Falling For You: GE Launched World’s Longest Apple Drop on Vine to Celebrate #GravityDay

GE and hundreds of tech and science fans came together over the weekend to celebrate #GravityDay on Sunday, Sept. 8 (9.8 m/s2 roughly equals gravitational acceleration). GE's pitch was the Apple Drop, a nod to Sir Isaac Newton and an attempt to create the longest user-generated Vine chain ever experienced on the social media platform. The Vine activation lasted from Friday Sept. 6 through the end of Gravity Day.

Users dropped apples from the top of the screen, caught them, and then dropped them again through the bottom of the screen. The results appear as if a single apple is falling through all participating vines as you scroll through the app.

Here’s the inaugural Apple Drop entry.

Eyes on the Nobel Prize: GE Has Employed 2 Nobel Winners, Opened Labs to Others

GE once hired St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson to throw a fastball through a piece high-tech glass. Gibson pitched six innings and failed. GE engineer Ivar Giaever tried something similar on the atomic scale and succeeded. He figured out how to pitch electrons through a thin layer of an insulating material, a technique called electron tunneling. The discovery helped GE build the world’s first full-body magnetic resonance machine (MRI) and earned Giaever a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

October is Nobel Prize season and GE researchers have scored two Nobels of their own. Besides Giaever, GE scientist Irving Langmuir won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his research on lamp filaments. His work allowed GE to take the first images of blood vessels.

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Ivar Giaever's 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Ivan Giaever in front of Irving Langmuir's portrait.
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Giaever at the Nobel awards ceremony in Stockholm with his prize.
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Giaever's Nobel acceptance telegram.
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Irving Langmuir received his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932.
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Langmuir's Nobel Prize replica.
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Nobel-winning physicists Richard Feynman, who coined the word nanotechnology, and Ernest O. Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron and whose name graces two U.S. national laboratories (Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley), spent time at GE as research fellows. Martin Perl, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for the discovery of the tau lepton elementary particle, worked at GE as a chemical engineer for two years.

The awards are no accident. GE spends annually $6 billion on R&D. The company develops innovative machines, technologies, and materials, but it also grows its own research talent. “In a company like GE, it was clear that an engineering degree gave you a vast opportunity,” Giaever said. “I got really fired up by that.” He joined an in-house training course for engineers and got his Nobel-winning “tunneling” idea while splitting time between GE’s research lab in Schenectady, New York, and classes at nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute(RPI), where he was working on a PhD. in physics. "When I grew up in Norway, believe it or not, I knew the name Schenectady,” Giaever told a local paper. “I could even spell it."

Thomas Edison moved the company’s machine works to Schenectady in 1886, and GE opened its research labs close by in 1900. Early visitors to Edison’s labs included radio telegraph inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Niels Bohr, who cracked the structure of the atom, I.P. Pavlov famous for his conditioned dogs, and other Nobel winners.

GE research labs now employ 3,000 people, including 1,125 PhDs. The global research center is still in New York, but GE has labs also in San Ramon, California, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, and Munich. Just in 2011, GE researchers received more than 3,600 patents. All this innovation is helping to create new jobs, and companies. GE’s newest business, GE Energy Storage, makes high-tech Durathon batteries in a new $170 million plant just outside Schenectady.

Then there is the flip side. “Unfortunately, most people take Nobel Prize winner seriously, and that includes some of the Nobel winners themselves,” Giaever told a GE newsletter. “Because I’m a winner, people tend to think that I should have some unique insights into everything, from the Middle East crisis to every conceivable scientific field. Of course, I don’t know any more about them than anyone else, so I’ve got to watch what I say – which I’m not very good at.”

Pretty on the Inside: New BodyMaps App Lets Users Explore the Inside of the Body

Some of earliest and best anatomical drawings come from Leonardo da Vinci. The renaissance polymath would sit in on human and animal autopsies (he would sometimes cut the bodies himself) and record his observations in detailed drawings fringed with copious notes. He also made realistic body part models by injecting molten wax inside the cranium and the aortic valve and studied their shape and function. His work, however, progressed in fits and starts. Leonardo was hamstrung by the lack of cadavers (often the bodies of criminals) and a ban on human dissections issued by the Pope. His drawings remained out of sight for 400 years after his death in 1519, despite their revolutionary nature.

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Body Check: The BodyMaps app allows users see inside and learn about the body. Doctors can use it to explain medical procedures.
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The app, which was specifically developed for the iPad’s Retina display, features anatomy models of both sexes.
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BodyMaps features 3D, high-resolution images of more than 1,000 body parts, tissues, bones and organs, all captured in a searchable index.
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BodyMaps features 3D, high-resolution images of more than 1,000 body parts, tissues, bones and organs, all captured in a searchable index.
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Doctors and nurses can draw directly on the images and highlight information for patients.
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There is no need to worry about Papal wrath or corpse supply in the digital era. Anybody, from medical students and professionals to enthusiasts and artists, can view the inside of the human body in sharp detail with a new app called BodyMaps and launched today by GE and Healthline Networks. The app, which was specifically developed for the iPad’s Retina display, features 3D, high-resolution images of more than 1,000 body parts, tissues, bones and organs, all captured in a searchable index. Just like Leonardo’s multi-view models, users can rotate more than 30 body parts for a better look. They can also toggle between the male and female body.

BodyMaps also contains 200 videos covering various medical conditions, procedures, and treatments, as well as a mark-up tool. Doctors and nurses can draw directly on the images and highlight information for patients. The app is social media ready and users can share their mark-ups and notes through email and Facebook.

“For patients, the [visual] resources were very scarce all through the medical world,” says Gloria Horns, a nurse educator and well-known patient advocate at University of California, San Francisco. “You were creating your own, reinventing the wheel every time, and working with diagrams, charts, and flat images.”

Horns has cared for many organ transplant patients during her long career. She says that the new app “is really going to be a terrific tool for the nurses that are teaching these patients through the whole course of the illness.”

Says Horns: “They are really going to get it. It’s hard to describe how this will help us. It’s pretty phenomenal.”

Tongue Twister: When A Diving Accident Left a GE Engineer Quadriplegic, He Turned to Bionics for Help. Now He Is Driving His Wheelchair with the Flick of His Tongue

Four years ago, Jason Disanto’s life took a skid. For a dozen years, Disanto, who is 38-years old and has an easy smile, had been a globe-trotting GE engineer bringing electricity to people in West Africa, China, and South America. “Basically, there would be a green field,” he says. “We would go in and leave behind a power plant.” Then in April 2009, at home in Atlanta, he dove into his backyard pool and rammed his head against the concrete bottom.

The accident left Disanto paralyzed from the neck down. But it failed to subdue his spirit and the curiosity and engineering drive that animated his life and career.



Disanto spent the next four months in the hospital, first in the trauma center and then at Atlanta’s Shepherd Center, a renowned specialty hospital for people with severe spine and brain injuries. He soon made new friends. A group of graduate students and engineers from the Bionics Lab at the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology were at Shepherd testing high-tech gear designed to makes simple tasks, like turning a wheelchair or moving a computer cursor, easier for quadriplegics.

One such device was the tongue drive system. The technology tracks the position of a magnetic stud attached to the tongue and allows users to steer their wheelchairs by its movements. Disanto was intrigued.

One member of the team was Xueliang Huo, a graduate student from Ningbo, a Chinese seaport where Disanto built a power plant. They hit it off. Disanto started working with the team, using the tongue drive to navigate an obstacle course and control a computer. “We had a lot of sessions on functionality and the esthetics we needed to develop,” Disanto says. “For them, it’s a little bit difficult to understand the little nuances and the little ins-and-outs that somebody like me can provide.” For example, he helped the team to improve the steering. “They had it very jagged and jerky,” he says. “When you move faster the drive is actually more smooth.”

An early version of the tongue drive system tracked the magnetic stud with two plastic “booms” running down Disanto’s jawbones, like a couple of hands-free headsets. “When I moved my tongue to the top right-hand corner of my mouth, that would be a stop command,” he says. “If I go to the top left-hand corner of my mouth, that would make my wheelchair go forward. For the lower teeth, I can set up the left and right movement of the chair.”

The booms were a good first step. “One of the problems we encountered with the earliest headset was that it could shift on a user’s head and the system would need to be recalibrated,” says Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo, founder of the Bionics Lab. Disanto helped Ghovanloo test a new system with sensors fitted tightly inside a dental retainer.

The system links the retainer wirelessly via a Bluetooth with an iPhone running special software that interprets the tongue stud signals. Disanto can use the tongue drive to operate a computer, make calls, or flip a TV channel. “It’s an independence tool,” he says. “It’s also a little fashionable, I guess,” he says about his tongue stud. “I try to keep it discrete for business reasons.”

Disanto has business in mind because he is back at work as product service engineer. GE has set him up with a modified desk, voice activated software, a head mouse to operate the computer, and flexible hours. He goes to work with his personal assistant. “There are a lot of things I did before that I don't do too much of these days, such as car racing,” he says. “I used to travel a lot, and I'm slowly getting back into that.”


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Jason Disanto with Georgia Tech's Hung Yoo Park, Xueliang Huo, and Dr. Ghovanloo, mom Victoria Disanto, and GE colleagues Sherwyn Applewhaite and Abdul Wahab Memon (from left to right).
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Jason Disanto with his family. His brother-in-law George Cowles III, sister Ginalyn Cowles, nephew George Cowles IV, father Joseph Disanto, and mom Victoria Disanto.
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The circuitry for the new intraoral Tongue Drive System developed at Georgia Tech is embedded in this dental retainer worn in the mouth (right). The system interprets commands from seven different tongue movements to operate a computer (left) or maneuver an electrically powered wheelchair. Image credit: Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo
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The dental appliance for the new intraoral tongue drive system contains magnetic field sensors mounted on its four corners that detect movement of a tiny magnet attached to the tongue. It also includes a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and an induction coil to charge the battery. Image credit: Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo
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Georgia Tech researchers designed this universal interface for the intraoral Tongue Drive System that attaches directly to a standard electric wheelchair. The interface boasts multiple functions: it not only holds the iPod, but also wirelessly receives the sensor data and delivers it to the iPod, connects the iPod to the wheelchair, charges the iPod, and includes a container where the dental retainer can be placed at night for charging. Image credit: Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo
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Community Health Pioneer Says GE Grant Will Help Cut Primary Care Doctor Shortage

Dr. H. Jack Geiger in a cotton field near Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

When Dr. H. Jack Geiger opened America’s first community health clinics in the cotton fields of segregated Mississippi and a poor Boston neighborhood, five decades ago, many of his patients had never seen a doctor. “There were enormous gaps in the health status of the African American, Native American and Hispanic populations, minority groups, and poor whites as well,” Geiger says. “There was a lot of need and community health centers were invented to deal with that need.”

More than a thousand of such centers across the country now serve 17 million minority and low-income patients. They stand as a testament to Geiger’s pioneering work, but need still remains. The United States is facing a looming deficit of primary care physicians. According to some estimates, the country will be short of 40,000 primary care doctors by 2020. This trend, combined a sharp rise in medical costs, “is not just a problem for vulnerable populations,” Geiger says. “It’s rapidly becoming a problem for the whole nation.”

Geiger says that U.S. medical care is “badly skewed to the extent that we are oversupplied with specialists,” and that “developed nations that have strong primary care networks are delivering not only the best primary care but also the most efficient.”



The GE Foundation has committed $50 million for more than 70 community health centers in 20 states to improve access to healhtcare. This week the foundation also made a $2.3 million grant to the National Medical Fellowship (NMF), where Geiger is a board member. The grant will help train future primary care physicians, nurses and doctor’s assistants at five community health centers in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Nashville, and Jackson, Mississippi. Students will learn clinical skills in neighborhoods with shortage of doctors and receive mentoring from local staff. The goal of the grant is to help launch a pipeline of primary care physicians to community centers around the country.

Geiger says that twice as many students applied as there were places for the first round. “There are few if any programs like this,” Geiger says. “It is this kind of team workforce that will be increasingly the way that medical care is delivered in the future.”

Breaking the Ice: GE Global Research Scientists Achieve New Anti-Icing Breakthrough With Nanotechnology

Scientists from GE Global Research announced this morning yet another breakthrough in an ongoing project to develop new anti-icing applications from coatings created in the lab using nanotechnology, which involves the science of materials at a very tiny scale (a nanometer is one-billionth of one meter). At the nano-level, materials behave differently than they do at a normal scale, and GE material scientists have focused on creating superhydrophobic, or extremely water repellent, materials as coatings for surfaces that could prevent icing. The new research presented today shows that in addition to dramatically reducing ice adhesion on surfaces, the experimental “nanotextured” coatings also delay ice from forming under simulated atmospheric icing conditions in the lab. While a non-coated surface will experience ice formation almost immediately under those conditions, the GE researchers found that a surface with the nanotextured coating won’t for approximately 80 seconds.

Check out this video of water drops bouncing off superhydrophobic surfaces, captured using a high-speed camera at GE Global Research.




That delay could mean big efficiency gains and cost savings for operators of machines susceptible to ice buildup, such as jet engines and wind turbines. The EPA estimates that nearly 25 million gallons of deicing agents are used on aircraft departing from commercial airports in the U.S. every year. That’s in addition to the extensive, energy-intensive heating systems used on planes to prevent ice formation. GE’s scientists are also exploring applications of both low ice adhesion and anti-icing surfaces for the blades of wind turbines, battered as they often are by frozen wind, which can cause ice buildup and drag on their rotation.

And that’s not all. GE researchers are also developing superhydrophobic coatings to aid in moisture control in steam turbines, which can boost efficiency. Applied to other parts of a gas turbine, the nanocoatings can reduce “fouling,” enabling the turbine to run more efficiently and reduce maintenance shutdowns.

Move Over Indiana Jones – GE Cameras Do Non-Invasive Tomb Exploration

Archaeologists exploring a newly discovered first-century tomb in Jerusalem have brought to bear some twenty-first century Remote Visual Inspection (RVI) equipment from GE. The Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras and VideoProbes enabled the crew from the University of North Carolina to unlock the secrets of the tomb without entering the chamber. What they discovered there will be revealed in a new documentary film and an accompanying book which launches today at the Discovery Times Square Museum in New York.

License to study this historically significant tomb in the East Talpiot section of Jerusalem was granted to the academic team under stipulation by religious groups and the Israel Antiquities Authority that nobody should enter the tomb, nor should anything be disturbed or retrieved.

Secrets of the tomb: A view of the inside of the 2,000-year-old tomb on the screen of the XLG3.

After drilling three eight-inch holes through two meters of rock, the team deployed a GE CA-Zoom PTZ camera attached to a mechanical/pneumatic arm designed by Hollywood prop maker, Walter Klassen. The crew also employed GE’s XLG3 video probe, which was able to snake its way through the ancient masonry and capture images from even more remote corners of the tomb.

Ultra sharp images were required to make the inscriptions on the ossuaries legible to viewers, so engineers from the Inspection Technologies business of GE Measurement & Control custom designed a high definition camera for the crew.

The project was launched and funded by Toronto based Associated Producers, with Discovery Channel backing. Titled “The Resurrection Tomb,” the documentary will air this spring in the U.S. on The Discovery Channel.

Shedding light on the past: The PTZ camera inside the tomb, illuminated by the XLG3 video probe.

GE’s RVI technology was developed for industrial applications such as inspection of jet engines for overhaul and repair. It is used to check for corrosion and cracks in machinery, to peer inside tanks and containers, down pipes, and through all sorts of apparatus on oil platforms, commercial heat exchangers, racecar engine blocks, and power generators. As David Jervis, Media Manager for GE Energy Measurement & Control says, “virtually any situation where you need to see inside something where your eye won’t take you.” The U.S. Air Force recently ordered a score of them, he says.

As is the case in ancient Jerusalem, technology designed for industry often turns out to have applications far beyond their initial intended use. “You’d say this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Jervis says, “but actually they’re doing something like it right now at the Tower of London, using the same equipment to inspect wooden horses there. You never know, we might find one thousand Greek soldiers inside.”