Each year, the folks at Discover Magazine honor a number of scientists with Innovation Awards, which spotlight inventions and discoveries with the potential to change our lives.
This year, 19 scientists were honored. I’ve chosen a few from the list to highlight this week, to give you a taste of the remarkable discoveries that are occurring now–and shaping our futures.
For instance, E. Fred Schubert, professor of electrical engineering at Boston University, may have come up with a replacement for the light bulb. His photon-recycling semiconductor light-emitting diode consists of a chip that emits blue light bonded to a chip that absorbs blue light and turns it into yellow light. The blue and yellow light combine to create white light. You could light a room evenly with rows of these tiny LEDs in the ceiling.
Schubert’s LEDs generate little heat, are compact (a round wafer five centimeters in diameter can be diced up into 10,000 light sources) and, if used widely, could reduce energy consumption by 10 percent.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team led by electrical engineer Steven Leeb has discovered a way to turn ordinary fluourescent lights into lights that “talk.” The lights, which flicker anyway, can be set to flicker in a particular pattern that sends a message to a decoder. The procedure costs only $20 per light, there are no wires to install, and the bulbs don’t use extra energy. Lights in important locations in airports, shopping malls, and hospitals (like Regina’s labyrinthine General Hospital) could be set up to constantly broadcast a pre-determined message anyone with a decoder could hear: i.e., “The men’s room is on the right.”
Some of the honored innovations tackle serious global problems. The land-mine detector developed by Thomas Thundat, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee promises to make detection and removal of land mines far easier, faster and safer. Crude land mines cost only about $3 apiece to make. As a result, there are more than 110 million active mines in at least 64 countries, killing 26,000 people a year. At the current rate of removal, it will take more than a millennium to get rid of them all, even if no new ones are installed. That’s because the current method, in many places, consists of someone crawling along the ground poking at it with a stick!
Thundat’s land-mine detector is built around a cantilever, a tiny diving-board-like silicon projection 80 micrometers long and only a quarter the diameter of a human hair, heated to 570 degrees Celsius. When combustible fumes from hidden explosives contact the cantilever, tiny explosions make the cantilever bounce. The speed of the bouncing is determined by the explosive, so the flashlight-sized, $300 device can both detect the presence of a mine and tell you what sort of explosive it contains.
Sometimes you’d think Regina had been seeded with land-mines, judging by the craters in the road. Leo Mara at Sandia National Laboratories may have the solution: bus-sized, high-tech vehicle called a 3RV (Rapid Road Repair Vehicle) that uses laser scanners and onboard computer to evaluate road damage and then performs instant repair, vacuuming debris from potholes, then filling them with sand and a quick-drying liquid polymer. Mara thinks the vehicle would cost about $500,000 U.S., but would quickly pay for itself.
Tthe Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation’s $100,000 award this year went to Anthony Atala, who is growing tissues and organs in the lab.
Atala’s team is growing various kinds of tissues, but is most advanced in the growing of bladders. Atala, a pediatric urologic surgeon, knows that any babies are born with bladders outside their bodies. As well, bladders can be destroyed by various diseases. About 10,000 children and adults in the United States undergo bladder-replacement or repair surgery each year. For more than a century new bladders have been fashioned from the patient’s stomach or intestinal tissue, but the tissue usually reverts to its original function, absorbing instead of excreting.
Atala builds bladders by extracting healthy cells from diseased tissue, then squirting them onto a bladder-shaped scaffold made of a biodegradable polymer mesh. The cells multiply and produce tissue in the correct shape. Transplanted into a patient– the team has successfully performed such an operation on a dog–the scaffolding deteriorates harmlessly, leaving behind a brand-new bladder grown from the patient’s own cells.
From talking lights to lab-grown organs, the annual Discover Magazine Innovation Awards provide a fascinating snapshot of where science is today–and where it may be taking us tomorrow.
