An electrode and electrolyte combination developed by Qichao Hu’s SolidEnergy has the potential to improve battery cost-efficiency enough to make electric cars competitive with conventional ones.
One key to SolidEnergy’s battery strategy is the use of high-energy lithium-metal electrodes instead of the graphite ones currently in use in lithium-ion batteries. The lithium-metal electrodes which are used in some specialty batteries now require the use of solid polymers instead of liquid electrolytes to prevent short circuits. The polymers are poor conductors of lithium ions and must be heated to high temperatures to work properly, creating inefficiencies.
Hu has solved that problem by coating his lithium-metal electrodes with a thin layer of special polymer using a conventional process and using a non-flammable ionic liquid for the electrolyte. By eliminating the potential for fires, and the various costly measures used to prevent them, SolidEnergy’s solution cuts dramatically the cost of the materials used to make battery packs and improves their energy efficiency and reduce cost, according to Hu.
He figures that his materials would cost $130 per kilowatt-hour, much less than the estimated $250 to $500 per kilowatt hour for packs in current commercial use. If Hu’s calculation is correct, his innovation would bring the cost of electric vehicles in line with the affordability target set by the Department of Energy.
Hu was an MIT graduate student working in the lab of renowned MIT professor Donald Sadoway when he developed a polymer ionic liquid (PIL) rechargeable lithium metal battery that can operate at room temperature. The feat helped him win the Department of Energy’s 2012 National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition. He was also named to the Forbes list of 30 most important innovators under 30.
Confident that his PIL batteries can be made to be safer, smaller and hold twice as much energy as conventional lithium ion batteries, Hu co-founded SolidEnergy and is serving as its chief technology officer.
In its first round of venture funding SolidEnergy raised $4.5 million. It has already built small batteries that can store 30% more energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries. Hu believes he can achieve a 40% improvement. He sped up the process of developing a working battery by making use of the facilities and expertise of a Boston-area lab of A123 Systems, a firm bought out of bankruptcy by China’s Wanxiang.
The first commercial application of SolidEnergy’s battery technology will likely be for portable electronics like mobile phones. Smaller batteries can be developed within a few years while batteries for electric cars be far more durable and take much longer to develop.
Stanford professor Sachin Katti heads up a company that has developed technology to allow wireless systems to handle twice the bandwidth by doing away with the “self-interference” problem.
Current wireless communications systems can’t send and receive data at the same time because the transmissions interfere with the signals being received. Radio transmitters like cell phone towers, wifi routers, wifi-equipped PCs, cell phones and other wireless broadcasters must either use separate transmit and receive frequencies or rapidly alternate between transmit and receive modes to get around the self-interference problem.
To eliminate this bandwidth waste Kumu Networks, a startup headed by Katti, developed a technique to assess the interference likely to be produced by the transmission and simultaneously generate an off-phase signal to cancel it out. A new cancellation signal is generated for each transmitted data packet, allowing the system to work even for mobile devices whose transmissions cause interference inever-changing configurations due to signals reflecting off constantly changing surroundings.
“This was considered impossible to do for the past 100 years,” notes Katti.
Self-cancellation techniques have been used in the past but not for the kinds of transmissions involved in LTE and wifi for which the signals to be cancelled are five orders of magnitude greater than the signals being received.
Kumu’s technology is one of several that have been developed recently to improve bandwidth efficiency for wireless communications. Others include new ways of encoding data, ultra-rapid shifting of frequencies and software solutions for making more efficient use of the radio spectrum. But Kumu’s technology has impressed enough knowledgeable people to attract $10 million in venture funding from the likes of Khosla Ventures. It has also persuaded a major wireless carrier to conduct trials of the technology early next year.
Sachin Katti is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford. He is one of several among his colleagues and graduate researchers at Stanford who joined to co-found Kumu. He received his PhD in EECS from MIT in 2009. His research focuses on designing and building next generation high capacity wireless networks using techniques from information and coding theory.
USC molecular biologist Qi-Long Ying is closing on the holy grail of stem-cell research by isolating the mechanism that causes some embryonic stem cells to differentiate into specialized cells while allowing others to continue replicating into pluripotent cells.
“My research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanism underlying ES (embrynic stem) cell self-renewal and differentiation,” writes Ying . “When an ES cell divides it can either produce identical copies of itself (self-renewal) or it can produce other more specialized cell types (differentiation) such as neurons. Understanding how an ES cell makes this choice between self-renewal and differentiation is the central challenge in stem cell research.
“We recently identified a novel regulatory pathway that promotes the multiplication of pure populations of mouse embryonic stem cells.”
Ying and his team discovered that in mice Tfcp2|1 is the transcription factor — a protein that controls the switching on and off of genes within a cell — tells ES cells to self-renew. When it prompts the protein beta-catenin to remain within the cell cytoplasm but outside of the nucleus, the stem cell continues to self-renew. When beta-catenin moves into the cell’s nucleus, it begins to differentiate, losing its pluripotence.
The same transcription factor also shows promise as a mechanism for reverting slightly more differentiated epiblast stem cells (EpiSCs) back to the pluripotent ESC state.
“These new findings have allowed us to develop conditions for the efficient propagation of human ESCs, and might also enable us to establish pluripotent stem cells from different species,” said Ying. “This has far-reaching implications for a variety of applied areas of investigation, ranging from manipulating the genomes of agricultural animals to developing stem cell-based therapies for ailments such as Parkinson’s disease or spinal cord injuries.”
Ying plans to build on his findings by pursuing the molecular difference between mouse and human ES cells in order to develop a way to sustain pluripotency in human cells as well.
Ying’s findings were published in September in Nature Communications and in August in EMBO Journal.
Qi-Long Ying is an associate professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC. Prior to USC he conducted a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Edinburgh from 1999 to 2006.
He received his BS in medicine in 1987 from the First Military Medical University in China, his MS and PhD in neurology in 1992 and 1995, respectively, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship from 1995 to 1998, all from Shanghai Medical University.
As Microsoft’s new head of research Peter Lee is betting big on machines that learn in a bid to turn the company into a major player in the increasingly mobile computing universe.
“The smartphone battle isn’t over yet,” Lee insists because he knows that the mobile computing technologies that drive smartphones is becoming increasingly central to all computing.
To give Microsoft the best possible chance to win what will likely be a marathon rather than a sprint, Lee is putting his main bet on what most tech experts see as the holy grail of all computing — computers that can teach themselves how better to serve their users.
“Machine learning is the really big one,” he recently told Technology Review. “It is our number one investment. We think we’re well within reach of solving speech recognition, making a big dent in translation, and devices that see and hear with capabilities approaching human ones. So, for example, a camera could understand what is being said and what it is looking at. A photo could include this extra information. Or [a phone] could look at a plate of food and understand what it is, to help your diet and monitor your health.”
To give machines the capability to learn on their own, even superior to those possessed by their users, Lee is committed to endowing them with superhuman sensing capabilities. For example, his team devised a nine-microphone array capable of tuning into a single voice in noisy environment. That was ultimately evolved into a four-mike array that made its way into the Kinect motion-sensing controller for the Xbox360 video game console.
“Now if you use a Kinect and wave your hand, the microphone array will focus on your mouth and you can control it with speech, in a noisy environment, without yelling,” Lee explains.
Another example of Lee’s focus on machines that learn is the keypad on the Windows phone which is generally considered to be superior to those of both the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S line.
“The soft keyboard technology in the Windows phone… is able to learn where your fingers actually type — depending on the word, and even on the sentence,” he says. “That’s the reason why typing feels like it’s working better than it does on the iPhone.”
Another long-term research commitment Lee sees as key to Microsoft’s bid to overtake the competition is quantum computing — a field that remains largely theoretical today, with rudimentary encoding applications that stretch the concept of “quantum”.
“I predict that within five years, there will be a Nobel Prize related to quantum computing, for the basic science and physics of the ability to encode and compute using quantum effects,” Lee says. “These are becoming technologies that will be the equivalent of a transistor for a new age. And it will help with other major efforts in security and privacy.”
Lee will have to hit the mark in all those areas if Microsoft is to expand its share of the mobile operating systems market from the puny 4% it currently holds, less than a tenth of Android and about an eighth of iOS. But he’s in charge of the software giant’s immense resources which include 1,100 researchers and engineers in 13 labs around the world. The pending takeover of Nokia will add much to the company’s mobile computing resources. In his quest to secure a bigger piece of the mobile computing universe for Microsoft Lee is literally limited only by his imagination.
Lee’s official title is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research which puts him at the head of the software giant’s worldwide research operations. Prior to that he headed up the firm’s US research operations which comprises seven labs employing over 500 researchers, engineers and support personnel. He had joined Microsoft in 2008 as Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director of the Microsoft Research Redmond Lab.
Prior to coming to Redmond Lee worked for the US government’s highly secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he founded and directed an office supporting research in computing and related areas in the social and physical sciences. While there he turned DARPA onto the power of social networks by implementing the DARPA Network Challenge in which millions of people worldwide were mobilized to hunt for red weather balloons as part of an experiment in social media and open innovation.
Before DARPA Lee headed up the nationally top-ranked computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University as well as serving as the university’s vice provost for research. At CMU he conducted research in software reliability, program analysis, security, and language design. He achieved prominence there for his role in developing proof-carrying code techniques for enhanced software security. He also worked on programming for large-scale modular robotics systems and shape analysis for C programs.
Lee has made policy contributions to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is also a member of both the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and the Advisory Council of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation.
Lee earned his BS in math and computer science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before earning a PhD in computer and communication sciences from that university.
UCLA professor James Liao has devised a potentially revolutionary technique to genetically modify micro-organisms to produce 50% more biofuels while eliminating carbon-dioxide emissions.
Currently biofuels are made by letting yeast bacteria feed on corn or other biomass in order to convert the sugar to ethanol. The problem is that this process wastes a third of the carbon in the sugar releasing them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Not only does this waste a third of the energy, its greenhouse gas production offsets much of the value of using biofuels. This limitation has prevented biofuels from being able to compete with gasoline and natural gas.
“Anytime you use fermentation, you lose one-third of the carbon to carbon dioxide,” said UCLA chemical and biomolecular engineering professor James Liao. “We can retain that carbon, reduce the carbon footprint of ethanol production, and make more money.”
Liao implanted genes taken from various organisms into E. coli bacteria to produce a strain capable of converting biomass efficiently into ethanol. But he believes the same genetic engiineering technique can be used with other organisms, including yeast.
To help with these genetically engineered organisms make full use of the carbon in biomass sugar, Liao also had to supply them with extra hydrogen. At the moment natural gas is the cheapest source of free hydrogen though it releases some carbon dioxide. Another cleaner albeit more expensive source would be hydrogen released by using solar energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.
The next hurdle for Liao would be to show that bacteria can be engineered in large enough quantities to be used in commercial-scale biofuel production.
Liao received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He then worked as a research scientist at the Eastman Kodak Company before joining the UCLA engineering department in 1997. For his extensive work in using bio-engineered bacteria to produce fuel more efficiently he was recently inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, an elite honor society with fewer than 70 members.
Liao’s work also includes turning exhaust and other greenhouse waste gases into fuel by reacting them with bacteria and sunlight. He has also converted protein into fuel as a potential solution to the problems of obesity. Liao has said his ultimate research goals are to use biochemical methods to replace petroleum processing and to treat metabolic diseases.
Stanford researcher Zhenan Bao has proven out a new way to to make ultra-efficient transistors using ribbons of single-atom-thick graphene.
First discovered in 2004, graphene is a single-atom thick carbon material that can conduct electricity much faster than silicon. That property has made it a promising material with which to make microscopic transistors that make up super-efficient processor chips. The problem has been graphene’s lack of a sufficient bandgap — the difference in resistance between a transistor in its “on” and “off” states. This lack of bandgap allows too much current leak to make graphene a practical substitute for silicon.
Bao and her team set out to exploit recent theoretical and experimental evidence suggesting that graphene fashioned into ribbons less than 10 nanometers wide will possess sufficient bandgap to be used as transistors.
The problem is in fabricating such thin strands of graphene and positioning them precisely enough on a silicon substrate to become the circuitry of a processor chip. Bao decided to use DNA to achieve what has heretofore seemed impossible.
Her team began by spin-coating a silicon substrate with a solution containing bundles of double-stranded DNA. By adjusting the solution’s buffer Bao was able to control the thickness and length of the strands, ultimately producing thin DNA bundles up to 20 micrometers long and aligning them on the substrate.
The team infused the DNA strands with copper ions, then heated them at very high temperatures together with methane and hydrogen gases. The copper ions served as the catalyst causing the depositing of 10-nanometer-wide ribbons of graphene formed from carbon that had made up the DNA and methane. The ribbons aren’t perfect, Bao notes, as some regions have more than a single layer of carbon atoms and may more strictly be called “graphitic”.
Nevertheless the team showed a way to create graphene ribbons thin enough to possess sufficient bandgap, and to deposit them in precise formation onto a substrate — the fundamental requirements needed to produce computer chips. The team’s success “opens up a new path” to a method for manufacturing graphene transistors and circuits on a large scale, said Bao.
Zhenan Bao is a professor of chemical engineering and material science at Stanford. She received her PhD in chemistry in 1995 from the University of Chicago before joining the Bell Labs materials research department. She joined the Stanford University faculty in 2004. Bao currently has about 285 refereed publications and 65 US patents.
Her team’s study on using DNA to form graphene transistors was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Shinichiro Imai of the Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) has led a study that identifies the brain region in which a specific protein can trigger a delay in the onset of the aging process.
Imai’s team based its study on a long line of mouse research suggesting that calorie-restricted diets increase the production of a protein called Sirt1 which appeared to extend life spans.
In an effort to ascertain the location of the mechanism responsible for extending life spans, the Imai study used two types of mice genetically modified to overproduce the Sirt1 protein. One type overproduced the Sirt1 protein in body tissues while the other type, known as BRASTO, overproduced the Sirt1 protein only in the brain.
“We found that only the mice that overexpressed Sirt1 in the brain had significant lifespan extension and delay in aging, just like normal mice reared under dietary restriction regimens,” said Imai. “They were free to eat regular chow whenever they wished.”
Despite the lack of any dietary restriction the BRASTO mice showed marked improvements in their skeletal muscle and a dramatic increase in physical activity, body temperature and oxygen consumption compared with mice not genetically engineered to overproduce Sirt1 in their brain. The BRASTO mice also slept more deeply.
Most importantly, the life spans of the BRASTO mice increased 16% for females and 9% for males, the equivalent of 8 to 14 years for humans. Another significant difference noted among the BRASTO mice was a delay in deaths due to cancer.
“What we have observed in BRASTO mice is a delay in the time when age-related decline begins,” noted Imai, contradicting popularly-held beliefs about the impact of Sirt1 overproduction. “So while the rate of aging does not change, aging and the risk of cancer has been postponed.
“In our studies of mice that express Sirt1 in the brain, we found that the skeletal muscular structures of old mice resemble young muscle tissue,” said Imai. “Twenty-month-old mice (the equivalent of 70-year-old humans) look as active as five-month-olds.”
Imai’s team traced Sirt1’s impact on aging to the hypothalamus, specifically the dorsomedial and lateral hypothalamic nuclei, and identified genes related to those areas that respond to elevated levels of the Sirt1 protein by sending nerve signals that delay the onset of the aging process.
“We found that overexpression of Sirt1 in the brain leads to an increase in the cellular response of a receptor called orexin type 2 receptor in the two areas of the hypothalamus,” said Akiko Satoh, a postdoc in Imai’s lab who served as the study’s first author.
“We have demonstrated that the increased response by the receptor initiates signaling from the hypothalamus to skeletal muscles,” she said. but noted that the team hasn’t yet discovered the signaling mechanism that delays aging of the skeletal muscle.
The results of the study has encouraged Imai to believe that they may soon be able to pinpoint and ultimately manipulate the brain’s “control center of aging and longevity” in order to preserve youth and extend life spans in mammals other than mice. Success in that pursuit would be tantamount to the discovery of a fountain of youth.
The results of his team’s study were published in the September 3 issue of Cell Metabolism.
Shinichiro Imai is an associate professor in WUSM’s departments of developmental biology and medicine and a noted expert in aging research. He obtained his MD and a PhD from the Keio University School of Medicine in 1995. He taught at Keio until 1997, then conducted postdoctoral fellowship in the biology department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1997 to 2001. From then until 2008 he served as an assistant professor in WUSM’s Department of Developmental Biology before becoming an associate professor there.
Imai has received many awards and honors in the field of aging research, including the Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar in Aging Award (2008-2012), the Longer Life Foundation Pilot & Feasibility Award (2008-2010), the WUSM 2008 Distinguished Investigator Award, and the Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging (2007-2008).
UC Berkeley researcher Daniel Nomura has discovered how to stop the growth of malignant cancer cells by disabling an enzyme critical to the formation of a protein essential to cancer growth.
Nomura’s team succeeded in stopping the growth of malignant cancer tumors in mice by injecting them with a compound that disables an enzyme called AGPS which is critical to the formation of ether lipid. Ether lipids are fatty molecules that reside in cell membranes and provide the nourishment to feed the rapid growth of cancerous tumors.
The team began the study by injecting mice with cancerous skin cells and aggressive breast cancer cells to induce malignant tumors. Once the tumors were well established the team injected the mice with a compound that disables AGPS. The compound proved effective in completely suppressing tumor growth though it wasn’t able to do so in culture.
The role of ether lipids in cancer growth has been suspected since the 1950s but Nomura’s team is the first to show that the protein is essential to the proliferation of cancerous cells. Noting that ether lipids exist in benign tumors in lower levels, Nomura hopes to show that blocking AGPS will prevent the tumors from turning malignant.
Nomura’s team is now seeking to develop a drug that safely targets AGPS in humans.
“Certainly I don’t think the AGPS inhibitor is the cure for every cancer, but it would probably be combined with other chemotherapeutic agents,” says Nomura.
Daniel Nomura received both his BA and PhD at UC Berkeley, then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
Nomura’s study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Johns Hopkins molecular biologist Se-Jin Lee made the discovery that has inspired a class of drugs whose likely abuse will unleash the potential for massive muscle development with little effort.
In 1992 Korean American genetics researcher Se-jin Lee led a Johns Hopkins team that discovered myostatin, a protein present in muscle tissue. Within five years it was able to show that the presence of myostatin limits the division of muscle cells, both prior to birth and after birth.
By knocking out the gene that codes for myostatin, Lee’s team bred mice that quickly developed two or three times the skeletal muscle mass of ordinary mice. Strikingly, the loss of the gene had no impact on non-skeletal muscles like the heart or the intestines, enabling the breeding of otherwise healthy farm animals that could develop far larger quantities of meat.
Lee’s discovery also prompted a search for myostatin inhibitors that might help victims of muscle-wasting diseases like muscular dystrophy, cancer or kidney disease, or even those suffering from muscle atrophy caused by inactivity following severe injuries.
Now several statin-blocking drugs are set to receive FDA approval. Their imminent arrival on the market is seen as heralding a new era of abuse of performance-enhacing drugs by athletes and body-builders. A similar phenomenon occurred after the release of the anemia drug EPO which promotes the production of red blood cells. Lance Armstrong heads up the long list of athletes known to have abused EPO to enhance athletic performances. HGH is another growth-factor drug that has been abused by legions of athletes, including Alex Rodriquez.
Observers speculate that once bodybuilders get a glimpse of the super-beefy Belgian Blue Bulls, a variety of beef cows bred to lack the myostatin gene, they will swarm to the new myostatin inhibitors.
Lee himself recognizes the huge potential for abuse of myostatin inhibitors.
“You only have to look at those mice for 10 seconds to realize not only the potential to treat patients, but also the potential for abuse,” he said, referring to the muscular mice bred by his laboratory to lack the myostatin gene.
“When you get rid of the myostatin gene entirely, you see more muscle fibers, and then you get bigger muscle fibers.”
Se-Jin Lee received his bachelors degree in biochemistry from Harvard before going to Johns Hopkins for his MD and a PhD in molecular biology and genetics. Upon graduation he served as a staff associate at Carnegie Institution’s department of embryology before returning to Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor in 1991. He became an associate professor in 1997 and is currently a full professor.
IBM researcher Dharmendra S. Modha has led the development of TrueNorth, a radically new computing architecture that mimics the efficiency and cognitive capabilities of the human brain.
“It doesn’t make sense to take a programming language from the previous era and try to adapt it to a new architecture,” explained Modha. “It’s like a square peg in a round hole. You have to rethink the very notion of what programming means.”
As part of its pioneering work toward developing more brainlike computing, in 2011 IBM researchers had unveiled chips that use a network of “neurosynaptic cores” to mimic the way neurons work. TrueNorth is the scheme they devised to task those chips for specific cognitive tasks like a visual sensor that can process images the way the human brain does.
To do that TrueNorth distributes the processing of information into vast numbers of parallel paths in the manner of the brain’s neurons and synapses. This is a radical departure from the conventional Von Neumann architecture in which information is retrieved from storage and processed in a single sequence, or at most, in a small number of sequences.
But powerful computers using a massive number of neurosynaptic cores remains theoretical at this point. So a key intermediate step toward their development is using a conventional supercomputer to simulate the functioning of a brainlike machine. Modha’s team has developed software that uses a conventional supercomputer to simulate the functioning of a brainlike machine with 100 trillion virtual synapses and 2 billion neurosynaptic cores in a single massive network.
The simulated neurosynaptic computer is made up of many cores, each with its own network of 256 “neurons” that mimic biological neurons. Each one develops its own response times and firing patterns to process input from neighboring neurons, unlike conventional processors that run at a fixed speed.
The cores are programmed with corelets that determine the basic functioning of a network of neurosynaptic cores. Individual corelets can be nested into more complex networks “like Russian dolls”, says Modha. Each of TrueNorth’s 150 corelets are pre-designed for a specific cognitive function like detecting motion or sorting images.
Mimicking the brain would allow computers to solve problems that would require them to learn, cope with ambiguity, infer relationships and make predictions the way intelligent human beings do.
One contemplated use of TrueNorth is to develop systems that can mimic the human visual processing power to create a visual sensor sophisticated enough to provide intelligent input to self-driving vehicles or robots built to rescue people from burning buildings, for example.
Dharmendra Modha founded IBM’s Cognitive Computing group at IBM Research – Almaden. As the principal investigator for DARPA SyNAPSE team globally he leads a global team across neuroscience, nanoscience and supercomputing to build a computing system that emulate the brain’s perception, cognition and decision-making powers.
Modha received a bachelors in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from UC San Diego.
