Avoiding the Power Grid

A cheaper fuel cell could provide affordable power for microgrids.

• By David Talbot on October 22, 2013

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Eric Wadsman

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Why It Matters

The electricity grid is increasingly stressed, and existing backup power sources are either expensive or inefficient.

A one-meter-square gray box studded 
with green lights sits in a hallway near the laboratory of materials scientist Eric ­Wachsman, director of the Energy Research Center at the University of Maryland. It is a mockup of a fuel-cell device that runs on natural gas, producing electricity at the same cost as a large gas plant.

The box is designed to house stacks of solid-oxide fuel cells that differ from their conventional counterparts in a dramatic way: they’re projected to produce electricity for $1 per watt, down from $8 in today’s commercial versions, thanks to improvements that ­Wachsman has made in the ceramic materials at their heart.

The technology could eventually become a practical and affordable way to ease strain on the increasingly stressed electricity grid; anywhere there’s cheap natural gas, we could also have constant and cheap electricity.

That would make it possible to do away with the diesel generators that are now widely used for backup power and as a key component of microgrids in places like Malaysia and cellular base stations in rural areas around the world. Solid-oxide fuel cells—which can run on diesel fuel or gasoline, not just natural gas—use much less fuel per watt than diesel generators of similar size.

Conventional solid-oxide fuel cells run at high temperatures, making them more expensive and prone to performance losses. A key advance in the Maryland fuel cell is that it is based on cerium oxide and bismuth oxide, which are far more electrically conductive than materials used in commercial versions and produce much more electricity per square centimeter. The cell can operate at 650 °C, down from 900 °C in existing products, reducing thermal stresses and insulation needs. And the final product is made of 32 stacks, each of which can be replaced if it fails.

The gray box mocks up a 25-kilowatt version of the technology, which is now under development by a startup called Redox Power Systems. Redox is building a factory in Melbourne, Florida, and hopes to launch the product in 2014. A 25-kilowatt fuel cell is enough to power a small strip mall; units that are smaller still could serve a single house. In the long term, the technology could even be put into hybrid vehicles to charge their batteries, since it is both lighter than an internal-­combustion engine and more efficient at producing electricity.

But the stand-alone generators, if successful, would be impressive enough. They’d mean “we’re on par with conventional power generation,” Wachsman says. “It’s not just backup power—it’s energy security.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/demo/520451/avoiding-the-power-grid/

The Decline of Wikipedia

By Tom Simonite on October 22, 2013

The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.

Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The Real Privacy Problem

As Web companies and government agencies analyze ever more information about our lives, it’s tempting to respond by passing new privacy laws or creating mechanisms that pay us for our data. Instead, we need a civic solution, because democracy is at risk.

By Evgeny Morozov on October 22, 2013

 

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Why It Matters

Most proposals for enhancing our privacy treat it as an end in itself. Instead we need to be talking about how to best stimulate democracy—a balancing act that laws or market mechanisms can’t achieve alone.

In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”

Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—like telegrams. We could check to see whether the local department store has the advertised sports shirt in stock in the desired color and size. We could ask when delivery would be guaranteed, if we ordered. The information would be up-to-the-minute and accurate. We could pay our bills and compute our taxes via the console. We would ask questions and receive answers from “information banks”—automated versions of today’s libraries. We would obtain up-to-the-minute listing of all television and radio programs … The computer could, itself, send a message to remind us of an impending anniversary and save us from the disastrous consequences of forgetfulness.

It took decades for cloud computing to fulfill Baran’s vision. But he was prescient enough to worry that utility computing would need its own regulatory model. Here was an employee of the RAND Corporation—hardly a redoubt of Marxist thought—fretting about the concentration of market power in the hands of large computer utilities and demanding state intervention. Baran also wanted policies that could “offer maximum protection to the preservation of the rights of privacy of information”:

Highly sensitive personal and important business information will be stored in many of the contemplated systems … At present, nothing more than trust—or, at best, a lack of technical sophistication—stands in the way of a would-be eavesdropper … Today we lack the mechanisms to insure adequate safeguards. Because of the difficulty in rebuilding complex systems to incorporate safeguards at a later date, it appears desirable to anticipate these problems.

Sharp, bullshit-free analysis: techno-futurism has been in decline ever since.

Chemical Reaction

Just how frightened should we be of chemical weapons, really? A 1929 essay tried to answer that question.

• October 22, 2013

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From “Facts and Fancies about Gas Warfare,” originally published in the February 1929 issue of Technology Review.

“Deadly gases purported to have sufficient toxicity to wipe out whole cities are periodically discovered, according to the public press, and it has grown to be the great indoor sport of a school of front-page chemists to draw horrific pictures of the use of gas in the next war. A ready-made example of this is a public statement from Hilton Ira Jones of Chicago, listed in the Directory of the American Chemical Society as Director of Scientific Research, The Redpath Bureau. He is quoted as asserting that the Government possesses knowledge of a new gas, believed by him to be cacodyl isocyanide, which is so overwhelmingly deadly that the Chemical Warfare Service of the Army has attempted to suppress discussion about it.

At best Dr. Jones’s statement is an ill-informed outburst, adding to public fear and misunderstanding of lethal gases and their military uses. It is a generally accepted maxim among informed chemists and physiologists that no gas exists at the present time (nor will one be discovered) against which some means of protection and defense may not be devised. Professor James F. Norris, former President of the American Chemical Society, in talking recently of the development and use of war gases, stated that the gas referred to by Dr. Jones was tested exhaustively by the Germans during the World War but was not used by them. Dr. Norris, who was in charge of offense chemical research and war gas investigating for the United States Government during the war and is now a consultant for the Edgwood Arsenal, holds that the Allies were also familiar with the cacodyl group and found it unsatisfactory.

Moreover, as Dr. Norris points out, it is improbable that more deadly and toxic gases will be discovered; enough sufficiently lethal gases are already known. Asphyxiant gases such as phosgene and blistering gases such as mustard gas will certainly kill if they make contact in sufficient quantities. Instead, the probable trend of gas warfare studies will be toward finding more effective means of using these known gases against the increasing effectiveness of methods to combat them, and in the development of so-called neutralizing gases which incapacitate rather than kill. Anyhow, it is patently absurd to say that any gas could be used in quantities sufficient to annihilate whole populations and altruism of the sort imputed by Dr. Jones would be obviously incompatible with faithful adherence to the responsibilities the Republic has entrusted to its Chemical Warfare Service.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/fromthearchives/519971/chemical-reaction/

A Tale of Two Drugs

By Barry Werth on October 22, 2013

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Why It Matters

New drugs can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

In January 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Kalydeco, the first drug to treat the underlying cause of cystic fibrosis, after just three months of review. It was one of the fastest approvals of a new medicine in the agency’s history. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which discovered and developed the drug, priced Kalydeco at $294,000 a year, which made it one of the world’s most expensive medicines. The company also pledged to provide it free to any patient in the United States who is uninsured or whose insurance won’t cover it. Doctors and patients enthusiastically welcomed the drug because it offers life-saving health benefits and there is no other treatment. Insurers and governments readily paid the cost.

Several months later, Zaltrap was approved to treat colorectal cancer. The drug was discovered by Regeneron, an emerging biopharmaceutical company like Vertex, but sold by the French drug maker Sanofi. Though it worked no better in clinical trials than Roche’s cancer drug Avastin, which itself adds only 1.4 months to life expectancy for patients with advanced colorectal cancer, Sanofi priced Zaltrap at $11,000 a month, or twice Avastin’s price. Unexpectedly, there was resistance. Doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, one of the world’s leading cancer centers, decided Zaltrap wasn’t worth prescribing. They announced their decision—the first time prominent physicians anywhere had said “Enough” to the introduction of a high-priced cancer drug—on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Three weeks later Sanofi effectively dropped its price by half through rebates to doctors and hospitals. Even so, British health authorities said they would not pay for the treatment.

Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think

• By Will Knight on October 22, 2013

Why It Matters

Carmakers are developing vehicles that have an increasing ability to autonomously drive themselves, potentially reducing accidents and traffic congestion.

A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and Ingolstadt. I’m in the driver’s seat, watching cars and trucks pass by, but I haven’t touched the steering wheel, the brake, or the gas pedal for at least 10 minutes. The BMW approaches a truck that is moving slowly. To maintain our speed, the car activates its turn signal and begins steering to the left, toward the passing lane. Just as it does, another car swerves into the passing lane from several cars behind. The BMW quickly switches off its signal and pulls back to the center of the lane, waiting for the speeding car to pass before trying again.

Putting your life in the hands of a robot chauffeur offers an unnerving glimpse into how driving is about to be upended. The automobile, which has followed a path of steady but slow technological evolution for the past 130 years, is on course to change dramatically in the next few years, in ways that could have radical economic, environmental, and social impacts.

Adventures on the Intellectual Playground

MIT professor Angela Belcher applies her biological toolkit to society’s biggest problems in energy, the environment, and health care.

• By Martin LaMonica on October 22, 2013

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One of the most thrilling moments in Angela Belcher’s professional life came during a routine visit to the lab in the winter of 2009. Two of her graduate students in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering were trying to harness biological tools to make materials for a battery electrode. They showed her a petri dish holding a virus they had engineered to bind to materials that it normally wouldn’t have any affinity for—iron phosphate and carbon nanotubes. The virus had neatly assembled the two materials into tiny wires, which would turn out to perform as well as the electrodes in commercial lithium-ion batteries.

To the students, it was a promising result. To her, though, it was something much bigger—the realization of an audacious idea that she had once been discouraged from even pursuing. “When I started out, my dream really was to use genetics, or control of DNA, to make nonbiological devices better than can be made in other ways. It was a longer-term, pie-in-the sky idea,” says Belcher, who says she still gets chills recounting the story. Now her students had actually accomplished that goal: by tinkering with the genes of a virus, they were able to produce a high-­performance electrode material. “We had got there faster than I was expecting,” she says.

Google Entangles Minecraft with Quantum Physics

Thanks to Google, Minecraft players can now toy with quantum teleportation and Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.” 

Tom Simonite

October 21, 2013

One reason for the popularity of the video game Minecraft is the way its blocky universe faithfully adheres to the physics of the real one. Google has now released a software package that introduces quantum physics to the game, an area of nature’s laws previously missed out by Minecraft creator Markus Persson (see “TR35: Markus Persson”).

Players of qCraft, as the new “mod” is called, can toy with quantum teleportation, entanglement, and objects that exist in a “superposition” of multiple states at once.

Google asked Caltech quantum mechanic Spyridon Michalakis to help design qCraft. In a blog post on the project, he expresses hope that the mod will help people from school age and up to understand the quantum world better. Google also partnered with MinecraftEdu, a project run by educators from the U.S. and Finland interested in using the game as a teaching aid.

Although qCraft was released just last week, some Minecraft enthusiasts are already showing off what they can do with quantum physics in the game. In this video, a Minecraft player recreates the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Google’s own interests in quantum physics extend beyond the theoretical. Earlier this year the company began a new research effort into quantum computing (see “Google and NASA Launch Quantum Computing AI Lab”).

For those looking for hints on how to get started, the qCraft project has produced a series of how-to videos about the mod. For an introduction to Minecraft read our recent article explaining its allure (see “Minecraft and the Secret to a Video-Game Phenomenon”).

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520596/google-entangles-minecraft-with-quantum-physics/

Why This Might Be the Model T of Workplace Robots

A mobile, one-armed robot that costs $35,000 is headed for research labs and maybe even some workplaces.

• By Tom Simonite on October 21, 2013

Why It Matters

Robots capable of working in human environments could transform many workplaces and lead to new, more efficient ways of doing business.

Helping hand: The UBR1 robot is designed to advance robotics research and could one day work alongside humans.

According to Melonee Wise, the manual laborer of the future has only one arm and stands just three feet, two inches tall. Such are the vital statistics of UBR1, a $35,000 mobile robot unveiled today by Wise’s startup company Unbounded Robotics.

Wise, the company’s CEO and cofounder, says her business will at first sell the robot to researchers in academia and industry, who currently must either pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get hold of a similar robot or build one themselves. But the UBR1 has also been designed to be capable and safe enough to help out in real workplaces such as warehouses and factories.

Million-Year Data Storage Disk Unveiled

Magnetic hard discs can store data for little more than a decade. But nanotechnologists have now designed and built a disk that can store data for a million years or more 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 21, 2013

Back in 1956, IBM introduced the world’s first commercial computer capable of storing data on a magnetic disk drive. The IBM 305 RAMAC used fifty 24-inch discs to store up to 5 MB, an impressive feat in those days. Today, however, it’s not difficult to find hard drives that can store 1 TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk.

But despite this huge increase in storage density and a similarly impressive improvement in power efficiency, one thing hasn’t changed. The lifetime over which data can be stored on magnetic discs is still about a decade.

Review: Qualcomm’s Toq Is a Watch Smart Enough to Keep It Simple

Qualcomm shows how a smart watch can make sense: by offering only limited functions.

• By Tom Simonite on October 21, 2013

Why It Matters

Although many companies are rushing to create “smart watches,” it is unclear how such devices might attract a wide audience or advance the way people engage with technology.

Always on: A novel display modeled on the way iridescent butterfly wings create color allows the Toq smart watch to keep its display on for days between charges.

For all the technology companies large and small talking of smart watches as a mass-market inevitability, those that have launched are muddled and disappointing (see “So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb”). But a hands-on demonstration with a new smart watch called the Toq has convinced me that this genre of gadget may yet succeed.

The Toq, made by Qualcomm, doesn’t try to do too much with the limited yet prominent real estate it inhabits on a person’s wrist. And the device can last days between charges thanks to the novel Mirasol display technology owned by Qualcomm.

Fracking for Geothermal Heat Instead of Gas

AltaRock has figured out how to use fracking to get more heat out of a geothermal well, but work remains before the energy source can dent carbon emissions.

• By Kevin Bullis on October 21, 2013

Why It Matters

Heat deep underground could provide a major source of carbon-free power, but it’s too expensive to use.

Rock on: A geothermal well at the Newberry Volcano in Oregon where new rock fracturing technology was tested.

The use of hydraulic fracturing has unlocked vast new reserves of natural gas. Now Alta Rock, a startup based in Seattle, is developing technology that might do the same for geothermal resources, turning a marginal power source into a major source of carbon-free electricity and heat in the United States.

Earlier this year near the Newberry Volcano in Oregon, Alta Rock demonstrated a key part of that technology, a process akin to fracking. Just as fracking involves pumping high-pressure liquid into underground shale formations to unlock natural gas and oil that’s been trapped there, the new technology could unlock heat trapped deep underground. Unlike solar and wind power, that heat would be available around the clock and in all sorts of weather.

Experts Doubt Snowden Could Keep His Leaked Documents Safe From Spies

There is reason to doubt Edward Snowden’s claim that Russian or Chinese spies have not seen the NSA files he leaked. 

Tom Simonite

October 18, 2013

In an interview with the New York Times published yesterday, document-leaking NSA contractor Edward Snowden made a bold claim in response to allegations that other nations may have got hold of his classified haul:

“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.”

Many security and surveillance experts publicly questioned that claim. Google security engineer Justin Schuh tweeted that the remark showed “Snowden is divorced from reality”, saying in a discussion thread with a fellow security industry insider:

@headhntr If you don’t assume any reasonably capable foreign intel has had all of it for months, then you’re indulging a fantasy.
— Justin Schuh (@justinschuh) October 18, 2013

That sentiment was shared by many others, including Jeffrey Carr, CEO of security company Taia Global and adjunct professor at George Washington University. He was dismissive of Snowden’s belief that he knows the capabilities of China’s security services thanks to his work at the NSA:

Snowden’s a classic case of Western arrogance towards the East combined with the illusion that SIGINT is all-powerful and all-knowing.
— Jeffrey Carr (@jeffreycarr) October 18, 2013

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York also questioned Snowden’s trust in his knowledge of what China’s spies can and can’t do.

Snowden told the Times that although he took the documents to Hong Kong in June, when he fled to Russia in July he didn’t take copies with him. That leaves the journalists he has worked with to disseminate the documents as the only people in possession of them.

What has been released from those files so far suggests that properly implemented cryptography remains unbreakable even for national intelligence agencies (see “NSA Leak Leaves Crypto-Math Intact But Highlights Know Workarounds”). Yet we have also been reminded that agencies such as the NSA can be powerful because implementing security controls in a way that can foil a well-resourced nation-state is extremely difficult.

Even if Snowden did know everything about the capabilities of the NSA or its equivalents in other countries, his curent location in Russia would hardly put him in a position to know for sure that everyone who has access to his files has adequately protected them. That list now includes people at the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, and Pro Publica amongst various others.

Perhaps the best reason of all to be skeptical about Snowden’s claim that what he leaked is unknown to other nations is the ease with which he harvested the documents. Snowden was able to poke around inisde the NSA’s systems to collect the files, despite being a relatively low-ranking employee with an external contractor. It’s plausible other countries could have taken the same route.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520516/experts-doubt-snowden-could-keep-his-leaked-documents-safe-from-spies/

The Secrets of Online Money Laundering

Criminals are increasingly using the internet to turn dirty money into a spotless shade of green. Now a report written for the United Nations lifts the lid on many of these increasingly popular techniques 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 18, 2013

 
Money laundering is increasingly becoming a cybercrime. Gone are the days when the bad guys would pop down to the casino and hope to convert their loot into a clean win on the roulette table. And less popular is the old scam of taking out an insurance policy and then redeeming it at a discount.

Instead, modern criminals are focusing on the internet. And the opportunities for turning dirty money into a spotless shade of green are plentiful.