Cracking Cancer's Secret Code: Oncologist Searches for Breast Cancer’s Achilles’ Heel

Triple-negative breast cancer has been defined by what it is not, but Dr. Jennifer Pietenpol and her team has identified six different subtypes of the disease.

Over the last decade, oncologist Jennifer Pietenpol has been trying to decode and kill a difficult-to-treat type of breast cancer. Known as triple-negative breast cancer, this form of the disease can be highly aggressive and resistant to chemotherapy.

The cancer, which accounts for 10 to 20 percent of all breast cancers in the United States, is also a deadly genetic riddle that doctors find easiest to describe in terms of what it is not. “Between 75 to 85 percent of breast cancers express one of three clear targets for therapy,” says Pietenpol, who runs the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tenn. “But with triple-negative cancer, there is nothing to attack and patients go into a standard of care that involves combinations of chemotherapy that have been determined by experiment. We felt that in this era of precision medicine, we should get a better handle on the treatment.”

Pietenpol and her team have collected and analyzed more than 600 cases of triple-negative breast cancer so far, and their results have defined six biological subtypes of the disease. This breakthrough could help scientists apply existing drugs and procedures to attack the cancer, develop new ones, and map out treatment.



Last year, GE’s Healthymagination Challenge, an open innovation quest that seeks to find and fund the best new ideas in breast cancer detection and treatment, gave Pietenpol’s team $100,000 to finance more science. “We are beginning to get that molecular information from an individual patient’s tumor,” she says. “This is helping us guide therapy and align it with patients. Every bit of additional funding helps to accelerate this further.”

Doctors divide breast cancer into four groups, based on what is driving tumor growth. The vast majority of breast cancers use the estrogen receptor, the progesterone receptor or the HER2 pathway for growth. “When we see this, we can apply existing therapy, like Tamoxifen,” Pietenpol says.

Her research group and other teams are now looking for similar tools and targets to destroy the fourth type of breast cancer, triple-negative cancer. “Our task is to understand how these tumor cells grow, find their Achilles’ heel, and how we can hit it,” she says.

Pietenpol starts by looking at the different pathways the tumor cells appear to use to signal growth, pairs that information with genetic data about how the cells mutate and then tests the hypotheses in her lab. “In cancer, we want to move to predictive oncology where we can use molecular information to better guide treatment,” she says.

Pietenpol’s team has already pinned six unique targets to triple-negative cancer’s back. One of them, an androgen receptor, could expose as many as 10 percent of triple-negative cancer cases to attack. But additional targets will likely be smaller. “As we go more into precision medicine, the fraction of people with any given molecular subtype will get smaller and smaller,” she says. “This is where we are going, using much more precision therapy where no two tumors are going to be alike.”

Pietenpol’s team has started designing clinical trials for each of the six subtypes. She says that “androgen-receptor antagonists” used for treating prostate cancer could be effective against the androgen receptor subset her team discovered. “We are continuing to accelerate this, but we have a lot of work to do,” she says. “We’ve just begun to uncover these lower hanging fruits.”

Applied Science: Futuristic Microfactories Bring Next-Gen Jet Engines to Life

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So you’ve developed a revolutionary new material that could take hundreds of pounds off a jet engine and save millions in costs, but now what? “We invent these fantastic new technologies and processes, but then we have to navigate the challenges that come with effectively scaling them up for production,” says Robert McEwan, general manager for new product introduction at GE Aviation.

That’s why McEwan’s business together with GE Global Research set up a cluster of manufacturing boot camps designed to get innovations in shape for mass production. They call them “microfactories” and the facilities are already working on technologies ranging from advanced composites to robotics and 3-D printing. “The purpose of these microfactories is to bridge the gap between investment and production,” McEwan says. “When we plan to introduce a new technology into our engines, we need to make sure that we have the right equipment, the right processes and the right people to produce it, scale it, and make it mature.”

Tom Mantkowski leads the turbine airfoil microfactory in Cincinnati, Ohio, and his team developed a new way to drill a complex system of cooling holes in the twisting blades of jet engine turbines. The team designed the process, started running samples of 150 parts, and over several months brought “first-time yield” to 90 percent. At that point they moved the manufacturing equipment to the production plant. “We have a lot of front end capabilities that manufacturing shops do not,” Mantkowski says. “When we’re working on new technologies, we can bridge the gap between development and manufacturing.”

Traveling Light: GE Composites Give Brand New Airbus Jet a Lift

GE has started building an advanced composites plant that will supply lightweight wing components for one of the world’s most innovative passenger planes, the Airbus A350. The jet had its maiden flight on June 14, on the eve of the Paris Airshow.

GE Aviation traditionally makes high-end composites for next-generation jet engines like the GEnx and the LEAP. But the A350 will be the first passenger jet using advanced GE composites inside its structure.

GE is building the new $50 million, 100,000 square-foot composites plant in Hamble, U.K., near Southampton. Workers at the plant will use an advanced manufacturing method that combines vacuum and heat to harden the composite wing components. Engineers call this method “out-of-autoclave” because it skips a step that involves a kind of giant pressure cooker ovens called autoclaves to manufacture the parts.

GE will make the fixed trailing edge on each of the A350’s wings. The plane made its maiden flight on June 14 in Toulouse.
Photo credit: Airbus

The technology will allow the plant to accelerate and simplify production, and allow GE Aviation to deliver 13 sets of the wing components per month by 2017.

Each set contains more than 3,000 deliverable components, mostly carbon fiber composite panels but also machined aluminum alloy rib assemblies and fittings.

The components form the fixed trailing edge on each of the plane’s wings, which span more than 200 feet. John Savage, a senior engineer at GE Aviation, said that the new technology was “a major technological breakthrough in lowering the cost of composites manufacturing”. It will help GE meet “the demand for a rapid ramp up and high volume production, early product maturity together with high performance, and reduced environmental impact,” Savage said.

Airbus said that over 70 percent of the A350’s air frame was made from "advanced materials, combining 53 percent of composite structures with titanium and advanced aluminum alloys.”

There are three versions of the A350 twin-engine jet capable of holding from 250 to more than 400 passengers. Airbus has already secured over 670 orders for the next-generation aircraft. First deliveries of the plane are expected in 2014.

Hey! You! Get Onto My Cloud: GE Moves Big Machines to the Cloud

Utility bills, electronic airline tickets and medical records already live in massive data centers we’ve come to call “the cloud,” putting them never farther away than our fingertips. But GE said today it would start moving far more complex machine data to the cloud and build the first big data and analytic platform robust enough to manage the torrent of information generated by turbines, jet engines, medical scanners and other technology.

GE has partnered with Amazon Web Services, which pioneered the development of the cloud ‑ and coined its name ‑ to broaden GE's data software and analytical offerings. GE also expanded its partnerships with Accenture and Pivotal to develop new Industrial Internet services and deploy new high-volume machine data management software based on the powerful Hadoop open-source framework.

Werner Vogels, Amazon's chief technology officer said that GE's "domain expertise" combined with Amazon's global infrastructure, services, and big data expertise "will help enable customers to solve problems in ways we haven’t even imagined yet, such as improved accuracy in healthcare treatments or extreme levels of energy efficiency.” Paul Maritz, Pivotal's CEO, said that Pivotal and GE shared "a vision for a common platform that is cloud-agnostic and based on modern, scale-out technologies, and does it all at speeds faster than what was previously possible."

Jeff Kelly, a big data analyst with the Wikibon Project, said that new research by his firm found that an industrial strength cloud environment "needs to meet the challenges of integrating large volumes of machine data with data from other sources while executing near real-time analytics." Kelly said that GE had "both the Industrial Internet technology and the deep expertise across healthcare, energy, transportation and aviation" and was "well positioned ... to develop and deliver software and services capable of scaling and delivering meaningful insight and action from complex industrial data."



The GE "machine cloud" technology will undergird the Industrial Internet, a robust data network designed to bring machines into the digital age, equip them with sensors and software, and use the data they generate to make customers more efficient.

“GE’s industrial-strength platform is the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity, but the next era of computing,” said Bill Ruh, vice president of GE’s Global Software Center. “The ability to bring machines to life with powerful software and sensors is a big advancement - but it is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand and put machine-based data to work in real-time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data. We are building an ecosystem with partners to save money for our customers and unlock new value for society.”

The new cloud technology will work together with GE’s “Predictivity” services and technologies like Grid IQ, AgileTrac and Taleris, which customers like Mount Sinai Hospital, Etihad Airways and Norfolk Southern have tapped to manage and operate their medical machines, planes and trains.

Two new research papers from the Wikibon Project say that industries have been slower than enterprises to take advantage of the cloud because industrial big data has unique requirements and managing this data requires enormous computing power. Wikibon found that industrial data will grow at two times the rate of any other big data segment within the next ten years, and that companies will spend more that $500 billion by 2020 to handle and analyze this growing avalanche of bits moving with increasing speed. Wikibon estimates that the Industrial Internet could create $1.3 trillion in new value by the end of the decade by improving productivity and efficiency.

Brains for Planes: Etihad Taps Big Data to Keep Planes on Time

Etihad Airways, the United Arab Emirates’ flag carrier, will tap the Industrial Internet and use sophisticated software to harvest and analyze gigabytes of data generated by hundreds of sensors working inside its planes. The tools will allow Etihad to monitor planes in real time, reduce fuel costs, manage plane maintenance, and even spot problems before they happen.

The Industrial Internet is a robust network of computers, machines and sensor that combines connectivity with advanced software analytics and low-cost sensing. It has the potential to save customers ranging from airlines to hospitals and oil companies billions by making them more efficient.

Werner Rothenbaecher, Etihad’s senior vice president for technical issues, said that “the advanced capabilities of the service" will help Etihad "to make rapid and informed decisions in relation to maintenance, while gaining technology leadership in diagnostics and prognostics health monitoring. With Taleris’ prognostics, we will be able to predict future faults and take proactive measures which result in less unscheduled disruptions to our global operations.”

GE Aviation and Accenture launched Taleris in 2012. The joint-venture provides airlines and cargo carriers with tools to predict, prevent and recover from operational disruptions like those caused by severe weather. “The aircraft is clearly the airline’s biggest and most important asset,” said Andy Heather, vice president of engineering at Taleris. “Traditionally, however, the aircraft has not been well connected into the airlines’ digital systems, operations and maintenance to the same degree, leaving significant potential value unrealized.”

Big data and the Industrial Internet will help keep Etihad Airways planes on time.

Heather said Taleris’s approach to optimizing aircraft systems and predicting maintenance takes advantage of the hundreds of sensors already present inside new planes. “Most modern aircraft already have many thousands of parameters flowing around their digital networks,” he said. “Our goal is to integrate the aircraft data in a broader environment with the rest of the airline IT.”

The analytical tools from Taleris will help Etihad’s fleet of advanced Boeing and Airbus planes keep their engines and other mechanical systems in the best working order, burn fuel more efficiently, and repair parts before they fail. The system will also help Etihad hold down maintenance cost, reduce operational downtime and lower the chance for passengers to encounter unexpected equipment maintenance-related delays.

The FAA estimates that delays cost airlines more than $8.3 billion in 2010. But Taleris president and CEO Norm Baker said that "significant benefits can be realized through our predictive analytics technologies which leverage an aircraft’s data within the context of the operations so one can address an issue before it occurs.”

The Right Stuff: New GE Advanced Manufacturing Plant to Make Next-Gen Ceramic Parts for Jet Engines

Parts from ceramic composites will serve inside next-generation jet engines like the LEAP.

People have been using ceramics to store food, drink tea, and tile their homes for millennia. But GE engineers recently upped the ante and started putting high-grade ceramics inside jet engines.

Their version is a light super material that combines silicon with ceramic-coated silicon carbide fibers. It is tough enough to take the heat and forces inside a roaring jet engine and outperform even the most advanced alloys, and light enough to shave hundreds of pounds off a jet engine. “We are pushing ahead in materials technology, which gives us the ability to make jet engines lighter, run them hotter, and cool them less,” says GE Aviation manufacturing executive Michael Kauffman. “As result, we can make the engines, and the planes they’ll power, more efficient and cheaper to operate.”

GE is said today that it would invest $125 million and build a new 125,000 square-foot advanced manufacturing plant in Asheville, N.C., to make parts from the new material, called ceramic matrix composites, or CMCs.

The first products will be stationary high pressure turbine parts for the next-generation LEAP jet engine manufactured by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Safran. But CMCs, which weigh a third of metal alloys, could also find applications as light-weight turbine blades, rotors, and other parts. “When you start thinking about design, the weight savings multiplier effect is much more than three to one,” Kauffman says. “Your nickel-based superalloy turbine disc does not have to be so beefy to carry all those light blades, and you can slim down the bearings and other parts too because of a smaller centrifugal force. It’s just basic physics.”

Engineers at GE Global Research and GE Aviation’s pilot-scale production facility in Delaware developed the material over the last 20 years. They also designed the machines that manufacture CMCs. Pending final approval from the state of North Carolina, the Asheville facility would be the first of its kind in jet propulsion.

GE plans to use the Delaware facility to apply the highly engineered ceramic coatings onto silicon carbide fibers and then incorporate the fibers into flexible sheets together with polymers and other composite matrix materials. Workers in North Carolina will then cut the sheets into shapes, put them inside molds and compact them in giant pressure cookers called autoclaves, which make the parts take their form.

The parts then travel inside a hot oven that “burns out” the polymers and leaves a porous lattice made from the ceramic-coated silicon carbide fibers in the shape of the desired part.

A hot oven “burns out” polymers and leaves a porous lattice made from ceramic-coated silicon carbide fibers in the shape of the desired part.

The workers then melt silicon on top of the lattice and let the silicon wick its way into the shell’s nooks and crannies. “The ceramic coating the fiber is the secret sauce,” Kauffman says. “It allows us to use a relatively simple process to get really good infiltration.”

Finally, the workers will use hard diamond grinders to get the desired part dimensions. “We often use ceramics as metal cutters, so we had to go to one step beyond, to diamond,” Kauffman says. “This is a new process. We generally don’t cut anything as hard as CMCs.”

The company completed design freeze on the first two versions of the LEAP engine in June 2012. The first full LEAP engine, a LEAP-1A for the Airbus A320neo, is on schedule to begin ground testing in September of this year.

Boeing estimates that the world aircraft fleet will double in size over the next 20 years to some 40,000 planes. Much of the growth will come from single-aisle next-gen planes like the A320neo, Boeing’s the 737 MAX, and COMAC’s C919, the LEAP’s target market. CMCs will also serve inside the new GE9X engine selected by Boeing for its future 777X aircraft program.

Southwest, Lion Air, AirAsia, Virgin America, Quantas and dozens of other airlines have already placed orders for more than 4,500 LEAP engines.

GE estimates that the new plant, along with plant and equipment upgrades across GE’s facilities in North Carolina, could create 240 new jobs by 2017.

How to Build a Man of Steel: Genius Man and the Amazing Physics of Superheroes

A few years ago, physics professor James Kakalios took a playful detour from the lab and the classroom and published The Physics of Superheroes, an engaging explainer of the natural laws and forces driving the amazing feats of Superman, Spider-Man, Magneto and dozens of other heroes and villains. “Reading classic and contemporary superhero comics books now, with the benefit of a Ph.D. in physics, I have found many examples of the correct description and application of physics concepts,” Kakalios writes. “Of course, nearly without exception, the use of superpowers themselves involves direct violations of the known laws of physics, requiring a deliberate and willful suspension of disbelief.”

But what if you could create a superhero that wields amazing powers that remain in the realm of the possible? Scientists at GE Global Research gave it some thought and came up with Genius Man. The strapping fellow sports a protective suit made from a super-strong ceramic composite and “invinci-guard” that shields him from titanic pressures and extreme heat. He also has a powerful laser that can cut through an inch-thick steel at a single pass, and super vision that allows him to see through solid objects.

OK, maybe they did get carried away a bit, but Genius Man could make a worthy sidekick. Hey, Man of Steel, need some help? We’ve heard that General Zod is causing trouble again.

Click to Enter Genius Man Page

He Sees The Light: Gary Allen’s TED Talk Illuminates the Future of Light

GE engineer, inventor and physicist Gary Allen has spent the last 25 years blazing a trail to a better light. He says that we are on the cusp of a lighting revolution that will lead to nearly perfect illumination. “Lighting is becoming almost everything we ever wanted it to be, and even things we never imagined,” Allen says.

Allen recently talked about his quest at a TED event in Cleveland, Ohio. “If you had a nearly ideal light source what would you do with it?” he asked the audience. “It would have long life, be vanishingly small, [have] high-precision, high-efficiency, great color, controllable, smart, and connected."

That light source is the LED, invented 50 years ago by a former colleague Nick Holonyak. LEDs are bits of special semiconductors that convert as much as a third of the electricity that flows through them directly to light. After a flickering start, the use LED systems in commercial lighting applications has exploded over the last decade. Grocery cases, commercial ceilings, business signs, parking lots and roadways all use LEDs, and LED lights are now moving into the home. Commercial and consumer LED lighting could reach 60 percent of all sales by the end of the decade, according to some estimates. "In five years, the cost of LED light bulbs should not be a concern for most consumers," Allen says. "They’ll get a nearly perfect light bulb at an affordable price, and each one will save them $100 or more."



LEDs are so efficient because of the way they convert electricity into light. Thomas Edison’s breakthrough 1879 light bulb could only convert about one percent of electricity into light and wasted the rest as heat. If you've recently tried to touch a lit old-fashioned light bulb with bare hands, you know that things have not improved much over the last 130 years. Allen said that by 2030, advanced LEDs would be able to convert up to 80 percent of electricity that courses through them directly into light.

Allen started his career by working on nuclear fusion, but moved into lighting with the hope of making a more near-term difference to the world. “I wanted to see my work have a more direct impact in my lifetime,” he said. “Having worked in lighting, we’ve had an immediate and significant impact on global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. That’s been very satisfying to me.”

Healing By Numbers: GE Software Investment Will Grow Industrial Internet for Healthcare

Nobody likes waiting, and doctors at Florida’s Aventura Hospital and Medical Center hate crowded waiting rooms as much as their patients. Last year, Aventura invested in AgileTrac, a GE software system pooling and crunching gigabytes of patient and equipment data zipping across a hospital-size Industrial Internet. Each patient now receives an electronic wristband during admission. The wristband automatically checks in as patients arrive in their beds, travel around the hospital, and check out. Similar tags track pumps, heart monitors and other equipment. Aventura estimates that AgileTrac has cut more than 3,000 hours in discharge time at the 400-bed hospital over nine months and freed up the emergency room. “We are doing much better now than a year ago,” says Karen Bibbo, chief nursing officer at Aventura’s parent, HCA East Florida.

The Aventura examples shows the benefits health care providers can earn by using software to improve efficiency and patient outcomes. John Dineen, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, just announced that his business will invest $2 billion to improve and develop new software like AgileTrac over the next five years “to better help our customers manage the operational and clinical complexity across the healthcare system.”



It can also save them money. Jan De Witte, CEO of GE Healthcare IT, told the Wall Street Journal that many healthcare systems were fighting for survival and had razor-thin margins. De Witte said that the new investment will help GE grow its software services, support the Industrial Internet, and help customers cut costs.

GE Healthcare employs more than 3,000 software engineers and the business is already the largest software developer inside GE. The unit is also working with GE’s Global Software Center in San Ramon, California, to expand its software portfolio. “As a result of the Industrial Internet, what you’re seeing from [GE Healthcare] is a doubling down that says that they are going to increase their spending to reflect that opportunity,” Bill Ruh, vice president of the software center, told the WSJ.

Dineen says that the new investment will also allow GE Healthcare to optimize care across entire regions, ultimately providing a safer environment. Doctors at Sweden’s Västra Götaland Region (VGR) Hospital Group, for example, are already using GE’s Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) system to make faster, more informed decisions about patients, often in consultation with remote specialists.

The system can combine clinical images and data from a range of different sources and specialists, and enable analysis and sharing between departments and across hospitals in the region. “What we’ve got now is information transparency,” said Lars Lindskold, chief information officer of VGR’s Radiology Infrastructure.

Says GE’s Dineen: “Healthcare has always relied on big data, and the need to understand data is even greater now.”

Torque Reform: Huge Rare-Earth Magnet Motor Will Simulate Sea Gales at Wind Turbine Test Bed

GE engineers have designed a new monster motor for testing wind turbines capable of generating extreme torques produced by gale force winds and nasty offshore storms. “It’s basically a huge wind turbine in reverse,” says Franz Hubl, global business leader for test systems at GE Power Conversion. “It generates torque instead of electricity. We can put a lifetime of stress on a wind turbine prototype in just 200 days.”

New test bed can exert a lifetime of stress on a wind turbine prototype in just 200 days.

At the heart of the motor is a huge permanent magnet made from an alloy of rare-earth elements. It can generate 20,000 horsepower (the equivalent of 150 cars) and drive the shaft at 10 to 20 rotations per minute. That’s double what a large wind turbine can typically experience on a breezy day. The motor is so large, 26 feet in diameter and 330 tons, that it had to be assembled on site.

It will power a brand new wind turbine test bed at the National Renewable Energy Center (NAREC) in Blyth, UK. The motor will work in combination with a sophisticated testing system manufactured by the American firm MTS. The MTS hydraulics and mechanical system attaches to the front of the wind turbine like a giant three-prong steel mandible that distributes the torque unevenly in simulation of extreme conditions. “We can expose the turbines to as much as twice the overload,” Hubl says. “When you have a turbine that’s 150 meters in diameter, a sudden gale can apply tremendous asymmetrical load on the bearings at the center of the turbine. The wind speed at the top of the blades will be higher than at the bottom. Now we can simulate those conditions.”

The assembly can test an entire nacelle, the large grey box sitting atop of the wind turbine tower and housing the electricity generation system.

The system will replace older technology using standard electrical motors. Those motors were spinning at 1,500 rpm and engineers had to slow them down to wind speed rotation with elaborate gearboxes.

Extreme Measures: When a Huge Tornado Struck Moore, Volunteers Raced to Help

Dennis McBride works as a GE technician servicing wind farms in Oklahoma’s tornado alley and knows a few things about wind. From early in the morning on May 20, he had a feeling that it would be a rough day. While out on the job at the Blue Canyon wind farm near Lawton, his phone kept buzzing in his pocket with severe weather alerts. Around noon his boss, Kenny Weaver, told him to secure equipment and go to a shelter – a dangerous storm cell was moving through the state. “The weather looked bad,” Weaver says. “Our work was pretty much done that day.”

The storm rolled right over the wind farm. But it saved its crushing blow for the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, about an hour north of Lawton. Moore has since become a somber symbol for the ravages of severe weather.

Trained to Help: Dennis McBride (left) and Patrick “Codie” Lang (middle) spent two days helping Moore dig out and recover from a massive tornado. Kenny Weaver stayed behind and helped them pull through.

News helicopters tracking the storm were reporting the Moore devastation live on TV and McBride, who used to live in the area, realized the situation was serious. He and his colleague Patrick “Codie” Lang, a 21-year-old Navy vet who grew up near Moore, checked in with Weaver and prepared to head north.

They loaded a Ford pickup truck GE kept at the wind farm with clean water, cut-resistant gloves, headlamps, first-aid kits and a heart defibrillator machine. “We grabbed just about anything first-aid that we could get our hands on,” McBride says.

As GE wind technicians, McBride and Lang had been trained in personnel rescue and resuscitation, and they could safely operate at heights. But they did not know what to expect from a storm of this magnitude. “On the ride there, we talked to each other and tried to get our mind set on what was fixing to happen,” McBride says. “You prepare for the worst and move from there.”

Weaver, who stayed behind, reached the rescue command post in Moore on his cellphone and told the soldiers running it that McBride, Lang and another crew from northern Oklahoma were coming with help.

McBride and Lang arrived in Moore three hours after the storm hit. When McBride turned the pickup into the command post that had been set up in a Home Depot parking lot, he was shocked. “It was a scene that you never want to see,” he says.

They checked in with the soldiers at the post and because of their training and their helmets, head lamps, gloves and other protective gear they brought along, they were assigned to a fire brigade that had raced to Moore from Velma, Oklahoma, some 80 miles away.

McBride and Lang knew the area and the team soon started looking for survivors on an obliterated residential block near Interstate 35. “We went straight to the first house on the corner and started moving through the rubble, looking for anything and everything that might be there,” McBride says.

They searched for survivors, victims, and pets, peeling off the remains of soggy houses and shattered furniture, moving piles of bricks, and prying open crushed cars. They inspected black gaping basements while the firefighters used detectors to check for natural gas leaks. “The smell of this kind of devastation is like nothing else,” McBride says. “It’s the dirt, raw sewage from the shattered septic system, gasoline, food and water all mixed together. Pictures do it no justice.”

McBride and Lang agreed to call Weaver and check in with him every hour. Weaver had been living in Moore in 1999 when another devastating tornado tore through, so he knew their job would be hard. “I knew they may come across some things they’ve never seen in their lives,” Weaver says. “I had to make sure that they were safe and their heads were focused.”

The two kept searching through the rubble until the next afternoon, when they collapsed in the command post for a few hours of sleep. In the evening on May 21 they returned to their team and continued clearing the neighborhood for another day. They left Moore when the Oklahoma National Guard took over.

Back at work, Weaver set up McBride and Lang with counseling, but they were back on the job the same week.

Says McBride: “We were trained to help.”

The Greatest Show on Earth: Earth Time-Lapse Shows Pictures Fetched by GE-Designed Satellites

Google, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and TIME have stitched together tens of thousands of satellite images taken over the last 30 years into stunning interactive time-lapse animations that reveal how civilization alters the face of Earth – from your town to palm islands sprouting off the coast of Dubai, retreating Alaskan glaciers, and the vanishing Amazon rainforest.

This time-lapse video shows the rate of Dubai's growth at one frame per year from 2000 through 2011. Source: NASA

Google used its Google Earth Engine technology to analyze more than 2 million images stored on tapes in USGS vaults and find those without clouds for every year since 1984.

GE has something to do with the picture show. GE engineers led the design, integration and testing of the 14-foot, 4,400-pound Landsat 4 and Landsat 5 satellites that photographed the planet from 1982 until 2012. The company also managed the flight and ground missions of the spacecraft, and GE’s digital image analysis lab in Lanham, Maryland, processed ground images to reveal details as small as 30 meters long, such as highways and bridges.

In March 2012, Landsat 5 earned a Guinness World Record as the “longest-operating Earth observation satellite.” The spacecraft was designed for a three-year mission but served for nearly 30 years. (Landsat 4 stopped sending pictures in 1993.)

Landsat satellites - there have been seven in the history of the program - fly 423 miles above the Earth along a sun-synchronous polar orbit that keeps the angle of the light falling on the face of the planet nearly constant. Each satellite records a continuous ribbon of the surface below, completing 14.5 orbits per day, or one per every 100 minutes. (NASA recently released a 20-minute-long video showing Landsat footage in which the satellite, traveling at 16,800 mph, covered the distance from northern Russia to the tip of southern Africa.)

Besides Landsats 4 and 5, GE also manufactured the program’s first three satellites. Since Landsat 1 launched in 1972, the U.S. and international partners have used the program to monitor agriculture, land use, climate change and disaster relief.