Today Bill Gates talked about our nuclear reactor project, TerraPower, at TED 2010. As an investor in several promising energy projects, Gates said it is our responsibility to pursue technologies that achieve cheap energy with “zero carbon” emissions.
TerraPower determined a new type of traveling-wave reactor would be the best approach to meeting the world’s energy demand. Our team decided to pursue nuclear energy after investigating many different technologies and solutions. With advances in computing power in just the past few years, we are able to make radical contributions to science that weren’t possible a few years ago. We believe the traveling-wave reactor concept provides the kind of innovation that society needs.
This video explains the traveling-wave reactor and how it works.
These high speed photographic images of mosquitoes were captured by Intellectual Ventures Laboratory scientists using a Vision Research Phantom V12.1, shooting at up to 6,000 frames per second. [read more about IV's malaria research]
Understanding Mosquito Flight: Intellectual Ventures researchers study flight dynamics of mosquitoes to look for novel ways to attack them. This video shows a technique called “Particle Image Velocimetry.” Tiny suspended water droplets, illuminated by a green planar laser, show the movement of the air around the mosquito’s wing.
Download video in high definition (58.9 MB)
Mosquito in Flight: This video depicts an Anopheles stephensi mosquito in flight. To capture this footage in focus, the mosquito was placed in a custom designed chamber that sensed when the mosquito flew through the focal plane.
Download video in high definition (19.3 MB)
Mosquito Shootdown Sequence: Video clips showing mosquitoes being killed by lasers. If played in real time, these segments would be roughly 1/10th of a second long.
Download video in high definition (26.2 MB)
Modeling the Eradication of Malaria
Despite decades of attempts to control malaria, the disease still afflicts some 250 million people every year and claims the lives of about one million, mostly children. The parasite that causes malaria has shown stubborn resilience against the most powerful antimalarial drugs, and the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite have similarly grown resistant to insecticides. Although there is great hope for an effective vaccine, none is yet available.
At Intellectual Ventures, we believe history shows that trying to control malaria is an insufficiently ambitious goal. We in the scientific and technical community should instead develop technologies and strategies that can be used to completely eradicate the disease. Much of the progress we make toward eliminating malaria will also be directly useful in exterminating other infectious plagues of humanity, such as polio and tuberculosis.
Toward this goal, a team led by Dr. Philip Eckhoff is developing a completely original computer model that calculates not only how malaria spreads in a particular part of the world, but also how it will respond to a deliberate suppression campaign. The goal of this model, more ambitious than any similar software ever attempted before, is not just to understand and control the disease, but to stamp it out completely.
Read more…
Why We Work on Solutions for the Prevention, Detection and Eradication of Malaria
Why are you inventing in this area?
Humanity faces significant global health challenges that have been difficult to solve through traditional methods. Our hope is that through inventive thinking, we can find new ways to tackle some of these issues.
With regard to our malaria projects, we are actively pursuing several invention ideas that could help detect, prevent and eradicate the disease. We believe that introducing the right combination of these technologies—while keeping older approaches in place—will lead to a better chance of completely eradicating malaria.
But why malaria and not AIDS or other health issues?
We have a variety of global health projects underway. One reason we are focusing on malaria first is it is a disease that is both preventable and curable. Yet more than one million people—including half a million children—reportedly died of the disease last year.
Read more…
TerraPower is making great progress on their nuclear reactor design by using supercomputing clusters for computational modeling work. A calculation that takes all day to run on a desktop computer can run in one minute on our cluster.
This past year, the TerraPower team has been heavily involved in engineering work and design with a confidence and speed that would not be possible without the use of a computing cluster. Rigorous modeling techniques present intricate insight into the physics of the online cultivation of fuel, that enables the unique fuel cycle of the Traveling Wave Reactor. Extensive computer simulations and engineering studies produced new evidence that a wave of fission moving slowly through a fuel core could generate a billion watts of electricity continuously for well over 50 to 100 years without enrichment or reprocessing. The hi-fidelity results made possible by advanced computational abilities of modern supercomputer clusters are the driving force behind one of the most active nuclear reactor design teams in the country. Read more…
Recently, my wife and I went and saw Avatar in 3D at the local cinema. They used RealD 3D glasses that look just like sunglasses. Rather than dropping ours in the recycling bin after the movie, I took them back to the lab to play with, because they have some interesting optical properties.
Here’s a view through one of the lenses of the big LCD display in the lab:
And here’s a view of the same thing, but with the glasses flipped around so that they are “backwards” (i.e., the light is going through the lens in the opposite direction as before):
At first glance, it would seem absurd to have light behave so differently when going forwards or backwards through the glasses. However, there is an interesting explanation for why this occurs.
Read more…
You can learn even more about the StratoShield and the science behind it on our video, Climate Science page, Our Answers about Geoengineering and the StratoShield White Paper.
What is the StratoShield?
The StratoShield is one possible way to respond to a climate emergency in which greenhouse warming becomes intolerable. The StratoShield would reverse greenhouse warming by slightly reduc¬ing the amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth. The shield does this by increasing the amount of sulfur aerosols injected into the atmosphere by about 1%, a process that happens naturally whenever volcanoes erupt. The aerosols reflect incoming sunlight back into space. Although the change in sunlight would be imperceptible to human eyes—and probably beneficial for plants—it would have a substantial cooling effect for the part of the Earth under the shield.
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This year, Intellectual Ventures launched a Holiday Food Drive to support Hopelink.
Echoes of rallying and strategizing rang through IV Lab like silver bells as the objective was not just to lend a helping hand to those in need this Holiday Season, but also to raise more food than the other 4 Bellevue IV office buildings… combined! As a guess of what it would take to achieve this, a lofty goal was set of raising more than 50 lbs of food per person in the lab, rounded up to 2500 lbs of food.
Strategy was reduced to tactics as a blitz wave of guerrilla fundraising was led by 3ric Johanson, followed by a group raid on the Kirkland Costco. In a matter of hours, the lab collectively gathered 1,326 lbs. of nonperishables to help families in need, using Hopelink’s food wish list as a guide.
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A panoramic view of the Lab's warehouse, containing our 'pile of junk.'
Thomas Edison is credited with saying,
“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
At Intellectual Ventures, we’re dedicated to being the leaders in the business of invention. Therefore, a big pile of junk is somewhat of a forgone conclusion. In 2006, even as Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung were still forging the idea of IV Labs, truckloads started to arrive at our then empty Bellevue, WA location. Since that point, the Lab has worked hard to develop an enormously diverse and capable set of scientific equipment to complement its enormously diverse and capable staff.
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Inventors in History: The Wright Brothers
A model of a Wright brothers airplane is hanging up here at the Intellectual Ventures Lab and I decided to do some research and figure out what made these two brothers special.
They didn’t just start with flight though, they stumbled into it. They started with a printing press publishing a journal and when bikes started getting popular, they had some tools and so they added bikes to their workshop. Later, because they had the tools for bikes, they could start experiment with gliders. They saw some photos of Otto Lilienthal’s glider and got inspired to get into pushing the frontier of flight forward. Projects that inspire projects is something I’ve noticed at the Intellectual Ventures Lab…. Read more…
