GE’s Digital DNA: When Big Data Was 30 Tons of Steel, Glass, and Copper

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One iPhone 5 is 9,000 times more powerful than the ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer. Here an Army officer sets the switches on one of ENIAC's function tables.
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ENIAC was the first electronic computer.
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It was 66 years ago that the U.S. Army switched on the world’s first general purpose electronic computer and launched the information age. The army used the machine, called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), to calculate artillery trajectories. GE was the first company to tap the ENIAC for solving hard engineering problems.

There were other, mechanical computers before the ENIAC, write historians Dilys Winegrad and Astushi Akera, but “by showing that electronic computing circuitry could actually work, ENIAC paved the way for the modern computing industry that stands as its great legacy.”

The ENIAC was an unwieldy beast. It weighed 30 tons, held 18,000 vacuum tubes and required a small power plant to supply it with electricity. At 1,800 square feet, it was too big to fit in many New York City apartments. (By comparison, the iPhone 5 is almost 9,000 times more powerful). Programming the ENIAC and checking the code could take several weeks.

In 1954, GE bought its own computer, the Universal Automatic Computer I (UNIVAC I), and put computing at the core of the company. GE put the computer in Louisville, Ky., where engineers used it to build the first industrial computerized payroll for GE Appliances.

Over the years, GE computers monitored the liftoff of Apollo 11, which took the first humans to the moon, improved manufacturing control, and managed efficient asset allocation and other complex business problems.

Data is deep in GE's DNA. The company is now building the industrial internet, a network of computers, machines and low-cost sensors, and pushing into the cloud. Last spring GE partnered with Amazon Web Services, Accenture and Pivotal and to build the “machine cloud,” the first big data and analytic platform robust enough to manage the stream of data generated by turbines, jet engines, medical scanners and other technology. Bill Ruh, vice president of GE’s Global Software Center, says that the platform will be “the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity, but the next era of computing.”

Thirty tons of steel notwithstanding, big data has never loomed larger.

Blast From The Past: Edison’s Discovery Powers Next-Gen Jet Engines

Everyone knows that Thomas Edison created the modern light bulb, but a lesser known Edison discovery tied to the bulb’s birth is now enjoying the limelight.

In 1879, the inventor and GE founder exposed thin slices of bamboo to scorching heat at his lab in Menlo Park, N.J. The cellulose inside the bamboo quickly carbonized and transformed the splinters into the first carbon fibers. The fibers could conduct electricity and handle intense heat, and Edison used them as filaments in his early light bulbs. In 1906, however, GE engineers invented the modern tungsten filament and carbon fiber was quickly forgotten.

It remained dormant for the next 80 years, until NASA engineers re-discovered the material in the 1960s. They were seeking an edge in the space race with the Soviet Union and carbon fiber’s combination of  toughness and light weight made it an ideal space age material. Designers were soon crafting composite parts made from “prepregs,” layers of carbon fiber mats impregnated with resin. These parts were tougher, stronger and lighter than steel and aluminum alloys. They quickly started replacing metals in the fuselage and other structural parts of planes and missiles.

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New York’s Museum of Modern Art included a GE90 blade made from carbon fiber composites in its Architecture and Design Collection.
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Carbon filaments did the trick but they darkened the inside of the light bulb. Edison replaced it with Tungsten wire.
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The GEnx jet engine has fan blades and fan case made from carbon fiber composites.
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Boeing’s Dreamliner has sections of its fuselage made from carbon fiber composites.
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The BMW i3 all-electric concept car is the first all-composite car.
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Carbon fiber composite parts from GE's plant in Hamble, UK, serve on the wing trailing edge of the A350, the latest passenger get built by Airbus.
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The early carbon fiber cost as much as $400 per pound. But production innovation brought down price and composites quickly spread. Today, BMW and Tesla Motors cars have carbon fiber bodies, there are carbon fiber golf clubs and tennis rackets, and Boeing and Airbus build large portions of their next-generation planes, the Dreamliner and the A350, from the material.

But no company went further than GE. GE spent several decades developing a version of carbon fiber composites that could replace the metal fan blades at the front of the jet engine and make it lighter and more efficient. “This was a huge, expensive and risky project,” says Shridhar Nath, who leads the composites lab at GE Global Research. “We planned to replace titanium with what is essentially plastic. We were starting from scratch and we did not know how carbon fiber blades will respond to rain, hail, snow and sand, and the large forces inside the engine.”

The bet paid off. It allowed GE engineers to shed hundreds of pounds from the fan and build the GE90, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine. The fan blades and fan case in the GEnx, GE’s latest and most fuel efficient large jet engine, are made from the material.

But GE engineers are already looking for new applications. They are experimenting with carbon fiber wind turbine blades, riser pipes for the oil and gas industry, and patient tables for X-Ray and CT machines that are transparent to radiation and improve image quality. “Over the next 15 years you are going to see carbon fiber explode across areas where we have not seen them before,” says Nath. “Everybody is interested in reducing weight and increasing strength. That’s what’s carbon fiber composites got.”

GE Phone Home: GE Technology Helped Fly Humans to the Moon

NASA attached a GE jet engine to the Lunar Lander Test Vehicle to simulate the moon’s weaker gravity.

It was 44 years ago last Saturday that Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's boots touched the surface of the moon for the first time. Those soft boots and other systems supporting NASA’s Apollo missions relied on solid GE engineering.

GE scientists developed the silicon rubber for the moonwalking boots and the super-strong plastic for the visors of Armstrong's and Aldrin's helmets. They also built the Apollo program’s radio command and guidance equipment, and tested Apollo 11’s command and lunar modules. “With so much riding on this one, an extra effort was made to solve all the problems, no matter how insignificant,” said Earl Wayne Turner, GE test director for Apollo. “This one had to be absolutely clean.”

A total of 6,000 GE employees from 37 different operations helped NASA run the Apollo program between 1961 and 1972 and send 24 people to the moon and back.

GE and NASA keep working together. Carbon fiber blades developed for NASA’s “unducted turbofan” jet engine now serve on GE’s most advanced engines like the GEnx. Crews on the International Space Station are using a GE ultrasound device to study the impact of microgravity on Astronaut vision loss, which is still poorly understood. Take a look at our slideshow.

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 On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong went for a walk in boots made from GE silicone rubber.
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Leading up to liftoff, GE computers were continuously monitoring vital booster systems on Apollo 11’s huge Saturn rocket.
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GE engineers ground-tested Apollo 11’s command and lunar modules. NASA attached a GE jet engine to the Lunar Lander Test Vehicle to simulate the moon’s weaker gravity.
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GE’s ship-to-satellite system provided the first simultaneous live transmission of color TV images, newspaper copy and radio commentary from Apollo 11's splash-down and recovery in the Pacific.
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While the astronauts slept on the moon, GE engineers examined a broken switch on a circuit breaker critical to the startup of the lunar module's ascent engine. The circuit closed, the engine fired, and Armstrong (pictured) and Aldrin went home.
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NASA used GE displays to receive pictures of Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s first steps on the moon.
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The visors of the astronauts’ helmets were made from Lexan, a transparent, super-strong plastic developed by GE Global Research (GRC).
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GRC also developed a new geological dating technique for analyzing Apollo 11 moon rocks. GE was one of two private companies selected to study lunar samples and search for clues about the formation of the solar system.
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Popular Science: GE Girls Stokes Student Interest in STEM

GE Girls are building AT-AT-like robots at the University of Connecticut this week.

Waukesha seventh-grader Laurel Chen says that when she grows up, she wants to be a biomedical engineer. "I like to build things, learn about math and science, and draw,” she said. “As long as it lets my creativity spark, I’ll do it.”

Chen is an example of a budding trend. Women are earning more degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), but the situation far from rosy. “Studies show that while a majority of today’s girls have a clear interest in STEM, they don’t prioritize STEM fields when thinking about future careers,” said Dee Mellor, “executive champion” of GE Girls at GE Women’s Network and chief quality officer at GE Healthcare. “They say that they don’t know a lot about STEM careers and opportunities.”

In June, Mellor’s business held a week-long science camp called GE Girls. The program, conceived by GE Women’s Network and carried out by GE Healthcare and the Milwaukee School of Engineering, gave Chen and 24 other sixth and seventh graders from the Waukesha School District in Wisconsin a taste of what it’s like to be a scientist. The hands-on curriculum focused on medical technologies, physiology, and biomedical engineering. The girls also had the opportunity to learn about X-ray physics and ultrasound technology.

Many of the students were easy converts. “When I grow up, I want to be an engineer like my father,” said sixth-grader Erin Colgrove. “I love to build electronics, work with computers and experiment with science and chemistry. I enjoy baking in the kitchen and seeing chemical reactions take place.” Seventh-grader Mary Hopper wants to become a nuclear physicist. “I love the way the camp is set up so that we get hands-on experience,” she said. “At school the teacher usually does it and we have to stand back. The result is that we don’t get a close look at what is actually happening. Getting to work hands-on with advanced technology is an opportunity I wouldn’t miss for the world.”

GE's Mellor said that it was “so satisfying to see the girls engage with the program during the week. Maybe they’ll even come to work at GE Healthcare someday,” she said.

GE Girls started in 2011 when GE Women’s Network reached out to GE Aviation and MIT, and asked them to develop a STEM curriculum for the program. It has since grown to include many players. There are six GE businesses and six universities hosting GE Girls this summer, including MIT, Georgia Tech, and Penn State.

If she could, Laurel Chen would attend all of them. “I am looking forward to experimenting with X-ray physics, using ultrasound and being mentored by great role models,” she says. "Not many kids are offered this chance."

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GE Girls experimented with medical technology in Waukesha.
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GE Girls visited a nursing lab at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.
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GE businesses participating in GE Girls this summer include GE Aviation, GE Capital, GE Energy Management, GE Global Research, GE Healthcare, GE Power & Water, and GE Transportation. GE Asset Management in Stamford, Conn., also provided support and funding to the local GE Girls program.

Supersize Me: GE Takes 3D Printing to Massive Gas Turbines

A new 1-kilowatt 3D laser printer is finishing the GE monogram. (Our video below has the final result.)

Over the last decade, engineers at GE Aviation have been experimenting with a new way to make jet engine parts. Rather than cutting, milling and drilling engine components, they weld together thin layers of powdered metal with a 200-watt laser and build parts from the ground up. Now, other businesses are supersizing 3D printing and pushing the technology into new areas.

GE Power and Water recently acquired a laser printer that is five times as powerful as the GE Aviation machine and can work with two lasers at the same time. “We are learning how to use this technology,” says Jon Schaeffer, senior manager for materials and processing engineering for Power and Water. “We’ve got to spread the word and change the design paradigm that metallurgists, designers and manufacturing teams have had for a long time.”

Schaeffer says that the 3D printer will help speed up innovation and test new ideas and designs faster. “We’ve been able to embed new technologies into our components without the messy manufacturing steps normally required,” he says. “We are cutting out months in the development cycle with this technology.”

The printer’s build area is almost a cubic foot, large enough to print gas turbine parts. “The biggest thing that was holding us back was the size of the chamber,” Schaeffer says. “But the chamber volume has grown 50 times over the last five years. It’s almost like Moore’s law for 3D printing.”

Schaeffer, who started at GE two decades ago in GE Aviation, points to his former colleagues as a model for making advanced technologies work. GE Aviation is already printing nozzles for the next-generation LEAP jet engine. Each nozzle used to made from 18 parts welded together. It is now grown as a single piece that is 25 percent lighter than its predecessor.

David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation, says that the technology liberated his business from the limitations of machining. “It gives the designer a whole different palette of colors to paint with, and truly on a whole new canvas,” Joyce says.

Engineers at Power and Water have already used their new machine to design and print a cooling shroud for GE’s latest gas turbine. “There was a time when we could not test new designs and technologies in new parts because we were not able to make them,” Schaeffer says. “3D printing is pointing engineers in the right direction to see if they’ve got a successful concept. It’s really quite exciting.”

Slime Science: The “OMG Microscope” Helps Scientists See How Bacteria Creep

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a bacterial pathogen that is able to actively colonize surfaces via a process called twitching motility.

Australian scientists have used a powerful GE microscope to study the spread of slimy, drug-resistant bacterial colonies called biofilms. They have been able to determine how the microbes stick together and move in intricate, self-organized patterns. The research could help doctors fight aggressive infections caused by biofilms colonizing catheters and other medical devices. “Biofilms are notoriously difficult to clear,” says team leader Cynthia Whitchurch, senior research fellow at University of Technology Sydney. “The bacteria can actively migrate along the surface and move up to the bladder and the kidneys, where they can cause a lot of problems. We are trying to understand how the bacteria coordinate to be able to achieve this migration so we can come up with smart ways to inhibit that.”

The team used a number of imaging technologies including GE’s DeltaVision OMX Blaze microscope equipped with high-speed cameras. They observed for the first time how bits of DNA that stick to the outside wall of the bacteria hold the biofilm together and guide its movement. Scientists call this microbe glue extracellular DNA, or eDNA. “We knew it was there - we had evidence from observing how the bacteria were behaving - but we just couldn’t see it or detect it in any way,” Whitchurch says. “The high-sensitivity cameras on the OMX Blaze enabled us to answer the question of how the bacteria were gluing themselves together.”

The researchers released their findings in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They observed cell movements during the expansion of living biofilms by combining microscope images with sophisticated computer-vision algorithms. Their analysis found “highly coherent groups of bacteria” at the leading edges of the biofilm. These groups create channels that help cells following behind them migrate, and leave eDNA that “facilitates efficient traffic flow” throughout the channel network.

Extracellular DNA (yellow) in biofilms of the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa organizes traffic flow of individual bacteria (blue) as they move through the biofilm trail network. Credit: E. Gloag and L. Turnbull, The ithree institute, University of Technology Sydney.

This insight could guide scientists to new ways of fighting biofilms. “We could introduce artificial channels along the surface of the device and confuse the bacteria so they can’t be as effective,” Whitchurch says. “Another option would be destroying the eDNA.”

Scientists have recently used the OMX microscope to observe malaria parasites attacking blood cells, the response of cancer cells to chemotherapy, and even the cell-to-cell transmission of HIV. Jane Stout, a research associate at Indiana University, used it to study cell division and dubbed the machine the “OMG.” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, agreed. He called images produced by the OMX “showstoppers.”

Delta Vision OMX is for research use only, not for use in diagnostic procedures. Delta Vision OMX is a GE trademark.

Lifting the Fog of War: New High-Tech System Aims to Shed Light on IED Blasts

GE is helping the Georgia Tech Research Institute develop a wearable wireless network of sensors and computers that could assist doctors in dealing with brain injuries caused by roadside bomb blasts.

The technology, called Integrated Blast Effects Sensor Suite (I-BESS), uses vehicle and body sensors and computer analytics to record and time-tag information like blast force and direction from explosions caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The Army plans to use the information to better diagnose brain injuries and choose the best treatment.

GE’s Intelligent Platforms unit is supplying the Georgia Tech team with a rugged, off-the-shelf computer system the size of a six-pack that can process large amounts of raw sensor data. The system gathers information from accelerometers, pressure sensors and other devices placed on the soldiers’ bodies and inside the vehicle. Such off-the-shelf systems help the Army to reduce development time and risk, and create a robust system that can quickly accommodate new devices and sensors.



The I-BESS sensors and computers have been designed to operate in harsh conditions. They can power through shock waves, vibrations, high G-forces, and extreme temperature swings. The sensors communicate with each other over standard wireless protocols like Bluetooth and RFID. They feed the information into the GE computer.

The system allows the army to capture a holistic picture of the blast impact. “I don’t want this to sound wrong, but the data we collect from these explosions is very important for us to measure how these blasts affect a soldier’s head and body,” Amy O’Brien, a chief scientist at the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF), told military.com.

REF first approached the Georgia Tech Research Institute in 2011. The Army started deploying the first 1,000 I-BESS sensors last year.

This is not the first GE effort to better understand the brain. This spring, GE, the National Football League, and Under Armour launched a $60 million partnership designed to speed up the diagnosis and treatment for mild traumatic brain injuries and stimulate new research and innovation in the field.

Don’t Sweat It: High-Tech Fabric Takes Climbers to the Top of the World

Climber Januzs Gołąb on top of Gasherbrum I. His red climbing suits was lined with eVent, an innovative GE fabric.

In the 1990s, engineers at BHA Group, an innovative maker of industrial air pollution filters, were experimenting with Teflon membranes for cement kilns and coal-fired boiler chimneys. They noticed that when they stretched the material in the lab into a thin film and applied a special coating, it became both waterproof and breathable. “The process created millions of microscopic pores too small for water droplets to get through, but large enough for vapor to escape,” says Daniel Burch from GE Power & Water, which acquired BHA in 2004.

GE now calls the material eVent fabrics. It has shielded climbers and athletes in the harshest conditions. In March 2012, a pair of Polish mountaineers wearing eVent climbing suits reached the top of Gasherbrum I, a lethal Himalayan peak more than 26,500 feet high. They were the first humans to scale the mountain in the winter, braving temperatures of minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit and winds topping 75 miles per hour. “It was the first time our down suits were dry during the whole climb,” said expedition leader Artur Hajzer. When climber Adam Bielecki melted snow in the death zone at Camp 3 and then spilled the cup by accident on his suit, “what normally would have been a catastrophe simply wasn’t problem at all,” Bielecki said.

Clothing manufacturers have been paying attention. GE just signed a deal to supply eVent fabrics to Dishang Group, China’s largest garment maker and exporter of clothing and textiles. Dishang will set up a special unit making eVent apparel. It will start production by the end of this year. Chad Kelly, GE’s global product manager for eVent fabrics, says that the arrangement will simplify and streamline product development and provide a channel for eVent fabrics to launch new designs more rapidly.

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Janusz Gołąb on the mountain wearing a climbing suit protected by GE’s eVent fabrics
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eVent fabric does not need to get wet to let moisture out. GE calls it "a dry system."
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eVent uses a proprietary technology that coats the ePTFE membrane but does not cover the pores.
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Other manufacturers use stretched Teflon, the proper name is expanded polytetrofluoroethylene (ePTFE), to make waterproof fabrics. They typically protect the ePTFE film from from oils, sweat, sunscreen and other sticky residue with a polyurethane coat and sandwich it between a tough outside waterproof layer and a soft inside lining. But the polyurethane layer effectively blocks the ePFTE pores and traps sweat inside the garment until body heat pushes it through.

Garments made from eVent fabrics, however, do not use this polyurethane shield. GE engineers developed a technology that covers the ePFTE membrane with a special proprietary coating that protects the layers and keeps the tiny pores open. “Because eVent doesn’t block those pores, sweat immediately escapes and you stay cooler and dryer,” GE’s Burch says. “We say that eVent let’s the sweat out. We call it the dry system.”

Go With the Flow: These Electric Air Jets Could Smooth Out Your Plane Ride

Seyed Saddoughi inspects one of his creations, a propeller using miniature piezoelectric bellows designed to generate an air jet that can spin the arm attached to the device up 1,000 rotations per minute.

Scientists at GE Global Research are experimenting with thin jets of air to reduce turbulence along aircraft wings and wind turbine blades, and to improve efficiency. They are using devices the size of two stacked credit cards to speed up air that naturally slows down due to surface friction. Just a small decrease in drag could save millions of dollars for airlines alone.

The devices, called synthetic jet actuators (SJAs), have no moving parts and work like tiny bellows. They generate rapid pumping and sucking by applying electrical current across pieces of special ceramic material attached to the sides of two nickel plates separated in the middle by a narrow space. Electricity makes the ceramic vibrate slightly and the vibrations cause the gap between the plates to pull in and push out jets of air.

“This device works like our lungs, by expanding and contracting a chamber in such a way that air is sucked in and ejected through a single hole,” says Seyed Saddoughi, principal engineer in GE’s Aero-Thermal & Mechanical Systems lab. Saddoughi, who is leading the actuator’s development, says that devices eliminate the need for fans with moving parts. “The device is lightweight, very simple in operation, and with minimal power usage.”

Because of its low energy use, powerful air jet and silent operation, a version of the device is already beginning to be used for cooling consumer electronics and computers.

But Saddoughi says SJAs will realize their potential when rows of them start getting embedded in aircraft wings and turbine blades. His research team has also been running experiments with another version that can operate in water. Their experiments have shown that pumping high-powered water jets against the surface of boat hulls can change hydrodynamic flow and decrease drag.

“These devices energize the flow close to surfaces to reduce losses and increase the overall efficiency of the machines,” he says. “Synthetic jet actuators give us active control of flow over these surfaces. We can manipulate flow intelligently to gain better performance from our machines.”

It’s Not Brain Surgery: These Earbuds Can Measure Brain Pressure, No Drills Required

In 1953, Russian archaeologist A. D. Stolyar excavated a group of 14 skeletons from a Mesolithic cemetery near Kiev, Ukraine. One of the skulls found at the 7,000 year-old site showed signs of trepanning, the surgical removal of a small piece of bone from the cranium. Some historians consider trepanation the oldest form of surgery and doctors today still drill holes in the skull to obtain and monitor essential information about brain pressure, also known as intracranial pressure (ICP). High ICP is a serious medical condition that can cut off blood supply into the brain and sometimes cause permanent damage to the nervous system and brain function.

ICP can rise due to the build-up of fluid or blood around the brain caused by head trauma, brain tumor, or swelling inside the brain. Monitoring pressure requires placing a catheter in the brain through a burr hole in the skull. But because of the risk of infection, doctors use such “invasive” monitoring only in the most severe cases even though more patients could benefit from the information. “Right now the main challenge with ICP is that the only good way to monitor it accurately and continuously is the invasive way,” says Guy Weinberg, chief executive officer of HeadSense, an Israeli startup that decided to put the drill aside and obtain ICP with sound waves.

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Innovative headphones use sound to monitor pressure inside the brain. A tablet app then decodes the data. Obtaining the information would normally require drilling a hole in the skull.
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Innovative headphones use sound to monitor pressure inside the brain. A tablet app then decodes the data. Obtaining the information would normally require drilling a hole in the skull.
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Innovative headphones use sound to monitor pressure inside the brain. A tablet app then decodes the data. Obtaining the information would normally require drilling a hole in the skull.
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HeadSense developed a set of disposable earbuds that emit a series of low-pitch beeps and record changes to the signals after they cross the brain. The headphones feed the data over a Bluetooth link to a tablet app that converts signal modulations to units of intracranial pressure in seconds. “This non-invasive system will allow doctors to monitor pressure continuously, determine whether medication is effective, and steer the course of treatment,” Weinberg says.

The HeadSense system is designed to listen for sound modulations caused by blood flow in the brain. As ICP goes up, blood vessels narrow to compensate for the rise in pressure, and send the pitch of the beeps higher. “It’s kind of like a pipe organ,” Weinberg says. “A pipe organ has pipes with different diameter that produce sounds with different pitch. This is exactly the same case.” The system also listens for bumps in ICP caused by breathing and feeds the data into a proprietary algorithm.

HeadSense tested and calibrated the system in human investigational trials in India, Armenia and Italy. The company just received financing by Pontifax, a leading Israeli venture capital fund, GE Ventures of Menlo Park, California, Everett Partners from Akron, Ohio, and JuMaJo, an investment group from Hamburg, Germany.

This 5,500 years old skull of was trepanned with a rock. The patient survived. Source: Natural History Museum, Lausanne Credit: Rama

Weinberg says that HeadSense will use the proceeds to obtain the necessary regulatory authorizations and bring the device to market. He estimates that in the U.S. alone there are over 3 million patients suffering from traumatic brain injury, stroke, and brain tumors, but only 200,000 receive invasive ICP monitoring due to high cost and the lack of neurosurgeons to perform the procedure. “High pressure [in the brain] is one of the most significant adverse outcomes that derive from head trauma, and one of the most serious conditions for US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Weinberg says. “That’s why it’s so important to monitor it and measure it.”

Weinberg says that doctors are still looking at the brain like a black box. “With our device they can get a better understanding of the conditions inside and provide better and lower-cost treatment”.

Joined at the Hip: Where the 3-D Printed Jet Engine Meets the Human Body

Todd Rockstroh has spent the last decade on manufacturing’s vanguard, using lasers to “print” nozzles and other complex jet engine parts from bits of superalloy dust. Despite enormous progress, this process, which is called 3-D printing, remains a tricky terrain. Rockstroh, who is a laser processing expert at GE Aviation in Cincinnati, Ohio, has been working to eliminate as many unknowns as possible, starting with the material. “When we designed the nozzle, we wanted to make it from an alloy that was mature, well known and thoroughly tested, nothing exotic,” he says.

He found it inside the human body. Rockstroh and his team looked at various materials suitable for 3-D printing and settled on cobalt-chromium alloys that have been used for decades for joint replacements and dental implants. These alloys are light, tough and corrosion resistant. Conveniently, they can also operate in temperatures as high as 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and are relatively cheap. “Because of their medical applications, there has been a tremendous amount of research done on these alloys,” Rockstroh says. “They are also pretty common because they serve such a large market, which makes them cheaper.”

Artificial knees are solid, however, and Rockstroh and his team needed powdered metal. The team fanned out to search for specialty smelters. They found several who could turn molten alloys into powder through gas atomization, mechanical milling, spray forming and other advanced methods.

Engineers at GE aviation use alloys developed for artificial joints to 3-D print jet engine parts. But doctors have also started looking at the technology to print replacement body parts.

The powder arrives at the GE Aviation plant in 15 to 30 pound containers. “It’s smaller than a pitcher of water,” Rockstroh says. The team sifts the powder to make sure they have right particle size and empty three to six containers in a tub sitting on top of the 3-D printer, called direct metal laser melting machine, DMLM.

A computer that holds a file with a digital drawing of the nozzle guides the DMLM machine’s high-powered fiber optic laser across the powder bed like a painter moves a brush across the canvas. The laser then fuses successive layers of powder each 20 microns thick to the desired shape.

The process can take as long as 120 hours and the workers use big data analytics to monitor everything from the size of the weld pool, temperature and the stability of the laser. The new nozzle is 25 percent lighter and as much as five times more durable than the current nozzle made from 20 different parts.

Jet engine parts have never been so hip.