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Startups bring new attitude to fusion quest

Image: Prototype fusion reactor
General Fusion is working on a prototype fusion reactor. (Credit: General Fusion)

The lab where a company called General Fusion is trying to spark an energy revolution looks like a cross between a hardware store and a mad scientist’s lair. Bins full of electrical gadgets are piled high against the walls. Capacitors recycled from a bygone experiment are stacked up like bottles in wine racks. Ten-foot-high contraptions bristle with tangled wires and shiny plumbing.

Michael Delage, General Fusion’s vice president for strategy and corporate development, makes sure nothing is turned on when he takes a visitor through the lab, which is tucked away in a bland industrial park near Vancouver. He’s worried about the voltage.

“If you get a broken wire or something like that, you get a very loud bang,” Delage explains.

His company and others are looking for a bang of a different sort: a smashing together of superhot hydrogen atoms that produces a net gain in energy. Nuclear fusion. It’s the same mass-to-energy reaction that’s behind the sun’s radiative power and the blast of a hydrogen bomb, but scaled down to a manageable level for power generation.

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Scientists trace link between the moon and rain

Image: TRMM
Readings from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, shown in this artist’s conception, provided evidence to support a link between lunar tides and rainfall patterns. (Credit: NASA)

When the moon is high in the sky, its gravitational pull warps the atmosphere enough to reduce rainfall ever so slightly. At least that’s the conclusion that researchers from the University of Washington reached after reviewing 15 years of detailed rainfall data.

The evidence is laid out in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Readings from the U.S.-Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, collected between 1998 and 2012, suggest that rainfall is reduced by about 1 percent if the precipitation falls when the moon is directly overhead or underfoot.

Those findings are in sync with a 2010 study that laid out a similar link between phases of the moon and precipitation. Both papers show that lunar tides have an effect on the atmosphere.

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Quake summit focuses on ‘the Really Big One’

Image: Quake simulation
A simulation shows the kind of alert that would be generated by an 8.0 quake. (PNSN via YouTube)

The Pacific Northwest mega-quake known as “the Really Big One” may not be televised, but a White House summit focusing on earthquake preparedness will be streamed online next Tuesday.

The White House says new commitments to adopt an earthquake early-warning system for the United States will be announced at its Earthquake Resilience Summit, due to be live-streamed starting at 9:30 a.m. PT Tuesday.

Researchers from the University of Washington are heavily involved in developing such a system through the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, or PNSN – and in a series of tweets, PNSN said the system could go public as early as this year.

“A year depends on it being ready,” UW seismologist John Vidale, the network’s director, told GeekWire today. It’s not yet ready for prime time, but PNSN has shared a video showing how the ShakeAlert system could provide 28 seconds’ worth of advance warning about a magnitude-8 quake off the coast of Oregon.

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A.I. software masters the game of Go

Image: Go computer
Google is set for the ultimate human-vs.-machine Go match. (Credit: Nature / Google DeepMind)

Mark another milestone in the rise of the machines: An artificial intelligence program pioneered by Google DeepMind has learned how to play the game of Go well enough to beat a human champion decisively in a fair match.

That’s a quantum leap for artificial intelligence: Go is looked upon as the “holy grail of AI research,” said Demis Hassabis, the senior author of a research paper on the project published today by the journal Nature.

The game seems simple enough, involving the placement of alternating black and white stones on a 19-by-19 grid. The object is merely to avoid having your stones hemmed in on four sides by your opponent’s stones. But Go, which originated in China thousands of years ago, is considered the world’s most complex game. “It has 10170 possible board positions, which is greater than the number of atoms in the universe,” Hassabis noted.

That means a computer program can’t best humans with the same kind of approach used for checkers and and chess. The programs for those games combine brute-force searches through the possible moves with a weighted evaluation of patterns in moves. But researchers at Google DeepMind say their software, known as AlphaGo, takes a different approach.

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A.I. pioneer Marvin Minsky dies at age of 88

Image: Marvin Minsky
MIT Professor Emeritus Marvin Minsky has died at 88. (Credit: Louis Fabian Bachrach via MIT)

Marvin Minsky, the computer scientist who helped blaze the trail for virtual smartphone assistants and other manifestations of artificial intelligence, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on Sunday at the age of 88.

Word of Minsky’s passing came today from his family as well as from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Minsky worked on the foundations of A.I. since the 1950s.

As the co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, now known as theComputer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Minsky contributed to the decades-long drive to make machines more humanlike – through the development of robotic hands and neural networks, as well through his musings on the philosophical underpinnings of intelligence.

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This biologist slips science into ‘The X-Files’

Image: Anne Simon
University of Maryland biologist Anne Simon puts science into “The X-Files.” (Credit: Univ. of Md.)

If the truth is out there in this year’s reboot of “The X-Files,” microbiologist Anne Simon helped put it there.

Simon, a researcher at the University of Maryland at College Park, has been a science adviser to “X-Files” creator Chris Carter since the end of the original show’s first season in 1994. Carter was a family friend, and Simon was so taken by the show’s premiere that she volunteered her scientific services.

She loved seeing the interplay between FBI Agent Fox Mulder, who’s a true believer in UFOs, and Agent Dana Scully, who starts out as a thoroughly skeptical scientist. “How often are scientists portrayed as real people?” she told GeekWire. “Back then, never.”

The first show she consulted on, “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” featured a mysterious character with green blood, as well as a flask containing weird bacteria. Simon came up with a way to tell that the bacteria were of extraterrestrial origin.

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Stephen Hawking: Mad scientists could kill us

Image: Stephen Hawking
British physicist Stephen Hawking worries about humanity’s long-term future. (Credit: NASA)

British physicist Stephen Hawking says we need to colonize other worlds because humanity will almost certainly face a disaster on Earth sometime in the next few millennia – perhaps a disaster of our own making.

Among the risks he outlined in a report from the BBC are nuclear war, climate change and genetically engineered viruses. What’s more, he said further progress in science and technology will bring “new ways things can go wrong.”

Like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Hawking believes the best cosmic insurance policy is to create human colonies on other worlds in our solar system and beyond. Find out how he put it in the BBC report.

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Smartphone gizmo maps meals, counts calories

Image: NutriRay3D device in action
The NutriRay3D device uses a laser-mapping gizmo and a smartphone app to estimate the calories and other nutritional content on a plate of food. (Credit: University of Washington)

How many calories are on your plate? Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a gizmo that estimates the nutritional value of your meal with the mere snap of a smartphone.

NutriRay3D combines a smartphone app with a laser-mapping add-on: The app identifies what kind of food is in the picture, and the laser-mapper provides an estimate of each food’s volume. Then you get a real-time estimate of the calorie count and nutritional content.

The system gets around the toughest hurdles in nutrition tracking: Keeping an accurate record of what you eat, and figuring out how much of it you’re eating.

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Senators want to close the icebreaker gap

Image: Murkowski and Cantwell
U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., call on the White House to upgrade the Coast Guard’s icebreaker fleet. In the background are workers at Vigor Shipyards, where the icebreaker USCGS Healy is undergoing maintenance. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

Two U.S. senators from opposite sides of the aisle – Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell and Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski – teamed up on Friday to hold President Barack Obama to his word when it comes to beefing up the U.S. Coast Guard’s sagging fleet of polar icebreakers.

“We are falling behind in our icebreaking capacity,” Cantwell said during a news conference at Seattle’s Vigor Shipyards, where the medium icebreaker Healy is undergoing maintenance. She underscored her concern in a letter that was sent to Obama and released to journalists.

“There is a race to the Arctic – and the United States isn’t even in the game,” Cantwell said in the letter.

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Political markets sense disturbance in the force

Image: Rubio and Trump
GOP presidential hopefuls Mario Rubio and Donald Trump tangle at October debate. (Credit: CNBC)

Although Donald Trump has long dominated coverage of the GOP presidential campaign, electoral prediction markets have been favoring Marco Rubio instead. Until now.

The shift in support could be a significant signal, because over the years, prediction markets have chalked up at least as good a record as traditional political polling when it comes to handicapping elections.

The concept, pioneered by the Iowa Electronic Markets, involves letting “traders” buy shares in a given proposition. The proposition may be that the Seahawks will win the Super Bowl, or that Trump will win the GOP nomination.

In a winner-take-all market, the price of a share can rise or fall depending on the demand. If the prediction you’ve invested in comes true, you’re paid a specified amount – say, $1 per share. But if you’re wrong, you get nothing.

It may sound like Vegas betting, but economic researchers use the method to study how the “wisdom of crowds” can affect market movements. The concept has come into play in other settings as well, ranging from anticipating flu outbreaks topredicting whether a Microsoft project will stay on track.

For 20 years, presidential elections have provided valuable test cases for prediction markets. “It really does well in primaries, especially early,” said David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research in New York City.

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