Love and the heart go together like chocolates and Valentine’s Day. Starting with the ancient Egyptians, and maybe even sooner, humans believed that the heart was where the soul, emotions and wisdom dwelled.

It was the only internal organ the Egyptians did not remove during mummification “so that the Goddess Ma’at might weigh it against the feather of truth in the afterlife and punish the heavy-hearted,” writes cultural historian Iain Gately.

The idea stuck. “Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night,” mused Romeo three thousand years later, and hearts of many sizes and designs will be ubiquitous everywhere today, on Valentine’s Day.

An image captured by GE’s Revolution CT scanner shows a human heart with stents typically used to treat narrow or weak arteries.

But science has moved on and our rational understanding of the heart followed. In 1628, English court physician William Harvey described for the first time that the heart was a pump pushing blood around the body.

Doctors and researchers have been delving deeper into the heart ever since. Where Harvey and others relied on autopsies and detailed drawings, modern physicians are using high-tech imaging tools that can peer inside the body and help them fix broken hearts. Take a look.

This stained newt chromosome seems to be getting in shape for Valentine’s Day. The image, which was captured by a high-resolution microscope from GE Healthcare Life Sciences, shows an RNA splicing factor in red and polymerase II in blue. The image could help scientists solve developmental biology riddles.

Doctors and researchers are using the latest CT technology to peel away layers of tissue and study in detail the heart and other organs.

The Revolution CT scanner produced this image of the heart in just one heartbeat.

Scientists at GE Global Research are working with tiny, gas-filled “microbubbles" that can flow through the bloodstream and clarify ultrasound images of the heart (pictured here) and other organs. The technology could fit inside the ambulance and help medical staff diagnose patients on the spot, potentially saving lives.

Vascular muscle cells, which typically surround blood vessels in the body, can be used to study abnormalities in several genetic syndromes. Australian researcher Leslie Caron captured this image with the IN Cell Analyzer.

A cell model used to study ischemic heart disease. Image by Yoshiko Fujita, National Cardiovascular Center, Japan.

When people talk about the future of manufacturing, they usually have Germany, Japan and the United States in mind, not India. That’s about to change. GE has invested over $200 million in a new “flexible factory” that will produce diverse products, from jet engine parts to locomotive components, for four different GE business all under one roof for the first time.

The plant, which is located in Pune in western India, near Mumbai, covers 67 acres, an area equal to 38 football fields. It will employ 1,500 workers who will share production lines, support infrastructure, and equipment like 3D printers and laser inspection technology. Besides making jet engine and locomotive technology, they will also assemble wind turbines and build water treatment units for the oil and gas and agriculture industries. “The plant will allows us to quickly adjust production as demand comes in, using the same people and space,” says Banmali Agrawala, president of CEO of GE South Asia.

Top image: Wind turbine hub assembly at GE’s new flexible factory in Pune, India. Above: Locomotive turbochargers.

This flexible “multi-modal” factory, which opened on Saturday, is as groundbreaking for India as it is for GE. It’s the first application of the concept that GE calls the “brilliant factory” where factory equipment and computers talk to each other over the Internet in real time, share information, and make decisions to preserve quality and prevent downtime. In such a factory, production lines are digitally connected to supply, service and distribution networks to maintain optimal production. “The brilliant factory is more than 3D printing parts from digital files, which we already do,” says Christine Furstoss, global technology director at GE Global Research. “We can build a factory that can make itself better.”

Small parts CNC machining section of the plant.

The idea to build the first iteration of such a plant in India made sense to GE, because the company wanted to harmonize its operations there, gain size and scale quickly, and support its suppliers. “We have too many small suppliers and their ability to leverage size and scale becomes a problem,” Agrawala says. “The multi-modal plant is good for us and good for them. It will give us a chance to invest in the right tools, processes and training, keep our machines utilized, and develop new products faster and cheaper. It will also give a chance to experiment and try new things.”

The flexible factory also fits into Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” campaign. Modi, who attended the opening, wants to boost the share manufacturing in India’s GDP to 25 percent by 2022, create 100 million new jobs, and alleviate poverty

Wind turbine head waiting for assembly. All photos credited to: Farhad Bomanjee 

Eric King has made many an extreme machine cry uncle over his long career as a testing engineer. But nothing comes close to his current charge, Harriet, the world’s largest and most powerful gas turbine. “What we are doing is akin to the hardest military boot camp,” King says. “There is nothing like this anywhere in the world. We can simulate conditions ranging from the Arabian Desert to the mountains of Colorado, and run Harriet through extreme events it will likely never see in service.”

GE is investing over $1 billion in Harriet. The turbine can generate 600 megawatts when combined with a steam generator, enough to power the equivalent of 600,000 U.S. homes. The company also spent an additional $185 million on King’s high-tech boot camp, a unique full-speed, full-load test bed at GE Power & Water in Greenville, S.C. “Here we can really see what it’s made of,” King says. “In field testing, we measure data and extrapolate. With this test stand, we measure data and then verify it.”

Harriet has turbine blades made from superalloy monocrystals to manage temperatures as high as 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit. It also has variable stator vanes (the moving parts above), which direct the flow of air and were originally developed for supersonic jet engines. Both technologies come from GE Aviation. GE calls the concept of sharing ideas between its businesses the GE store.

Since the test bed is not connected to the grid, King and his team of testing engineers can do things that could otherwise destabilize or damage the power network. 

In just 3 months, they ran the turbine through operations that would normally take years to encounter in the field. They tested it at the maximum power output and simulated extreme events like severe grid instability caused by the oversupply of power, and observed the turbine respond and bring the grid back to normal. “You can’t do his in the field without wrecking the grid,” King says. “This hasn’t been done before. More than 50 customers flew in to see the test, including representatives from France’s Électricité de France.”

GE engineers have never tested before a turbine as big as Harriet.

Instead of generating electricity, the turbine exhales hot air at a speed equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane. “We could fill the Goodyear blimp in about 10 seconds,” says Brad Carey, the engineering manager for Harriet.

In fact, the turbine is so large and powerful, and the tests are so extreme that GE had to build a dedicated gasworks that can store 180,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas to feed it, and North America’s largest railroad turntable to maneuver it inside the test bed. “The city of Greenville is a light industrial and residential area,” Carey says. “It does not have the infrastructure to give us the gas flow rates we need for this type of equipment.”

Made in France, the first Harriet arrived for testing in April last year (see below). GE engineers placed some 5,000 measuring instruments and sensors on the turbine, and another 2,000 on a compressor validation rig that must absorb Harriet’s 500,000 horsepower. The detectors produced nearly 5 terabytes of data, about half the content of the printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. “The test stand allows us to obtain information about the turbine about a year earlier than in the normal development cycle,” Carey says.

The engineers feed the data into custom-made, proprietary software that allows them to monitor the immediate health of the turbine and measure parameters like output heat rate and emissions. 

The testing had three phases. The validation stage took the turbine through its normal operations, the demonstration stage studied the machine’s fuel and load flexibility, and the growth phase took the validation rig beyond its limits.

The tests will help engineers to fine tune Harriet before the first one starts producing electricity in France next year. GE also already has 15 backlog orders for the turbine from customers in the U.S., Japan and the E.U. “Knowing what each component does will also allow us to make changes and improve the turbine in the future,” Carey says.

The 9HA turbine, aka Harriet, is the world’s largest and most powerful gas turbine. Harriet can reach a combined cycle efficiency that exceeds 61 percent, a number that has been called the Holy Grail in the power generation business.GIF and image credits: GE Power & Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The airplane was still barely a teenager when the United States entered World War I, and the U.S. Army’s fledgling aeronautical division wanted to make its airplanes fly higher without losing power.

Sanford Moss, a GE engineer and one of the brightest minds in the steam turbine business, had an idea. He and his team designed a device called turbosupercharger. It used exhaust fumes coming from an aircraft engine to power a small turbine. The turbine increased the air pressure in the engine’s cylinders and gave it more oomph, especially at high altitudes where the air is thinner.

In 1918, Moss took the device to Pikes Peak in Colorado, elev. 14,000 ft., (see above) and proved that a supercharged Liberty V-12 aircraft engine performed much better at this height than the standard version. The government was pleased and GE started making superchargers for the Army.

Moss shrunk his Pikes Peak turbosupercharger to fit on a plane.

It was this contract that launched GE into air. Today, there are more than 30,000 GE  aircraft engines in service, from tuboprops powering commuter planes to the world’s highest elevation airports in the Himalayas, to the largest and most powerful jet engine ever built. Take a look at the highlights.

First aircraft turbosupercharger: In 1921, a LePere biplane (above) equipped with Moss’ turbosupercharger set a world altitude record, reaching 40,800 ft. In 1937, Howard Hughes used the device on his record-breaking transcontinental flight from Newark, N.J., to Los Angeles lasting 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds. GE Aviation made turbosuperchargers for several decades. Later versions of the technology served on B-17, B-24 and B-29 bombers during World War II. Since GE was not yet making engines, they worked with Pratt & Whitney and Curtiss-Wright piston engines.

The heated, high-altitude flying suit: These WWII bombers flew missions above 25,000 feet without pressurized or heated cabins. At that height, crews had to wear oxygen masks to remain conscious and protect themselves from temperatures so low that exposed skin froze to metal. GE engineers stepped in to help. They designed a heated flying suit for high altitudes by drawing on previous experience from a successful but decisively non-military product: electric blankets.

First U.S. Jet Engine: In the fall of 1941, a top secret group of GE engineers nicknamed the Hush-Hush Boys (above) used Sir Frank Whittle’s British jet engine design to build America’s first jet engine. The prototype flew in 1942, and the jet engine entered service in 1944, powering the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, the first jet fighter in the U.S. Air Force’s arsenal.

First U.S. Commercial Jet Engine: In 1947, GE’s J47 engine became the first jet engine certified for commercial aviation in the U.S. GE made more than 35,000 of them. They found a handful of applications outside aviation. The Spirit of America jet car used one, and a pair of them powered what is still the world’s fastest jet-propelled train (above). They also served on the railroad as heavy-duty snowblowers.

Early supersonic engines: In 1948, GE hired German aviation pioneer Gerhard Neumann, who quickly went to work on the jet engine. He developed a revolutionary design called variable stator (above). It allowed pilots to turn the vanes on the engine’s stator, 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, engineers thought that their instruments were malfunctioning because of the amount of power it produced. In the 1960s, the  GE-powered XB-70 Valkyrie (above) aircraft was flying in excess of Mach 3, three times the speed of sound.

Two experimental reactors for testing nuclear-powered jet engines in Arco, Idaho. Image credit:  Wtshymanski

The nuclear-powered jet engine: In 1954, GE even put a nuclear-powered jet engine on a test stand in Arco, Idaho. It ran for more than 100 trouble-free hours before the project was shelved. The idea was that the the engine would use heat produced by a nuclear reactor aboard the plane to generate thrust. A plane with these engines could theoretically stay in the air for days and weeks. Although the U.S. Air Force did modify a B-36 Peacemaker bomber to carry a nuclear reactor, it never used the engines.

The first high-bypass turbofan engine: In the 1960s, GE engineers started working on a new powerful jet engine that could lift heavy loads across long distances, but also made planes more fuel efficient. They came up with the TF39 engine (above), which generated a record 40,000 pounds of thrust. Although it was developed for the military, later versions of the engine launched the CF-6 family of engines, which has powered DC-10s, Lockheed L1011s, and Boeing 747 passenger jets, including Air Force One.

The first unducted turbofan: Following the oil crisis in the 1970s, GE and NASA developed a funny looking engine design called “unducted turbofan” (pictured above and also in the top GIF). The engine, named GE36, was a cross between a jet and a propeller engine. For the first time, the fuel efficient machine used fan blades made from light and tough carbon fiber composites. GE is still the only company in the jet engine business using these materials on engine fans. In 1988, a GE36-powered MD-80 passenger jet flew from the U.S. to the Farnborough Air Show in England. 

The world’s largest and most powerful engine: Although the unducted turbofan didn’t catch on, the carbon fiber blade technology allowed GE engineers to build a new a line of massive high-bypass turbofan engines, including the GE90-115B (above). It is the world’s most powerful jet engine, capable of generating 115,000 pounds of thrust. Its next version called the GE9X will be the world’s largest engine with a fan that’s 11 feet in diameter (that engine is still in development).

First engines with 3-D printed parts and new ceramic materials: The LEAP jet engine is the first jet engine with 3-D printer fuel nozzles and components made from strong ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), which are much lighter than even high-grade alloys. The LEAP, which is 15 percent more fuel efficient than comparable GE engines, was developed by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Snecma (Safran). CFM has received more than $100 billion in orders and commitments (U.S. list price) for over 7,700 LEAPs. It will enter service until 2016.

First spinning parts from ceramics: GE spent two decades developing CMCs. Scientists at GE Global Research tried to shoot  a steel ball flying at 150 mph through a sample, but failed (see above). The scored a breakthrough when it for the first time successfully tested rotating parts made from CMCs inside a jet engine turbine. “Going from nickel alloys to rotating ceramics inside the engine is the really big jump,” says Jonathan Blank, who leads CMC and advanced polymer matrix composite research at GE Aviation. “CMCs allow for a revolutionary change in jet engine design.”

The superjet: Engineers at GE Aviation developed a new “adaptive cycle” engine for sixth-generation fighter jets. It’s called ADVENT and it can switch between high power and high efficiency modes (see above and below). “We are making a generational leap with this technology,” says Dan McCormick, manager for adaptive cycle engine programs at GE Aviation. “We are looking at speed and performance, but also fuel savings of 25 percent. That extra fuel could increase how far a military jet flies by up to 35 percent. That’s huge.”

Flying to the top of the world: Lukla’s Tenzing-Hillary airport in Nepal is probably the most extreme commercial airport in the world (see below). Perched 9,382 feet high, in a valley filled with wicked wind shear, it has a fearsome uphill runway just four football fields long that ends in a rock wall. Some of the planes that fly there are powered by propeller engines made by GE.

Before Planet of the Apes, there was Monkeyshines.

Fresh from inventing the recording and playback machine (1877), and the practical light bulb (1879), Thomas Edison focused on moving pictures. In 1889, he filed a patent for the Kinetograph, an early movie camera.

The wooden box didn’t look like much. Inside was a complicated mechanism that used a sprocket powered by an electric motor to pull the perforated edge of unexposed celluloid film - it had been recently invented by George Eastman - in front of a lens at a speed of 46 frames per second. The device was so large that Edison called it the “dog house.”

Edison inspecting a film. Image credit: Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science

“But what a perfectly marvelous dog house!” wrote The Nickelodeon in 1910, then a brand new magazine covering the budding movie industry. “It stands there in the Edison works as the absolute foundation of an amusement business that encircles the world, giving employment to thousands and numbering its daily devotees by hundreds and hundreds of thousands.”

The mechanism of Edison’s first movie camera. Image credit: Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science

Edison also invented the Kinetoscope, another wooden box that allowed people to watch movies through a peephole one at a time. He also hired the Scottish inventor William K. L. Dickson and put him in charge of the film business. Dickson and another movie pioneer, William Heise, took the Edison camera for a spin in 1889 (or perhaps 1890 – the records are blurry) and made Monkeyshines No. 1, possibly the first film ever made in the United States (see GIF below).

A GIF made from Monkeyshines No. 1. The first American movie star was either John Ott or G. Sacco Albanese. The record is fuzzy.

The film, all 56 seconds of it, may show lab worker John Ott “horsing around” — the meaning of monkeyshines – in front of the lens. Alternately, the “actor” might also be G. Sacco Albanese, another lab worker at the company.

It doesn’t look like much, but it gave Edison a business idea. In 1893, he erected a wooden building covered with tarpaper behind his lab in Menlo Park, N.J., and called it Black Maria. It was perhaps the world’s first movie production studio, and it started making film loops for the Kinetoscope (see below).

Image credit: Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science

Hundreds of Edison loops and films survive in the collection of the Library of Congress. They show President William McKinley’s inauguration, Mark Twain, the Sioux Ghost Dance, and also a pair of boxing cats (eat this, Buzzfeed!).

Edison, who later moved the film studio to the Bronx, was already thinking about the big picture, including Technicolor, surround sound, and even music videos. “Thus the motion picture of the future will show apparently solid objects projected in natural colors and accompanied in natural reproduction by all the concomitant sounds,” The Nickelodeonquoted him in 1910. “It will revolutionize the stage. The world’s greatest musicians, singers and actors can then be heard in the most insignificant hamlet at a nominal price.”

“The possibilities of the motion picture in the field of entertainment are tremendous and unbounded,” Edison went on, “and opportunity is offered to the inventors of the world to solve some interesting problems before the Utopian state I picture will be realized.”

Sunday’s Oscars will give us an annual taste of the Utopia Edison imagined.

The light filters inside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, Pa., through a set of precious Tiffany windows framing its spacious nave. This life-size kaleidoscope of colors harkens back to a time over a century ago, when Franklin was at the epicenter of America’s first oil boom.

The good times didn’t last.

The wells stopped producing and local energy companies like Pennzoil, Quaker State and Wolf’s Head decamped for Texas and elsewhere by the mid 1980s. “The good-paying jobs went with them and the county became economically depressed,” says John Dumot, president and CEO of Liberty Electronics. “We had to reinvent ourselves.”

Franklin’s rebirth is an unlikely success story. The local community pooled money to start businesses like Liberty, which makes wiring harnesses, cable assemblies and other electrical products for the military but also large customers like GE and Westinghouse. The company, which started in 1985 with $600,000 in financing and 50 workers, now employs 340 people and pulled in $36 million in 2014 revenues. But once again, that prosperity is in danger.

Top: A GE Evolution locomotive pulls a freight train near Almaty, Kazakstan. Above: This locomotive will soon travel to Egypt. Image credit: GE Transportation

Liberty’s products ride the rails inside GE locomotives built for customers based in Egypt, Kazakhstan, Indonesia and elsewhere. In fact, GE makes up roughly one-third of Liberty’s business.

But many of these international sales were secured by the Export-Import Bank, America’s export credit agency that provides loan guarantees and helps customers abroad purchase U.S. products. There’s a movement afoot in Congress to shut it down, and many small and mid-sized businesses like Liberty are worried. “I have a conservative bent, support small government and less regulation, but this seems like a crazy place to start,” says Scott Anderson, vice president of operations at Liberty. “This bank is producing a net return. I don’t understand why they are even looking at it. Other countries have it and it helps us level the playing field.”

Liberty Electronics employees build wire harness assemblies for GE locomotives. Image credit: Liberty Electronics

Scott is in Washington, D.C., today to attend the Ex-Im Fly-In, a large gathering of some 650 U.S. exporters from 41 states seeking to re-authorize and secure the Ex-Im bank’s charter, which is set to expire at the end of June. “I saw the stories in the paper and, at first, didn’t grasp the impact,” Liberty CEO Dumont says. “But then I realized that the shut down would hit us. Without Ex-Im, GE would struggle to sell abroad and we would lose that revenue.”

The Ex-Im Coalition, which represents thousands of big and small American manufacturers and chambers of commerce, estimates that the bank supported 1.3 million U.S. jobs in the last six years, and had a positive effect on the entire American manufacturing sector, which employs 17 million people.

Back in 1985, Liberty started with 50 shareholders, mostly from Franklin and the surrounding the area. The number has grown since, and now more than 80 locals hold a stake in the company, not to mention jobs. “We are an anchor for the community,” Dumot says. “If we close Ex-Im, we could lose as much as a fifth or more of our business. This could backfire on everyone.”

The picturesque Romanian city of Oradea dates back at least 900 years. Some locals joke their heating system is just as old.

Large portions of the city, which sits near Romania’s western border with Hungary, have relied on a district heating plant that opened in 1966, one year after Nicolae Ceaucescu consolidated power. The plant has been mostly fueled by low quality brown coal and oil. (Only recently it also started using cleaner-burning natural gas.)

The pipes of the city’s heat distribution network are feeling their age, too. They leak more than a quarter of the thermal energy that flows through before it reaches customers, almost four times the norm.

But Oradea’s power sector is now moving into the jet age. The city will start using a new gas-fired turbine based on technology originally developed for jet engines to produce lower-emissions heat and electricity for more than a quarter of its residents, or 140,000 people.

The combined electricity generation and heating unit will have a sky-high efficiency of 92 percent at the output from the power plant.

Top and above: The technology at the heart of the power plant comes from GE Aviation’s CF6 jet engine. Image credit: GE Aviation

This is the first installation of such jet engine-based power plant in Romania. In a nod to the technology’s aviation history, GE calls the machines “aeroderivatives.” They are using the compressor, combustor and turbine from the CF6 jet engine to generate power. (The CF6 powers many Boeing 747 passenger jets, including Air Force One). The earthbound version of the engine spins a shaft attached to the generator to produce electricity.

The turbine of an “aeroderivative” power plant. Image credit: GE Distributed Power

Many cities and businesses around the world are using aeroderivatives to efficiently generate reliable heat and power. For example, in October 2012, when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast of the U.S. and knocked out power to 2.6 million people, several aeroderivatives rode out the storm.

One such co-generation plant at Princeton University used the technology to keep the campus lit and warm, while the surrounding town went dark.

This earthbound version of the CF6 engine, which GE calls the LM6000-PF SPRINT gas turbine for power applications, will produce heat and more than 45 megawatts of electricity for Oradea. The city partnened on the the project with the Italian power developer STC SpA. Image credit: GE Distributed Power

In 2012, MIT’s Technology Review selected aeroderivatives as a “key innovation” for “building flexible and efficient natural gas power plants,” and the technology is at the core of GE’s Distributed Power business. There is also a mobile version of the technology that can be moved around on a trailer.

The company says that some 2,100 GE aeroderivative gas turbines are generating electricity and keeping people warm in 73 countries, from Sakhalin Island to South Africa.

Japan is as technology rich as it is hydrocarbon poor. The country’s proven oil reserves stand at a measly 44 million barrels. (The U.S. holds nearly a thousand times more, or 36 billion.) The Niigata Prefecture, located some 200 miles northwest of Tokyo, is one of the few places in the country that had produced domestic oil, and the streets of local towns still feature many metal works and factories that once supported the industry.

One of them is the Kariwa Plant, located in a village of the same name on the blustery coast of the Sea of Japan. Though far from the country’s high-tech corridors, it has recently consummated a marriage between advanced manufacturing and the oil industry.

For the last 45 years, Kariwa has been making a huge variety of valves for transporting natural gas, oil and other fluids, mostly for export. GE acquired the plant in 2011, and two years later it started testing 3D printers to manufacture special control valves, whose walls are peppered with hundreds of narrow holes (see below). While 3D printing is quickly becoming old news, this story has a twist.

Top and above: A 3D printer is firing an electron beam into an alloy powder. The result is an intricate metal valve riddled with tiny holes that would be otherwise difficult and time-consuming to make. Image credits: GE Oil & Gas

The project is unusual since it combines human craftsmanship with 3D printing. The valves include arrays of tiny holes and flow channels, which had been difficult to make and had to be assembled from many parts. The plant is relying on seasoned metal craftsmen to come up with designs for 3D printing that eliminate not only the assembly, but also the need for burdensome and time consuming post-processing, like removing burrs from the holes.

The team first made prototypes from plastic on a MakerBot. Image credits: GE Oil & Gas

“Existing methods require processes such as brazing or assembling multiple components to produce complex shapes,” says Eiji Mitsuhashi, the industrial designer who started experimenting with the technology in 2013 and is leading the project. “The metal 3D printer allows us to make a single component, simplifying the process and dramatically increasing what we can do.”

The final 3D-printed metal control valve. Image credit: GE Oil & Gas

Mitsuhashi’s team approached the project by 3D printing the part from plastic. By the end of the first year, they were making prototypes of the whole control valves, and switched to metal.

That wasn’t so simple. The design team saw that the electron beam 3D printer didn’t fix all of their manufacturing problems. “3D printing does not make everything possible,” Mitsuhashi says. “There are things that can only be done by the human hand.”

GE’s Jun Ishikawa (left) and Eiji Mitsuhashi, who led the project. Image credit: GE Oil & Gas

For example, existing 3D printers can only produce objects at accuracies of up to about 0.1 millimeters. But Kariwa’s seasoned machinists can work with a precision up to 100 times greater. Mitsuhashi is using them to develop optimal designs that minimize the need for finishing after printing and speed up prodction. “Through the years of experience, I can tell an error of about one one-thousandth of a millimeter by how it feels in my hand,” said one Kariwa technician.

Kariwa’s master machinists can feel the difference of one one-thousandth of a millimeter the touchof their hands. Image credit: GE Oil & Gas

Mitsuhashi says that the workers’ skill will allow him to take 3D printing to next level. “They show designers where our blind spots are, or provide us with hints for making the products even better,” Mitsuhashi says. The 3D printer has already helped cut the time it takes to make certain parts from two months to about two weeks.

Kariwa may not be a household name, but the new manufacturing method puts the local plant at the forefront of industrial additive manufacturing, along with 3D-printed fuel nozzles, which are already being produced for the next-generation LEAP jet engine, and other components.

Mitsuhashi’s team expects to deliver the first products in March 2015.

A 3D-printed fuel nozzle for the next-generation LEAP jet engine developed by CFM International. CFM is a 50/50 joint-venture between GE and France’s Snecma (Safran). Image credit: CFM

Two things lurk deep at the heart of the digital love story. It’s not “me” and “you.” It’s “0” and “1.”

The analytics that are helping people find a better match are just one place where science informs contemporary life. Big Data may be unromantic, but it’s powerful and efficient. It’s helping wannabe lovers as well as scientists to find new meanings and hidden patterns in piles of data and build better robots, decode the brain, and, yes, avoid a bad first date.

Top GIF: A robot running on a treadmill at 28mph at DARPA. Above: A robot navigating a DARPA obstacle course. Image credit: Vice

The eye, for example, can distinguish 10 million colors, including hues like pink, which do not correspond to any actual wavelength of light. (There’s even a spirited debate whether pink exists at all.) But scientist are now using high-tech eyes in combination with big data to expand human sight and perception.

Vicehas recently teamed up with GE to go behind the scenes and find out how the marriage between analytics and innovation works. The project is called Invention Factory, and each video episode will provide a glimpse of things to come.

The series will have nine episodes covering the brain, aviation, vision and other areas. Five of them will be in English, two in Chinese and two in Portuguese. The first three in English are live now.

Two years ago, when Boeing decided to build the world’s largest twin-engine jet capable of routinely crossing more than 9,000 miles on a tank of fuel, it needed a powerful engine to go with it. GE engineers solved the problem for the plane maker by proposing an engine so large it could swallow a subway train through its 11-foot-wide air inlet.

When completed, the engine, called GE9X, will be the largest jet engine ever built. It’s design became possible because of a high-stakes engineering wager that paid off 20 years ago this month.

Until the early 1990s, all jet engines were made from steel and titanium. But GE designed an engine with large fan blades from what was essentially plastic.

To be sure, this wasn’t the stuffof disposable cutlery. The team focused on a strong and light material calledcarbon fiber composite. It’s made from stacked sheets of carbon fiber fabric and a toughened  epoxy, kind of like a high-tech crepe cake.

If the idea worked, the GE team reasoned, the lighter composite blades would shave hundreds of pound off each engine, and allow engineers to design a bigger machine with more thrust. “But it was a really tough sell,” says Nick Kray, a consulting engineer for composite design at GE Aviation, who joined the effort early on. “People weren’t initially so hot about the idea. Nobody had tried this before.”

The teamwasn’t starting completely from scratch. In the 1980s, the company developed the experimental GE36 open rotorengine (see above). It used carbon fiber composite blades in an unusual hybrid design thatcombined features from turbofan and turboprop engines. Although the enginedemonstrated fuel savings of more than 30 percent compared withsimilar-sized conventional jet engines, it didn’t catch on.

This GE90 engine had to survive encounters with golf ball-size hail. Top image: Blade designer Paul Izon next to a blade for the GE90 engine.

Back in the lab, challenges popped out behind almost every test. Typical titanium blades absorb energy and bulge  when they hit an obstacle, say, a bird. But ordinary composites can delaminate and break. “We didn’t know how this new material would respond to stress,” Kray says.

The team ranhundreds of intensive tests simulating bird strikes, rain, snow and hail stormsat GE’s jet-engine boot camp in Peebles and the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, both in Ohio. “We’d test almost daily and make changes based on what we learned,” Kray says. “The results gave us enormous confidence in the material when we saw how durable it was.”

Brian Rowe served as CEO of GE Aviation and led the GE90 development. The FAA certified the engine in February 1995.

By 1993, the team had the right material and blade design, but they were far from done. Now they had to produce it. GE Aviation decided to team up with its European jet engine partner Snecma. The French aerospace company was experienced in making in high-tech composites. They former a joint-venture called CFAN and built a new composites factory in San Marcos, Texas.

Even with the help, making the blade was a hard climb. “The manufacturing of composites remains a manual process,” Kray says. “The material goes through chemical changes and tends to move around. We had to learn how to get it right.”

The workers inspect every single blade with X-rays, ultrasound, laser and other tools for defects. Initially, only 30 percent of them passed. (The current yield is about 97 percent.)

The GE90-115B is currently the world’s most powerful jet engine.

The Texas workers weren’t learning about composites alone. GE also had to explain the material to regulators, and even Boeing. The plane maker wanted to use it on its 777 long-range jet, and the first one was scheduled to leave its plant in 1995. “On top of everything, we were racing against time,” Kray says. “It was a very steep learning curve.”

Ultimately, the wager has paid off. Even though the engine had a fan with 128 inches in diameter, the composites shaved 400 pounds of the machine. The Federal Aviation Administration certified the engine, called GE90, and the composite blades in February 1995. “The engines essentially opened the globe up to incredibly efficient, twin-powered, wide-body planes,” says David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation.

The engine wasn’t shy about showing its power and grace. In December 2002, the GE90-115B version of the engine entered the Guinness list of world records as the most powerful jet engine ever built, generating thrust in excess of 127,000 pounds – more than early space rocket engines. In 2005, a GE90-powered Boeing 777 set another world record, this time for distance traveled non-stop by a commercial jetliner. The plane covered 11,664 nautical miles between Hong Kong and London in 22 hours and 42 minutes. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in New York included the curved composite blade in its design collection.

The GE90 engine is blowing off rocks near the runway at GE’s Flight Test Operation Center in Victorville, Ca.

Even after 20 years, GE is still the only jet engine maker with engines using composite blades in service. Kray and other engineers are currently working on a fourth-generation blade for the GE9X engine for the 777’s successor, Boeing 777X. That plane will be the largest and most efficient twin-engine jet in the world.

New advances in composites technology have allowed the team to make an even bigger engine – the GE9X’s fan diameter will be 134 inches – with fewer thinner and stiffer blades. (The GE9X will have just 16 blades, compared to 22 on the GE90.)

“Next-generation composites will go even further,” Kray says. “We are never going back to metal.”

A rendering of the fan for the GE9X. It will have only 16 blades made from fourth-generation carbon fiber composites.The silver tips of the blades are made from titanium.

Image credits: GE Aviation

Business cycles have always been opportunities for GE, and today’s environment of lower oil prices is no different. To take advantage of a volatile world, GE has been investing in its core infrastructure businesses, simplifying its operations, and leading the next industrial era of machines connected through the Industrial Internet.

“We capitalize on cycles by investing when others can’t, and persisting through periods of doubt,” GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt wrote in his annual letter to shareowners, which will be published later this month. “GE plans to be a stable partner to our oil and gas customers during good times and bad. Our financial strength allows GE to invest when others walk away.”

The advantage of GE’s current portfolio is the ability to thrive during periods of disruptive events and commodity cycles – like the recent downturn in the price of oil. “We’re not distracted by short-term adversity – we lean into it,” Immelt said. “If you stop investing – for instance, if we had not doubled down on aircraft engine development after 9/11 — you lose for 30 years. Instead, our CFM LEAP engine has a 79 percent market share since launch.” (See graphic above.)

Similarly, GE is currently the only company taking orders on the Tier 4 freight locomotive, designed to meet new EPA standards, because it invested aggressively at a time where competitors did not.

In the oil and gas sector, GE has diversified beyond surface and subsea drilling (about 40 percent of its portfolio) into compressors and turbines pushing oil through pipelines and technology boosting refinery production (60 percent percent of portfolio). This technology, unlike surface drilling, is less prone to cyclical changes.

GE’s ability to play through cycles follows a decade in which Immelt has repositioned GE as a more focused, high-value industrial company, investing in core infrastructure and selling businesses in which GE lacked the competitive edge. “We have exited all the industrial businesses that didn’t fit the infrastructure model,” said Immelt, when giving investors GE’s 2015 outlook in December. “By 2016 more than 75 percent of our earnings are going to be an output of that.”

Analysts agree. “In our view, there are more changes happening at GE today than in any previous period in the company’s history,” wrote Deane Dray of RBC in January. “CEO Jeff Immelt has divested more than half of the revenues inherited from the Jack Welch era. We expect the portfolio pivot to 75 percent industrial technology and 25 percent finance by 2016 will be a game-changer, both in how investors perceive GE and its expected boost to valuation.”

The key portfolio changes in 2014 included the planned acquisition of the power and grid businesses from France’s Alstom, the spinning off non-core assets like the retail finance unit Synchrony, and agreeing to sell its appliances business to Electrolux.

As a result, every GE business in the industrial sector “can leverage all of our capabilities, what we call the GE Store: technology, services, global footprint, simple structure,” Immelt said. (See graphic above.)

The transformation delivered robust results last year, providing GE with a 7 percent industrial segment organic revenue growth. That compares to 2 percent for Siemens, 3 percent for Honeywell, and negative 1 percent for Caterpillar. The company’s margins also continue to improve at a rate many analysts find impressive.

“We have profoundly changed the company, to lead the next generation of industrial progress,” Immelt writes in his letter to shareowners. “Today, we offer investors consistent growth in a volatile world, with a strong dividend yield, and a set of businesses that share competitive strengths.”

(For more details see also GE’s 2014 Annual Report published last Friday.)

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

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

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

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

That’s why in 2014 GE Healthcare Life Sciences acquired for $1 billion three subsidiaries of Thermo Fisher Scientific to boost its presence in the industry and round out its product portfolio (see video below). The $4 billion business (2013 revenues) is already making super-resolution microscopes that can observe how the HIV virus jumps between cells, and tools that help researchers hunt for genes in junk DNA.

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

Microscopes from GE Healthcare Life Sciences help researchers come up with new treatment. Top picture: Metastatic breast cancer cells stained for actin (green), tubulin (red) and DNA (blue). Middle: Intestinal epithelial cells. Above: Ovarian cancer cell culture. Image credit: GE Healthcare Life Sciences 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engineers at jet engine proving grounds in Ohio are using a jet engine GE developed for Boeing’s Dreamliner to test engine parts made from a new ceramic super-material. The material could help pave the way to more fuel efficient planes.

The temperatures inside jet engines are so extreme that even parts from high-end titanium alloys require an intricate cooling system to work well. But the new material, called ceramic matrix composite, needs 20 percent less cooling air, which allows engineers to extract more power from the extra heat. “When you drop the need for cooling components, your engine will become aerodynamically more efficient and also more fuel efficient,” Jonathan Blank, who leads CMC and advanced polymer matrix composite research at GE Aviation, told GE Reports.

Top: The GEnx engine with ceramic parts during testing at Peebles in February. The grey orb at the front of engine is the “turbulence control structure.” (Read more here.) Above: A GEnx-1B engine suspended from a Dreamliner jet. A version of this engine will also power the next  Air Force One. Image credits: GE Aviation

GE Aviation is testing the GEnx jet engine with the ceramic parts at its hard-core testing facility in Peebles, Ohio. The parts include inner and outer combustor liners, high-pressure turbine stage one shrouds, and stage two nozzles. CMC stage one nozzles for the high-pressure turbine will be tested on the second build of this demo engine.

GE has spent the last two decades and over $1 billion developing CMCs. The light material, which has one-third the weight of metal, is made from a combination of silicon carbide ceramic fibers and ceramic resin sealed together during a highly sophisticated process, and further enhanced with proprietary coatings. GE recently opened the first CMC factory in Asheville, N.C.

Boeing’s 777X jet will use GE engines as well as avionics and power systems. Illustration credit: Boeing

GE is currently designing CMC parts for the next generation of jet engines like the LEAP and the GE9X. If fact, the GEnx in Peebles is a stand-in for the GE9X, which is still in development and will power Boeing’s new 777X wide-body passenger jet.

GE and its partners will spend more that $500 million on maturing CMC parts this year alone. “The GEnx engine testing campaign, which began in late January, will allow us to demonstrate the functionality and durability of the full suite of CMC hot section components, and help the team lock down the final design for the new GE9X engine by mid-2015,” said Bill Millhaem, general manager of GE’s GE90 and GE9X engine programs.

Although the GE9X isn’t scheduled to enter service until the end of the decade, GE has already received $20 billion (list price) in orders and commitments from airlines like Emirates, Lufthansa, Etihad and others.

But GE isn’t done. All of the CMC components inside the GEnx engine are static, they don’t move. In February, engineers scored an important breakthrough when they for the first time successfully tested rotating parts made from CMCs inside a jet engine turbine. “Going from nickel alloys to rotating ceramics inside the engine is the really big jump,” Blank told GE Reports. “CMCs allow for a revolutionary change in jet engine design.”

A turbine rotor with blades made from CMCs after a test. The yellow blades are covered with an environmental barrier for experimental purposes. Image credit: GE Aviation.

A century ago, Sigmund Freud developed the radical idea that there is a lot more going on inside our heads that we know. Today, many doctors (and patients) still stick by his groundbreaking theory. But it comes with a problem. As neuroscientist Eric Kandel notes in his book The Age of Insight, “psychoanalysis suffered from a serious weakness: it was not empirical and was therefore not amenable to experimental testing.”

Until recently, much of modern medicine suffered from the same flaw. It was not until the early 1990s that “evidence-based medicine” took off. (See Google’s Ngram Viewer.) “Controlled clinical trials and formalized, evidence-based recommendations as to how medicine should be practiced is a fairly recent phenomenon,” says Deborah Kilpatrick, chief executive of the Silicon Valley startup Evidation Health.

Kilpatrick says that the same scientific rigor that the medical profession started applying to prescription drugs and devices now must expand to the booming digital realm including medical apps and remote monitoring devices. “We have a bias as a society that technology is good,” Kilpatrick says. “But it is imperative that we prove and validate it.”

Top image: Rat neurons captured by a digital microscope. Image credit: GE Healthcare Life Sciences

Evidation Health grew out of a 2014 meeting between Amir Dan Rubin, president and CEO of Stanford Health Care, and his GE counterpart Jeff Immelt. “They saw that there was a gap between new product claims and the evidence backing them up,” Kilpatrick says. “Proof of product value is actually much broader than just validating that something works. You need to demonstrate that the device can actually improve care in the real world and also be cost-efficient.”

That’s also the company’s business plan. Evidation Health will help digital health companies systematically test their products in real-world health systems, and measure their impact on cost and clinical outcomes.

Click here to download.

Evidation’s commercial progress has been accelerated by its relationships with GE Ventures, GE’s venture capital arm, and Stanford Health Care, an academic healthcare system with some 11,000 employees that operates a hospital, a trauma center, primary care centers and outpatient clinics throughout the Bay Area, as well as health plans. “Patients today face increasingly complex problems in managing their care,” says Amir Dan Rubin, president and CEO of Stanford Health Care. “At Stanford Health Care, we are committed to delivering integrated solutions to those complex problems, and those solutions will increasingly be advanced through digital health.”

Pravene Nath, Stanford Health Care’s chief information officer, says that the healthcare provider will be “much more than a sounding board” but a real-life test bed for digital devices. “It hasn’t been easy for companies both small and large to test the usefulness of their digital devices. Our goal is to solve that problem.” 

The Journal of the American Medical Association recently cited a study that estimated the U.S. market for wearable monitoring devices alone will reach $50 billion by 2018. “The gap between recording information and changing behavior is substantial,” JAMA wrote, “and while these devices are increasing in popularity, little evidence suggests that they are bridging that gap.”

Kilpatrick says that in addition to startups, Evidation Health will work with established healthcare companies and health plans to develop and deploy digital health strategies. “Digital technologies are rapidly revolutionizing the entire healthcare ecosystem, allowing patients and physicians to interact anytime anywhere,” Kilpatrick says. “None of these things are a problem. Rather, they present us with an incredible opportunity to improve patient care in altogether new ways.”

For more reading go to Kilpatrick’s op-ed piece on Ideas Lab.

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

The bee leg that started it all. Top image: A mosquito head.

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

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

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

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

Diatomaceous earth.

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

A slice of the India rubber plant (Ficus elastica).

It’s clear that Sarkis himself has also caught the Cytell bug. After the first leg, he’s imaged the rest of his daughter’s sample collection. After that, he acquired more samples on Ebay.  “To me, these are hidden treasures which have led to some amazing images,” he says.

The leg of a praying mantis.

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

A cross section of a pine needle.

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

The proboscis of a mosquito.

A close-up of the Rhizopus fungus.

The tip of an onion root.

An ant’s head.

An image of a corn stem.

A mosquito larva.

An image of the Pittosporum glabratum plant.

A slice of the Tilia tree.

A bee’s mouth.

A mouse knuckle.

Images courtesy of Gary Sarkis and GE Healthcare Life Sciences

In 1942, a group of GE engineers working in secret for ten months built America’s first jet engine. Their mission was to win the war, but they ended up shrinking the world. “They called us the Hush-Hush Boys,” says Joseph Sorota, one of the last living veterans of the project, who just turned 95.

A few early attempts at flight featured in Jet Power, a 1952 GE film about the development of the jet engine. GIF credits: The Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science

The team working on the project had some 1,000 workers, but only about a tenth of them, including Sorota, knew what they were doing. The war effort has become largely forgotten, but a GE historian discovered a 1952 film about the building of the jet engine. Take a look.

America’s high school graduation rate is at its highest point in four decades – three out of four students now get a diploma. But in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) in Ohio, Thomas Edison’s home state, the numbers remain grim: just 60 percent of students graduate.

However, kids attending Cleveland’s MC2 STEM High School, which focuses on science, technology, engineering and math education, are bucking this trend. Even though MC2 STEM students win their spots at the school through a lottery, 95 percent of them graduate and 84 percent go to college.

Old School STEM: In the 1950, GE started publishing comics to get kids hooked on science. The comics were in English but also in Spanish. Some print runs were as large as 3 million copies. See the full story here.

There are several reasons behind the school’s success, including the fact that MC2 STEM’s students don’t just learn science; they are surrounded by it. They spend 10th grade studying at GE Lighting’s historic Nela Park campus, before moving to Cleveland State University for the final two years.

The bond between the students, GE and CSU is now growing even stronger. GE just gave the university $500,000 to start the GE Scholars Program, a scholarship program that will offer five full-tuition scholarships each year for the next decade to students with a STEM major at CSU. “STEM education is the key to driving future innovation in the global economy,” says Russell Stokes, chief executive of GE Transportation, which makes some of the most-advanced diesel-electric locomotives in Ohio. “We expect some of the next great inventors will be the students right here in Cleveland.”

The scholarships will be open to sophomores, juniors and seniors, with preference given to MC2 STEM students and graduates of CMSD who majored in STEM programs.

Principal Jeff McClellan helped launch MC2 STEM – MC2 stands for Metropolitan Cleveland Consortium – six years ago as a public-private partnership among a group of local organizations and businesses. His goal was to set up a “project-based” school that would teach students the skills to “become leaders of the 21st century.” The school started with 93 students. It now has 375.

Image credits: All images come from the archives of the Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science

The first GE research lab opened in a barn behind a scientist’s home in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1900. The wooden structure employed three people before it burned down a year later (see below).

It was an inauspicious beginning for one of the largest corporate research institutions in the world. GE Global Research now runs a string of nine labs stretching across the U.S. to Brazil, China, Germany, India and Israel.

The research network employs some 3,000 scientists solving bespoke problem for GE businesses building everything from locomotives to wind turbines and jet engines, and writing software. Over the years, the labs have employed several Nobel laureates and nurtured technologies like LEDs, brain MRI, and new composite materials. GE expects to invest $17 billion in R&D this year, or about 5 percent of revenues.

Top image: Dr. Seyed Saddoughi and his team have developed a family of devices called synthetic jet actuators. They work like tiny bellows and make air and water flow more efficiently over aircraft wings, wind turbine blades and boat hulls. They can even cool electronics. Above: GE CT technology can probe the the brain as well as aircraft parts. 

Outside the labs, there are 47,000 other engineers working at GE. The real payoff comes when they pool their expertise, cross business boundaries and come up with innovative ways to crack tough problems. GE CEO Jeff Immelt calls this approach the "GE store.” 

“The business of research is not the business of Eureka moments,” says Mark Little, who runs GE Global Research (GRC). “It’s the business of planning strategic approaches to things, hard work, and patience.” Little is hosting an investor conference at GE’s research headquarters in Schenectady today, not too far from where the original lab once stood.

GE’s industrial businesses generated $108 billion in revenues in 2015, up 7 percent compared to the previous year. Once you start looking under the hood of GE machines, you can find the GE store everywhere. The company’s fleet of mobile power plants, for example, uses technologies originally developed for jet engines. The wind business has been looking at superconducting magnets developed for magnetic resonance machines to maximize electricity output.

But perhaps the best example of this technology mashup is GE’s latest Evolutions Series diesel-electric locomotive that meets the government’s new Tier 4 pollution limits.

The Evolution Series Tier 4 Locomotive. Hover over the yellow hotspots to reveal GE Store contributions. Click here to see the full size infographic.

The locomotive’s power, fuel and exhaust systems, turbochargers and other technology combine contributions from six different GE businesses (see infographic above). GE says that as a result, the locomotive cuts NOx emissions by 76 percent, particulate matter emissions by 70 percent, compared to previous models. It can also save customers $1.5 billion in expensive infrastructure costs they would otherwise have to make to meet the EPA regulations.

The GE store itself is an innovation that’s turning heads. “In the university we talk a lot about collaboration, discovery through bringing together disciplines,” says Yale biologist and Nobel winner James E. Rothman, who as former chief scientist at GE Healthcare still visits the labs in Schenectady. “I have never seen it work anywhere as well as at GRC…That sort of non-quantifiable knowledge has a way of leveraging across the whole of GE.”

If you live in a house, one of the most amazing materials known to humans is likely languishing in a dark corner of your basement. Spider webs and especially the draglines that form their structure are made from silk threads extruded by arachnids that can be several times tougher than Kevlar and stronger than steel by weight, but also extremely stretchy. Spider silk also has anti-bacterial properties, which may have led Greek and Roman soldiers to use it as wound dressing.

The idea of farming spiders for their silk, however, sounds like a nightmare in more ways than one. “Spiders are very difficult to farm,” observed the BBC. “They are predatory and will readily resort to cannibalism in the absence of other prey.”

Top image: Bundling several silk threads together can yield tough fibers of many shapes that are as strong as the tendons of mammals. Above: Researchers can whip a solution of Spiber spider silk into a fluffy foam, just like working with milk. But the foam remains solid even when immersed in solvents or sterilized with heat. Credits: Spiber Technologies

But in 2002, a group of Canadian scientists came up with a terrific new idea. They transplanted spider genes coding for dragline silk proteins into goat cells, which expressed the silk in the goat’s milk.

Scientists have since proven that harvesting spider silk proteins from goat’s milk works. But a new crop of companies working to commercialize synthetic spider silk, such as Sweden’s Spiber Technologies AB, are moving beyond “spider goats.”

Image credit: Spiber Technologies

The Stockholm-based biomaterials company is using genetically engineered bacteria and GE protein purification technology to produce large quantities of the so-called spidroin proteins found in dragline silk, and then customize them for a variety of specific purposes.“Man-made spider silk can be adjusted to contain specific parts that bind to cells and promote wound healing, thereby enabling use within fields of tissue engineering, diagnostics and cell culture,” says Kristina Martinell, Spiber’s production director. “In short, it’s a tailor-made biomaterial.”

The team at Spiber starts by selecting a portion of the gene sequence spiders use to express spidroin. They clone the genes into E. coli bacteria (see below), rather than goats, and grow the microbes in a bioreactor. Next they use a protein purification system developed by GE Healthcare Life Sciences to purify the proteins for medical use and other life sciences applications.

Image credit: Spiber Technologies

Spiber’s product development is similar to the process faced by pharmaceutical companies, Martinell says. The team had to scale hurdles such as learning to manage the “stickiness” of spider silk protein. “This protein, in its nature is a bit sticky,” she explains. “It has to be treated very carefully according to a specific method.”

Back in 2011, when Spiber and GE started working together, GE got a chance to test the technology on Spiber’s new sample of proteins, and Spiber used it to evaluate the process. “As a small company, we are excited to have access to GE’s equipment and promising knowledge,” Martinell says.

A drop of liquid containing Spiber protein solidifies into a transparent layer on the surface of plastic or glass labware. The resulting film can be peeled off as a sheet. Image credit: Spiber Technologies

Over time, the company’s technique has evolved to keep the material soluble until it is ready to be shaped into the arrangements needed for various applications

Spiber can now manufacture spider silk fiber, film, foam and even mesh. The company says that the material is as strong as mammalian tendons and remains stable at boiling temperatures of up to 267 degrees Celsius (512 Fahrenheit).

As a result, the range of potential products is huge.  The company is working to apply spider silk in several medical fields, including cardiology, heart tissue regeneration, bone reconstruction, skin cell growth and vaccines.

Who’s to say that we won’t be able to engineer a certain superhero one day.