Technologyquarterly June 11Th 2005

Software that The unexpected How to make tests new drugs success of the laser (almost) anything page 23 page 25 page 37 TechnologyQuarterly June 11th 2005

The sincerest form of flattery When technology borrows from biology

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Contents And now, a game from our sponsor

Gaming: As young people spend less time watching television and more time online and playing games, advertisers have devised a new way to reach them ROSS the popularity of a new me- And the popularity of many advergames C dium with the demands of advertis- suggests that gamers are evidently quite ers, and the result can be a whole new happy to put up with advertising in re- genre of entertainment. In the 1930s, the turn for free entertainmentjust as soap- On the cover sponsorship of radio serials by makers of opera fans were in the radio age. In elds from robot design to household-cleaning products led to the In-game advertising is not new, but materials science, engineers soap opera. Listeners were enthralled by until recently it was limited to static pro- are increasingly borrowing episodic, melodramatic storylines, and duct-placement, inserted rather awk- mechanisms from naturean advertisers were guaranteed a big audi- wardly into console games, says Denise approach known as ence. Today, the same thing is happening Garcia of Gartner, a consultancy. She biomimetics. Nature’s with another new medium. Video games estimates that less than 10% of console designs are, after all, the have been crossed with advertising to games carry such embedded ads, and results of millions of years of produce a new genre: the advergame. they account for a mere 0.25% of reve- trial and error. How a new Advergames appeal to both advertis- nues at Electronic Arts, the world’s big- database could make them ers and gamers alike. Advertisers face the gest games publisher. In the long term, easier to copy: pages 18-21 problem that many young people are ads will be piped directly into games over watching less television in favour of the internet, allowing games publishers Monitor gaming and internet surng. A report to update in-game advertisements as of- 1 Advergames, a new way to cut published last year by Nielsen, a market- ten as they want and to collect informa- diamonds, searching video, research rm, found that time spent tion about how in-game advertising is technology and the elderly, watching television was declining viewed. This may even lead to new, ad- pulling the plug on hurricances, among American men aged 18-34, and vertising-supported pricing models. more graceful walking robots, was decreasing even faster among gam- Today, however, few games consoles plastic bridges, the body as ers of the same age. Given that internet are connected to the internet. So while network, bre-optic sensors, users are nding ways to avoid pop-ups, there is vast potential for in-game ad- and fashionable ash drives ashing banners and spam, putting advertising on consoles, the near-term vertisements into games is an obvious opportunity lies in advergames, which Rational consumer way to reach them. Perhaps surprisingly, are specically designed around advertis- 9 Why radio is worth watching gamers seem to feel positive towards in- ingthe product is often the protagonist The new world of digital radio game advertising. Football, driving and and are either downloaded on to PCs or other sports games look more realistic played inside web browsers. American Reports with real advertisement hoardings rather rms spent around $90m last year on ad- 10 Technology, meet biology than generic ads for made-up products. vergames, compared with $20m on in- 1 Biomimetic designs that borrow from nature 13 Computers that test drugs How biosimulation is helping the pharmaceutical industry

Case history 15 A bright idea The dramatic yet unexpected success of the laser

Reports 18 When modern art shows its age New materials and technologies are changing art conservation 20 Flexible screens The science-ction technology is becoming realitybut slowly

Brain scan 22 How to make (almost) anything Neil Gershenfeld dreams of building a universal replicator Where America’s Army leads, Food Force follows 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

2 game adverts and product placements, ventures. The game avoids mentioning says the Yankee Group, a consultancy. tampons altogethergirls have to keep a A successful early example of the brutish brother from reading their dia- genre was America’s Army, an adver- ries. But after the game, they are ushered game rst released as a recruitment tool to a page that does discuss tampons. The in 2002 which is based on Unreal, a advergame, put on line in mid-February, shoot-’em-up. This strikingly realistic war was played 500,000 times in its rst six game, which covers basic training, tacti- weeks. Given that it cost $25,000 to de- cal planning and a variety of missions, velop, that works out at a cost-per-play of now has over 5m registered players. just $0.05. Andy Stawski, a brand man- About 100,000 people download the ager at Kimberly-Clark, says the game is game free every month. But advergames having a signicant eect on sales. can promote peace as well as war, as a Advergames have been used in some more recent example, Food Force, dem- unlikely ways. America’s National Rough and ready onstrates. This advergame, launched in Christmas Tree Association launched an April by the United Nations World Food advergame last year to promote real trees Holden, who specialises in applying Programme, is intended to raise aware- over plastic ones. In Britain, the Food technology to improve decision-making ness of global hunger. Players are cast as Standards Agency launched a game in business. Together with his colleague emergency aid workers who must pilot called Sid the Slug to encourage people Matee Serearuno, he has developed an helicopters, negotiate with rebels and to eat less salt. (This rankled the Salt Man- optimisation system called iGem. Be- help to rebuild communities. ufacturers’ Association, which has been sides automatically working out the Kris Oser, a video-game specialist at lobbyingso far in vainto kill the game.) grade of a rough diamond, it also sug- Advertising Age, an industry magazine, And excitement over the potential of ad- gests how best to cut it in order to maxi- says old-style television, print and radio vergames has led some would-be pio- mise the value of the resulting stones. advertising just throws brands at peo- neers astray. Ian Bogost of Persuasive The system uses a set of rules, distilled ple. Compare that with Dodge’s adver- Games, based in Atlanta, dreams of from the judgments of four diamond ex- game, Race the Pros, in which the building games that go outside the perts, to determine the clarity, and hence company’s cars can be driven to victory sphere of entertainment into rhetorical the grade, of each stone. Each expert was in a hyper-realistic simulation. Every Fri- tools. One of his eorts is Activism, the asked to classify 503 dierent virtual day, real NASCAR race times are Public Policy Game, which was paid for stonescomputer models of stones con- uploaded into the computer-controlled by the Democratic Congressional Cam- taining dierent types of aws. The ex- cars, and the track is dotted with the vir- paign Committee. Alas, the slow-paced perts’ verdicts were then boiled down tual billboards of dealerships close to the action of tax reform is neither motivating, into a set of rules, so that when a new player (who must enter a zip code to take fun, nor terribly educational. 7 gemstone is presented to the system, it part). Such driving advergames also can determine how the experts would neatly sidestep rules that prohibit boast- probably have graded it. Data from more ing about a car’s top speed in TV adverts. experts could have been used, but four Richard Schlasberg, a Coca-Cola mar- proved to be enough to produce a robust keting manager based in Hellerup, Den- Diamonds that and accurate system, says Dr Holden. mark, says the beverage-maker, long a In actual use, the system is fed models fervent believer in television advertising, of gemstones, which are produced by is now siphoning funds from its TV bud- are a cut above scanning the stones using a desktop X-ray get to maintain a regularly updated suite tomography machine. When a stone is of games. A 30-second prime-time slot on Materials science: The combination identied as a borderline case between American television can cost half a mil- of an expert system and a novel two grades, the system uses an optimisa- lion dollars, whereas an advergame laser-cutting technique could boost tion technique, called a genetic algo- rarely costs more than $50,000 to de- the value of rough diamonds rithm, to explore the dierent ways in velop and can be posted on the internet which the stone could be cut to maximise for months or years. Mr Schlasberg notes HILE a diamond may be for ever, its its value. Sometimes bigger is not neces- that, with television, potential drinkers Wvalue is far from set in stone. It de- sarily better: removing imperfections, just stare, briey, at Coca-Cola. With ad- pends on the four Cs: carat, cut, colour known as inclusions, may reduce the size vergames, consumers are actually play- and clarity. But while the rst three can and caratage of a stone, but could also el- ing you, he says, and they then associate be measured objectively, assessing a dia- evate it to a more valuable grade. Tests of the brand with fun. mond’s clarity involves a certain amount iGem showed that it could increase the The simple, browser-based games of- of subjectivity and can leave experts dis- value of a rough stone by as much as 23%. fered by Coca-Cola and other rms may agreeing about the gradeand hence the For over 600 years lapidarists, or not be as sophisticated as America’s valueof a stone. Now researchers at stone-cutters, have been using essentially Army, but they have merits of their Cambridge University’s Institute for the same techniques to cut diamonds own. They are easy to access and do not Manufacturing claim to have devised a and determine their value, says Dr require players to download an enor- way to make the grading of diamonds Holden. There is a great need for automa- mous installer le, so they are well suited and other precious stones more consis- tion, he saysa sentiment echoed within to casual play in lunch hours or coee tent. Tony Holden, the project’s leader, the industry. The Gemological Institute breaks. Such games also have a broader says automating this process could do of America, for example, is devising soft- appeal than traditional games. They can more than just lead to more accurate ware to enable retailers and consumers to be found on mainstream websites, and valuations. It could also make rough compare diamonds of dierent cuts by nearly half of players are women. stones more valuable, by reducing the grading the cut automatically. Kimberly-Clark, a maker of feminine amount of waste during cutting. The next logical step is to automate the sanitary products, launched an adver- Even a small improvement can yield a physical process of cutting the diamond, game called KT’s Impossi-Bubble Ad- signicant increase in value, says Dr and Dr Holden seems to have found the 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Monitor 3

2 ideal partner. He is talking to Calibrated Still, the amount of available content Diamonds, a company based in Johan- is growing. Mr Chandratillake says his nesburg, South Africa, about combining company has catalogued about 70,000 his optimisation techniques with an ad- hours of video, and adds about 200 vanced laser-cutting system. Tradition- hours a day. Karen Howe, who became ally, diamonds are cut and polished AOL’s vice-president of audio-video using other diamonds. But in recent search after AOL acquired Singingsh, a years, lasers have been introduced to company she founded, says it is not un- make rough cuts and to carry out brut- usual to nd 400,000 new streams a day ing, the bevelling process used to give di- (including audio). She says interest is amonds their characteristic sharp-edged growing, tooin a typical week, she shapes. John Bond, the founder of Cali- notes, one in four people over 12 will brated Diamonds, says his laser-cutting view video content on the web. method can make much more precise The business model for all this is, cuts and can even polish diamonds, however, unclear. Mr Weiner, who says though he is reluctant to explain how it the video-search drama is still in its rst works. He believes that combining his la- act, thinks it will follow the same model ser-cutting with Dr Holden’s software, as television: whoever has the biggest au- and automating the whole process, could dience wins. That suggests that the big both reduce waste dramatically and cut portal websites, with their huge audi- the turnaround time from months to ences, are in the best position. But many days. Currently, people are losing up to other opportunities could emerge for the 70% of the diamond, he says. technology. I don’t know if search is go- Mr Bond hopes that this combination Here’s the haystacknow nd the needle ing to live in the television, if DVRs and of technologies will help his home conti- TiVos are going to have smarts in nent to benet more from its natural just as Google uses its search engine to as- themor whether it’s going to be at the wealth. More than 60% of the world’s semble a virtual web-based newspaper. head-end of the cable or satellite com- rough diamonds come from Africa, he It could also be helpful in digital video re- pany, says David Ivess of TVEyes. says, but a lack of expertise and relatively corders (DVRs) such as the TiVo, by mak- There is at least one business model high labour costs means that the stones ing programmes easier to access. that works: real-time news indexing, the are usually shipped overseas, to coun- Searching video clips or streams is, speciality of Critical Mention, a rm tries such as India, for assessment and however, much harder than searching based in New York. It takes feeds from 66 cutting. He hopes to have his rst factory text. There are three main approaches. television stations in America, works out up and running later this year. 7 The rst, and simplest, is to search the what is being talked about, and then de- closed captioning, or subtitles, that are livers clips over the internet to its clients, broadcast alongside television pro- which are big companies interested in grammes. In America, most television reputation management. They use the programmes already include captions; by service as a form of early warning system Google, meet law, all will have to do so starting in 2006. for breaking news, and to see where their In Europe, captions should be broadly names are being mentioned. TiVo available by 2010. Such captions are not What is striking is that despite all the perfect, however, especially for live tele- buzz around video searches, none of vision, so searching using captions can be these companies actually searches the Search technology: The new frontier a hit-and-miss aair. The second ap- visual content of the video. That is be- for search engines is to make video proach uses software to listen to the cause actual video searchingnding all clips as easy to search as text. But video’s soundtrack. Turning spoken dia- the clips that show a red car, perhaps, or that is more easily said than done logue into text requires fancy algorithms George Bushis an extremely complex and is not always reliable, as anyone who problem. IBM, which is doing research in INDING text is easy, but nding video has ever used a speech-recognition sys- this area, is using a variety of techniques Fis not. Imagine you wanted to nd, tem can testify. But the resulting text is to determine the context of a clip: indoor, say, the episode of The Simpsons in then simple to search. The third ap- outdoor, sports and so on. which Homer makes psychedelic chilli. proach, called semantic tagging, involves In February, IBM made a test version Type those keywords into a search engine applying tags to video clips, either man- of its Marvel search engine available on- such as Google, and you will nd testa- ually or automatically. Tags may describe line. It uses a technique called support ments to its side-splitting humourbut the genre of a clip, which actors appear in vector analysis to classify clips into par- not the episode itself. Not yet, anyway. it, and so on. The tagged video can then ticular categories, by scrutinising audio, Search is, however, coming to video. As it be easily searched. video and transcribed speech. Having does, consumers will be able to type in a These three approaches are each used learned about a particular kind of con- favourite line from a lm and nd it, says on their own or, more often, in conjunc- tent, it can then recognise it in future. It is, Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder of tion with one another to analyse, label in short, a step towards an engine that can Blinkx, a video search-engine. and then search through video content. actually search video. IBM is working In anticipation, big websites such as Allen Weiner of Gartner, a consultancy, with CNN, the BBC and other broadcast- Google, Yahoo! and AOL have started to says the various methods work pretty ers to assemble a library of clips on oer basic video-search capabilities, and well. The challenge is actually getting which to train the system. John Smith, a upstarts such as Blinkx and TVEyes hold of video to search. We’re talking researcher in intelligent information (which has teamed up with Yahoo!) have about content that does not originate on management at IBM Research, thinks it popped up as well. The opportunity is the web, he says. That content is mostly could be ready for commercial use within immensesearching video content could locked up in the hands of broadcasters two years. But searching video is one create a web-based television network, and studios, or on the hard disks of DVRs. eld where seeing really is believing. 7 4 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

is medication time, Helping Hand beeps Netherlands, a country with a particular and ashes, and sensors track how many enthusiasm for telemedicine. The rm pills have been taken and when. A read- plans a British launch too. Home alone out indicates prescription compliancea At IBM’s research lab in Zurich, re- green light means the user is on track. searchers are working on a mobile-health Other products are still in the research toolkit to link medical devices with wire- labs, such as the system devised by Hew- less networks. Called mHealth, the kit lett-Packard (HP) to let pharmacists print could, for example, work with Bang & Technology and the elderly: The bar-codes directly on to pills. They can Olufsen’s Helping Hand so that a forgot- world’s population is getting older. then be held up to a scanner the size of a ten pill triggers a mobile-phone call. HP, How can technology help old people coee cup, which says out loud what the meanwhile, is working on wearable live independently at home? pill is and when to take it. A second de- wireless sensors, the size of sticking plas- vice holds all of a person’s pills and dis- ters, that could be used for remote moni- IKE many middle-aged people these penses each one at the appropriate time. toring of heart activity and other Ldays, Edie Stern, who lives in New Managing the chronic diseases that ac- information. The idea behind all of these York, often nds herself worrying about company old age, such as arthritis, dia- monitoring systems is to allow old peo- an ageing parent. Her father, Aaron, is 87 betes and hypertension, involves more ple to remain in their own homes for as years old and lives on his own in Florida, than just popping the right pills, how- long as possible, even when they are be- hundreds of miles away. He’s a very in- ever. Other new technologies focus on re- ing treated for chronic illnesses, rather dependent soul, she says. Many people mote management of such chronic than moving into a nursing home. in Ms Stern’s position feel torn: they want diseases. Health Hero Network, for exam- Another category of devices monitor their parents to continue to live in their ple, has developed the Health Buddy, a non-medical activities: Has Mum got up own homes and pursue their own lives, dedicated computer that oers daily today? Did Dad have any breakfast? but are concerned about their parents’ coaching for some 45 health conditions. Lance Larivee, who works in the software growing frailties. Unlike others, however, The latest version has a colour screen and industry and lives in Portland, Oregon, is Ms Stern can at least feel she is doing ports for connecting medical sensors, testing a new system from Lusora, a something to help resolve this dilemma. such as a device for measuring diabetics’ start-up based in San Francisco. The Lus- As a researcher at IBM, a big computer glucose levels. Used by American health- ora Intelligent Sensory Architecture rm, she is one of many people develop- care organisations to look after over (LISA), which will go on sale later this ing new technologies intended to make it 5,000 chronically ill patients, the Health year, is a collection of wireless devices in- easier, less stressful and even healthier Buddy plugs into the phone and sends cluding a wearable panic alarm and va- for older folks to continue living at home. data between patient and doctor every rious monitoring devices that are placed Demand for such technologies could day. A Japanese version is now in the around the home and detect motion, be enormous, since baby-boomers are on works, and approval is pending in the sound and temperature. Data from these 1 the cusp of retirement. About 10% of the world’s population was 60 or older in 2000but that gure will more than dou- ble to 22% by 2050. Some countries will be especially hard hit: 28% of the population in Italy and Japan will be over 65 by 2030. In the rich world, there will be two old people for every child by 2050. Consider the daily chore of taking the right pills at the right time. As people grow older, the combinations of medi- cines they must take often become elabo- rate cocktails. Pills are easily confused and labels can be hard to read. So Medi- voxRx Technologies, a division of Wiz- zard Software, based in Pittsburgh, has developed Rex, the talking pill bottle. Pressing a button on its base plays back spoken prescription information, stored in a microchip, through a miniature speaker. This information can either be generated automatically from prescrip- Anti-hurricane technology tion data, or recorded directly using a docking station: Mum, take this arthritis How can you slow down a hurricane? Moshe Alamaro, a scientist at the Massachusetts pill for your shoulder pain, but not more Institute of Technology, has a plan. Just as setting small, controlled res can stop forest than three times a day. A new version of res by robbing them of fuel, he proposes the creation of small, man-made tropical Rex, now in the pipeline, will warn if a cyclones to cool the ocean and rob big, natural hurricanes of their source of energy. His bottle is opened too many times in a day. scheme, devised with German and Russian weather scientists and presented at a Similarly, Bang & Olufsen’s Medicom weather-modication conference in April, involves a chain of oshore barges adorned division is test marketing a device in sev- with upward-facing jet engines. Each barge creates an updraft, causing water to eral European countries that helps people evaporate from the ocean’s surface and reducing its temperature. The resulting tropical remember how many pills they’ve taken. storms travel towards the shore but dissipate harmlessly. Dr Alamaro reckons that The Helping Hand device holds blister- protecting Central America and the southern United States from hurricanes would cost packs, those cards of pills packaged un- less than $1 billion a year. Most of the cost would be fuel: large jet engines, he observes, der individual bubbles of plastic. When it are abundant in the graveyards of American and Soviet long-range bombers. The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Monitor 5

2 devices can be accessed securely via the forces calculation at the ankle joint deter- internet. So Mr Larivee can, for example, mines the position of the shin, and the check online to see if his 87-year-old process is repeated at the knee to deter- grandmotherwho lives alone in Los Al- mine the position of the thigh, and so on. tos, Californiahas opened the refriger- The problem is that the complexity of ator yet today. the calculation grows, roughly speaking, Living Independently, a rm based in in proportion with the cube of the num- New York, last year began selling a simi- ber of joints in the robot, which quickly lar system, called QuietCare, the develop- becomes computationally unwieldy. ment of which was funded in part by This will make life increasingly dicult America’s National Institutes of Health for the engineers in future as they attempt and Ageing. It too combines motion de- to add more complex behaviours to their tectors with a secure website where cus- robots’ repertoires, says Russ Tedrake, an tomers can check activity. But the system expert in bipedal locomotion at the is also backed up by ADT Security Ser- Massachusetts Institute of Technology. vices, a home-security rm. ADT is told Which is why a new algorithm devised what patterns of activityor lack of activ- by Dr Grizzle, called hybrid zero dynam- ityshould trigger particular pre-deter- ics (HZD), is so clever. It simplies the mined responses, such as calling for an problem, producing reliable predictions emergency doctor. for walking motions which can be ap- Such systems need not rely on elabo- plied across a range of robot designs. rate cameras and sensors, however. Any Walking humans roll their weight for- electronic device that is central to the ward from the heel to the ball of the sup- daily routine can potentially be used as a Walk this way porting foot, says Dr Grizzle. But while barometer of well-being. In Japan, over pivoting on this supporting foot, they 2,200 people use the i-pot system devised have no direct way to regulate the rate at by Zojirushi, Fujitsu and NTT. As its name which their bodies fall forward. The rate suggests, the i-pot is an internet-con- of fall can be regulated only indirectly, by nected kettle. Whenever it is usedwhich Robotics: Getting robots to walk artful positioning of torso and limbs, a is several times a day in tea-loving Ja- gracefully on two legs is hard. But a skill exemplied by some humans’ abil- panit sends a wireless signal to a central new approach could make robots ity to walk on stilts. So Dr Grizzle de- server. Usage records can be checked on a more elegant and versatile signed his algorithm to work with robots secure website, and the pot also sends a that do not have feet or ankles, but simply twice-daily summary by e-mail to a fam- N RECENT years robots have gone have two rigid legs, like stilts. Together ily member or other designated recipient. Ithrough a rapid evolution: like their hu- with Eric Westervelt, a doctoral student, Back at IBM, Ms Stern is working on man creators, they have gone from craw- he devised two simple equations. One something called the Friends & Family ling on the ground to walking upright on describes the motion of any complex Portal, which could tie many of these two legs. Indeed, the latest humanoid ro- walking system as a form of inverted concepts together. Bringing together bots, such as Honda’s Asimo and Sony’s pendulum; the other describes how this health updates, a listing of doctor’s ap- QRIO, can climb stairs, dance, run and inverted pendulum will move. The sim- pointments, chronic disease data and jump. Even the most advanced robots, plicity of these equations, and their abil- other information, the portal is designed however, still cannot move with the ity to make very accurate predictions, to house everything those concerned grace, agility and exibility of a human. ensure that the robot stays balanced. about an elderly person would want to The problem with current robots is the Remarkably, Dr Grizzle does not have know. A buddy list keeps everyone zero-moment point (ZMP) algorithm a robot of his own on which to test his al- connected via e-mail or instant messag- that controls them, says Jessy Grizzle of gorithm. Instead, it was tested on a two- ing. Ms Stern’s father, for example, could the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. legged robot called Rabbit at the Labora- upload his glucose readings to the portal Although ZMP can produce some impres- toire Automatique de Grenoble in France. so that his doctor in Florida, his daughter sive results, its design requires a low cen- Rabbit, it turns out, can walk and run, de- in New York and his son in Denver could tre of gravity and at feet, making it spite not having any feet. It can recover all see that he is keeping his diabetes in unable to emulate the speed and agility from being shoved, and can even carry a check. Patients who know that other peo- of a human gait or to cope with uneven load equivalent to 30% of its own weight ple are paying attention, says Ms Stern, surfaces. Both QRIO and Asimo walk in a without much reprogramming. are more likely to follow doctor’s orders. crouched position, with their knees per- To be fair, Honda’s Asimo does not It’s a virtuous circle, she says. manently bent in an awkward, consti- always require its feet to be at, as the While the demand for all these tech- pated-looking manner. Their ability to company points out. When Asimo is in its nologies seems certain to grow, this kind climb stairs is the result of careful chore- running mode, both its feet lift o the of monitoring inevitably raises the ques- ography and laborious mapping of the ground between strides. Dr Grizzle tion of privacya prickly issue that has environment, says Dr Grizzle. responds that it all depends on what you derailed other technologies in the past. The ZMP algorithm results in motion count as running. Asimo’s steps are less Will the elderly tolerate a barrage of that looks unnatural, says Dr Grizzle, be- than half the length of its feet, and both devices monitoring and tracking them, cause it has no bearing upon how hu- feet are o the ground for a mere ve revealing everything down to when they mans actually walk. While taking a step, milliseconds, he notes. His algorithm pro- had breakfast or last had a cup of tea? it requires that the supporting foot is at duces motion that is far more faithful to Richard Jones, the boss of Lusora, on the ground so that balance can be the way humans run, with both feet o responds with a question of his own: achieved by exerting forces through the the ground for 100 milliseconds and a What’s a greater loss of privacy than ankle joint. Keeping one foot at in this step length of over 60 centimetres. The moving out of your own house? He has way makes control of the robot relatively result, in short, is robotic movements that a good point. 7 easy, at least in theory. A balance-of- are much less, well, robotic. 7 6 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

Data with a human touch dustrial fa- cilities and Computing: The idea of using the highways. Some human body to interconnect are even tough enough electronic devices sounds like a to support a Sherman tank, gimmickbut could have its uses as was theatrically demonstrated during the inauguration in ATA networks can take many forms. 2002 of a road bridge in Shrivenham, DThey can be constructed using England. Its 11-metre deck was made by towers with coloured ags, carrier pi- Fiberline Composites, a Danish rm geons, electric pulses travelling along which, like Composieten Team, makes wires, or bursts of laser light whizzing plastic bridges to order. along optical bres. But perhaps strangest Plastic bridges have advantages over of all is the idea of using the human body both concrete and steel ones. They re- itself as a network. While it sounds bi- quire minimal maintenance during their zarre, systems that use the body to link up A bridge too far? lifespans (estimated at over 60 years for dierent devices are already available the InfraCore), whereas traditional and they might even be quite useful. bridges often need a costly overhaul after First in line is Matsushita, a Japanese only a decade or two. Plastic bridges are industrial giant. Last September it impervious to common problems such as launched a Touch Communication Sys- Materials science: As unlikely as it corrosion, frost, mould and insects, tem under the slogan Data transfer via sounds, plastic is becoming an which eliminates the need for special ngertips. It allows users to pick up in- increasingly popular material from coatings. Adding a new composite deck formation from a device simply by touch- which to build bridges can extend the life of an old bridge that ing it. The information is then stored in a would otherwise not be worth repairing. compact gadget worn on a wristband, RIDGES must always be epic engi- And plastic bridges can even be made and is transferred when the user touches B neering projects involving years of from discarded coee cups and detergent another device. Very weak currents are construction work and vast amounts of bottles: a 14-metre span built over New used to transmit data across the skin’s steel and concrete, right? Wrong. New de- Jersey’s Mullica River in 2002 consists of surface, and the data-transfer rate, a mere sign and construction techniques mean recycled polyethylene and polystyrene. 3.7 kilobits per second, is much slower that bridges can be put together in a mat- Technologically, says Mr Peeters, than a dial-up modem. ter of daysand they can even be made many of the plastic bridges that are now Even so, Teraoka Seiko, a Japanese out of plastic. Consider the InfraCore popping up around the world could have rm that makes measuring instruments, bridge, a design launched in January by been built ten years ago. It has simply has begun to incorporate the technology Composieten Team, a rm based in Rot- taken time for civil engineersa naturally into its line of electronic scales, registers terdam. The designers’ goal was to shave cautious bunch who are used to building and printers. The resulting keyless data- months, or years, o the commissioning bridges out of concrete, steel and entry systems are being targeted at sales- of new bridges, a process that typically woodto come round to the idea of using men who handle bulk merchandise that entails lengthy rounds of sketching, plastic in bridge construction. is unsuitable for labelling with bar-codes, specifying and contracting. But enthusiasm for plastic bridges is such as big chunks of meat and sh. The Standardising the design and produc- now growing. In November, Fiberline technology is on trial at several stores, tion processes, says Jan Peeters, one of the supplied the materials for an all-compos- says a Matsushita spokesman, and the engineers behind the new design, makes ite trac bridge in Klipphausen, near company has high hopes for it. It plans to ordering a bridge as easy as buying a car. Dresden. Indeed, the former East squeeze all the required circuitry on to a With a few clicks of the mouse, software Germany, notes Finn Jerno of Fiberline, single chip by the end of the year. adjusts the bridge recipe to a client’s was an unsung pioneer of the use of ad- Skinplex, devised by Ident Technol- specications. The bridge’s size, colour, vanced plastics in construction. Five of ogy, a German start-up, is a similar sys- and options such as handrails are chosen Klipphausen’s wooden bridges were de- tem designed with security applications on screen, and because engineers no lon- stroyed in the massive European oods in mind. You carry a device with a unique ger need to design each bridge from of 2002, and replacing the originals identifying code on your body, perhaps scratch, the nished product can be de- would probably have meant disruptive embedded in your watch or glasses. The livered within a week. The lightweight repair work every ten years. After consid- code is transmitted via your skin as soon plastic even oats, and a two-man crew ering the long-term costs, the mayor de- as you touch a receiver, embedded in a can install a small bridge in a few hours. cided to build the new bridges using car door, for example. This is more secure This is just the latest example of the Fiberline’s glass-bre-reinforced plastic than a wireless key fob, says Stefan Donat growing use of plastics in bridge con- instead. The plastic design has another of Ident, since the signal cannot be inter- struction. Bridges made of bre-rein- benet, too: the next time catastrophic cepted by a nearby eavesdropper. forced polymers have been around since weather threatens, Klipphauseners can As well as having potential security the late 1990s, and several hundred plas- simply disassemble their new plastic advantages, transmitting data from one tic bridges now dot the globe, mainly in bridges at a moment’s noticeand then device to another via the user’s skin also Europe and North America. They traverse snap them back together once the storm sidesteps the problem of radio interfer- everything from rivers and railways to in- has passed. 7 ence as other personal-area network 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Monitor 7

your pocket when you sit down the telecoms boom is that prices have at your desk, for example; or you tumbled, so bre-optic sensors can be could unlock a door by touching used more widely, and in new ways. it. NTT boasts that there is no need The most common type of bre-optic to insert smart cards or mess around sensor in use today is called a Bragg grat- with cables to get two RedTacton devices ing, which is the bre-optic equivalent to talk to each other. of a strain gauge. A Bragg grating is a re- Ian Pearson, a futurologist at BT, Brit- gion of a bre where the refractive index ain’s incumbent telecoms rm, says the has been modied so that it varies in a future for body-based communications precise, periodic way. This causes the looks good. Eventually, he says, it will be grating to reect light of a specic wave- possible to make very sophisticated de- length (ie, a specic colour). As the bre is vices that live in or on a person’s skin, stretched or compressed, the wavelength and that talk both to each other and to that is reected then changes accordingly, other, nearby devices outside the body. and the strain can be determined. Just as the roll-out of broadband internet Changes in temperature also change the access depends on bridging the last bre’s properties in predictable ways. By mile between telephone exchange and incorporating several Bragg gratings into subscriber, human-body networking a single bre, each tuned to reect a dier- could carry data across the last metre. ent wavelength, it is possible to measure 2 devices, based on the established Wi-Fi Well, maybe. Whether using the elec- the variations in strain or temperature and Bluetooth wireless technologies, pro- tric eld of the body to transmit bits will along the bre’s length. liferate. So why is the technology not be compelling is really open, says Bragg gratings are used to measure more popular? For one thing, it is still Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Micro- strain in things like turbine blades, and quite new: Microsoft was awarded its pat- soft’s Bay Area Research Centre in San are now cheaper than conventional ent for skin-based data transmission only Francisco. I’m a bit sceptical. But we strain gauges. Indeed, bre-optic sensors in June last year, for example. Another won’t know for at least ve years, he are replacing electrical sensors in many problem is the need to maintain direct adds, since it will take time for a standard areas of engineering, science and medi- contact with multiple devices. Sending to emerge. That raises the question of cine. But Julian Jones, a professor of engi- music to a set of headphones via the skin what the standard will be called. Wi-Skin, neering optics at Heriot-Watt University makes sensebut means that the music- perhaps, or Body-Fi, or Blueskin? 7 in Edinburgh, says that the spread of this player must be touching the skin too. And technology from the laboratory into ev- health worries over mobile phones and eryday use has barely begun. In collabo- other sources of radiation mean that peo- ration with researchers at Aston ple are not quite ready to accept the idea University and the University of Shef- of signals being transmitted via skin, says From dumb pipes eld, he is currently working on several Thomas Zasowski, a researcher at the new types of bre-optic sensor. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in to smart sensors The rst is a bre with multiple cores, Zurich. Besides, the data rates achievable an idea that was originally intended to in- may simply be too low. crease bre-optic capacity, but which Many of these drawbacks are being Materials science: Optical bres are was soon abandoned. Dr Jones found addressed by NTT, Japan’s telecoms widely used to pipe data around at that such bres can be used not just to giant. Instead of passing an electric cur- high speeds. But bre optics can be measure strain, but also to measure the rent through the skin, its RedTacton used as sensors, too degree of bend and its direction. Bragg technology, announced in February, gratings are etched into each core of a works by inducing tiny uctuations in IBRE optics are most commonly asso- four-core optical bre. When the bre the body’s existing, but very weak, elec- Fciated with communicationsand bends, some of the gratings are stretched tric eldin much the same way that a ra- with the telecoms crash that followed and others are compressed, and the dio modulates a carrier wave to transmit when too many rms built too many wavelengths they reect change accord- sound. This means that the transmitter identical bre-optic networks, and the ingly. It is then possible to calculate the need not be in direct contact with the trac to ll them never materialised. But direction and the angle of bend. This ap- skin, but can be in a pocket or purse: the bre optics can do more than just act as proach is ideal for monitoring structures technology works through multiple lay- pipes for transporting data; they can also such as aircraft wings and yacht masts, ers of clothing, up to 20 centimetres from be used as sensors that can gather data. and a single bre can do the work of hun- the body. The receiver is based around an Compared with electrical sensors, they dreds or even thousands of electrical sen- electro-optic crystal, the optical proper- are smaller, cheaper, longer lasting and sors, says Dr Jones. ties of which change in sympathy with can operate at much higher temperatures Another new type of sensor is based the body’s electric eld. These variations (600°C rather than 125°C). And unlike on a conventional optical bre, the end of are detected by a laser and an optical sen- electrical sensors, bre-optic sensors are which has been modied in various sor, and the transmitted data can then be not susceptible to electromagnetic inter- ways. In one example, a small hole, just extracted. NTT says a data rate of 10 ference and can therefore be reliably used an eighth of a millimetre in diameter, is megabits per second is possible, making in power plants, magnetic-resonance im- drilled into the end of a bre using a high- the user’s body equivalent in capacity to aging laboratories and other situations powered laser. A copper membrane is ap- an oce Ethernet network. where such interference abounds. plied, creating a small air cavity inside The technology could have all sorts of Fibre-optic sensors are not newthey the bre. The optical properties of the - uses, since it also works with inanimate have been around since Corning Glass bre then vary depending on the pressure objects such as walls, oors, furniture and Bell Labs rst started developing op- dierential across the membrane. The re- and even water. Music could be transmit- tical bres for the telecoms industry back sult, says Dr Jones, may be the fastest re- ted from your PC to a music-player in in the 1960s. But a happy consequence of acting pressure sensor ever made: it is 1 8 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

2 ideal for measuring such things as blast waves. In the current climate, there’s a huge demand for technology which could help to design bomb-proof build- ings, he says. Data gathered using these sensors in explosion experiments can show how blast waves interact with structures, leading to a better understanding of blast damage and its mitigation. Researchers at the Centre for Pho- tonics Technology at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Virginia, are pursuing a similar approach. They have also developed new ways to get a single bre to function as a very large number of independent sensors. In one experiment, Anbo Wang and his colleagues demonstrated a technique that can read 1,000 dierent Bragg gratings along a single bre. A very short laser pulse is launched into the bre, and each grating reects a small amount of the pulse. Reections from nearby gratings arrive sooner than those from gratings at the far end of the - bre, and the intensity of each reection The iPod Shue, prêt à porter reveals the local temperature or strain. Analysis of the timing and intensity of Valley, ash-drive necklaces are most tronic clothing and wearable computers the reections results in a temperature or popular among men in wealthy Asian of the future. Much of the growth is com- strain prole for an entire bridge, dam or countries. The bestselling models in Asia ing from business people. Rather than pipeline from a single embedded bre are cute and shiny with brightly contrast- handing out bulky folders of sales mate- sensor. Optical bres have already ing colours. SanDisk, a rm based in Sun- rial, they now dish out cheap ash drives slashed the cost of communications. Evi- nyvale, California, that pioneered ash instead, preloaded with electronic les dently their ability to reduce costs while drives, recently launched new models and emblazoned with company logos. delivering ever increasing amounts of with vibrantly coloured rubber casings, The latest ash drives can store four gi- data extends to sensing, too. 7 which are selling briskly in Asia. Other gabytes of data, though 512-megabyte decorative casings are on the way. Mike drives, which cost around $50, are more Morgenstern, a marketing manager at common. Weighing slightly more than a SanDisk, says the coolness factor of pen, a 512-megabyte ash drive can store customisable mix-and-match covers is about 15 albums or ten music videos. The Flash and carry currently driving sales, and he should ash memory technology that gives know: SanDisk’s products account for ash drives their name does not require nearly half of all ash drives sold. battery power to preserve its contents. Rappers and hip-hoppers bear some Unlike oppy disks, ash drives slip eas- responsibility for the rise of the wearable ily into a pocket, and are far more robust. Computing: Flash drives, which allow ash drive. Their enthusiasm for heavy, SanDisk’s Titanium drive can survive be- huge amounts of data to be carried metallic neckwear made it acceptable for ing driven over by a car, and weathers the around easily, are changing from menwho own 80% of ash drivesto washing machine, too, in spite of its re- geek toys into fashion items wear chunky pendants. But ash drives tractable but unsealed connector. aimed specically at women are on the For the cognoscenti, a ash drive TRANGE but true: memory chips have way too. PNY, a New York-based manu- serves as an invitation to share and pro- S become fashion items. Well, sort of. facturer with a product line that includes vides an easy way to exchange music or Flash drivesalso known as thumb, key, a ash drive hidden inside a pen, will photos. Roland Mouret, a French designer pen or jump driveswhich can store me- launch a collection this autumn of drives who has incorporated laptops into fash- gabytes of data, and are simply slotted with feminine shapes, colours and ma- ion collections, says ash drives are giv- into a computer’s USB port, have dis- terials. A fashionable drive needs to be ing mobile urbanites the opportunity to placed old-fashioned oppy disks as the shown o, says Stephane Rouveyrol of absorb culture wherever they go. Even so, easiest way to carry your data around. As PNY. Similarly, Maastrek, a rm based in Cathleen Laporte, president of the Black ash drives become more popular Hildesheim, Germany, that already sells Fashion Designers Association in New among students and business people, ash drives built into watches, is design- York, says that ash drives have yet to hit and not just computer-support sta, ing a line of ash-drive earrings and catwalks on either side of the Atlantic. more attention is being paid to their de- bracelets, and a series of necklaces in the Fashion-conscious Italians, however, sign. Some people have even taken to shapes of tigers, birds and sh. They will are not so keen on the technology. Kim wearing their ash drives around their go on sale later this year. Coston, who teaches at Polimoda, a fash- necks, like jewellerya trend boosted by The ash-drive market is now worth ion school in Florence, says Italians prefer the launch earlier this year of Apple’s about $4 billion annually, and it is not to exhibit what they consider to be a iPod Shue, the ash-drive version of its roughly doubling in size every year, symbol of American corporatism. But iconic and fashionable music-player. according to Rafael Achaerandio of IDC, a Italy aside, the ash drive is undeniably According to the USB Flash Drive Alli- market-research rm. He says the tech- and unexpectedlymoving from geek ance, an industry body based in Silicon nology is a fun rst step toward the elec- toy into the realm of fashion. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Rational consumer 9

Why radio is worth watching

lite services (XM and Sirius) and a lows radio stations to broadcast multiple technology called HD Radio that allows streams, which appear as sub-channels Consumer electronics: Digital digital signals to piggyback on standard on the tuning menu. In future, car radios radio broadens choice for FM transmissions. Satellite radio now has could store a trac bulletin in memory around 5m subscribers and can be found and play it back when the driver hits a listeners and opens up new in 4% of households, and the number is trac news button, says Ms Abraham. possibilities for broadcasters more than doubling each year. The grow- Forthcoming radios with colour screens ing clout of satellite radio is illustrated by could display a map during the weather ELEVISION has changed dramatically its exclusive content deals, such as those forecast, or a sponsor’s logo during a par- Tin recent years. You can now sit down struck by XM with Major League Baseball, ticular show. When the advertising guys in front of a wide, at-panel screen, and and by Sirius with Howard Stern. get hold of this, goodness knows what call up hundreds of channels in an in- Then there is an emerging global digi- will happen, says Mr Moloney. stant. You can pause and rewind live tal-radio standard called Digital Radio Broadcasters and advertisers are, says broadcasts and record every episode of Mondiale (DRM), which uses digital en- Ms Abraham, rubbing their hands at the your favourite programme using a per- coding to deliver near-FM audio quality new business models made possible by sonal video recorder (PVR) such as a TiVo. in the long-wave and medium-wave fre- digital. Satellite radio has demonstrated And in some parts of the world video on quency bands, which have a far longer that subscription-based charging can demand services enable viewers to call reach than FM signals. DRM transmis- work in radio, as it does in TV. More tar- up programmes when they want to watch sions are already under way in some parts geted channels, sub-channels and online them, rather than when broadcasters de- of the world, though receivers are still ex- channels will allow broadcasters to reach cide to transmit them. All this has been pensive, as DAB receivers were initially. specic audiences more easily, which made possible by digital technology, But cheaper DRM radios are on the way. should enable them to charge more for ad- which has visibly transformed television. Finally, digital radio can also be de- vertising. And the ability to send other At the same time, however, a similarif livered via the internet, in the form of au- forms of data alongside audio means that less remarked upontransformation is dio streaming. According to gures from broadcasters could, for example, deliver under way in radio. It is going digital too. Forrester, a consultancy, 16% of American mobile-phone ringtones or discount cou- The latest digital radio receivers, households have listened to streaming pons alongside particular shows: only by launched this month in Britain, feature audio online. The latest twist is podcast- listening to the whole programme can TiVo-style pause, rewind, programme ing, the audio equivalent of blogging, you receive the download, which can guide and timed recording functions. which allows anyone to post audio les then be transferred from the radio to your Some digital-satellite receivers, which are online for downloading by others. mobile phone. There is even talk of using becoming increasingly popular in Amer- global-positioning technology in digital ica, also oer pause, rewind and record- Tuning in to the future receivers to deliver adverts specic to the ing features, as well as access to dozens of All of this means greater choice and con- listener’s location. channels. Such features will become com- trol for listeners, says Michelle Abraham There is a paradox here, observes Ted monplace as sales of digital radios in- of In-Stat. Digital radio oers better sound Schadler of Forrester. Broadcasters see crease, from 4m receivers in 2004 to an quality than analogue, and its more e- digital as an opportunity to increase ad- estimated 23m units in 2008, according to cient use of the airwaves means there is vertising revenue, but the success of satel- gures from In-Stat, a market-research room for more channels, and hence lite radio in America is partly the result of rm. In Britain, sales of digital receivers greater variety. (XM and Sirius oer doz- listeners’ desire to escape from advertis- have overtaken sales of analogue radios, ens of genre-specic music channels, for ing: many satellite music channels are ad- according to Dixons, a retail chain. example.) Digital-radio listeners tend to free. Consumers say they hate advertis- Dierent digital-radio technologies are be more promiscuous in their listening ing, but they also say they won’t pay being deployed in dierent parts of the habits, says Andrew Moloney of Radio- enough to make it go away, he says. Digi- world. Outside the United States, the lead- Scape, a British rm that develops digital- tal radio will oer a wider range of ing standard is called DAB. It is already radio technology. Since it is easier to ick choices, however, and consumers will popular in Britain, Germany and Canada, between stationssome radios even have pick the business model that gives them and is spreading in Europe and Asia. DAB a back button for quick switchinglis- the programming they want at the lowest signals are transmitted separately from teners do more channel-hopping. cost. Charging more for advertising de- conventional analogue FM signals, but As well as improving quality and pends on attracting specic audiences, many receivers can switch to a station’s choice, digital radio can do things that an- and that will require investment in better FM signal in the event of the digital signal alogue cannot. Music stations can trans- programming, says Mr Schadler. So as ra- being lost (in a moving car, for example). mit artist and track information, and dio goes digital, choice will improveand In America, there are two kinds of digi- news stations can transmit scrolling head- both listeners and broadcasters ought to tal radio: subscription-based digital satel- lines to the radio’s screen. Digital also al- be able to get more of what they want. 7 10 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

Technology that imitates nature

the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural oratories in New Jersey. And sometimes Technologies at the University of Bath in the systems found in nature can make Biomimetics: Engineers are England. So he and his colleagues have even the most advanced technologies increasingly taking a leaf out of been working on a scheme to enable engi- look primitive by comparison, she says. neers to bypass the biologists and tap into The skeletons of brittlestars, which are nature’s book when looking for nature’s ingenuity directly, via a database sea creatures related to starsh and sea ur- solutions to design problems of biological patents. The idea is that chins, contain thousands of tiny lenses this database will let anyone search that collectively form a single, distributed FTER taking his dog for a walk one day through a wide range of biological mech- eye. This enables brittlestars to escape Ain the early 1940s, George de Mestral, anisms and properties to nd natural so- predators and distinguish between night a Swiss inventor, became curious about lutions to technological problems. and day. Besides having unusual optical the seeds of the burdock plant that had at- properties and being very smalleach is tached themselves to his clothes and to How not to reinvent the wheel just one-twentieth of a millimetre in di- the dog’s fur. Under a microscope, he Surely human intellect, and the deliberate ameterthe lenses have another trick of looked closely at the hook-and-loop sys- application of design knowledge, can de- particular relevance to micro-optical system that the seeds have evolved to hitch- vise better mechanisms than the mind- tems. Although the lenses are xed in hike on passing animals and aid less, random process of evolution? Far shape, they are connected via a network pollination, and he realised that the same from it. Over billions of years of trial and of uid-lled channels, containing a light- approach could be used to join other error, nature has devised eective solu- absorbing pigment. The creature can vary things together. The result was Velcro: a tions to all sorts of complicated real- the contrast of the lenses by controlling product that was arguably more than world problems. Take the slippery task of this uid. The same idea can be applied in three billion years in the making, since controlling a submersible vehicle, for ex- man-made lenses, says Dr Aizenberg. that is how long the natural mechanism ample. Using propellers, it is incredibly These are made from silicon and so can- that inspired it took to evolve. dicult to make rened movements. But not change their properties, she says. But Velcro is probably the most famous Nekton Research, a company based in by copying the brittlestar’s uidic system, and certainly the most successful exam- Durham, North Carolina, has developed she has been able to make biomimetic ple of biological mimicry, or biomimet- a robot sh called Madeleine that ma- lens arrays with the same exibility. ics. In elds from robotics to materials noeuvres using ns instead. Another demonstration of the power science, technologists are increasingly In some cases, engineers can spend de- of biomimetics comes from the gecko. borrowing ideas from nature, and with cades inventing and perfecting a new This lizard’s ability to walk up walls and good reason: nature’s designs have, by de- technology, only to discover that nature along ceilings is of much interest, and not nition, stood the test of time, so it would beat them to it. The Venus ower basket, only to fans of Spider-Man. Two groups of be foolish to ignore them. Yet transplant- for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, researchers, one led by Andre Geim at ing natural designs into man-made tech- has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are re- Manchester University and the other by nologies is still a hit-or-miss aair. markably similar, both in appearance and Ron Fearing at the University of Califor- Engineers depend on biologists to dis- optical properties, to commercial optical nia, Berkeley, have independently de- cover interesting mechanisms for them to bres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a re- veloped ways to copy the gecko’s ability exploit, says Julian Vincent, the director of searcher at Lucent Technology’s Bell Lab- to cling to walls. The secret of the gecko’s1 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Reports 11

2 success lies in the tiny hair-like structures, called setae, that cover its feet. Instead of secreting a sticky substance, as you might expect, they owe their adhesive properties to incredibly weak intermolecular at- tractive forces. These van der Waals forces, as they are known, which exist between any two adjacent objects, arise between the setae and the wall to which the gecko is clinging. Normally such forces are negligible, but the setae, with their spat- ula-like tips, maximise the surface area in contact with the wall. The weak forces, multiplied across thousands of setae, are then sucient to hold the lizard’s weight. Both the British and American teams Madeleine, a swimming robot modelled on a sh have shown that the intricate design of these microscopic setae can be repro- than wheels. That is because legs can get NASA in conjunction with the University duced using synthetic materials. Dr Geim you places that wheels cannot, says Dr of Bremen in Germany, is also biologi- calls the result gecko tape. The technol- Kenny. Wheels work well on at surfaces, cally inspired. Meanwhile, a Finnish tech- ogy is still some years away from com- but are much less ecient on uneven ter- nology rm, Plustech, has developed a mercialisation, says Thomas Kenny of rain. Scientists at NASA’s Ames Research six-legged tractor for use in forestry. Stanford University, who is a member of Centre in Mountain View, California, are Clambering over fallen logs and up steep Dr Fearing’s group. But when it does reach evaluating an eight-legged walking robot hills, it can cross terrain that would be im- the market, rather than being used to modelled on a scorpion, and America’s passable in a wheeled vehicle. make wall-crawling gloves, it will proba- Defence Advanced Research Projects Other examples of biomimetics bly be used as an alternative to Velcro, or Agency (DARPA) is funding research into abound: Autotype, a materials rm, has in sticking plasters. Indeed, says Dr four-legged robot dogs, with a view to ap- developed a plastic lm based on the Kenny, it could be particularly useful in plying the technology on the battleeld. complex microstructures found in moth medical applications where chemical ad- Having legs is only half the storyit’s eyes, which have evolved to collect as hesives cannot be used. how you control them that counts, says much light as possible without reection. While it is far from obvious that Joseph Ayers, a biologist and neurophysi- When applied to the screen of a mobile geckos’ feet could inspire a new kind of ologist at Northeastern University, phone, the lm reduces reections and sticking plaster, there are some elds Massachusetts. He has spent recent years improves readability, and improves bat- such as roboticsin which borrowing de- developing a biomimetic robotic lobster tery life since there is less need to illumi- signs from nature is self-evidently the that does not just look like a lobster but ac- nate the screen. Researchers at the sensible thing to do. The next generation tually emulates parts of a lobster’s ner- University of Florida, meanwhile, have of planetary exploration vehicles being vous system to control its walking devised a coating inspired by the rough, designed by America’s space agency, behaviour. The control system of the scor- bristly skin of sharks. It can be applied to NASA, for example, will have legs rather pion robot, which is being developed by the hulls of ships and submarines to pre-1

The hook-and-loop mechanism (left) of burdock seeds (centre) inspired Velcro (right) 12 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

funding from Britain’s Engineering and you don’t copy a bird, but you do copy the Physical Sciences Research Council, have use of wings and aerofoils, says Dr Vin- spent the past three years building a data- cent. base of biological tricks which engineers He hopes that the database will store will be able to access to nd natural solu- more than just blueprints for biological tions to their design problems. A search of mechanisms that can be replicated using the database (available on the web at technology. Biomimetics can help with TRIZ www.bath.ac.uk/˜ensab/ /) with the software, as well as hardware, as the robo- keyword propulsion, for example, pro- lobster built by Dr Ayers demonstrates. Its duces a range of propulsion mechanisms physical design and control systems are used by jellysh, frogs and crustaceans. both biologically inspired. Most current The database can also be queried us- robots, in contrast, are deterministically ing a technique developed in Russia, programmed. When building a robot, the known as the theory of inventive pro- designers must anticipate every contin- blem solving, or TRIZ. In essence, this is a gency of the robot’s environment and tell set of rules that breaks down a problem it how to respond in each case. Animal into smaller parts, and those parts into models, however, provide a plethora of particular functions that must be per- proven solutions to real-world problems formed by components of the solution. that could be useful in all sorts of applica- Usually these functions are compared tions. The set of behavioural acts that a against a database of engineering lobster goes through when searching for The robot scorpion being evaluated by patents, but Dr Vincent’s team food is exactly what one would want a ro- NASA (above) and a robolobster (right) have substituted their database bot to do to search for underwater of biological patents instead. mines, says Dr Ayers. It took 2 vent algae and barnacles from attaching These are not patents in the con- nature millions of years of themselves. At Penn State University, en- ventional sense, of course, since trial and error to evolve gineers have designed aircraft wings that the information will be avail- these behaviours, he says, can change shape in dierent phases of able for use by anyone. By call- so it would be silly not to ight, just as birds’ wings do. And Dr Vin- ing biomimetic tricks take advantage of them. cent has devised a smart fabric, inspired biological patents, the re- Although Dr Vincent’s by the way in which pine cones open and searchers are just emphasis- database will not be capable close depending on the humidity, that ing that nature is, in eect, the of providing such specic re- could be used to make clothing that ad- patent holder. sults as control algorithms, it justs to changing body temperatures and One way to use the system is to could help to identify natural keeps the wearer cool. characterise an engineering problem in systems and behaviours that might be the form of a list of desirable features that useful to engineers. But it is still early days. From hit-and-miss to point-and-click the solution ought to have, and another So far the database contains only 2,500 Yet despite all these successes, biomimet- list of undesirable features that it ought to patents. To make it really useful, Dr ics still depends far too heavily on avoid. The database is then searched for Vincent wants to collect ten times as serendipity, says Dr Vincent. He estimates any biological patents that meet those cri- many, a task for which he intends to ask that there is only a 10% overlap between teria. So, for example, searching for a the online community for help. Building a biological and technological mechanisms means of defying gravity might produce a repository of nature’s cleverest designs, used to solve particular problems. In number of possible solutions taken from he hopes, will eventually make it easier other words, there is still an enormous dierent ying creatures but described in and quicker for engineers to steal and number of potentially useful mecha- engineering terms. If you want ight, reuse them. 7 nisms that have yet to be exploited. The problem is that the engineers looking for solutions depend on biologists having already found themand the two groups move in dierent circles and speak very dierent languages. A natural mechanism or property must rst be discovered by biologists, described in technological terms, and then picked up by an engineer who recognises its potential. This process is entirely the wrong way round, says Dr Vincent. To be eective, biomimetics should be providing examples of suitable technologies from biology which full the requirements of a particular engineering problem, he explains. That is why he and his colleagues, with A Venus ower basket has spiny skeletal outgrowths very similar to optical bres The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Reports 13

cused on creating three-dimensional images from the resulting data. There is a lot of confusion, even among scientists about how to demarcate the eld, says Cristiano Migliorini of Roche, a drug giant based in Basel, Switzerland. Drug companies have concluded that so far, no one in- silico rm has all the pieces needed in the drug-development puzzle, so they have contracts with several of them. Because of the overpromising of genomics, there is still a lot of confusion about where each of us ts into drug development, says Colin Hill, the boss of GNS. In-silico biology technologies are being applied to a number of drug-development challenges. But the technology that seems most likely to improve the economics and predictability of drug development is software that simulates the workings of biological processes. There are many factors that aect health and disease, so the trick is to nd out which matter most and how to inuence them. Models that take drugs Biosimulation can help both to identify promising targets and to determine the degree to which a drug can aect them. In the April issue of Drug Discovery and Development, an industry journal, existent cars can be driven and aircraft several drug companies including Roche, own in virtual reality. But none of this Pzer, and Johnson & Johnson, oered Biosimulation: Designing drugs can be said of the drug industry, which high praise for this approach. Roche said in computers is still some way may explain why it spends nearly 25% of that biosimulations had helped it to nd its revenues on research and develop- additional uses for Pegasys, its hepatitis-C o. But software is starting to ment, or about twice as much as most drug. Pzer noted that America’s medi- change the way drugs are tested high-tech industries. cines regulator, the Food and Drug Ad- Worse, as the industry spends more, it ministration (FDA), had specically IVE years ago, when the rst draft of seems to get less. According to an oft- mentioned that computer models pro- Fthe human genome was unveiled and quoted gure from the Tufts Centre for the vided conrmatory evidence of ecacy the dotcom boom was in full swing, Study of Drug Development, in Medford, for Neurontin, a drug that treats the pain hopes were high for the union between Massachusetts, developing a drug typi- experienced after a bout of shingles. biology and computing. The deluge of ge- cally costs $900m and takes 15 years. Only nomic information would, the theory one in 1,000 compounds tested makes it You will be simulated went, be funnelled into powerful com- into human trials, and only one in ve of Biosimulation software is based on inter- puters, which would then be able to those emerges as a drug. Few industries connected sets of mathematical equa- model biological systems, gure out how have such a low hit rate. In-silico biology tions, calibrated to represent particular they went wrong, and design drugs to x promised to improve things: in 1999, biological and physiological behaviours, them. Test-tubes would give way to mi- PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy, which respond realistically when their crochips; biology would go from in vi- estimated that it could save $200m and numerical parameters are adjusted to imi- tro to in silico. two to three years’ development time for tate a particular medical condition or the All of this promised to benet not just each drug. So how is it doing? Alas, the introduction of a drug. It is still not possi- the health of patients, but of drug compa- high hopes of a few years ago have yet to ble to give a virtual drug to a virtual pa- nies too, by improving the predictability, be realised. But there are some hopeful tient and instantly determine whether it and hence the economics, of drug designs that the technology might, at last, be will work against a particular disease velopment. It would prevent costly starting to prove its worth. but it is possible to draw some useful con- sometimes tragicsurprises late in clini- The eld is a crowded one. Some rms, clusions from biosimulation. cal trials, or worse, long after drugs had such as Gene Network Sciences (GNS), Consider a recent example from Ente- reached the market. In other industries, Entelos, and Rosetta Biosoftware (owned los, a rm based in Foster City, California. after all, computerised models and simu- by Merck), specialise in modelling biolog- Its technology, called the Metabolism lations of new products are common- ical systems and processes. Others, such PhysioLab, is based on a mathematical place. Chipmakers simulate new designs as Spotre, Simulations Plus, Select Bio- model of the human metabolism. It simu- before committing them to silicon; non- sciences and Lion Bioscience, are more fo- lates carbohydrate, lipid and amino-acid1 14 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

2 metabolism, and models the actions of the gut, the absorption of intestinal nutri- ents, insulin release, and nutrient cycles in muscle, connective tissue, liver and other tissues. Entelos researchers created 125 unique virtual patients, to represent the variability seen in real-world patients, and then ran a simulation to evaluate an experimental approach to asthma treatment for Pzer. The simulation determined that while potential drug targets were involved in more than 50 processes in the respiratory system, only three of the 26 known eects and one of the hypothe- sised eects had a clinically signicant impact. The simulation thus determined which physiological processes and drug targets were worth concentrating on. It would have cost Pzer several years and millions of dollars to get this answer using its standard techniques. As well as helping in the discovery And not a test tube in sight processthe search for and validation of promising drug candidatesbiosimula- California, have become so useful that the human genome project gave us a parts list tion can also help with development, FDA itself is adopting them. Pharsight’s for biology, molecular biology taught us when the drug enters clinical trials. Ente- computer-assisted trial design system how individual parts of the cell work, but los ran another simulation that helped models and simulates clinical trials to de- ‘known biology’ is still trailing the ‘un- Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Re- termine the optimal number of patients, known biology’, he says. search & Development (J&JPRD) deter- dose amounts, and dosing frequency, all As well as the need for more data, Dr mine the safety limits for a new treatment of which have for years mostly been de- Migliorini of Roche notes that for the eld for type-2 diabetes. The original plan for termined through time-consuming and to live up to its promise, the process of the trial was to administer dierent doses costly trial and error. Pharsight has con- drug development will also have to be to ve groups of patients. The biosimula- tracts with big rms including Pzer and overhauled. Without a change in pro- tion, again using a group of virtual pa- IBM Life Sciences. cesses, he says, any large productivity tients, suggested that the drug would not gain is missed. But, he adds, the indus- cause an adverse event regardless of the Getting from here to there try is certainly now learning how to use dose. So Entelos recommended that the While in-silico biology has come a long these tools intelligently, creating success trial need only test the highest dose. This way over the past ve years, it still has a stories that will pave the way to process enabled J&JPRD to eliminate four-fths of lot to prove. Its importance will increase changes in the future. the trial, reducing the total number of re- over time, says Henri Theunissen of Or- Hans Winkler, senior director of func- cruited patients by 60% and shortening ganon, a drug rm based in Oss, in the tional genomics at J&JPRD in Beerse, Bel- the trial’s duration by 40%. Netherlands. But, he says, we’re cur- gium, says that pathway analysis, better A big limitation of biosimulation, rently still in the validation phase of understanding of biological interactions however, is that not all physiological pro- many of these technologies. One pro- and a greater availability of empirical cesses are known, so not all are included blem is that the computer models are still data all mean that the industry can do a in the various software models. GNS, only as good as the data on which they are lot better than it could ve years ago. But based in Ithaca, New York, combines the based, and those data are still incomplete, the in-silico biology eld is, he says, still bottom-up simulation of physiological or are scattered around in scientic jour- 10-20 years from reaching what those in processes with a top-down inference nals. Nothing would speed the advance- the eld say is a key validation point. We modelling approach based on the analy- ment of biosimulation more than data all still have a dream to do something like sis of clinical-trial data. Using machine- from clinical trials. Despite public pres- a gene-expression experiment to analyse learning and data-mining techniques, sure, drug rms and medical journals are how a compound inuences apoptosis, which sort through mountains of data reluctant to make such data available. he says. This would involve taking a mea- looking for patterns, it is possible both to Dr Hill, the boss of GNS, says his tech- sure of which genes were active in a par- conrm known behaviours of biological nology delivers to the best of its ability, ticular form of cancer, plugging it into a systems, and to predict other, unknown but needs more information about mo- simulation, and then being able to deter- behaviours. The rm’s clients include No- lecular pathways and mechanisms of ac- mine which pathways were active, and vartis, Merck and Johnson & Johnson. tion. He reckons that scientists only exactly what the impact of a particular Another area where computational understand about 5% of the processes in- treatment would be. This is still not pos- modelling can help is in the design of clin- volved in drug-cell interaction well sible, laments Dr Winkler. So although ical trialsa eld in which models de- enough to model them, create simula- in-silico biology is starting to show pro- veloped by Pharsight, of Mountain View, tions and predict drug behaviour. The mise, it still has a long way to go. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Case history 15 An unexpectedly bright idea

they began working on the technology emission. This causes a cascade eect, as back in the 1950s. each photon stimulates the emission of Lasers: Few innovations of the The grandfather of the laser was Al- additional, identical photons. The gain past century have changed as bert Einstein. In 1917, the great physicist medium acts, in short, as an amplier of many aspects of everyday life as postulated that atoms could be per- light: hence the name laser, an abbrevia- suaded to emit tiny packets of energy, tion of light amplication by stimulated the laser. A laboratory curiosity called photons, in an organised manner emission of radiation. at rst, there now seems no though a process of stimulated emis- Laser light has several unusual prop- limit to its usefulness sion. But how could this be achieved in erties. It is monochromatic, since it is practice? The answer came in a ash of made up of identical photons of a spe- OR several years after the invention of inspiration on a park bench, or a middle- cic wavelength, and the wavelength of Fthe laser, Charles Townes’s colleagues of-the-night Eureka! momentdepend- light is what determines its colour. Next, teased him about its seeming irrelevance ing on whose story you believe. laser light is coherent, which means the to the real world. They told him bluntly peaks and troughs of the light waves are that it was a solution looking for a pro- A tale of two epiphanies aligned. The light is also emitted in a blem. But Dr Townes, who later received As Dr Townes tells it, he had his epiphany tight, concentrated beam. a Nobel prize for his work in developing shortly after dawn on a spring morning Dr Townes, who was the head of the the technology, has had the last laugh. in 1951, as he was sitting on a bench in Columbia University Radiation Labora- Over the past four decades, he has Franklin Park in Washington, DC. He tory in New York, applied his idea to gen- watched the laser emerge from the obscu- quickly jotted down his idea on a scrap of erate an invisible beam of microwave rity of the laboratory to become a ubiqui- paper he found in his pocket. It is per- radiation, rather than visible light, using tous technology that is used in an haps a hackneyed device among drama- ammonia as the gain medium. His team amazing diversity of applications. Lasers tists to have a scientist scribble his called their device a maser, which is short can now be found in everything from thinking on the back of an envelope, but for microwave amplication by stimu- DVD players to weapons systems, tele- that is what I did, he later wrote. lated emission of radiation. Their rst phone networks to operating theatres. In essence, lasers work by setting up a maser was not capable of continuous Lasers pack a powerful punch, and chain reaction, in which photons of a par- output, but two Soviet scientists, Nikolai have had a huge impact on society. To- ticular wavelength prompt other atoms Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, came day, they guide missiles, point mining to emit further, identical photons. For all up with a solution to this problem. They equipment in the right direction and en- of this to work, a suitable material, called subsequently shared the Nobel prize able astronomers to take clearer pictures a gain mediumwhich can be a solid, a with Dr Townes in 1964. of the heavens. They also perform myr- liquid or a gasis required. To get the pro- Following the invention of the maser iad mundane tasks, such as powering of- cess started, the gain medium is in 1953, the big question was whether the ce printers, removing unwanted body pumped using a burst of light or an same technique could be applied to visi- hair and carrying voices from one tele- electrical discharge. This excites the at- ble light. Dr Townes and his brother-in- phone to another. Lasers are synony- oms in the medium, some of which then law Arthur Schawlow, who worked at mous with precision, from industrial emit photons of a specic wavelength. the legendary Bell Laboratories, laid out cutting machinery to sights for sniper ri- When a photon encounters an excited much of the theoretical basis for such an es. Yet the creators of the laser were not atom, it may then cause it to emit an iden- optical maser in a paper that appeared so sure what they were aiming at when tical photona process called stimulated in the scientic journal Physical Review in 1

Charles Townes with the rst maser (left), and his rival and former student Gordon Gould (right) 16 Case history The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 It is not surprising that the pioneers of the laser could not predict what it would be used for, since its applications have been so many and varied.

2 1958. In particular, they had the idea of products. Today, such lasers are the most ing to the sequence of bumps and pits. putting mirrors at each end of the gain numerous: they can be found at the heart CD and DVD players work in essen- medium to cause photons to bounce of hundreds of millions of CD and DVD tially the same way, but DVDs can con- back and forth. But by another man’s ac- players, PCs and games consoles. tain more information, since they are count, the crucial insight that made lasers In an optical drive, a laser beam is fo- read using laser light of a shorter wave- possible came in the middle of a mild cused on to the microscopic bumps and length (650 nanometres, as opposed to November night in 1957. Gordon Gould, a pits on the disc’s surface. The bumps and 780 nanometres in the case of CDs). This doctoral student at Columbia under Dr pits are formed by injection-moulding shorter wavelength allows smaller Townes, sat up in bed when the idea hit the plastic disc; its surface is then covered bumps and pits to be distinguished, him. He says that the urry of inspiration with a very thin reective coating, and which means more of them, and hence lasted several days, and he lled over six the whole thing is encased in a transpar- more data, can t on the disc. The next pages of a notebook with the details of ent protective layer. As the disc spins, the generation of optical drives will be based how the light-emitting device would laser’s light is reected o the bumps and on blue lasers (with a wavelength of 405 function. In his notes, he was the rst to pits, each of which reects the light dier- nanometres), providing enough storage refer to this device as a laser; Dr Townes ently. These dierences are detected us- capacity for high-denition movies. still preferred the term optical maser. ing an optical sensor, which produces a Compared with videocassette play- Dr Gould rushed o and had the pages stream of digital information correspond- ers, which rely on magnetic tapes and notarised at a local sweet shop. But he did contain lots of complicated and expen- not apply for a patent: he wrongly sive moving parts, laser-based gadgets thought he would have to build a work- use cheaper o-the-shelf components, ing prototype of his design rst. explains Paul Jackson of Forrester, a con- Over the course of a patent war span- sultancy. As a result, the prices of DVD ning the next 30 years, Dr Gould told players fell far more quickly than those of countless courtrooms that Dr Townes VCRs. The DVD player became one of the had appropriated his ideas. He also ar- fastest-adopted products in the history of gued that he had always seen the laser’s technology: the rst players appeared in potential in real-world applications 1997, but around half the households in which were poorly outlined in the laser the developed world now have one, and patent granted to Dr Townes and Dr the cheapest models cost a mere $40. Schawlow. In the 1970s and 1980s, Dr Gould won several important legal bat- Seeing well and looking good tles, and was awarded a number of pat- As well as bringing crisper images to tele- ents relating to lasers. Neither Dr Townes vision screens, laser technology has also nor Dr Gould constructed the rst work- made it easier for people to see them ing laser, however. That happened in without the help of glasses, thanks to the 1960, when Theodore Maiman, a physi- development of laser eye-surgery. As cist at the Hughes Research Laboratories early as the 1960s, the possibility of using in Malibu, California, nally hit upon the the technology in medicine had occurred correct conguration of mirrors, gain me- to researchers such as Leon Goldman, of- dium and pumping mechanism to make ten called the father of medical lasers. He a working laserbeating Dr Townes’s had been asked to evaluate the safety of own team at Columbia, and Dr Schaw- industrial lasers, and his investigations low’s at Bell Labs, in the process. into the biological eects of lasers led him to consider their use in surgery. Beaming with success In 1965 doctors rst used an argon la- It is not surprising that Dr Townes and Dr ser to repair a detached retina, a sight- Schawlow could not predict what the la- threatening condition in which the light- ser would be used for, since its applica- sensitive layer of the inner eye becomes tions have been so many and varied. separated from its supportive tissue. Fo- Asking how lasers have inuenced cusing a laser on to the retina and making modern life is like asking how electricity tiny burns produces scar tissue that has inuenced modern life, says Lou welds the retina back into place. To the Bloomeld, a physicist at the University laser’s inventors, this application of the of Virginia in Charlottesville. To start technology was a completely unexpected with, it seemed that lasers would be most development. I had never heard of a de- useful in industry and in scientic re- tached retina, says Dr Townes. search: the rst examples had been de- More recently, an increasing number vised for use in spectroscopy, to probe of people have put aside their glasses and the properties of matter. But the advent contact lenses to take advantage of a of small, cheap, low-power semiconduc- speedy procedure known as laser-as- tor lasers meant they could be incorpo- sisted in situ keratomileusis, better rated into mass-produced consumer known as LASIK. Around 2m people in 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Case history 17

2 America alone will undergo the opera- They can be used to zap have increased tion this year to correct near- or far- tumours, remove polyps the capacity of sightedness. During LASIK surgery, an in- and stem bleeding. Lasers networks with- strument cuts a thin ap in the outer are more precise than con- out the need to portion of the eye, called the cornea. This ventional surgical instru- lay any new bre. ap is then peeled back, allowing laser ments, doing less damage and New ways to use pulses to vaporise and remove a micro- allowing for faster healing and re- lasers continue to prolif- scopic portion of the underlying tissue, covery. By directing a beam along a exi- erateand one of them might thus reshaping the cornea. Since it is the ble optical bre, they can even be used even be coming to a supermarket near shape of the cornea that determines how inside the body. you. Retailers already use laser scanners near- or far-sighted someone is, this re- Laser pulses travelling along optical - to read bar-codes. But Sherwood Technol- shaping has the eect of correcting the bres can heal, but are better known for ogy, a rm based in Widnes, Britain, has patient’s vision and reducing the need for carrying information. In 1988 the rst devised a system called DataLase that glasses or contact lenses. transatlantic bre-optic cable went into uses lasers to write prices, dates and Lasers have many other surgical uses, service, and such cables have since rede- other information on to fruits, vegetables, too. They have been adapted to zap away ned the economics of telecommunica- pills and even confectionery. An edible, spider veins, warts and wrinkles. The tions. If you look at a world map now, light-sensitive coating is applied to the impact of lasers and laser-like technol- it’s just a spider web of these undersea surface and then drawn on using a low- ogy in dermatology over the last 20 years cables, says Paul Shumate, executive di- power laser, which causes the coating to has been nothing short of miraculous, rector of the Laser and Electro-Optics change colour. It is yet another example says David Goldberg, who is the director Society at the Institute of Electrical and of the way that new uses continue to be of laser research at the Mount Sinai Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In 1975 developed for lasers, decades after their School of Medicine in New York. A tiny there wasn’t a bre in the telephone net- invention. beam can be used to heat up a wrinkle, work. Now, 30 years later, there’s hardly for example, and collagen proteins, any copper except at the last connection The lesson of the laser which have a rming eect, are then pro- from the curb. Stephen Anderson, edi- And therein lies a lesson. The technology duced as part of the skin’s healing mecha- tor-in-chief of Laser Focus World, an in- was originally developed for use in spec- nism. As people become older, richer and dustry journal, points out that people troscopy, and its myriad other uses were vainer across the developed world, re- have forgotten the challenges of making an unexpected bonus. People just didn’t searchers are devoting a lot of attention transatlantic calls. As recently as 40 years imagine the many applications which to improving such cosmetic procedures. ago, such calls required a lot of organisa- now seem so obvious, says Dr Townes. Lasers also have less frivolous medical tion. Bookings were made two days in But that’s a characteristic of most really uses, of course, not just improving peo- advance, and you were lucky if you could brand new ideas. Dr Schawlow has even ple’s appearances, but also saving lives. understand one another, he says. Dur- suggested that trying to anticipate the ing the 1990s, enthusiasm for bre net- possible uses for the laser might have works led to an enormous overbuild, hindered its development. We had no huge overcapacity, and plunging prices. application in mind, he said in 1981. If The result was meltdown for the tele- we had, it might have hampered us and coms industry, but far cheaper and easier not worked out as well. communications for its customers. Some people worry that the research Using several lasers, each with a dier- climate that produced this fundamental ent wavelength or colour, it is possible to technologyone that allowed bright send multiple streams of data down a sin- minds to pursue abstract ideashas be- gle optical brea trick called wave- come regrettably rare. Dr Bloomeld, length division multiplexing. Improving who himself once worked at Bell Labs, the precision with which particular col- feels that today’s corporate research lab- ours of laser light can be generatedin oratories tend to have a shortsighted particular, through careful temperature view, focusing only on the next six controltherefore has the eect of in- months. More and more, everyone’s creasing the capacity of a bre. At the be- waiting for someone else to do the pio- ginning of the 1980s, bres carried a neering work and hoping to take advan- single stream of data at 45 megabits per tage of other people’s foresight, he says. second, says Dr Shumate. The capacity of The laser is an object lesson in the each stream has since increased to 10 value of blue-sky research, and a re- gigabits per second, and researchers have minder that even a seemingly obscure achieved speeds of 40 gigabits per sec- technology can go on to have an extraor- ond in laboratory conditions. Sending dinary range of uses. So has Dr Townes dozens of such streams, using many ventured back to the Franklin Park bench slightly dierent wavelengths, down a since the morning he came up with his single bre increases its capacity to sev- breakthrough idea? No, he admits, but eral terabits (millions of megabits). Im- perhaps it would lead to new insights. I A light for sore eyes provements in laser technology, in short, probably ought to go back, he says. 7 18 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

Portrait (1993), has had to have its latex case recreated for display. Also troubled is Paul Thek’s Fishman (1968), owned by the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington, DC. This life-size body of a mostly latex man in a tree has grown brittle, is torn in places and has sometimes been shown outdoors, which hastened its deterioration. In all these works, conservators must decide whether the latex should be left on, or replaced or removedthus al- tering the work in order to extend its life. Another challenge is scale. Some of today’s nest sculptors produce enormous works. In 2001 the National Gallery of Art unveiled a sculpture weighing nearly nine tonnes by Frank Stella, an American artist. To clean this knot of twisted steel, aluminium, bre-glass and carbon bre, the museum had to hire a boom lift with a When modern art 60-foot arm. Fortunately, the squirrels that had been nesting there found another home before they had to be evicted. The good news is that many modern shows its age materials are actually more durable than historical materials. Paints are a prime ex- Worries about the durability of o- ample. Acrylic emulsion, a form of plas- beat materials are not altogether new. As tic, is the medium of choice for artists at Art conservation: Contemporary conservators are quick to point out, artists their easels today. This and other syn- works of art, based on modern through the ages have faced such pro- thetic paints came along only last cen- blems. Many centuries ago, oil on canvas tury. Because they dry faster and yellow materials and technologies, are was an experimental technology. Works more slowly than traditional oils, they ap- proving hard to maintain that could not be saved from rot or rust are pealed as house-paints; they can also be long gone: those that survive are the ones cleaned with water. Artists adopted them OW long can a tiger shark dunked in that conservators gured out how to treat. tooand, says Tom Learner of the Tate Hformaldehyde last? Damien Hirst’s Even Leonardo da Vinci, that great inno- museums in Britain and co-author of peculiar creation is, alas, deteriorating. vator, lost some gambles. He daringly The Impact of Modern Paints, they have Since being unveiled in 1991, the liquid painted his Last Supper on a dry plaster resisted ageing well. has become murkier and the shark skin wall, not the customary egg tempura on looser. What to do? The artist has made wet plaster. The wall aked, leading to Swings and roundabouts no public pronouncements, and conser- 500 years of conservation headaches. But there are still plenty of unknowns vators are divided. Perhaps the shark’s Still, the amount of choice today about modern paints. For one thing, a rotting guts should be removed. Or the seems greater than ever. Chocolate, lard staggering array of new pigments and formaldehyde could be strengthened. But and yogurt can all show up in contempo- binders has been created over the past 70 would such measures change the mean- rary art, says Shelley Sturman, who is in years, according to the Getty Conserva- ing of the work, whatever that is? Happily charge of object conservation at the tion Institute in California. Variety has for Mr Hirst, worries about the work’s lon- National Gallery of Art in Washington, meant opportunity, with room for all gevity seem tangential to its value: it was DC. So too can items such as vacuum sorts of new colours and degrees of tran- sold earlier this year for $12m. cleaners or pills; and when these show sparency. So, for example, Morris Louis Modern and contemporary art can be wear and tear, should the conservator run used acrylicsolution, not emulsionfor hard going for conservators. Their job is to to the shops to buy new ones, or let the old his starkly coloured vertical lines. Mark maintain each piece in its original glory ones age gracefully? Rothko used the new paints for his power- for as long as possible. But so many new Such problems are particularly acute ful single-colour patches. But each of the materials have come into use in recent with latex, a type of rubber popular for its hundreds of new pigments, in combina- years that tried-and-trusted methods are exibility and beauty. Eva Hesse’s Rope tion with binders such as nitrocellulose or often outdated. Painters use umpteen va- Piece from the late 1960s, a cascade of acrylic, has its own chemical and physical rieties of synthetic pigments and binders, rope from metal hooks, can be only rarely properties. There are also additives not the straightforward oils and varnish displayed by the Whitney Museum of thickeners, defoamers, buers, antifreeze of their forebears. Sculptors rely on much American Art in New York. Its latex coat- and so forth. More complicated still, more than just marble or bronze. Digital ing has aked and discoloured in places. paints are not the only things on paintings artfrom videos and slides to the in- Another work owned by the Whitney, these days. Alberto Burri, a 20th-century ternetfurther complicates matters. Tim Hawkinson’s life-size Balloon Self- Italian painter, had a fondness for burned1 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Reports 19

2 plasticsa nightmare for conser- tape can stop it from being de- vators, says Giacomo Chiari, chief graded, says Mr Phillips of the scientist at the Getty. Getty. But DVDs too can de- What does the explosion of new gradeand information can be paints mean for conservation, cleaning lost (or changed) in the compres- and display? Learning more about them, sion process, thus changing the and identifying their exact compositions, original work, says Pip Laurenson, is high on the agenda. Much also de- a conservator at the Tate. Old lm pends, says Mr Learner, on how each installations, such as those by Dan piece is displayed or stored. Synthetic Graham, an American artists who paints can expand, soften or get sticky got his start in the 1960s using closed- when hot; they can grow brittle when circuit television footage, should al- cold. At the Getty laboratories, conserva- ways be shown on lm, she says. tors observe samples under high-inten- An even newer area is web art. sity light and various temperature and Artists have exploded into this me- humidity conditions. dium, creating images, animation, There is also the matter of how best to video clips and much more online. clean the new paints. Dirt can accumulate But only the very simplest works, such surprisingly quicklya particular pro- as a straight animation, are likely to sur- blem for monochrome paintings fa- Has Nam June Paik’s dog had its day? vive, says Amy Stone, head of the (online, voured by the likes of Rothko, where any of course) Museum of Web Art. The pro- o-colour patch stands out. Experimental work just as the artist intended. blem is that pieces are rendered by web treatments for cleaning acrylics, using Just imagine keeping up with the work browsers in dierent ways, especially if such things as lasers, enzymes and liquid of Nam June Paik, a prolic Korean-born they use rapidly evolving technologies carbon dioxide, are due to be tested by re- video artist. One of his best-known early such as Flash. Each new version of a searchers at the Tate, who are also work- works, Exposition of Music-Electronic browser can change the way things look. ing with conservators at the Getty to Television (1963), involves 12 television boost their knowledge of paints. sets strewn around the exhibition room, Creative destruction An even trickier area is digital art, or some of them overturned. Another piece, What do artists think of these hazards? As time-based media in art-world lingo. TV Buddha (1974), involves an ancient contemporary art has expanded its range, Anyone with an old computer gathering Buddha gure gazing at a television moni- the denition of conservation seems to be dust in the attic can spot the problem: tor that shows his own imagean unset- changing. Whereas the deterioration of hardware goes out of date in a ash. Fix- tling union of western and oriental Old Masters is seen as tragic, plenty of art- ing old models is expensive at best, im- themes. Such sculptures, says Glenn Phil- ists today accept that their work serves a possible at worst. But often the original lips, a curator at the Getty’s research insti- dierent purpose than as a precious col- equipment is necessary to display the tute, must use the monitors from the lectible item, says Andras Szanto of Co- 1960s and 1970s in order to stay true to the lumbia University. Many artists do not original piece. Yet cathode-ray tubes are even worry that their work may expire needed to run conventional monitors, someday, though attitudes can change and their availability is diminishing as when their works start selling. at-panel displays proliferate. Some artists have escaped conserva- Similar worries aect works that use tion problems in the only way they know slides and slide projectors, which are fast howmore creativity. Conveniently, going out of stock. But some artists actu- some of the trendiest installations in really like using the old stu. Cory Arcangel, cent years have been self-destructing. In a Brooklyn-based artist known for hack- Breakdown (2001), Michael Landy ing Nintendo game cartridges, hunts spent two memorable weeks smashing down old computers and video-game sys- up his possessions in a London depart- tems from eBay (or the occasional ea ment store, as a comment on consum- market or charity shop). He then recon- erism. Mr Arcangel, the pop artist keen on gures the systems with new music or soft- old machines, is bullish on his favourite ware. One recent work, Japanese Driving medium, Nintendo. The technology is al- Game (2004), Mr Arcangel took o the ready 25 years oldit’s lasted quite a bit, cars from a racing game, and plugged the he says. Even if the hardware does eventu- game back into the Nintendo. Now it ally fail, he notes, it is always possible to plays like an empty road that simply resort to emulation, or software mimicry passes by for ever, with no cars. of the old machines. Evidently, conserva- Surely digital media are easier to pre- tors will require a wide range of skills in serve, since they can be so easily copied? the future. As Mr Phillips of the Getty Mr Paik’s videotapes, for example, might says, Probably some of the most dicult be stored on a modern DVD but displayed conservation challenges are things that Fishman is not as exible as he was via old-fashioned equipment. Digitising a have not yet occurred to us. 7 20 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

the pixel can be turned on and o without aecting its neighbours. (This is what dis- On a roll? tinguishes active matrix LCDs from blurry passive matrix ones.) But transistors must be made of a material with rea- sonable electronic properties if they are to switch fast enough for the display to show concept design, above left). video. The usual approach is to deposit Yet as exible displays inch towards silicon on the backplane and then etch the Electronics: Flexible-display the market, their initial uses are likely to transistors into it in the usual way, but this technology is comingbut it be more prosaic: on shelf-edges and signs can only be done if the backplane is made in shops, says Kimberley Allen of iSuppli, of glass with a very high melting point. still falls far short of the a market-research rm. What you want Try this approach with a exible plastic science-ction ideal in a exible display is something that can backplane, and it will simply melt. go on a shelf-edge display or be wrapped LEXIBLE video displays, like jet-packs around a post, is light and looks cool, she How to be more exible Fand talking robots, are a science-ction says. One idea is to update labels on shelf- One promising way around this problem, staple: think of the self-updating newspa- edges over wireless links. This would let being pursued by Philips Polymer Vision, pers in Minority Report, or the video shops update their prices more quickly Plastic Logic and other rms, is to make wallpaper in Total Recall. For years, re- and cheaply than is currently possible. the transistors themselves out of plastic search laboratories, big companies and They could then try out new price regimes specically, out of organic polymers. Both start-ups have been working hard to turn in individual locations, or quickly re-price rms have developed organic electronic the idea into reality. Flexible screens goods to clear them at the end of the day. materials that are soluble and so can be would have a number of advantages. There would be similar advantages for deposited using screen printing and ink- They would be lighter and more robust large signs, which could be quickly up- jet technologies. Transistors and other cir- than the glass-based screens currently dated to reect changing circumstances or cuitry can then be printed on to a exible used in laptops. And roll-up screens that to promote special oers. plastic substrate. could be unfurled when needed would The question is how a exible display So much for the backplane; the front- be one way to solve the problem that would t in with the current consumer plane presents its own challenges. With a while the technology to store and process market, says Charles Spear of Intertech, traditional LCD, the frontplane is also information has become smaller and another market-research rm. He thinks made of a rigid piece of glass, and the cell cheaperas demonstrated by the vast exible-display rms need to focus on gap between it and the backplane must storage capacity of an iPod, or the process- niche applications, where they can make be precisely maintained. (Press gently on ing power of a portable games console a name for themselves, rather than trying a large LCD display, and you will see why: display technology has not kept pace. to displace liquid crystal displays (LCDs), small variations in the size of the gap Proponents of exible displays imag- the dominant form of at-screen technol- cause a visible rippling eect.) Maintain- ine a device as thin as a piece of paper that ogy at the moment. If developers try to ing a constant cell gap is hard enough can be stored in a folder, and then act as a follow the substitute path then they’ll end even with large, rigid displays, let alone video display for a mobile phone or up with a near zero market in ve years, exible ones. But exible LCDs are not im- handheld computer. Or how about a he says. If they start in novel markets possible. Philips Research has devised a smart blueprint that can be scribbled on they will have a $300m to $500m mar- self-stratifying LCD technology, in at a building site, with the modications ket. But while the technology has come a which a blend of liquid crystal and a po- being automatically copied back to a data- long way in the past few years, it still faces lymer-forming material is applied to a base at head oce? There’s a huge vol- a number of challenges. What makes a exible substrate. The material is exposed ume of information that isn’t making its exible display so dicult to build? to ultraviolet light through a mask pat- way to people on the move because they Most displays consist of two main ele- terned with the outlines of cells. Wher- don’t have a suitable device to display it, ments: a backplane that controls which ever the light hits the material, it hardens says Karl McGoldrick, the boss of Philips dots in the display (called picture ele- into a polymer, creating a grid of cells full Polymer Vision, one of several rms mak- ments, or pixels) turn on and o, and a of liquid crystal. A subsequent exposure ing exible displays. He is focusing on the frontplane that either emits light, or of the whole surface closes the cells by mobile-phone market to start with, be- controls the ow of light from another creating a polymer cap across each one. cause he believes that light, robust and source. Ideally, the backplane should Another approach is to abandon LCD exible displays solve a real problem (see have a transistor under each pixel, so that technology, in which the pixels act as tiny1 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Reports 21

Full colour exible displays that can show video are still some way o.

2 shutters for a separate light source, in fa- albeit monochrome, displays in the not- be integrated into soldiers’ clothing or vour of emissive materials, in which each too-distant future. Plastic Logic, which en- folded up into their pockets. Its rst proto- pixel actually emits light. But these ma- tered into a co-operation agreement with type, a small, semi-exible colour display, terials also face challenges. Organic light- E Ink in December, has already produced is due later this year (see mock-up at top emitting polymers of the type pioneered backplanes with a resolution of 100 pix- of previous page). by Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) els per inch (ppi), the same as a laptop Oddly enough, Lunar Design, an in- are steadily improving in eciency and LCD. It is now installing equipment to en- dustrial-design rm based in San Fran- operating lifetime, and have begun to ap- able it to make such backplanes at paper- cisco, came up with a very similar pear in mobile-phone and digital music- back (A5) size, and then plans to move on concept when it turned its attention to the player displays. But these materials are to 150ppi displays at magazine (A4) size. consumer potential of exible displays. vulnerable to moisture, making it critical There’s been a lot of talk and research re- Designers mocked up a cycle courier’s that they are completely and perma- sults over the past several years, but this jacket covered in exible-display material nently encapsulated. The search for ma- year you’ll see real product prototypes, (below). Using satellite-navigation tech- terials that can both ex and provide very says Dr McCreary. Then you’ll see real nology, the courier’s current location strong encapsulation is continuing. Ac- products in volume within two years. would be displayed on a map on the cordingly, CDT is touting its materials as jacket’s wrist. The team also proposed the basis for large area displays to chal- Ready to roll making jackets that could act as bill- lenge LCDs, rather than as exible dis- Mr McGoldrick says his rm is working boards, or could be subscribed to a de- plays in portable devices. on displays, also based on E Ink’s front- signer’s pattern of the day service. So-called electrophoretic frontplane plane technology, that are just 0.1mm The next magical step is when the dis- technologies are another alternative, but thick and can be rolled up into a tube just play leaps out of the product and be- they have their own limitations. In elec- 15mm across. Sooner rather than later comes the wrapper, eliminating the trophoretic displays, tiny white and black we’ll show a working device with a rolla- frame, says John Edson, the president of pigment particles are given opposite elec- ble display to wake people up to the fact Lunar Design. When I look at my phone trical charges and encapsulated in micro- that this is a real technology, ready to be display, it is like I am looking at the tele- capsules of about the diameter of a designed into applications, he says. phone number through a peephole. If human hair. When an electric eld is ap- Further evidence of growing interest you can pull that information out on to plied to a microcapsule, the pigment par- in exible displays came in February, the surface it’s very intuitive. ticles within it move, turning one side of when Arizona State University opened a Clearly, the science-ction dream of the capsule white and the other black. The new Flexible Display Centre. America’s the exible display continues to captivate microcapsules can be suspended in a car- Army Research Laboratory is providing the imagination. But until some substan- rier medium, so that they can be screen- $43.7m of direct funding over ve years, tial technical challenges are overcome, printed on to surfaces including glass, with the option of another $50m over a you are more likely to see such displays on plastic, fabric and even paper. Sony has further ve years. The centre plans to de- shelf-edges and signs than wrapped introduced an e-book reader that uses velop full-colour exible displays that can around a member of the digerati. 7 electrophoretic materials to provide a high-resolution, high-contrast display. The drawbacks of electrophoretic displays are that they have slow response times, since the pigment particles take time to move, and that colour versions are still in development. But the technology is still improving, notes Mike McCreary, vice-president of research and advanced development at E Ink, a pioneer of electrophoretic displays based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As well as being used for in-store signage, E Ink’s technology pow- ers Sony’s e-book reader, and in April, Seiko, a watchmaker, unveiled a digital watch built around an E Ink display. Dr McCreary says he has monochrome displays in the laboratory that can show video at 20 frames per second, and later this year the rm plans to demonstrate a colour display for the rst time. Even so, it would seem that full colour, fully exible displays that can switch fast enough to show video are still some way o. But the combination of organic electronic backplanes and electrophoretic frontplanes could produce truly rollable, 22 Brain scan The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 How to make (almost) anything the $13.75m grant made to his centre might be directed to educational out- Neil Gershenfeld wants to build reach, Dr Gershenfeld and his colleagues devices that do for atoms what had a thought: what if machines like PCs do for bitsmake them those used in his class were made more cheap and easy to manipulate widely available? Perhaps a good way to reach out and educate would be to create more fab labs, and see what people in dif- FEW weeks ago, on a crisp spring ferent parts of the world did with them. Aevening in Washington, DC, Neil The answer, it turned out, was that Gershenfeld walked up to the podium like MIT’s students, they were outra- before a modest crowd at the Library of geously creative. By 2004, fab labs were Congress, adjusted his black, thick- popping up around the world, from in- rimmed glasses and told his audience ner-city Boston to the coast of Ghana to that the world was about to shift beneath rural India. Each was made available to their feet. Before long, he explained, peo- local residents so that they could use the ple will own inexpensive desktop ma- labs to work on whatever problems they chines that can print objects in three felt were important. Far above the Arctic dimensions just as eortlessly as desktop Circle in Norway, herders began develop- computers can already print pictures and ing radios to track their sheep and rein- words in two dimensions. Such per- deer in the mountains. In the Boston lab, sonal fabricators would, he explained, children remade scrap materials into transform us into magicians, capable of saleable jewellery, and started making conjuring up precisely what we want, and selling antennae with which to set when we want. We might design our up neighbourhood wireless-internet net- own mobile phones, clothes or appli- works. A fab lab in Pabal, India, now ances, or we might download designs makes a device to test the quality of milk from the internet and modify them to our to ensure that farmers get a fair price. liking, like recipes. Either way, we wouldn’t be going to a shop and picking Why fab labs are fab items from shelves full of identical, mass- In each case, Dr Gershenfeld credits vi- produced products. sionary activists and community leaders Yeah, right. Yet Dr Gershenfeld is not a for seeing how the fab lab might best be science-ction writer, but an engineer, put to usepeople such as S.S. Kalbag in and his magical vision of the future is Pabal, Mel King in Boston and Nana more than just a ight of fancy. He is at Agyekum, a Ghanaian tribal chief who work now, making it happen. Back in had, uncharacteristically, worked in the 2001 he founded the Centre for Bits and technology industry in America. They Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of were the driving forces in the communi- Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massa- ties where the fabs took root. It’s an chusetts. He rst began exploring ways to amazing group of people that have made create working electronic gizmos from all of this possible, says Dr Gershenfeld. scratch with students enrolled in his pop- He admits that his far-ung fab labs ular class How to Make (Almost) Any- are not the advanced molecular ma- thing. He soon found that when he gave chines he foresees proliferating in the his students a few electrical parts, some next 20 years on a desktop near you, but fancy manufacturing equipment (such as just clunky precursors. Nevertheless, he laser and water-jet cutters), and several says, they hint at the transformative boxes of computer chips, there was no power of giving ordinary people the abil- end to the fascinating, some might say bi- ity to make whatever they want. When zarre, inventions they would cobble to- visiting each of the labs, he found that gether. I was amazed with what they participants were passionate unlike any- came up with, says Dr Gershenfeld, thing, driven by the sudden power to shaking his head of unruly black hair. solve problems unique to their lives. He It was as he watched his students en- picks up the book he has just written thusiastically create their wild inventions about his experiences, Fab: The Coming that the idea of personal fabricators be- Revolution on Your DesktopFrom Per- gan to take shape. He could see, in the so- sonal Computers to Personal Fabrica- called fab lab he had developed for his tion (Basic Books, 2005) and opens it to a class at MIT, glimmerings of a future picture of a seven-year-old girl beaming where people could make whatever they and holding up a string of cut metal that wanted. Then, when asked how some of she created using fab-lab machines. It 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Brain scan 23 Today’s clunky machines will turn into a universal fabricator that can make almost anything.

2 spells out her name. That smile says it simply taking them apart. $20,000 each. His goal is to turn the labs all, he says, pointing at the book. By the mid-1980s he had made his into self-sustaining operations that can Dr Gershenfeld believes that the way to MIT’s Media Lab, where he got in- have real local impact and generate reve- march he foresees towards personal volved in a project called Things That nue to fund more inventions. Any of the fabrication will be a social revolution as Think. He developed shoes, for example, emerging fabs are full of the little projects much as a technological onea democ- that generate power for other devices as that could be businesses, he says. These ratisation of the ability to manipulate you walk. He created an all-digital cello might not satisfy huge global markets, matter, just as personal computers have for Yo Yo Ma, a virtuoso musician, which but they might protably provide villages democratised the ability to manipulate turned out to be devilishly dicult but and rural areas with tailor-made pro- information. Fabricators will, he says, be- was ultimately successful. Along the way, ducts that big rms will never make be- gin migrating from factory oors into ev- Dr Gershenfeld wrote two physics text- cause the markets are too small. ery home, just as computers evolved books and a popular book that described In some ways, Dr Gershenfeld’s work from room-sized mainframes to the lap- his attempts to build objects with minds is just an extension of his boyhood love tops and mobile phones that billions of of their own, ttingly entitled When of tinkering as a form of self-expression. people now use to run their lives. Things Start to Think. In the mid-1990s Fab labs empower people by giving them Dr Gershenfeld was a child who, by he collaborated with several colleagues the means to turn ideas into working, his own admission, operated in his own to create a quantum computer using a concrete objects. In time, he says, the sep- little world, was not much of a student, thimble of chloroform and a nuclear arate, clunky machines of today’s fabs but loved to tinker. Mostly I was better at magnetic resonance imaging machine. It will morph into a single, universal fabri- taking things apart than I was at putting successfully solved a simple problem in a cator that can make almost anything. them together, he recalls. He remembers single computational step, lending cre- Whether you believe that such a the schools he attended in Plymouth dence to the idea that quantum comput- machine is just around the corner, or Meeting, a community outside Philadel- ers may some day be able to operate far many decades away, its implications are phia, as dismal, boring places where he faster than current computers. A com- truly mind-boggling. Fabricators would seemed to get either As or Fs, depending mon theme runs through all of this work: give people the power to make whatever on how passionate he was about the sub- combining information and atoms, and comes into their heads and then share the ject. But while life was boring in school, it embedding intelligence in objects. plans over the internetleading perhaps was very dierent at home. Conversa- to a sort of Napster for real-world objects, tions at the dinner table were intellectual Bits to atoms, ideas to objects or a new world of open-source manu- boot camps where the young boy and his Dr Gershenfeld remains as rebellious facturing. People have asked Dr Gershen- two brothers discussed the cases their and unconventional as he was when he feld if there is an opportunity in parents were handling in their jobs as was growing up, and is undaunted by becoming the Microsoft of personal fabri- law professors and arbitrators. Simply those who say his ideas are novel but im- cators, but he says it makes no sense. spouting opinions on the cases being dis- practical. He is now exploring the cre- After all, once you can make a machine cussed wasn’t good enough: You had to ation of mini venture-capital funds to that makes anything, who needs the back up your thinking with solid logic, create more fab labs, which cost around company that makes the machine? 7 says Dr Gershenfeld. Occasionally the family also took sabbaticals in other countries, including Jamaica and Eng- land, where they lived for a year. When the time came for him to go to high school, Dr Gershenfeld had a real knock-down, drag-out ght with his parents. He wanted to go to the technical side of the high school where he could take shop and make real things. His parents wanted him to take a more academic approach. That struck me as punitive, he says. Making three-dimensional objects seemed much more sensible than sitting in a classroom, but in the end he did as his parents wanted and subsequently went on to Swarthmore College, not because his grades were particularly good, but because he won a swimming scholar- ship. He earned a degree in physics and then completed a PhD at Cornell before heading to Bell Labs in 1981. There he re- turned to tinkering, but he was now able to use his knowledge of physics and complex systems to put electronic devices together in interesting ways, rather than At work in the fab lab