Making the sensors and their accompanying radios smaller and cheaper is central to Broad's work. How small and how cheap? Consider that one name for wireless sensors is "smart dust," and you'll get a sense of the goal. The hundreds of sensors in a network, in Broad's vision, would collaborate when making decisions. Before sounding an alarm, they'd poll one another to make sure that one of them wasn't operating on bad data. To conserve battery life, sensors would sleep most of the time, waking up at predetermined intervals, or when something in their environment changes.
That would let engineers cover a bridge with sensors to better gauge how winds, waves, and traffic affect its structural elements over time. They would let farmers and wine makers conduct more precise monitoring of the amount of sunlight and rain their crops receive. "You'd put sensors anywhere you wanted to gather information, instead of needing a person out there in the field with a clipboard," says Broad.
Cynthia Kenyon wants to help you live a longer, healthier life. She thinks a microscopic worm that grows to just one millimeter in length may hold the secret to doing so.
Kenyon is a cofounder of Elixir Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, biotech company, and also director of the Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging at the University of California at San Francisco. Her laboratory is crawling with a species of worm known to scientists as Caenorhabditis elegans. She studies this worm because it's both simple enough to understand--it has a transparent body and fewer than 1,000 individual cells--and complex enough to have been conceived from a sperm and an egg and have a basic nervous system. Plus, the tiny critter's genome has already been sequenced.
Ordinarily, C. elegans has a life span of two to three weeks. But Kenyon's worms have had their genes altered in a way that lets them live up to six times longer. "When a normal worm was lying dead, or it was time for the nursing home, these other worms were moving around," she says. "You'd just never think you could do that."
Picture Kenyon and her researchers sitting at a giant mixing board that can adjust the activity levels of various systems in the worm. "We're looking at about 50 genes and asking what their functional significance is," she says. The circuits, or signaling pathways, that genes use to control various activities can be turned on and off by feeding the worms bacteria spiked with RNA. The lab has discovered that reducing the worm's genetic receptivity to insulin increased its life span, but they also knew that if you knocked out insulin receptors entirely, the animal would die because it couldn't regulate its metabolism. Dialing down the worm's susceptibility to stress seemed to add to its life span, as did enhancing its aggressive attack on bacteria inside its body.
In 1999, Kenyon cofounded Elixir to help turn her research into products, joining forces with a venture capitalist and Lenny Guarente, a longevity researcher at MIT. "There's no more important question, in my mind, than how can you control longevity," says Kenyon, who was elected into the National Academy of Science last summer. Kenyon doesn't spend too much time worrying about the societal repercussions of extending the human life span. Longer-life humans would have more years of productive work, and maybe fewer years of infirmity as they approach the end. And in any case, she says, "we tend to believe, as a society, that it's not good to die."
Chad Dyner quit his job at one of the world's most famous architecture firms because he wanted to do something different. He wanted to become an inventor.
In 2000, Dyner left the Los Angeles firm of Gehry Partners to spend time tinkering in the two-bedroom apartment that he shared with a roommate in Hermosa Beach, California.
Dyner wanted to transform thin air into a movie screen--a full-color display. And he wanted users to be able to use their hands to manipulate the images, the way Tom Cruise did in the film Minority Report. "I wanted to come up with a system that would allow for collaboration," Dyner says. "It would give designers and architects a way to manipulate data and discuss a project together."
Dyner bought a digital projector--the same kind used to display PowerPoint presentations--and took it apart. Inside was a micromirror system, a single chip that relies on a million tiny mirrors that tilt back and forth to create images. Dyner spent "seven days a week, 18 hours a day" trying to figure out "how to make the light stop in free space" using the micromirror system.
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