Fooling the body’s Superconductors, Hybrids reinvent defence systems 100 years on the wheel TechnologyQuarterly December 3rd 2011

Cities on the ocean Libertarians dream of creating self-governing fl oating colonies. Will the idea sink or swim?

TQCOV-December03-2011.indd 1 21/11/2011 17:30 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Monitor 1

Contents

On the cover Libertarians dream of creating self-governing, ocean-going cities. To do so they must work out how to build seasteads in the rst place; nd a way to escape the legal shackles of sovereign states; and give people a good reason to move in. What are More than just digital quilting their chances? Page 8

Monitor 1 The rise of the maker movement, multispectral document scanning, humans as computers, computerised Technology and society: The maker movement could change how science is pathology, a new way to monitor corrosion, measuring taught and boost innovation. It may even herald a new industrial revolution the viscosity of tomato sauce, HE scene in the park surrounding New York’s Maker Faire was a pavilion labelled and who won our innovation TYork’s Hall of Science, on a sunny with an obscure Italian name: Arduino awards this year weekend in mid-September, resembles a (meaning strong friend). Inside, visitors futuristic craft fair. Booths displaying were greeted by a dozen stands displaying Dierence engine handmade clothes sit next to a pavilion credit-card-sized circuit boards. These are 7 The devil in the details full of electronics and another populated Arduino micro-controllers, simple com- The mathematics of buying a by toy robots. In one corner visitors can puters that make it easy to build all kinds high-denition television learn how to pick locks, in another how to of strange things: plants that send Twitter use a soldering iron. All this and much messages when they need watering, a Seasteading more was on oer at an event called Mak- harp made of lasers, an etch-a-sketch 8 Cities on the ocean er Faire, which attracted more than 35,000 clock, a microphone that serves as a Will the libertarian dream of visitors. This show and an even bigger one breathalyser, or a vest that displays your oating colonies sink or swim? in Silicon Valley, held every May, are the speed when riding a bike. most visible manifestations of what has Such projects are taking o because Biomedicine come to be called the maker movement. Arduino is aordable (basic boards cost It started on America’s West Coast but is $20), can easily be extended using add-ons 11 Breaching the body’s defences spreading around the globe: a Maker Faire called shields to add new functions and New tricks are being developed was held in Cairo in October. has a simple programming system that to sneak drugs into the body The maker movement is both a re- almost anyone can use. Not knowing sponse to and an outgrowth of digital what you are doing is an advantage, says Inside story culture, made possible by the convergence Massimo Banzi, an Italian engineer and 13 Resistance is futile of several trends. New tools and electronic designer who started the Arduino project Superconductors are nally components let people integrate the physi- a decade ago to enable students to build spreading into power grids cal and digital worlds simply and cheaply. all kinds of contraptions. Arduino has Online services and design software make since become popularselling around Flywheels it easy to develop and share digital blue- 200,000 units in 2011because Mr Banzi 16 Reinventing the wheel prints. And many people who spend all made the board’s design open source A new kind of hybrid car uses day manipulating bits on computer (which means that anyone can download mechanical not electrical storage screens are rediscovering the pleasure of its blueprints and build their own ver- making physical objects and interacting sions), and because he has spent much Brain scan with other enthusiasts in person, rather time and eort getting engineers all over 18 Seer of the mirror world than online. Currently the preserve of the world involved with the project. A prole of David Gelernter, a hobbyists, the maker movement’s impact This openness has prompted a sizeable visionary of the virtual world may be felt much farther aeld. ecosystem of add-ons. They include a Start with hardware. The heart of New touch-screen, an illuminated display and 1 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011

2 support for Wi-Fi networking. Other rms real community, says Mitch Altman, a have built specialised variants of Arduino. co-founder of Noisebridge. SparkFun, for instance, has developed This sort of thing makes the maker Lilypad, a exible micro-controller that movement sound a lot like the digital A classic can be sewn into clothing (think blinking equivalent of quilting bees. But it has T-shirts), along with many other add-ons. already had a wider impact, mainly in invention Applying the open-source approach to schools in America. Many have discov- hardware has also driven the develop- ered 3D printers and Arduino boardsand ment of the maker movement’s other are using them to make their science and Multispectral imaging: A scanner favourite piece of kit, which could be technology classes more hands-on again, that sees a wider range of colours found everywhere at the Maker Faire in and teach students to be producers as well 3D than the human eye is unlocking New York: printers. These machines as users of digital products. previously illegible manuscripts are another way to connect the digital and All this will boost innovation, predicts the physical realms: they take a digital Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make ECHNOLOGICAL spin-outs from model of an object and print it out by magazine, a central organ of the maker Tuniversities are usually expected to building it up, one layer at a time, using movement. Its tools and culture emerge from the engineering department, plastic extruded from a nozzle. The promote experimentation, the school of medicine or the faculty of technique is not new, but in collaboration and rapid physics. At Oxford, however, they like to recent years 3D printers have improvement. Makers do things dierently. The latest invention become cheap enough for can play in niches that to emerge from the dreaming spires of consumers. MakerBot In- big rms ignorethough England’s oldest university is the brain- dustries, a start-up based in they are watching the child not of any of these academic New York, now sells its ma- maker movement and Johnny-come-latelies, but rather of a chines for $1,300. The output will borrow ideas from it, Mr group who trace their origins to Oxford’s quality is rapidly improving Dougherty believes. The Maker medieval foundation: its classicists. thanks to regular upgrades, many of Faire in New York was sponsored by The multispectral-imaging scanner them suggested by users. technology companies including HP and developed in the faculty of classics by None of this action in hardware would Cognizant. Autodesk, which makes com- Dirk Obbink, a lecturer in papyrology and have happened without a second set of puter-aided design software, bought Greek literature, and Alexander Koval- powerful drivers: software, standards and Instructables in August. chuk, a mathematician and physicist, is online communities. Arduino, for in- Firms may also copy some of the un- able to detect traces of faded or hidden stance, relies on open-source programs usual business models that makers, often inks and paints in historical manuscripts, that turn simple code into a form that can accidental entrepreneurs, have come up expose forged documents and art works, be understood by the board’s brain. Simi- with. Arduino lets other rms copy its and highlight forensic evidence such as larly, MakerBot’s 3D printers depend on a designs, for example, but charges them to ngerprints and stains from bodily uids. standard way to describe physical objects, use its logo. Quirky, an industrial design It will soon be available commercially called STL, and aordable software to rm based in New York City, uses crowd- from a rm called Oxford Multi Spectral. design them. Some basic modelling pro- sourcing to decide which products to Multispectral imaging works by scan- grams, such as Google SketchUp and make. MakieLab of London is developing ning objects at a series of specic fre- Blender, can be downloaded free. a platform to allow toy shops or individ- quencies both within and beyond the As for online communities, Arduino uals to develop customised toys and have visible spectrum. It is able to highlight has an active forum on its website, while them printed. Venture capitalists are nos- details human eyes cannot normally see, MakerBot runs a website called Thingi- ing around the eld. In recent months either because they are swamped by the 1 verse, which lets people share 3D designs. Quirky raised $16m, MakerBot raised $10m YouTube and other video-sharing sites and Shapeways, a rm that oers a 3D- oer how-to clips for almost everything. printing service, received $5m. On Instructables, users post and discuss The parallel with the hobbyist comput- recipes to make and do all kinds of things. er movement of the 1970s is striking. In And then there is Etsy, an online market- both cases enthusiastic tinkerers, many on place for handmade goods, from hand- America’s West Coast, began playing with knitted scarves to 3D-printed jewellery. new technologies that had huge potential The ease with which designs for physi- to disrupt business and society. Back then cal things can be shared digitally goes a the machines manipulated bits; now the long way towards explaining why the action is in atoms. This has prompted maker movement has already developed predictions of a new industrial revolution, a strong cultureits third driver. If you are in which more manufacturing is done by not sharing your designs, you are doing it small rms or even by individuals. The wrong, says Bre Pettis, the chief executive tools of factory production, from electron- of MakerBot. Physical space and tools are ics assembly to 3D printing, are now avail- being shared, too, in the form of common able to individuals, in batches as small as a workshops. Some 400 such hacker single unit, writes Chris Anderson, the spaces already operate worldwide, ac- editor of Wired magazine. cording to Hackerspaces.org. Many are It is easy to laugh at the idea that hob- organised like artists’ collectives. At byists with 3D printers will change the Noisebridge, a hacker space in San Fran- world. But the original industrial revolu- cisco, even non-members can come and tion grew out of piecework done at home, tinkeras long as they comply with the and look what became of the clunky group’s main rule: to be excellent to each computers of the 1970s. The maker move- other. The internet is no substitute for a ment is worth watching. 7 Seeing more than meets the eye The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Monitor 3

2 signal from other visible frequencies, or because they are not detectable by the rod and cone cells of the retina. Classicists at Oxford rst deployed the technique in 1999, to examine papyri discovered in a villa that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. They then applied it to previously illegible manuscripts called the Oxyrhynchus papyri, which were discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in Egypt. Docu- ments deciphered using it include an epic poem from the 7th century BC by Archi- lochos and parts of a lost tragedy by Sophocles that dates to the 5th century BC. Over the past decade Dr Obbink, Dr Kovalchuk and their team have both improved the hardware of multispectral analysis (which was originally developed by America’s space agency, NASA), and written more sophisticated algorithms to analyse what is seen. To start with, they Return of the human computers had to rely on a high-resolution camera mounted on a frame, and a series of lters attached to a rotating wheel, to create a set of single-frequency images from the same perspective, in order that they could be Technology and society: The old idea of human computers, who work together merged as desired. to perform tricky tasks, is making a comeback Now they have something that works like a atbed document scanner, with a T WAS late summer 1937, and the recov- that computers cannot. They are em- scanning head containing either six or 12 Iery from the Depression had stalled. ployed in large numbers and are organised light-emitting diodes, each emitting light American government ocials had stimu- into streamlined workows. And, as was of a specic wavelength between 350 lus money to spend but, with winter the case in the age before electronic com- nanometres (ultraviolet) and 800 nano- looming, there were few construction puters, their output is combined to gener- metres (infra-red). Each time the head projects to fund. So the ocials created ate results that could not easily be pro- moves across the instrument a dierent oce posts instead. One project was duced in any other way. diode is switched on, and the results are assigned to a oor of a dusty old New York In one proof-of-principle experiment, recorded and fed into a computer. industrial building, not far from Times published earlier this year, human com- Sometimes images taken at a specic Square. It would eventually house 300 puters were used to create encyclopedia frequency provide the best contrast. For computershumans, not machines. entries. Like performing mathematical example, iron-gall ink, commonly used on The computers crunched through the calculations, this is a skilled job, but one ancient documents, is transparent to calculations necessary to create mathe- that can be broken down into simpler infra-red light and most visible in the matical tables, then an indispensable parts, such as initial research, writing and ultraviolet region of the spectrum. In reference tool for many scientists. The editing. Aniket Kittur and colleagues at other cases the clearest picture emerges by calculations were complex and the com- Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, combining images from several frequen- puters, drawn largely from the ranks of Pennsylvania created software, known as cies. The iron-and-carbon-based ink used New York’s poor, possessed only basic CrowdForge, that manages the process. It in one of the oldest Hebrew commentar- numeracy. So the mathematicians in hands out tasks to online workers, which ies on the Old Testament is an example of charge of the project worked out how to it contacts via Mechanical Turk, an out- this. Much of the book, which dates from break each calculation down into simple sourcing website run by Amazon. The the 10th century AD, was rendered illeg- operations, the outcomes of which could workers send their work back to Crowd- ible in the late 19th century by misguided be combined to give a nal result. Forge, which combines their output to academics who used shellac to varnish it. It was a technique that had been em- produce surprisingly readable results. Combining data from dierent frequen- ployed for decades across America and Several American start-ups are operat- cies has highlighted the old ink and al- Europe. The eld of human computing ing similar workows. CastingWords lowed the document to be read. even had its own journal and trade-union breaks audio les down into ve-minute Besides looking at ancient scrolls, the representation. Computing oces calcu- segments and farms each out to a tran- multispectral scanner can compare things lated ballistics trajectories, processed scriber. Each transcription is automatical- like bank notes and passports with refer- census statistics and charted the course of ly bounced back to other workers for ence documents of known provenance. comets. They would continue to do so checking and, once deemed good enough, Alternatively, as in the case of forensic until the 1960s, when electronic comput- an (electronic) computer combines the evidence when the user does not know ers became cheap enough to consign the segments and returns the nished product precisely what to expect, dierent combi- profession to history. to the customer. At CloudCrowd a similar nations of frequencies can be examined to Until recently, that is. Over the past few system is used to co-ordinate teams of see if anything interesting emerges. As an years, human computing has been reborn. human translators. Others are combining added bonus, the new scanner also pro- The new generation of human computers human and articial intelligences. An app vides a novel retort to those who question carry out dierent tasks, but they mirror called oMoby, produced by IQ Engines, the value of studying the classics in the their predecessors in many other ways. can identify objects in images snapped by modern world. 7 They are being drafted in to perform tasks iPhone users. First it applies object-recog- 1 4 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011

2 nition software, which may not be able to would tell the computer to measure the cope if the lighting is poor or the image three traits human pathologists use to was captured from an unusual angle. determine a tumour’s grade: the percent- When that happens, the image is sent to a Indolent or age of its cells that are tubelike; the div- human analyst. Either way, the user gets ersity of appearance of the cell nuclei; and an answer in half a minute or so. aggressive? the proportion of cancer cells undergoing Much more is to come. In old-fash- division. However, people are excellent at ioned computing oces, workows were pattern recognition and skilled patholo- co-ordinated by senior sta, often math- Medicine: A computerised gists rely not just on these relatively easy- ematicians, who had worked out how to pathologist that can outperform its to-describe traits, but also on less well- deconstruct the complex calculations the human counterparts could transform dened characteristics that years of expe- computers were tackling. Now silicon the eld of cancer diagnosis rience have taught them are signicant foremen such as CrowdForge oversee too. Restricting computerised pathologists human computers. These algorithms, OOKING for needles in haystacks is to the well-characterised bits of the pro- which co-ordinate workers by plugging Lboring. But computers do not get bored. cess therefore inevitably results in worse into Mechanical Turk and other online Contracting out to machines the tedious performance than that delivered by their piecework platforms, are relatively new business of assessing the dangerousness human counterparts. and are likely to get considerably more of cancer cells in histological microscope Dr Koller’s Computational Pathologist sophisticated. Researchers are, for ex- slides ought thus to be an obvious thing to (C-Path), by contrast, lets the system work ample, creating software to make it easier do. Cervical-cancer smear tests aside, out for itself what the most important to assign tasks to workersor, to put it however, such electronic intrusions into features of a tumour are. She and her another way, to program humans. the pathology laboratory are limited. colleagues started by setting down 6,642 Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft’s Grading cancer cells into indolent and characteristics the program might choose research labs in Redmond, Washington, aggressive, and hazarding an opinion from when it assessed images of biopsies has considered how such software could about whether they spell a treatable con- from breast-cancer patients, but did not be put to use. He imagines a future in dition or an untreatable one, has re- tell it which to prefer. Some of the charac- which algorithms co-ordinate an army of mained the realm of the human expert. teristics they oered were inherent to the human workers, physical sensors and But not for much longer, if Daphne cancer cells. Others were features of the conventional computers. In the event of a Koller, a computer scientist at Stanford surrounding stromal cells, which are child going missing, for example, an algo- University, and her colleagues have their not, themselves malignant, but act to rithm might assign some volunteers to way. They recently reported in Science support a tumour. And some were not search duties and ask others to examine Translational Medicine that they have features of individual cells at all but, rath- CCTV footage for sightings. The system written a program which can distinguish er, measured relations between cells (for would also trawl local news reports for between grades of breast-cancer celland example, the average distance between similar cases. These elements would be in a way that provides a more accurate cancer-cell nuclei) and the context cells combined to create a cyborg detective. prognosis than a human pathologist can. found themselves in (for example, wheth- This sounds terribly futuristic, and Previous attempts to build a comput- er they occurred in large clusters or were rather dierent to the pen-and-paper erised pathologist of this sort required the frequently interspersed with stroma). human computation of the 19th century. designers to specify precisely which char- The program was initially trained and But David Alan Grier, a historian of com- acteristics of the samples being examined tested using 248 breast-cancer samples puting at George Washington University were most important. For example, they from the Netherlands Cancer Institute. It in Washington, DC, thinks that the archi- was fed with images of slides from these tects of the new systems could learn a lot patients, together with information on by studying the old ones. He points out how long each patient had survived after that Charles Babbage, the designer of an the sample in question had been taken. early mechanical computer, gave much That done, the software was then tested thought to reducing the errors that human using a second set of samples, this time computers made. Babbage realised that from 286 breast-cancer patients at Vancou- duplicating tasks and comparing the ver General Hospital. The system was able results was not enough, because dierent both to grade the slides and to predict, in a workers tended to make the same mis- way that human pathologists could not, takes. A better solution was to nd dier- whether each patient would survive for ent ways to perform the same calculation. ve years after treatment. If two methods produce the same answer, When Dr Koller looked at which 11 the result is much less likely to be awed, features were the most robust predictors Babbage reasoned. of survival, she discovered that only eight There are many more such useful tips were characteristic of the tumour cells in the historical record, says Dr Grier. themselves. The other three were stromal Human-computing pioneers also wrote a characteristics. The fact that three stromal lot about how best to break a complex features were on the list suggests that the calculation into sub-tasks that are com- surrounding stroma inuences whether pletely independent of each other, for or not a cancer progresses and kills the example. There are all sorts of hints in the patient. That is important information old literature about what’s useful, he because, hitherto, pathologists have fo- says. He is often invited to human-com- cused on the cancer cells themselves and puting conferences at which he likes to ignored the stroma. As well as outper- chide researchers for overlooking such forming human pathologists, it seems that lessons from this forgotten but intriguing C -Path can also teach them a thing or two early chapter of computer history. 7 about cancer biology. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Monitor 5

and then back to the scanner for analysis. tory can, however, be hard. As a result, The scanners, which can run on the same manufacturing diculties may not be battery for around ve years, transmit detected quickly. But Julia Rees, Will Zim- Spotting the rot their readings back to base every 12 hours, merman and Hemaka Bandulasena of the over a secure wireless network. This pro- University of Sheeld in England, are vides an up-to-date and accurate measure- riding to the rescue. They have invented a ment (to within a tenth of a millimetre) of small, cheap device whichwhen com- a pipe’s thicknesses. bined with some clever mathematicscan Sensor technology: Ultrasound is Besides giving renery operators more measure viscosity-changing phenomena being exploited in a novel way to condence in the safety of their plants such as shearing. Moreover, it can do so on monitor corrosion at rusty oil many of which are decades oldthe new the y, rather than requiring samples to be reneries more reliably scanners should also give them more taken o to a laboratory. If the sauce com- exibility in their choice of crude oil, ing out of a factory does not have the OR the oil industry, with its sprawling dierent types of which corrode pipes at requisite gloopiness, that can then be Fand hazardous facilities, keeping on top dierent rates. Moreover, the technology detected immediately. of corrosion is a particularly dicult aair. has other applications, says Peter Collins, The new rheometerdescribed in a Crude oil is full of corrosive chemicals and Permasense’s boss. It could be used in recent edition of Measurement Science and abrasive minerals, so damage to pipework chemical plants, in nuclear-power stations Technologycontains a channel through is a constant risk. The consequences of and, with satellite links to retrieve the which some of the ketchup (or any other failure, though, are serious. A hole in a data, on pipelines that traverse remote material of interest) passes. This channel corroded pipe can cause not only an un- and hostile places. It will not stop the rot has a corner in it, and when the uid turns scheduled shutdown, costing millions of that bedevils the operators of industrial this corner its velocity, pressure and shear- dollars, but also a grave risk to life, limb plants, but it should let those operators ing rate all change in ways that give away and the environment. sleep more comfortably at night. 7 its rheological secrets. The changes in Oil men, then, should welcome an question are mapped using a technique invention by Peter Cawley and his col- called micron-resolution particle-image leagues in the non-destructive testing velocimetry, which seeds the uid with research group at Imperial College, Lon- tiny particles and follows their progress don. They have devised an automatic way with a digital camera. to monitor the integrity of pipelines, All of which is not too hard, using which they have just nished testing at modern technology. The trick is how you some reneries belonging to BP, an oil interpret what you see. What Dr Rees, Dr giant. A company called Permasense has Zimmerman and Dr Bandulasena (or, been set up to commercialise the idea. rather, their computers) do is to take the At the moment, tracking corrosion equations that describe rheology, feed in means inspecting miles of pipes using the observed behaviour and then crunch ultrasonic scanners that measure the through the possibilities to determine thickness of a pipe wall by timing the what combination of rheological proper- reections of pulses of sound from its ties would actually result in that behav- internal and external surfaces. This often iour. This, in turn, reveals the probable requires the plant to be shut down, be- physical characteristics of the uid, in- cause some sections can be as hot as cluding those that are not immediately 600°C when a renery is operating. At obviousand thus whether it is being such temperatures it is not possible to turned out according to spec. attach scanners permanently to the pipes. It seems to work. So far, results from That, combined with the diculty of Sticky ngers experiments using test liquids such as gaining safe access and the sheer number ketchup and mayonnaise have correlated of places that have to be monitored, well with those obtained using conven- means the thickness of the walls of some tional equipment in the university’s pipes might be measured only once every chemistry department. Moreover, if the four years or so. Wide (and costly) safety Materials science: Researchers have new device were deployed in a real fac- margins then have to be imposed to en- devised a nifty way to measure the tory, it would always be dealing with the sure there is no rapid deterioration. properties of viscous uids, such as same substance. There would then be no Dr Cawley and his colleagues get tomato ketchup need for a general-purpose algorithm to round all this in a surprisingly simple way. do the calculation, and the task of working Instead of attaching the scanners directly F YOU have ever given a bottle of toma- out what was going on could instead be to the pipes, they mount them on the ends Ito ketchup a good shake to make it pour handled by a simple processor built into of strips of stainless steel about 30cm long more easily, then you have experimented the rheometer itself. and bolt the other end of the strips to the with rheology. This is the study of how Nor is the technique restricted to indus- pipe. Stainless steel is a poor conductor of materials ow, and it considers the many trial applications. One rheometer made heat. This keeps the scanner’s sensitive elements which give a liquid its overall by the three researchers had a test channel electronics cool. The trick (and the reason viscosity. Shaking ketchup invokes one of the width of a human hair. This has at- this has not been done before) is that these those elements: shear thinning. This re- tracted interest from biologists who study are not just ordinary strips of stainless duces a liquid’s reluctance to ow, or uids such as blood and lymph. The re- steel; rather, they are specially shaped to viscosity, by forcing the layers within it to searchers are now looking for industrial act as waveguides. separate, suddenly making it runny. partners to carry out further tests. What This means they can convey ultra- If you want to make the perfect ketch- their invention is not yet able to oer, sound from a scanner to the surface of the up, therefore, rheology is important. Mea- though, is a way to get the last bit of ketch- pipe without the signal being degraded, suring what is going on in a ketchup fac- up out of the bottle. 7 6 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011

be reused, thus preventing infection from spreading. Since 2001the K1has prevented an estimated 10m infections and saved more than 5m lives. Corporate use of innovation: Ama- zon.com, the leading online retailer. Origi- nally an internet bookstore, Amazon now sells almost everything, has diversied into providing on-demand computing and storage, and catalysed a new market for e-books and e-readers. Anniversary award: To mark the tenth anniversary of our awards, we asked our readers to choose which of our previous winners was the most signicant innova- tor of the decade. The winner was Steve Jobs of Apple, who died in October.

And thank you We extend our congratulations to the winners and our thanks to the judges: Noha Adly, professor of computer science, Alexandria University and deputy head of ICT sector, Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Robin Bew, editorial director, Economist And the winners were Intelligence Unit; Hermes Chan, co-foun- der and chief executive, MedMira; Martin Cooper, chairman and chief executive, ArrayComm; George Craford, chief tech- nology ocer, Philips Lumileds; Innovation awards: Our annual prizes recognise successful innovators in Hernando de Soto, chairman, Institute for eight categories. Here are this year’s winners Liberty and Democracy; Rodney Fergu- son, managing director, Panorama Capital; HIS newspaper was established in 1843 lore, for reducing health-care costs using Nancy Floyd, founder and managing Tto take part in a severe contest be- mass-production techniques. His hospi- director, Nth Power; Mikkel Vestergaard tween intelligence, which presses for- tal performs more heart operations at a Frandsen, chief executive, Vestergaard ward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance lower cost and a lower mortality rate than Frandsen; Janus Friis, co-founder, Atom- obstructing our progress. One of the leading American hospitals. ico; François Grey, visiting professor of chief ways in which intelligence presses Computing and telecommunications: physics, Tsinghua University; Robert forward is through innovation, which is Paul Buchheit of Y Combinator, who Guest, business editor, The Economist; Vic now recognised as one of the most impor- created Gmail, a popular webmail ser- Hayes, senior research fellow, Delft Uni- tant contributors to economic growth. vice, and AdSense, an advertising plat- versity of Technology; Mo Ibrahim, foun- Innovation, in turn, depends on the cre- form, while working at Google. The in- der, Mo Ibrahim Foundation; Raghunath ative individuals who dream up new ternet giant’s 23rd employee, he also Anant Mashelkar, president, Global Re- ideas and turn them into reality. coined its mantra, Don’t be evil. search Alliance, India; Yoichiro Matsumo- The Economist recognises these talent- Consumer products: Je Bezos of Ama- to, professor and dean of engineering, ed people through its annual Innovation zon.com and Gregg Zehr of Lab126 for University of Tokyo; Julie Meyer, founder Awards, presented in eight elds: biosci- creating the Kindle e-book reader. and chief executive, Ariadne Capital; ence, computing and telecommunica- Launched in 2007, its striking design and Oliver Morton, briengs editor, The Econo- tions, energy and the environment, social innovative new business model sparked mist; Andrew Odlyzko, professor of math- and economic innovation, business- mass adoption of e-readers. ematics, University of Minnesota; Andrea process innovation, consumer products, a Energy and the environment: Chetan Pfeifer, chief executive, AC Immune; Sam exible no boundaries category, and the Maini of Mahindra Reva Electric Vehicles Pitroda, chairman, National Knowledge corporate use of innovation. This year we for building aordable, mass-produced Commission, India; Navi Radjou, fellow, also asked readers to vote on which of our electric cars. The REVAi, known as the Centre for India & Global Business, Judge previous winners was the greatest innova- G-Wiz in some markets, is sold in more Business School, University of Cam- tor. The awards were presented by John than 20 countries and has accumulated bridge; Lesa Roe, director, Langley Re- Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of The more passenger miles than any other search Centre, NASA; Paul Sao, tech- Economist, at a ceremony at the Science model of electric car since its 2001launch. nology forecaster; Syl Saller, global Museum in London on October 20th. And No boundaries: Jessica Jackley and innovation director, Diageo; Jerry the winners were: Matt Flannery, co-founders of Kiva, for Simmons, director, energy frontier re- Bioscience: Robert Langer of the Mas- pioneering web-based, peer-to-peer search, Sandia National Laboratories; Tom sachusetts Institute of Technology, a prol- microlending. Since 2005 Kiva has facili- Standage, digital editor and Technology ic biomedical engineer, for his pioneer- tated more than 343,000 loans worth a Quarterly editor, The Economist (chair- ing work on controlled-release drug total of $261m, mostly to borrowers in the man); Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global corre- delivery and tissue engineering, which developing world. spondent, The Economist; Huanming has beneted tens of millions of people. Social and economic innovation: Marc Yuang, director, Beijing Genomics In- Business process: Devi Shetty of Koska of SafePoint Trust, for inventing the stitute. The judging process was run by Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital in Banga- K1auto-disposable syringe that cannot John Eckhouse of Modern Media. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Dierence engine 7 The devil in the details

Consumer electronics: Changes in technology mean that choosing a big-screen television has become more complicated than ever. Should you pay extra for 1080p resolution, LED backlighting or 3D? We crunch the numbers F YOU have not gone shopping for a new and 1,080 pixels high) needs to be at least hertz (Hz) of conventional television to Itelevision set for quite a while, enough 69 inches across (measured diagonally) if 120Hz and even 240Hz. A few manufactur- has changed to require some serious viewers are to see all the detail it oers. To ers have begun oering sets with refresh thought. So before splurging on a new see all the detail on a 32-inch set with rates of up to 480Hz, with 960Hz on the high-denition television (HDTV) set, it is 1080p resolution means sitting a little over horizon. Unfortunately, the motion-com- worth considering which features make four feet from the screengreat for video- pensating circuitry can make lmed con- sense and which do not. gaming on your own, but hardly condu- tent look like a cheap videoa glitch Start with the viewing angles available cive to communal viewing. known in the trade as the soap-opera ef- in the room that will be used. THX, a tech- In other words, viewers are not enjoy- fect. The source of the problem is the way nical standards-setter for the video and au- ing the full benets of the higher pixel lm shot at 24 frames a second has to ad- dio industries, requires the back row of count of 1080p televisions if they sit any just to the television’s much higher refresh seats in a home theatre to have at least a 26° further back than 1.8 times the screen rate of 60, 120 or even 240 frames a second. viewing angle from one edge of the screen width. At a distance of 2.7 times the screen One way of doing this is to analyse rst to the other. Seats nearest the screen width, they might as well buy a cheaper one frame of lm and then the next, and should have a viewing angle of no more calculate an average of the two. This inter- than 36°. These subtended angles corre- polated frame is inserted between the rst spond to a viewing distance of roughly 2.2 and second frames, and the process repeat- times the screen width at the back row of ed for each successive frame of the lm. the seating, down to 1.5 times the screen The interpolation process is good at re- width at the front. Within these limits, moving blur and judder, but it can make viewers should be able to enjoy the most the motion appear unnaturally smooth immersive experience. and disconcerting. Be warned: 240Hz sets The question, then, is how to relate are the worst oenders. For sports fans in viewing distance to a person’s visual acu- particular, this gives plasma the edge. ity. In other words, what is the maximum Lastly, there are the LED sets. These are distance beyond which some picture de- simply LCD televisions that use LEDs for tail is lost because of the eye’s limitations? backlighting instead of the usual uores- Visual acuity indicates the angular size of cent tubes. The LEDs can be either along the smallest detail a person’s visual system the edges of the screen or spread as an ar- can resolve. Saying that someone has ray behind the whole of the display. Edge- 20/20 vision (6/6 in metric terms) means lit displays have problems with uniformity that they can resolve a spatial pattern (a let- of brightness, as well as a limited viewing ter of the alphabet, say) in which each ele- angle. Apart from giving more uniform ment subtends an angle of one minute of brightness, a full array of LED backlights al- arc when viewed from a distance of 20 feet lows the screen to be dimmed selectively (six metres). in places where a scene needs to be dark. In other words, a person with 20/20 720p set, as the eye cannot resolve the ner The eect is to make the LCD’s blacks ap- sight should, in normal lighting condi- detail of a 1080p screen at that distance. pear almost as dense as a plasma’s. Only tions, be able to identify two points that The next choice that must be made is top-of-the-range LCD sets from Sharp and are 0.07 of an inch (1.77mm) apart from a between plasma display, liquid-crystal dis- Sony currently have this feature. Expect to distance of 20 feet. Twenty feet is taken be- play (LCD) or the latest light-emitting pay dearly for it. cause, as far as the eye is concerned, it is in diode (LED) variety. Plasmas, with their eect innity. Beyond this distance, some rapid switching and deep blacks, have long 2D or not 2D, that is the question of the detail in the picture can no longer be been the favourite for sports fans and mov- So, what to choose? All things being equal, resolved by the conical receptor cells in the ie bus. Apart from their lack of blur and plasma televisions are about two-thirds retina of the eye. It will simply blend into judder when tracking fast-moving objects the price of their LCD equivalents, which the background instead of being seen as a and their freedom from wishy-washy are themselves up to a third cheaper than distinct feature. Thus, it is a waste to make greys, they can be viewed from wider an- LED sets. Meanwhile, the premium that 3D individual pixelsthe tiniest elements in a gles than LCDs without the picture chang- sets once commanded has all but van- displaysmaller than 1.77mm across when ing colour. But plasmas have lately fallen ished. They are now worth buying, not so viewed from 20 feet. out of favour because they are bulkier and much for their ability to show 3D content, The problem with viewing images on a more power-hungry. but because they display 2D even better television screenespecially the progres- To lick the LCD’s motion problems, than conventional plasma or LCD sets. 3D sively scanned 1080p HDTV sets in use to- manufacturers have developed special cir- sets have special features to reduce ghost- dayis that most people sit too far back. At cuitry to predict and compensate for any ing in the image and maximise the 3D ef- the typical distance of nine feet, a 1080p rapid movement within a scene. This in- fectand this ensures sharper 2D images, HDTV set (with a screen 1,920 pixels wide creases the screen’s frame rate from the 60 too. Happy viewing. 7 8 Seasteading The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011

Cities on the ocean

ers. To realise their dream they must over- tions, but they are even more vulnerable come some tricky technical, legal and than ships to choppy seas. Shipbuilders Seasteading: Libertarians dream of cultural problems. They must work out like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan creating self-ruling oating cities. how to build seasteads in the rst place; have proposed various designs for oating But can the many obstacles, not least nd a way to escape the legal shackles of cities based on massive mega-oat pon- the engineering ones, be overcome? sovereign states; and give people sucient toons, with skyscrapers towering above reason to move in. With nancing from Mr the waterline. But these would only work HE Pilgrims who set out from England Thiel and others, a think-tank called the in calm, shallow watersand these tend to Ton the Mayower to escape an intoler- Seasteading Institute (TSI) has been spon- be within land-based governments’ terri- ant, over-mighty government and build a soring studies on possible plans for ocean- torial limits. George Petrie, a former profes- new society were lucky to nd plenty of based structures and on the legal and - sor of naval architecture at the Webb Insti- land in the New World on which to build it. nancial questions they raise. And although tute in New York state who is writing a Some modern libertarians, such as Peter true seasteads may still be a distant dream, series of technical papers for TSI, has cal- Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, dream the seasteading movement is producing culated that even in a relatively benign of setting sail once more to found colonies some novel ideas for ocean-based busi- stretch of water o Hawaii, such structures of like-minded souls. By now, however, all nesses that could act as stepping stones to- would leave their residents pretty groggy the land on Earth has been claimed by the wards their ultimate goal. much of the time. governments they seek to escape. So, they As oil companies drilling in ever deeper conclude, they must build new cities on Floating some ideas waters have demonstrated, structures built the high seas, known as seasteads. Seastead designs tend to fall into one of on oating columns are the most rugged, It is not a completely crazy idea: large three categories: ship-shaped structures, though they are more expensive than ship- maritime structures that resemble seas- barge-like structures based on oating or pontoon-type vessels. The shipbuilding teads already exist, after all. Giant cruise pontoons and platforms mounted on industry has plenty of experience in mak- liners host thousands of guests on lengthy semi-submersible columns, like oshore ing them, but the expectations of comfort voyages in luxurious surroundings. O- oil installations. Over-ordering by cruise among the permanent residents of a sea- shore oil platforms provide oating ac- lines means there are plenty of big, sec- stead will be much greater than on an oil commodation for hundreds of workers ond-hand liners going cheap. Ship-shaped platform, where workers are paid well for amid harsh weather and high waves. Then structures can pack in more apartments short tours of duty in relative discomfort. there is the Principality of Sealand, a con- and oce space for a given cost than the Even in placid weather, oating-column crete sea fort constructed o Britain’s coast other two types of design, but they have a structures bob up and down as the sea during the second world war. It is now oc- big drawback: their tendency to roll in heaves beneath them, which can make cupied by a family who have fought va- choppy seas. Cruise ships can sail around people seasick. To prevent the vessel from rious lawsuits to try to get it recognised as a storms, but static seasteads need to be able drifting due to currents and winds, sea- sovereign state. to ride them out. And the stabilisers on big steads may need dynamic-positioning Each of these examples, however, falls cruisers only work in moderate seas and thrusters, but would increase costs. In wa- some way short of the permanent, self-go- when the ship is moving. ters less than 1,800 metres deep, Mr Petrie verning and radically innovative ocean- Pontoon-type structures, or giant calculates, a cheaper option would be to based colonies imagined by the seastead- barges, are the cheapest of the three op- moor the platform to the seabed. As it hap- 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Seasteading 9

Enthusiasts have proposed a wide range of designs for seasteads

2 pens, there are a number of barely sub- sert the right to extend their jurisdictions, ever sumptuously kitted out, would be lit- merged islands o the coast of California, in matters aecting their citizens, across tle bigger than a typical millionaire the location of preference for early seas- the entire planet. And like any other seago- libertarian’s bathroom. teaders. Alas, they tend to be volcanoes. ing structure, a seastead would be obliged Some seasteaders think the way for- Even once a viable blueprint for the to register with a ag state, to whose ward is to build less ambitious oshore structure of a seastead is produced, the maritime laws it would be subject. Some communities to demonstrate the potential technical challenges are not over. The ag states are lax about enforcement but if, of the idea. By basing themselves just out- more it relies on land-based supplies of say, America disapproved of the goings-on side countries’ territorial waters to avoid fuel and water, the harder it will be to aboard a seastead, it could lean on such some of their laws, oating habitats could achieve the libertarian dream of escaping states to get toughand oer enforcement show land-based governments how such the evil ways of existing governments. At on their behalf. In the 1960s Britain’s gov- things as low taxes, light regulation and sea there is plenty of wind and wave ener- ernment shut down pirate-radio ships not free access for foreign workers can produce gy, and occasionally sunshine, but build- by sending the navy to attack them but by wealth without ill eects. Such ocean- ing renewable-energy systems that can banning British suppliers and advertisers based businesses could be a step on the survive harsh ocean conditions is even from doing business with them. way to true seasteads. harder and more costly than designing In all, the leaders of the seasteading land-based ones. Another problem is com- movement concede that they will have to Stepping stones to a seastead munication. Satellite-based connections avoid getting into anything too provoca- In 2010 a group of marine engineers pro- are slow and expensive. Laying a bre-op- tivedrugs, pornography or money-laun- duced a detailed design study for the Club- tic cable would be dicult. A point-to- dering, for example. As for taxes, America Steada oating resort city which would point laser or microwave link might work, already demands that its citizens pay in- sit perhaps 100 nautical miles o the Cali- suggests Michael Keenan, the president of come tax even when they are living fornian coast, with 70 sta and 200 guests. TSI. But that would rely on a land-based abroadand that would include living on It would combine the comforts of a cruise transmitting station, again making the a seastead. There is nothing to stop other ship with the resistance to wind and seastead reliant on landlubbers. countries following suit and indeed get- waves of an oil platform, which its design ting extraterritorial about other taxes too. closely resembles. Seven storeys of build- The long arm of the law Until seasteaders are able to bank their ings would be cantilevered o the col- The technical challenges are daunting money with independent, ocean-going - umns and, in an idea borrowed from enough. The legal questions that seasteads nancial institutions, they may not be able bridge design, its extensive open decks are would face are no less tricky, and call into to escape the taxman’s clutches. slung from cables. There would be solar question whether it would really be possi- And escaping the taxman may not, in panels (and gardens) on the roofs of these ble to create genuinely self-governing any case, be enough of an incentive to lure buildings, but the ClubStead would also mini-states on the oceans. Until seastead- residents to a seastead. Despite their stated rely on diesel power. It would make its ers are ready to cut their ties with the land preferences even libertarians, it seems, own fresh water from seawater and have altogether, they will want to build their col- prefer to live in over-regulated, high-tax two helipads and a dock for boats. onies not much more than 12 nautical places like London and New York. Mr Kee- The ClubStead design study includes a miles (22km) oshorethe limit of coun- nan notes ruefully that the Free State Pro- lot of detailed work on wind and wave re- tries’ territorial watersotherwise travel- ject, a scheme started ten years ago to get sistance, construction methods, and so on. ling to and from the seastead will take too 20,000 people to move to New Hampshire But its authors admit that much more long. But the laws of the sea give countries and vote in a libertarian local government, would need to be done to produce a full powers to enforce some criminal laws up has had little success so far. Unless a seas- blueprint ready for a shipyard to start to 24 nautical miles out and to regulate tead were the size of Manhattan its citizens building it. Nigel Barltrop, professor of na- some economic activities in a 200-mile would have to forgo the cultural life, the val architecture at Strathclyde University exclusive economic zone. Ships are parks and the wide choice of shopping and in Scotland, says he has little doubt that granted exemptions, but a seastead teth- restaurants oered by large cities. The most you can do something like this and make it ered to the seabed would not qualify. realistic designs produced so far would re- work. But he thinks the structure may Some countries (notably America) as- duce residents to living in cabins that, how- need further reinforcement to prevent fa-1 10 Seasteading The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011

The ideal builders of seasteads may not be small groups of innovators, but giant engineering rms.

2 tiguethink of all of those metal joints ting involved in something subject to mar- that a cult is simply a church that lacks po- constantly creaking in the waves. Other- itime law, an unfamiliar matter. Another litical clout. Seasteads may end up as wan- wise the result could be a disaster like the problem, Mr Mutabdzija admits, is that it is nabe sovereign states without the means collapse in 1980 of the Alexander Kielland, unclear how American ocials will to defend their autonomy against land- a oating accommodation block for North choose to interpret the complex and based governments. The rst ones to over- Sea oil workers, which broke apart and vaguely worded immigration laws. He come the many technical challenges, raise capsized, killing 123 people. hopes that they will just leave us alone for the money to construct their vessels and Besides its moderately spacious apart- a while and see how it goes. set out for the open seas will be quite de- ments, the ClubStead would have room If the sort of just-oshoring approach pendent on terrestrial authorities’ good- for either a casino resort or a medical tou- of the ClubStead and Blueseed projects will. But countries short of available land, rism centre. Many of the sta could be can prove itself, it might be attractive for or whose leaders are struggling to pass lib- non-Americans who would otherwise several industries in which large revenues eralising reforms against resistance from struggle to get visas. They could spend are generated by relatively small numbers vested interests, may tolerate limited ex- most of the time aboard, taking occasional of skilled people, and which are subject to periments in low-tax, rule-free self-gov- shore leave on tourist visas. The designers onerous taxes or regulation. Financial trad- ernment. So the seasteaders may be in reckon it would cost $114mless than some ing, gambling and cosmetic surgery are ob- with a chance. land-based luxury hotelsof which the vious candidates. Private hospitals could biggest item is constructing and kitting out provide new treatments that have been ap- Who will jump in rst? the apartments, at just under $50m. Run- proved by other countries but not by Given the huge costs and risks involved, ning costs would be $3.4m a year. America’s sluggish regulators. perhaps the ideal builders of seasteads A breakaway group from TSI is working Rather than deciding in advance which will not be small groups of innovators like on a simpler and cheaper idea called Blue- line of business will be a seastead’s liveli- the Blueseed team, but giant engineering seed. The idea is to convert a cruise liner hood, Mr Petrie has a more Darwinian rms such as Mitsubishi, India’s Tata group into an oshore incubator for small, idea, one that libertarians should warm to: or Samsung of South Korea. Indeed, as Mr high-tech start-ups and position it just out- create a large expanse of oating land in Keenan notes, the most viable political side American territorial waters o Cali- mid-ocean and rent it out to whoever model for a seastead may not be a libertar- fornia. The attraction for the start-ups is wants it. Individual homes and business ian democracy but an enlightened cor- that they would be able to hire foreign en- premises would be winched aboard on porate dictatorship. gineers and scientists without the hassle of cranes and bolted down. If their owners Sceptics will say that oating pies in the getting work visas for them. don’t pay the rent, they could be lifted out sky are more likely to materialise than Dario Mutabdzija of Blueseed says and replaced. The seastead thus evolves oating cities on the oceans. But the sea- chartering and adapting a cruise ship and nds its way, says Mr Petrie. He has steaders are undeterred. Nobody antici- should cost $15m-50m, depending on its set himself the objective of making the pated the immense variety of uses that size, and the combined rent for a tenant’s cost of living on a seastead not much more would be dreamed up for the internet, Mr living quarters and oce space might be than the average for upper-middle-income Keenan observes, and the same may apply around $2,000 a month, comparable with housing in a typical American city. to the idea of creating colonies on the high costs in Silicon Valley. So far the project is at Linguists quip that a dialect is a lan- seas. As Mr Petrie puts it: All that is lacking the seed-capital stage, working to over- guage without an army and a navy to en- is for the rst one to go into the water and come venture capitalists’ doubts about get- force its status. Theologians likewise say say, ‘Hey, come on in, the water’s ne.’ 7

How the ClubStead might look The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Breaching the body’s defences 11

would have a way of dampening the im- mune system’s ability to detect trans- Getting past the guards planted organs. To do this, they used anti- bodies designed to bind to and thus decommission the molecules on T cells that are used to shake hands with antigen- presenting cells. But recipients of such new organs have to To test the eectiveness of these anti- pay a price. They must take drugs which bodies, the two researchers injected cells Medicine: Researchers are suppress the activity of their immune sys- that belonged to one genetic population of developing a range of cunning temsand thus their propensity to reject mice into the leg muscles of mice from a techniques to smuggle drugs past foreign tissues. Although these drugs keep dierent genetic population. The injected the body’s natural defences them alive, they open their bodies to infec- cells were genetically engineered to glow tion. A better way of subverting the de- when exposed to ultraviolet light, for ease Y ACCIDENT and by design, human fences put up by the immune system of detection. B bodies are hard to break into. They are would thus be welcome. In theory, the immune systems of the surrounded by defensive walls (the skin, Joseph Wu and Jeremy Pearl of Stan- recipients should have rejected the trans- the lining of the gut, the barrier between ford University think they have come up planted cells, and among mice that were the bloodstream and the brain), patrolled with one. Past work on immune rejection not treated with the antibodies this was in- by sentries (the cells and antibodies of the has shown that a group of immune-sys- deed exactly what happened. However, immune system) and lled with mazes, tem cells called T cells play a crucial role in the injected cells remained healthy in ani- such as the intricate network of blood cap- alerting the immune system to the pres- mals that were treated with the antibodies, illaries that connects the arteries to the ence of transplanted organs in the rst and three months after drug treatment had veins, delivering food and oxygen to cells place. Using this insight, Dr Wu and Mr ended these transplanted cells were even as it does so. Pearl focused their attention on disrupting found to be replicating in some of the ani- In a healthy body, all these things are T-cell activity. mals. Most importantly, when the drug- good. But they can be obstructions to the treated mice were later presented with oth- treatment of an unhealthy one. The glam- Disabling the sentries er types of foreign material their immune our of medical science tends to surround For a T cell to become active, it must receive systems responded rapidly. They had not, the process of devising and testing new signals from another part of the immune in other words, been permanently dam- therapies. But a therapy is worthless if it system called an antigen-presenting cell. aged by the antibody treatment. cannot be delivered. Researchers must Antigen-presenting cells collect fragments Having proved that the technique therefore deal with the obstructions that of proteins from foreign bodies (normally works in mice, Dr Wu and Mr Pearl have evolutionunable to anticipate the ad- pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria, now moved on to monkeys. If those tests vances medicine has made in recent but also transplanted organs) and show go well, human trials should follow. But yearshas placed in the way of adminis- these to T cells, in order to tell them what to many mysteries remain. The biggest is tering the therapies they have devised. attack. However, before the alarm can be why the new technique is able to make T One of the greatest advances of the he- sounded in this way, proteins on the sur- cells unresponsive to just the specic tis- roic side of medicine over the past few de- face of the antigen-presenting cell and the sues that are initially transplanted. For rea- cades has been transplant surgery. Some T cell must bind together in what is called a sons that are not yet clear, when the T-cell- 70,000 lives are saved every year by kid- cellular handshake. presenting system is reactivated by the gra- ney transplants, and 30,000 others by Dr Wu and Mr Pearl realised that if they dual disappearance of the antibodies, it no heart, lung, liver and pancreas transplants. could stop the handshake happening, they longer seems to perceive the transplanted 1 12 Breaching the body’s defences The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011

Defences protect a healthy body. But they can be obstructions to the treatment of an unhealthy one.

2 tissue as foreign. A lucky break, then, that fy one that they can attach erythropoietin University, and Vladimir Torchilin, a phar- may make organ transplants easier to carry to. And they think they have succeeded. macist at Northeastern University in Bos- out. However, tinkering with T-cell func- They found what they were looking for in ton, think they have found a way round tion is only a small part of what is being the form of an antibody to a substance this. They blast the drugs into small pieces done to overcome the body’s often-cursed called insulin-receptor protein. This is a with sound waves, then wrap the pieces refusal to be medicated. Doctors are also chain-like molecule that has a cluster of at- up in chemical blankets so that they can- working to devise ways to smuggle drugs oms, called a carboxyl group, at one end of not reform into larger lumps. into the brain. the chain. The researchers found that they The two researchers, along with a team could attach erythropoietin to the carbox- of colleagues, took powdered paclitaxel, Are you member of the club? yl group, and thus to the antibody. camptothecin, resveratrol and tamoxifen In the early 20th century researchers real- And it worksin monkeys, at least. In a and put them in water. They then blasted ised that although simple injections into study on macaques, half were given eryth- each mixture with powerful sound waves the bloodstream could get drugs to most ropoietin on its own and half were given it for up to an hour, to break the drugs up into parts of the body, the brain was almost al- attached to the antibody. Erythropoietin tiny bits. At the beginning of this process, ways an exception. This led to discussion on its own could not, as expected, enter the the drugs were mixed with a solution of of the idea that the brain is protected in a monkeys’ brains. When attached to the positively charged polymers that were ex- special way and to the discovery of what is antibody, however, it was able to cross the pected to wrap around the smashed-up known today as the blood-brain barrier. blood-brain barrier and get to the cells that bits of drug and prevent them from reag- This barrier is the result of unusually would need it in the event of a stroke. gregating. Towards the end of the sonic tight junctions between the cells lining battering, the researchers added a dierent those blood vessels (particularly the capil- Squeezing through the cracks set of polymersnegatively charged ones. laries) that run through the brain. Its role is The blood-brain barrier, of course, is a de- They hoped that these would interact with to be exceedingly picky about what it lets liberate defence, honed by millions of the positive polymers to form a stable through. Glucose and oxygen are permit- years of evolution. Some of the body’s ob- shell. Sure enough, they did. ted to pass quickly and easily, as are a structions to treatment, however, are just The upshot was to reduce the size of the handful of other proteins that are found on accidents. Many drugs, for example, are drug particles as much as a thousandfold the barrier’s exclusive members’ list. Just not properly soluble, and tend to travel from microns to nanometres across. They about everything else, though, including round as lumps of molecules. Such lumps were then small enough to travel through the active ingredients of most medicines, are frequently too large to squeeze through the tiniest blood vessels in the body, and is prohibited from entering. the blood capillaries that carry food and were thus able to penetrate to the very William Pardridge, an endocrinologist oxygen into tissues, and carbon dioxide heart of a tumour. More importantly, the at the University of California, Los Ange- and other waste products out of them. particles did not re-aggregate. Each was les, is trying to change that. He has spent This is particularly true of a number of kept separate from the others inside its years developing ways to breach the barri- anticancer drugs, including paclitaxel, two-layered polymer bubble. er so that medicines can be carried camptothecin, resveratrol and tamoxifen. Initial tests on animals indicate that through it. His latest attempt is intended to When these drugs are crushed and mixed these bubbles (or nanocapsules, as the provide protection against the damage with liquids, they often form clumps in- team calls them) are safe and eective. If caused by strokes. side blood vessels. This clumping tenden- human trials conrm this, it will allow In normal circumstances, when a cy forces doctors to keep doses lower than doses of anticancer drugs to be optimised. stroke takes place, the ow of blood to a would otherwise be desirable, to prevent a And another barrier, both literal and meta- particular section of the brain is cut o. blockage from forming. phorical, to the eective treatment of dis- Starved of glucose and oxygen, brain cells Yuri Lvov, a chemist at Louisiana Tech ease will have been overcome. 7 in this section die, and that part of the brain stops working. In recent years, how- ever, a protein called erythropoietin has been found to behave in a protective man- ner towards brain cells that have been cut o from blood ow. Exactly what it does is something of a mystery, but the result of its presence near brain cells that have been temporarily denied nutrients is that far fewer of them die. Unfortunately, erythropoietin is not on the blood-brain barrier’s membership list, so it has been impossible for doctors to use it as a drug to help stroke patients. Dr Par- dridge and his colleagues have therefore been looking for a way to disguise it as a trusted member of the club, to enable it to gain admission to the brain. They have looked at a number of pro- teins that are on the list and tried to identi- The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Inside story 13

tures this low involves the nicky and ex- pensive process of liquefying helium. As a result, low-temperature superconductors are used only in devices where there is no substitute for their remarkable properties. In MRI a more powerful magnet results in a sharper image and a quicker scan. Helium- cooled superconducting coils, typically made of an alloy of niobium and titanium encased in copper cladding, create magnet- ic elds ten times stronger than similar-size permanent magnets can muster. That is worth paying for, which is why MRI makes up the bulk of the 4.5 billion ($6.1 billion) global market for superconductors, accord- ing to the resolutely named Consortium of European Companies Determined to Use Superconductivity, or Conectus (see chart on next page). Siemens, a German engi- Resistance is futile neering giant and a leading maker of such devices, has seen demand for supercon- ducting MRI machines grow at the ex- pense of the non-superconducting sort. Another niche where powerful super- transfers energy from the electron to the conducting magnets are indispensable is ion, which starts vibrating more vigorous- high-energy physics. The Large Hadron Superconductors: A century after ly as a result. In other words, some electri- Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest particle their discovery, superconductors are cal energy is lost as heat (since the tempera- accelerator, uses a staggering 1,200 tonnes nally moving beyond scientic and ture of a substance is a measure of how of superconducting wire, similar to the medical uses and into power grids furiously its atoms are vibrating). sort used in MRI, in order to speed protons In 1956 Leon Cooper, an American up to within a whisker of the speed of light N 1908 a Dutch physicist, Heike Kamer- physicist, gured out that electrons in a su- and to collide them inside vast detectors, Ilingh Onnes, cooled helium gas to below perconductor avoid this fate by overcom- themselves stued with several hundred its boiling point of -269°C, or just four de- ing their mutual repulsion and pairing up. tonnes of superconducting materials. grees above absolute zero (4K). Three years As a negatively charged electron passes Helium-cooled superconductors like later, exactly a century ago, he observed through a lattice, the ions along its path feel those found in MRI machines and the LHC that when liquid helium was used to chill a slight attractive force and stray as far into cannot, however, compete with ordinary mercury, the metal’s electrical resistance the electron’s wake as the lattice structure copper wire in more pedestrian applica- suddenly vanished, allowing current to lets them. This distorts the lattice, creating tions, like transmission cables, where the ow completely unobstructed. He had dis- a concentration of positive charge. Other advantages of superconductivity do not covered superconductivity. electrons zipping along in the vicinity will merit the enormous costs. But in 1986 The implications seemed nothing short then be drawn to this region and, as a re- Georg Bednorz and Alexander Müller, two of revolutionary. Perfectly ecient electric sult, towards the original electron. researchers at IBM’s Zurich laboratory, dis- cables, more powerful generators and mo- covered that an exotic ceramic material be- tors, magnetic levitation and a host of oth- Pair-shaped haved like a superconductor at 35K. Be- er technological wonders beckoned. Since Normally, the pull of one passing electron cause Dr Cooper’s pairing theory only then most of those early hopes have been on another is drowned out by the ions’ works up to about 30K, some other, as yet dashed. A hundred years on, superconduc- own wriggling. Cool the metal down unexplained mechanism must be at work. tors have found widespread use in just one enough, though, and the wriggling be- Dr Bednorz and Dr Müller’s discovery technology, magnetic resonance imaging comes suciently weak for one electron’s therefore provoked a urry of research. (MRI), which lets doctors peer inside pa- gentle tug to be felt by another and for so- Soon, physicists were cooking up ceramics tients’ bodies. But this may be about to called Cooper pairs to form. Once paired, that superconducted at around 90K. This change, as materials which retain their re- electrons stop behaving like ordinary par- may not sound all that balmy, but it is markable properties at higher tempera- ticles of matter and, together with other above 77K, the boiling point of nitrogen. tures start to be put to work where Kamer- similar pairs, enter a quantum state in Unlike helium, which is extracted from lingh Onnes thought they belonged from which they become oblivious to the ions, natural gas, nitrogen can be readily har- the start: in generating and transmitting and so lose no energy bumping into them. vested from the air, and cooled for a frac- electricity without resistance. Current can then pass through the lattice tion of the price. Electrical resistance arises when the without resistance. Exactly how such high-temperature su- free electrons passing through the rigid The rub is that for Cooper pairs, cool perconductors (HTSs) work remains a mys- ionic lattice of a metal occasionally bump enough means no more than about 30K, or tery, but that has not stopped engineers into its constituent ions. The collision -243°C. The only way to achieve tempera- from trying to exploit them. On paper, 1 14 Inside story The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011

Superconducting cables are likely to take hold rst in crowded cities with little space for new cables.

2 HTSs oer many advantages over conven- cables is scarce and installing new capacity tional copper wires. They can carry ve to Warmer, warmer… is constrained by regulations or landown- 20 times more current in the same unit Global superconductor market, ¤bn ers reluctant to see their backyards dug up. area while reducing the amount of energy Electronics Scientific research Simply rethreading existing infrastructure lost as heat by 75-97% (depending on Large-scale commercial applications* MRI with superconducting wires could signi- whether the current is alternating or di- Market share of high-temperature superconductors, % cantly increase the supply of electricity to rect), even after accounting for all the nitro- power-hungry city dwellers. gen-cooling paraphernalia. Moreover, 7.7 3.8 5 modern copper-based grid systems tend to 2.2 1.5 Catching a second wind be cooled already. This is done either with 4 In the longer term many in the industry are mineral oils, which present a re hazard, or looking to the renewable-energy sector as with sulphur hexauoride, the most po- 3 a source of demand for their supercon- tent greenhouse gas. If nitrogen leaks out, ducting wares. Most wind and solar power by contrast, it simply boils o into the air 2 will be generated in remote places far from from which it was originally extracted. 1 where it is consumed. As these sources of The reason HTSs have not taken hold is power spread, which they are likely to giv- that brittle ceramics are incredibly tricky to 0 en global commitments to cutting carbon spin into exible wires, principally be- 2007 09† 11‡ 13‡ emissions, the electricity they produce will cause their crystals need to be perfectly *Electric-power technologies, magnetic † ‡ need to be carried over vast distances aligned in order for resistance to remain Source: Conectus levitation Estimate Forecast where power losses due to residual resis- low. A decade ago, the only way to do this tance, as much as 7-10% for conventional was to sprinkle the materials into silver vamping the state’s power infrastructure, cables, begin to hurt. tubes, which were then pulled into thin l- explains that the penchant for supercon- HTSs have a role to play in generating aments. The resulting wire was up to 80% ductivity is born of necessity. New York’s electricity, not just transmitting it. Winding silver. This was unsustainable even before dilapidated grid is struggling to keep up superconducting wires into coils would silver prices went through the roof, says with growing demand for electricity from make it possible to build turbine units that Jack McCall of AMSC (formerly American its large, densely populated urban areas. are half the size and weight of conven- Superconductor), the world’s biggest pro- (The state can also tap the local technical tional ones. According to America’s De- ducer of HTS wires. nous of SuperPower, a maker of HTS wire, partment of Energy (DoE), a 10% increase in In the past few years, however, produc- and Brookhaven National Laboratory.) tower height can increase a turbine’s ener- ers have devised clever manufacturing It is in crowded cities that supercon- gy output by a third. Lighter superconduct- techniques which use only a tenth as ducting cables are likely to take hold rst, ing turbines could thus be perched atop much silver as before. Nowadays AMSC according to Mark Blamire, who studies su- higher towers while still being capable of starts by engraving a microscopic pattern perconductor technologies at Cambridge generating tens of megawatts of electricity. onto a sheet of nickel-based metal, to align University. In such places, space to lay new The principal engineering challenge in the crystals. Several buer layers of non- all HTS revolving devices, be they wind- superconducting material are deposited turbines, steam generators or motors, is on top to rene the pattern. Then a coat is that they must be able to withstand forces applied of yttrium, barium and copper, the of up to 5,000G while maintaining a con- metallic elements of YBCO, today’s HTS stant, very low temperature. Moreover, the recipe of choice, along with impurities just ceramics must retain their desirable prop- nanometres (billionths of a metre) across. erties even in powerful magnetic elds. These impurities help tame the magnetic After a successful trial of a 4MW gener- elds caused by current inside the wire, in- ator, Siemens has teamed up with the creasing its capacity. A thin layer of silver Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to de- comes next. Finally, the whole sandwich is sign one capable of churning out several heated in the presence of oxygen, which hundred megawatts. In February the pro- combines with the precursor metals into ject won the support of Germany’s minis- fully edged YBCO. try of economics and technology. Across Techniques like this have helped bring the Atlantic, the DoE recently awarded a the price down by 90% from 1990s levels, $3.1m grant to the University of Houston though it remains ten times higher than and SuperPower and another $1.4m to the that of an ordinary copper cable, which Brookhaven lab, working with AMSC, to sells for $15-25 per kiloamp per metre, the come up with a cost-eective wire tailored industry’s preferred unit. But it is low for a wind turbine. The funds came from a enough to stoke interest. $156m kitty for projects to improve Ameri- New York state has long been at the ca’s energy eciency. forefront of HTS pilot projects, with one The DoE is also exploring another grid wrapped up in Albany, another currently technology: superconducting magnetic running in Long Island and a third being energy storage (SMES). Because current rolled out in New York City. John Love of ows unobstructed through a supercon- NYSERDA, an agency charged with re- Mostly MRI, so far ductor, once it is fed into one, it will contin-1 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Inside story 15

Superconductors have a role to play in generating electricity, not just transmitting it.

2 ue owing for a while without the need to However, these ventures would proba- In February Baiyin, a city in Gansu prov- expend energy to nudge it along. SMES sys- bly not have got o the ground on strictly ince, got a spanking new substation which tems could one day oer an alternative to commercial grounds, and had government sports a full set of superconducting kit: ca- lead-acid batteries as a way to store elec- support. Je Quiram, the boss of Super- bles, a SMES system and an FCL, as well as tricity and manage loads across smart conductor Technologies, another cable- a transformer. grids. But existing SMES prototypes can maker, pins part of the blame for HTSs’ Damien Hampshire, editor-in-chief of only store energy for a few minutes at a slow adoption on utilities’ innate conser- Superconductor Science and Technology, a time. ABB, a Swiss-Swedish conglomerate, vatism. But he is not alone in arguing that it specialist peer-reviewed journal, believes has received $4.2m from the DoE to lead an is also partly the upshot of deregulation of that the future of superconductors lies eort to extend this to an hour. America’s electricity markets, which be- elsewhere still. ITER, a huge experimental Superconductors might be making gan in the late 1990s and led to the disman- fusion reactor being built in France, will their way onto trains, toothough not, as tling of overweening monopolies. Smaller, use 80,000km of low-temperature, heli- many magnetic-levitation acionados had nimbler rms are a boon to consumers. Of- um-cooled superconducting wire to gener- hoped, to replace wheels. With money ten, they are quicker to embrace newfan- ate the immense magnetic elds needed to from the European Union’s Railenergy gled technologies. But they may be less conne the 150 million-degree plasma in project, Siemens is developing an HTS trac- willing to stump up the large sums needed which hydrogen atoms will fuse into heli- tion transformer that, thanks to its com- for projects with a distant and uncertain um, releasing oodles of energy. When the pact size, could t beneath the train’s oor break-even point. project is red up in 2019, its superconduct- rather than occupy bulky compartments. Like Mr Quiram, AMSC’s Mr McCall is ing magnets alone will have accounted for And, weighing 40% less, it would let trains eyeing places like South Korea and China, a third of the 15 billion price tag. go faster while using less energy. whose state-backed monopolies have the But many industry-watchers believe luxury of a longer time horizon, and ap- Drinking the cool aid? that the HTS technology ripest for com- pear more willing to take a punt on innova- Cynics quip that fusion is, like supercon- mercialisation is fault-current limiters tive technologies. In September the Korea ductors only more so, just a few years (FCLs). Fault currents are sudden surges of Electric Power Corporation, which gener- awayand always will be, because the en- power. They can be caused by a short cir- ates almost 90% of the country’s electricity, ergy gleaned from the reactor shows no cuitwhen a cable is struck by lightning or began sending 50MW of power through sign of surpassing the vast amounts need- hit by a falling tree, say. Power grids are superconducting cable at the Icheon sub- ed to keep it going. It is certainly far from as- equipped to handle such eventualities but station near Seoul. The cable was pro- sured that such burn with gain is feasi- this requires ensuring that all kit linked to duced by LS Cable, a South Korean rm. ble. But Dr Hampshire speaks for many them can withstand the spike in the cur- The two companies have since agreed to physicists when he touts fusion as the ulti- rent, often to many times the normal level, deploy 50km of cable in commercial grids mate solution to the world’s energy conun- before circuit breakers kick in several milli- by the end of 2015. Some of the rst batches drum. Whether or not his optimism is jus- seconds later. The circuitry needed to do will be used in a demonstration smart grid tied, superconductivity may yet prove this typically increases a grid’s total imped- being built in Jeju, an island o the south everyone wrong. Its next killer app could ance (the alternating-current equivalent of coast of the Korean peninsula. The Chi- well take everyone by surprise, just as MRI resistance) and reduces its eciency. nese, too, are hopping on the bandwagon. did 30 years ago. 7 Superconducting FCLs, by contrast, are transparent to electricity until the current surges past a critical level. Then, by dint of another fundamental property of super- conductors, they abruptly become resis- tive again, only to go back to business as usual when the surge dissipates. All this happens in a split second, in eect turning superconductors into reusable fuses which, because they rely on the laws of physics, are fail-safe to boot. Fault currents are likely to become a growing problem as smart grids grow in- creasingly complex, with ever more sup- pliers and complicated load management. Earlier this year Siemens, AMSC and Nex- ans, another big cable-maker, successfully tested a superconducting FCL at 115 kilo- volts (kV), the highest voltage yet, demon- strating that such devices could work on transmission lines. (Distribution lines car- ry electricity at below 50kV.) A dual-pur- pose distribution-FCL cable has also been installed as part of a New York HTS pilot called Hydra. Plugging in at last 16 Flywheels The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011

fth. Some industry-watchers are even predicting that ywheels will promptly re- Reinventing the wheel place electric hybrids as the technology of choice for green vehicles. The two approaches to energy saving have much in common. When you step on the brakes in a hybrid electric car such as a weight negated any fuel-eciency savings Toyota Prius, the electric motor that is used they might have brought. That, though, is to drive its wheels runs in reverse as a gen- Transport: After many twists and nally beginning to change. One reason is erator, turning the car’s kinetic energy into turns, ywheels are nding a new that modern ywheels are increasingly be- electrical energy that is stored in its on- role as an ecient way to store ing made of carbon bre, a material much board battery. Step on the accelerator, and energy in hybrid vehicles stronger than steel. This lets them whirr at this energy can be fed back to the motor, over 60,000rpm without falling apart. causing the car to pick up speed again. This OR nearly as long as man has used Carbon bre is not just strong. It is also is called regenerative braking. Fwheels to turn all sorts of energy e- extremely light. But a ywheel’s energy is Flywheels can do a similar thing by act- ciently into motion, he has been perform- proportional to its mass, and proportional ing as a temporary store of energy. But they ing the reverse trick with ywheels. From to the square of its rotational speed. In can do it much more eciently. In electric spindle whorls to steam engines, they hybrids only 35% of the kinetic energy lost have served to harvest and store energy for during braking is retrievable. With y- use in the (immediate) future. Now, they wheels more than 70% is, according to are gearing up to energise hybrid cars. Dick Elsy, boss of Torotrak, another The physics of a ywheel is pretty British rm working on the tech- basic. Take a disk that is free to rotate. nology. That is because regenera- Apply torque and it spins, gaining tive braking converts kinetic momentum in the process. Once energy into electrical energy, the initial torque is taken away, and then into chemical po- the wheel will keep going. tential energy in the battery. Some momentum is subse- Flywheels, by contrast, quently lost to friction on the merely turn one sort of ki- bearings and to air resis- netic energy (of the tance. Whatever remains wheels) directly into an- can be put to work, power- other (of the ywheel), ing whatever gubbins is which is far less wasteful. connected to it. Moreover, unlike bat- A ywheel’s mo- teries, which need to be mentum can be in- replaced every few years, creased either by mak- ywheels are designed to ing it heavier or by last the lifetime of the vehi- getting it to spin fast- cle, and contain no nasty er. In the past y- chemicals which need to be wheels used for more disposed of. Small wonder, ambitious energy-storing then, that carmakers have at last purposes have tended to be begun to sit up and take notice. bulky. That is because at speeds above several thousand Origins of a revolutionary idea revolutions per minute (rpm) the ma- As is often the case with newfangled terials they were made of could disinte- technologies, high-tech ywheels debuted grate. This made them practical for applica- in Formula 1 cars. In 2009 the Fédération tions in which size does not matter much, other words, doubling the mass merely Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the such as balancing loads across power doubles the energy stored, but doubling sport’s governing body, permitted teams to grids. They have only found one wide- the speed quadruples it. Increasing the deploy kinetic-energy-recovery systems spread use in transport: on trains, where speed makes it possible to ramp up a y- (KERS) in cars. The move was intended in they propel some locomotives across gaps wheel’s energy-storage capacity while re- part to show that petrolheads, too, can em- in the power rail. Typically, that calls for ducing its mass and size to something brace environmentally friendly technol- wheels one metre across, weighing over more manageable, says Andy Atkins, chief ogies. But it also injected new vim into ri- 100kgnot counting the hefty casket in engineer at Ricardo, a British company valry on the track, letting drivers boost which they are encased for safety reasons. working on ywheel technology. acceleration in short bursts when trying to There have been attempts to use y- Road tests have shown that, thanks to overtake or avoid being overtaken. wheels on big buses and trucks, but most modern materials and clever design, a y- Some teams plumped for battery- involved devices which were only slightly wheel as small as a hockey puck can re- based KERS akin to those in electric hy- less cumbersome. In smaller cars the extra duce fuel consumption by more than one- brids. A few, though, including Williams, 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Flywheels 17

Flywheels could be a cheap way to make cars more fuel-ecient.

ther than about half a mile on ywheel power alone. That need not be a problem, though, ar- gues Mr Crabb. Flywheels can save fuel in- directly, by providing a speed boost when needed. As a consequence, engines can be smaller and less gas-guzzling without sac- 2 chose to work with y- ricing performance. When Volvo rolls out wheels instead, giving the tech- its rst commercial ywheel hybrid, nology’s image a makeover. No longer around 2015, its KERS should be capable of synonymous with lumbering buses and providing an 80-horsepower boost when locomotives, ywheels were modern and tiny quantities of air leak into the chamber. overtaking, like in Formula 1. high-tech. Firms like Volvo and Jaguar are However, a small vacuum pump evacu- Further down the line, radical ywheel now testing them for use in ordinary cars. ates any stray particles automatically be- designs could provide even more addition- It is not just technological advances that fore they reach a dangerous level; it needs al oomph. Ricardo has simulated a y- make ywheels attractive. The changing to run only once a day for about 90 sec- wheel capable of spinning at a whopping economics of the car industry also plays a onds. Ricardo has taken a dierent tack. To 145,000rpm. This doughnut-shaped y- part, explains Derek Crabb, a senior engi- avoid the added bulk and complexity of a wheel would reach such breakneck speeds neer at Volvo. The Swedish carmaker vacuum pump, its Kinergy system oper- by concentrating most of its mass in the toyed with the idea of introducing y- ates its ywheel in a complete vacuum, us- rim, held in place with a thin carbon-bre wheels in its models in the 1980s. But the ing arrays of permanent magnets: one ar- envelope, leaving most of the ywheel’s technology was immature and reliant on ray in the ywheel’s shaft, the other in a disk hollow. The reduction in ywheel heavy steel, and there was little economic second, external shaft connected to the mass is more than made up for by zippier incentive to pursue it, says Mr Crabb. Back transmission. As one shaft turns its mag- rotation. The design has yet to be tested in then fuel was cheap and no one cared netic eld meshes with that of the other the real worldand might not be any time about carbon-dioxide emissions, agrees shaft like cogs of a gear. soon. So far there is little demand for this Mr Elsy. No longer. On one hand, cash- Then there is the problem of the y- sort of performance, Mr Atkins says. strapped consumers fretting about rising wheel’s constantly changing rotational No matter how fast they rotate, though, petrol prices increasingly want cars with speed. Torotrak solved this problem by de- ywheels will not drive out electric hy- decent fuel economy. On the other, legisla- vising a version of continuously variable brids altogether. Flywheel-based designs tion is forcing carmakers to cut their eets’ transmission, used in gearless electric mo- cannot compete on range with plug-in hy- average carbon emissions. tors. Instead of being locked solidly togeth- brids, which have large battery packs and Meeting those demands with hybrid er, the ywheel and transmission shafts can travel long distances on electric power electric vehicles alone would be costly, ar- are coupled using a viscous uid which al- alone, says Mr Hilton. But the market for gues Jon Hilton, co-founder of Flybrid Sys- lows them to rotate at dierent rates but plug-in hybrids is in its infancy. Flywheel tems, a British maker of KERS technology gently brings them into sync. This ap- hybrids could provide a cheap way to which has been working with the car in- proach has proven very ecient at trans- make cars more fuel-ecient until the dustry to make ywheels available for or- ferring energy, says Mr Elsy. technology of electric vehicles matures. dinary cars. Batteries, electric motors and Finally, despite their assorted advan- Firms like Volvo are hard at work design- complicated control systems are expen- tages over battery-based KERS, ywheels ing future cars to be ywheel-ready. When sive, adding around 6,000 ($8,000) to the do have some drawbacks. They cannot these hit the road they should be no dearer manufacturing cost of a car, says Mr Hil- store energy for as long as batteries. Nor than a run-of-the-mill petrol-powered car. ton. All carmakers lose money on electric can they store as much. Mr Hilton admits Frugal drivers will no doubt rush to take hybrids, he says. That’s why they don’t that the Jaguar prototype would go no far- one for a spin. 7 make many. A ywheel system, by con- trast, costs 1,500. Jaguar has already road- tested a prototype of its XF saloon featur- ing a Flybrid energy-storage system, and says it Volvo hopes to have a prototype by the end of the year. Technical hurdles remain, however. For a start, at 60,000rpm the ywheel’s outer rim is moving at around twice the speed of sound, or over 2,000kph (1,200mph). Un- der such conditions, any air resistance would cause even carbon bre to disinte- grate. So the ywheel has to spin in a vacu- um. That requires transmitting the kinetic energy from outside the vacuum-chamber to the inside, which is no mean feat. Flybrid’s solution is to have a rotating seal. It is not fully impermeable, letting Flywheel hybrids: A prototype Jaguar XF (top) and the Hope Racing LMP1 (above) 18 Brain scan The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Seer of the mirror world

elegant and accessible than existing soft- ware. He had already made a big contribu- David Gelernter, a pioneering tion to the eld of network computing computer scientist, foresaw the with his work on the development of modern internet but thinks Linda, a parallel-programming language computers are still too hard to use that allows programs running on dierent machines to co-ordinate their actions. ROM its very beginnings, the soft- Multiple interconnected computers can Fware industry has suered from then operate as a single, more powerful having too many engineers, says David machine. In 1991Dr Gelernter and his Gelernter, a professor of computer science colleagues at Yale demonstrated the value at Yale University. There are too many of this approach by linking 14 small people who love computers and too few workstation computers to create a clus- who are impatient with them. He blames ter that was as powerful as a supercompu- his fellow technologists for making com- ter, but cost a fraction of the price. This was puters too dicult for non-specialists to a forerunner of the modern cloud com- use eectively. The industry doesn’t grasp puting approach in which rms such as the fundamental lack of sympathy be- Google and Amazon combine thousands tween, conservatively, at least half the or millions of machines to deliver com- population and the software they’re us- puting services. ing. But what about the late Steve Jobs of Apple, who was obsessed with building Clouds on the horizon elegant and easy to use products? He and Linking up machines in this way, Dr Ge- Dr Gelernter ought to have been natural lernter observed at the time, made far allies. One of the many oddities of Dr more ecient use of computing resources Gelernter’s unusual career, however, is and created a foundation for new applica- that they ended up as adversaries instead. tions such as those outlined in Mirror More than two decades ago, Dr Gelern- Worlds. In 1992 the New York Times wrote ter foresaw how computers would be of his vision of a world wired together woven into the fabric of everyday life. In into one giant computer, though it noted his book Mirror Worlds, published in that this scenario was considered a po- 1991, he accurately described websites, tential nightmare by people who worry blogging, virtual reality, streaming video, about computer privacy. tablet computers, e-books, search engines The publicity around Dr Gelernter’s and internet telephony. More importantly, work may explain why Ted Kaczynski, an he anticipated the consequences all this anti-technology terrorist known as the would have on the nature of social inter- Unabomber, decided to target him with a action, describing distributed online letter bomb in 1993. Mr Kaczynski hoped communities that work just as Facebook to foment a worldwide revolution against and Twitter do today. the industrial-technological system and Mirror Worlds aren’t mere infor- sent a series of letter bombs, causing three mation services. They are places you can deaths and many injuries before being ‘stroll around’, meeting and electronically arrested in 1996. The letter bomb sent to Dr conversing with friends or random pass- Gelernter put him in hospital for weeks, ers-by. If you nd something you don’t required him to undergo extensive surgery like, post a note; you’ll soon discover and left him with permanent injuries to whether anyone agrees with you, he his right eye and right hand, which he wrote. I can’t be personal friends with all covers with a glove. Whenever I get to the people who run my local world any feeling a bit morose and missing my old longer, but via Mirror Worlds we can be right hand, I wind up thinking instead impersonal friends. There will be freer, how privileged I am to be an academic in easier, more improvisational communica- computer science, he wrote to his friends tions, more like neighbourhood chatting by e-mail after leaving hospital. In the and less like typical mail and phone calls. nal analysis one decent typing hand and Where someone is or when he is available an intact head is all you really need. won’t matter. Mirror Worlds will rub your The attack prompted Dr Gelernter to nose in the big picture and society may be branch out into new areas beyond com- subtly but deeply dierent as a result. puting. While convalescing he wrote an If his vision was correct, Dr Gelernter acclaimed book about the 1939 New York realised, then new systems would be World’s Fair, and he has gone on to estab- neededand whoever built them would lish himself as a political commentator, art have an opportunity to make them more critic and painter. (He was originally 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 3rd 2011 Brain scan 19

I want the state of each hospital patient to be watched by a million software agents.

2 attracted to computer science because he search feature, its Cover Flow interface for focus on this agent-based approach, some- thought it would be a solid career that displaying album covers in iTunes and its thing today’s internet rms show little would allow him to pursue his love of Time Machine backup software. A coun- interest in pursuing. Google is commer- painting.) At the same time Dr Gelernter tersuit from Apple accused Dr Gelernter of cially successful and dazzlingly imagina- pressed on with his work as a computer hiding prior art relating to his patents and tive but I don’t see what I would like to see scientist. In 1997 he and his colleague Eric misrepresenting his inventorship. from them, or Facebook or Twitter, says Freeman formed a company, also called Dr Gelernter thus found himself at war Dr Gelernter. They’re not turning on their Mirror Worlds, to develop an approach with Jobs, one of the few gures in the imaginations. His new company will called lifestreamsa graphical user computer industry who shared his views also deliver a new incarnation of life- interface intended to replace the windows on the importance of technology being streams, capable of subsuming social and les of conventional computer desk- subservient to users, rather than the other networking, news and multimedia. I’ve tops with an elegant chronological stream way around. Apple has always been added software layers and apps that make of digital objects. interested in the cultural and aesthetic it easy to take any kind of document, Looking like an endless Rolodex, a value of its products over the engineering. object or image and put it in the stream, lifestream would extend from the mo- Steve always saw himself as an artist, he says. I want this to be a publication ment of your birth to the day of your says Dr Gelernter. According to an internal medium, the launch pad for everything death, containing every document, photo, Apple e-mail presented at the trial, Jobs and a copy of everything. message or web page you have ever inter- saw an article about Scopeware in 2001, As ever, Dr Gelernter’s excitement acted withall in a single, searchable was impressed by the idea and suggested about the potential of new technology is stream, and held safely online. Individual that Apple might want to license it. The tempered by frustration that too little items could be shared with other people. two rms met but no deal was done. attention is paid to aesthetic and social When I want to make something public, I factors. A lot of convenience and power ip a switch, and everyone in the world Inversion of fortune could be gained, and a lot of unhappiness, who’s interested sees it, says Dr Gelern- In 2010 a district court in Texas found irritation and missed opportunities avoid- ter. I could also blend millions of other Apple guilty on all counts and awarded ed, if the industry thought about design, streams into mine, with a simple way to Mirror Worlds a stunning $625.5m in instead of always making it the last thing control the ow of information so I’m not damagesthe fourth-biggest patent award on the list, he says. We need more peo- overwhelmed. It would be my personal in history. It was good to be vindicated, ple who are at home in the worlds of art life, my public life and my condential although by that time, I had only a small and the humanities and who are less electronic diary. nancial interest in the verdict, says Dr dident in the presence of technology. If that sounds an awful lot like Face- Gelernter. In research, the capital that There are not enough articulate Luddite, book, the similarities become almost eerie you have is not money in the bank but anti-technology voices. when Dr Gelernter explains how he your reputation. I simply wanted a foot- It is not the sort of thing you expect to hoped to release lifestreams into the note saying that these were Gelernter’s hear from a professor of computer science, world. I wanted the company to build ideas. But in April 2011a federal judge let alone the victim of an anti-technology software for college students, who are overturned the verdict, even while up- extremist. But as well as having foreseen eager early adopters. It would be designed holding the Mirror Worlds patents, ruling the future of computing, over his career Dr not only to eliminate le systems but also that Apple had not infringed them and Gelernter has developed a clear under- to be a real-time messaging medium. should pay nothing. It was like a punch in standing of humans’ conicted relation- Social networking was the most impor- the face, says Dr Gelernter. Mirror Worlds ship with the technology on which they tant aspect of it. Starting with Yale, we is now appealing against this ruling and a increasingly rely. 7 would give it away for free to get under- nal judgment is expected in early 2012. graduates excited about recommending it Given his track record for predicting the future, what is Dr Gelernter working on Oer to readers to their friends, he says. But Mirror Reprints of Technology Quarterly are available Worlds’ investors decided that it would be next? One prediction in Mirror Worlds from the Rights and Syndication Department. better to focus on corporate clients, and remains conspicuously unfullled: his A minimum order of ve copies is required. the result was an organisational tool vision of cyberspace seething with bil- called Scopeware. It sold modestly to a lions of intelligent software agents work- Corporate oer few large American state agencies, but ing on behalf of their human masters. Customisation options on corporate orders of never took o. Mirror Worlds ceased They might monitor news feeds, track 100 or more are available. Please contact us to discuss your requirements. trading in 2004, the same year that Mark local-government decisions or keep an For more information on how to order special Zuckerberg launched Facebook. eye on people’s health via digital sensors. reports, reprints or any queries you may have The story of Mirror Worlds was not I want the state of each hospital patient to please contact: over yet, however. In 2008 the company, be watched by a million agents, says Dr now owned by a hedge fund, revived Gelernter. We can create a software agent The Rights and Syndication Department itself and led suit against Apple for pat- for a particular rare combination of cir- The Economist ent infringement. Between 1996 and 2003, cumstances that happens only once every 26 Red Lion Square London WC1R 4HQ Dr Gelernter and Dr Freeman had generat- 1,000 years but happens to you. The Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8148 ed a number of patents relating to the idea technology exists, he says, but our Mirror Fax +44 (0)20 7576 8492 of lifestreams. These patents, the rm World is uninhabited. It’s like a forest with e-mail: [email protected] argued, were being infringed by several nothing living in it. www.economist.com.rights Apple products, including its Spotlight He plans to form a new company to