent. A similar approach may work for enhancing other brain skills, such as vision or movement,” the magazine reported.

How does it work? The team has been working on the device, called Parylene C, for several years. The device has several probes “anatomically matched to multiple regions of the hippocampus,” a part of the brain that is involved in memory. When the team implanted it into the hippocampus of rats, for example, they were able to “successfully demonstrate recordings from targeted regions” and acquire for the first time “dense neural information from deep brain targets of interest” that play an important role in forming memories.

This Robot Gets Gold

What is it: Is there anything Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots cannot do? The latest version of machine has learned to do backflips and other moves previously reserved for gymnasts.

Why does it matter? An older Atlas already went for a walk by itself. The robot, which is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 180 pounds, could also move objects and even stoically handle a few mean pranks by humans (at least for now). The new version could be your gym trainer, an Olympic athlete, you name it. The company, which spun out of MIT, says that it is “combining the principles of dynamic control and balance with sophisticated mechanical designs, cutting-edge electronics, and software for perception, navigation, and intelligence.”

How does it work? You can see them in action yourself, but in a nutshell the electric robots have 28 joints and rely on a battery, lots of hydraulic actuators, LIDAR for navigation and stereo vision, and other technology.

The Software Will See You Now

“In just over a month, their algorithm could beat these standards in all 14 identification tasks,” Stanford News reported. “In that short time span, CheXNet also outperformed the four Stanford radiologists in diagnosing pneumonia accurately.” Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it: Computer scientists at Stanford University have written an algorithm that can learn from chest X-ray images and diagnose pneumonia better than radiologists. The code, called CheXNet, reportedly can diagnose up to 14 medical conditions.

Why does it matter? Some 1 million Americans are hospitalized every year with pneumonia, and the disease can be difficult to diagnose. “The motivation behind this work is to have a deep learning model to aid in the interpretation task that could overcome the intrinsic limitations of human perception and bias, and reduce errors,” Matthew Lungren, co-author of the team’s paper, told Stanford News. “More broadly, we believe that a deep learning model for this purpose could improve health care delivery across a wide range of settings.”

How does it work? The team trained the algorithm on more than 100,000 public chest X-ray images released by the National Institutes of Health. Next, they checked the results against four Stanford radiologists’ independent diagnoses. “Within a week the researchers had an algorithm that diagnosed 10 of the pathologies labeled in the X-rays more accurately than previous state-of-the-art results,” Stanford News reported. “In just over a month, their algorithm could beat these standards in all 14 identification tasks. In that short time span, CheXNet also outperformed the four Stanford radiologists in diagnosing pneumonia accurately.”

Rubber Power

A sample of piezoelectric rubber. Image and caption credits: Empa.

What is it? Scientists at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) have developed rubber that generates electricity when stretched and compressed.

Why does it matter? The material could lead to miniature rubber power plants that can be worked into buttons and clothing to generate electricity from movement. “This material could probably even be used to obtain energy from the human body,” said EMPA researcher Dorina Opris. “You could implant it near the heart to generate electricity from the heartbeat, for instance.” This could power pacemakers or other implanted devices, eliminating the need for invasive operations to change their batteries.

How does it work? The material takes advantage of the piezoelectric effect allowing certain materials to convert stress and vibrations into electricity. The effect was first discovered in 1880, but application have been mostly limited to stiff materials. “Opris and her colleagues have now succeeded in giving elastomers piezoelectric properties,” EMPA reported.

Editing Bodies

“For the first time, a patient has received a therapy intended to precisely edit the DNA of cells directly inside the body,” said Dr. Sandy Macrae, CEO of Sangamo Therapeutics. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Researchers at Sangamo Therapeutics said they edited genes inside a patient’s body for the first time. “For the first time, a patient has received a therapy intended to precisely edit the DNA of cells directly inside the body,” said Dr. Sandy Macrae, CEO of Sangamo Therapeutics. “We are at the start of a new frontier of genomic medicine.”

Why does it matter? The patient in question suffered from Hunter syndrome, a genetic disease caused by a faulty enzyme that leads to “the buildup of massive amounts” of harmful substances that can damage appearance, mental development and other functions, according to Mayo Clinic. There’s no cure for the condition.

How does it work? Sangamo wants to use gene editing “to insert a corrective gene into a precise location in the DNA of liver cells with the goal of enabling a patient’s liver to produce a lifelong and stable supply of an enzyme he or she currently lacks.”

Few people have done more to bring humans and robots together than Rodney Brooks. Two decades ago, the Australian inventor, mathematician and former MIT professor founded iRobot, the company that designed Roomba, a line of robots that zip around homes and clean dirty floors. Today, he’s still dreaming up clever ways to make robots do our dirty work — but in factories rather than living rooms.

In 2008, he founded the Boston-based Rethink Robotics, a company building collaborative robots like Baxter and the one-armed Sawyer. These “cobots” are working next to humans in assembly plants and warehouses, handling many repetitive, dirty and difficult tasks. Brooks serves as chairman and chief technology officer of Rethink Robotics, whose investors include Bezos Expeditions, Goldman Sachs, as well as GE Ventures.

We recently caught up with him at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York, where he opened its Robotics Symposium. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Above: Rethink Robotics’s Baxter (right) is hugging Sawyer, but their father, Rodney Brooks (top), they could be hugging us soon. Images credit. Rethink Robotics.

GE Reports: How do you convince factory workers to start collaborating with your robots?

Rodney Brooks: Most of our customers are putting robots in places they never had robots before. Traditional industrial robots require a cage around them so people can’t get close to them because they’re just not safe. Our robots are safe. People can place robots into workspaces right next to humans and have them take over the really dull, repetitive parts of the jobs that people don’t like doing.

GER: How do you design them so that they don’t knock someone over?

RB: Our robots have force sensors in every joint. As they’re moving, they’re predicting how much force they should feel, and then, if they hit something, within a millisecond or two they’re aware that the forces are not what they expected. We quickly shut down the motion and then we go into what is called squish mode, where a person can just push the arm out of the way.

GER: Squish mode sounds awesome.

RB: Indeed. As a result, you’re never going to get trapped by the robot and you only get hit very, very gently. For my robots, I’m always willing to put my head right in front of the robot and have a whack.

GER: What else is driving demand for robots?

RB: In the U.S., in Europe, in Japan and in China, we’re already seeing manufacturing suffering from an aging work force. We just can’t get enough young people to come and do dull, repetitive jobs, in any of those countries.

We are aiming at alleviating some of that labor shortage by taking over the duller parts of the jobs. But it’s not just factory automation, or factories. There’s a labor shortage coming. There’s an incredible wave of shortage in farming in the U.S., for example.

Users program Baxter and Sawyer just by moving their arms. GIF credit: GE Reports.

GER: How are you developing new applications for your robots?

RB: At Rethink Robotics, we’re concentrating on factory and fulfillment right now, but we’ve also made the robots available with special software as a research tool to universities. We have them in over 400 research labs around the world. We hope that lots of smart people will use them and help us go into hospitals, into elder-care facilities and even food production. We don’t think we can solve all of those things right at once, but we can provide a platform, which lets researchers figure a lot of new stuff out.

GER: When we get old, we could have a robot companion?

RB: I think the elderly want to maintain their independence and dignity and age in home as much as they can. So as people get more frail, what are the robotics systems that can help them maintain their independence? For instance, a lot of people have to go to managed care when they can no longer get into or out of bed by themselves. A robotic solution seems like a good idea. But now you have to have a robot manipulating a human body, which is a very fragile thing.

Our robot arms are able to measure forces and they could be a good basis for a system like that. The ultimate solution is going to look different from our current robots, but it will be based on that technology. I think that I as I get older, I will have robots hugging me quite a lot.

GER: Have you ever hugged a robot?

RB: Of course, haven’t you?

Baxter and Sawyer switch to “squish mode” when they bump into an object or a human. The operator can just push the arm out of the way. “For my robots, I’m always willing to put my head right in front of the robot and have a whack,” Brooks says. Image credit: Rethink Robotics.

GER: Besides hugging, what skills are you developing for the next generation of your robots?

RB: From the beginning, as we’ve been developing our robots, we’ve been trying to identify the friction points that stop people from deploying robots in factories. Early on, it was safety and having to put cages around them. Later, it was having to write lines of code for them. We brought those capabilities into our robots and you can now program them just by moving their arms.

Right now, our robots are doing a lot of packing into boxes. The next thing we are doing is giving them some elementary use of force connected to vision. It’s very easy to show the robot visual tasks, say, to look at a conveyor belt and pick up something from it. But we want our robots to be able to use force feedback as they are inserting, say, a delicate component into a circuit board, and also make it easy for the humans to show the robot what the exact parameters of the task are.

GER: What about awareness?

RB: It depends on your definition. When humans are working in a factory or any work site at all, they notice when something is wrong, and they raise an alert. You know, water pouring out of a pipe, a table is falling down, they know the fire’s somewhere. One thing we want to do is make our robots understand what’s usual and what’s unusual in the environment so they can at least alert humans.

GER: How big is the business opportunity for robotics?

RB: The Boston Consulting Group says that only 10 percent of automatable tasks in factories have been automated in the 50 years we’ve had industrial robots. The reason we haven’t seen more is because up till now, when you put a robot in a space, you have to get rid of the humans. But with collaborative robots we can mix humans and robots together. That helps open up somewhere between the current 10 percent and 100 percent of automatable tasks. There’s an incredible range of new possibilities coming about.