For 13 years we've recognized the greatest people and ideas in science, technology, and
engineering. This year, we focused on people whose careers are just beginning. These 12 young people have already changed entire industries—and lives. They're creating battle gear that treats wounds, hyperefficient digitized electricity, and these things: lightweight inexpensive robots that assemble like origami. The best part about these award winners? They're a long way from being done.
Flat-Pack Robots
Cynthia SungAge: 28Assistant professor of mechanical engineering, University of PennsylvaniaCynthia Sung's robots look more like toys than the work of engineers. A tightly folded starfish, a cubic white bird, a house with legs—they're inspired by origami that Sung's mother taught her in the third grade. They beckon you to play with them, to push them along and bend their movable joints. But their purpose is more than art or entertainment.The concept goes like this: Rather than making robots out of rigid, heavy material such as metal or hard plastic, Sung wants to build them out of paper or thin plastic. That way, they can be shipped or stored as lightweight flat sheets. When they need to be used, fold them along the lines to create the robot, then add the motor. The idea saves money, since thin sheets of plastic are inexpensive, and space."The big benefit is in the robots' ability to transform," Sung says. "Think of a robot that crawls around, folds itself up to move through small spaces, then unfolds again once it's in the open. It would be very useful for exploring new environments. You could also imagine a swarm of robots that store as flat sheets of plastic in an envelope, then self-fold to deploy, then unfold and store themselves back as flat sheets." Sung also sees potential in their use for education. Because the robots are small and made by folding rather than soldering, wiring, or welding, they're more accessible to young students.
Cynthia Sung
Age: 28
Assistant professor of mechanical engineering, University of Pennsylvania
Cynthia Sung's robots look more like toys than the work of engineers. A tightly folded starfish, a cubic white bird, a house with legs—they're inspired by origami that Sung's mother taught her in the third grade. They beckon you to play with them, to push them along and bend their movable joints. But their purpose is more than art or entertainment.
The concept goes like this: Rather than making robots out of rigid, heavy material such as metal or hard plastic, Sung wants to build them out of paper or thin plastic. That way, they can be shipped or stored as lightweight flat sheets. When they need to be used, fold them along the lines to create the robot, then add the motor. The idea saves money, since thin sheets of plastic are inexpensive, and space.
"The big benefit is in the robots' ability to transform," Sung says. "Think of a robot that crawls around, folds itself up to move through small spaces, then unfolds again once it's in the open. It would be very useful for exploring new environments. You could also imagine a swarm of robots that store as flat sheets of plastic in an envelope, then self-fold to deploy, then unfold and store themselves back as flat sheets." Sung also sees potential in their use for education. Because the robots are small and made by folding rather than soldering, wiring, or welding, they're more accessible to young students.
Flat-Pack Robots (Cont.)
Sung has a lot to figure out before these robots are used in the world. Currently, her designs are mostly folded by hand, and can take between ten minutes and five hours to complete. That's why she has enlisted the help of a materials scientist to look into active materials that will help the robots fold themselves. This summer, Sung tried making the robots out of polystyrene, the same substance used in those oven-baked Shrinky Dinks from the 1980s. When the unassembled sheets were exposed to boiling water, the polystyrene areas shrunk and pulled the folds together, dropping assembly time to less than a minute. To reduce design time, which can last months, Sung is also developing computer programs that will do the work for her.Sung sees her work somewhere between traditional robotics and the emerging field of soft robotics, which aims to make robots out of materials that mimic living organisms. She'll change how we think of robots—in terms of where they can go, what they can be made of, and who can afford them.—Lara Sorokanich
Sung has a lot to figure out before these robots are used in the world. Currently, her designs are mostly folded by hand, and can take between ten minutes and five hours to complete. That's why she has enlisted the help of a materials scientist to look into active materials that will help the robots fold themselves. This summer, Sung tried making the robots out of polystyrene, the same substance used in those oven-baked Shrinky Dinks from the 1980s. When the unassembled sheets were exposed to boiling water, the polystyrene areas shrunk and pulled the folds together, dropping assembly time to less than a minute. To reduce design time, which can last months, Sung is also developing computer programs that will do the work for her.
Sung sees her work somewhere between traditional robotics and the emerging field of soft robotics, which aims to make robots out of materials that mimic living organisms. She'll change how we think of robots—in terms of where they can go, what they can be made of, and who can afford them.—Lara Sorokanich
Domestic Outsourcing
Kyle BrothisAge: 30CTO, Techtonic groupWhen Techtonic group started 17 years ago, it was an off-shoring company. It accepted software-development work and farmed it out to a team of programmers in Armenia. But in 2014, CEO Heather Terenzio realized that the cost of travel back and forth and the quality of the work just wasn't justifiable—especially when there were plenty of people around her in Denver and Boulder who needed jobs. Techtonic started hiring locals, training them, and doing the coding themselves. Then last year, Terenzio hired Kyle Brothis as chief technology officer. Brothis brought with him experience teaching coding boot camps, and together he and Terenzio put together Techtonic Academy. Ex-baristas, ex-military, ex-cons, and anyone else who's interested can take the four-week-long free coding course with Brothis as the instructor. The best students land apprenticeships at Techtonic Group—out of the first class of 13, seven became apprentices—where they get paid and paired with mentors to do actual client work. For students, it's a way to find out if they like to code—and potentially even find a job—at no cost. For Techtonic, it's a way to staff their contracts, provide clients with a pipeline of talent, bolster the job market in their community, and help diversify a famously homogeneous industry.
Kyle Brothis
Age: 30
CTO, Techtonic group
When Techtonic group started 17 years ago, it was an off-shoring company. It accepted software-development work and farmed it out to a team of programmers in Armenia. But in 2014, CEO Heather Terenzio realized that the cost of travel back and forth and the quality of the work just wasn't justifiable—especially when there were plenty of people around her in Denver and Boulder who needed jobs. Techtonic started hiring locals, training them, and doing the coding themselves. Then last year, Terenzio hired Kyle Brothis as chief technology officer. Brothis brought with him experience teaching coding boot camps, and together he and Terenzio put together Techtonic Academy. Ex-baristas, ex-military, ex-cons, and anyone else who's interested can take the four-week-long free coding course with Brothis as the instructor. The best students land apprenticeships at Techtonic Group—out of the first class of 13, seven became apprentices—where they get paid and paired with mentors to do actual client work. For students, it's a way to find out if they like to code—and potentially even find a job—at no cost. For Techtonic, it's a way to staff their contracts, provide clients with a pipeline of talent, bolster the job market in their community, and help diversify a famously homogeneous industry.
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Domestic Outsourcing (Cont.)
Brothis's hope is that anytime someone is going to send a coding job overseas, to a team like the one his company used to manage, they'll check in with Techtonic first. After all, when you factor in the extra cost caused by distance, language barriers, and cultural differences, Techtonic can provide the same services for about the same price. More important, any time a company hires disenfranchised American workers, they're helping fulfill one of the great promises of the tech industry: At the cost of little more than an internet connection, work can come to the workers.Techtonic already has a satellite office in Bozeman, Montana, and is looking to Manhattan, Kansas; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Colorado Springs, Colorado, as future sites. They're able to offer the class for free only by corralling funding from state and local governments and nonprofits, so expanding isn't as simple as finding new office space. But it's important, despite the amount of work required. Techtonic plans to have offices in ten cities, with 100 developers each, by 2020.—Kevin Dupzyk
Brothis's hope is that anytime someone is going to send a coding job overseas, to a team like the one his company used to manage, they'll check in with Techtonic first. After all, when you factor in the extra cost caused by distance, language barriers, and cultural differences, Techtonic can provide the same services for about the same price. More important, any time a company hires disenfranchised American workers, they're helping fulfill one of the great promises of the tech industry: At the cost of little more than an internet connection, work can come to the workers.
Techtonic already has a satellite office in Bozeman, Montana, and is looking to Manhattan, Kansas; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Colorado Springs, Colorado, as future sites. They're able to offer the class for free only by corralling funding from state and local governments and nonprofits, so expanding isn't as simple as finding new office space. But it's important, despite the amount of work required. Techtonic plans to have offices in ten cities, with 100 developers each, by 2020.—Kevin Dupzyk
Interactive Online Video Games With No Delay
James Boehm and Matt Salsamendi Age: 19 (James) and 21 (Matt)Engineering leads and cofounders of Microsoft's Mixer, a streaming gaming platformWhen James Boehm and Matt Salsamendi started their first company in 2011, a Minecraft-server-hosting service, they had 28 years between them. Not years of experience—years of living. By 2014, their company was pulling in $5 million annually. And they kept hearing that their users wanted more. They wanted a place where they could watch and interact with other people playing video games, a growing segment of the $30-billion-a-year gaming industry. The problem was participation. There were plenty of opportunities online to watch gamers, but streaming a video game requires a lot of data—so much that no app allowed you to watch a game without a substantial delay. That delay ruined the possibility of interaction. By the time you tell gamers that there's an enemy around the corner, or change their weapons, they've already moved on.Boehm and Salsamendi had little experience in streaming. But they didn't care. They found that most existing apps relied on a sort of faux live feed, streamed in short chunks of video stitched together. They approached the issue as if it were web conferencing. "It all boils down to building Skype, but for thousands of people," Salsamendi says. And it worked. Salsamendi and Boehm achieved latency of less than a second.At the beginning of 2016, they used the technology to launch a company called Beam. Salsamendi presented Beam at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition held in New York in May 2016. It won, and Beam amassed 100,000 users in the first three months of beta testing. A month later, both men were named fellows in bajillionaire Peter Thiel's program that pays students to skip college. Two months after that, Microsoft bought their company.Now called Mixer, the technology was transferred to Xbox and Windows 10 PCs and is used by millions of fans of watching and participating as other people play games. With absolutely no delay.—James Lynch
James Boehm and Matt Salsamendi
Age: 19 (James) and 21 (Matt)
Engineering leads and cofounders of Microsoft's Mixer, a streaming gaming platform
When James Boehm and Matt Salsamendi started their first company in 2011, a Minecraft-server-hosting service, they had 28 years between them. Not years of experience—years of living. By 2014, their company was pulling in $5 million annually. And they kept hearing that their users wanted more. They wanted a place where they could watch and interact with other people playing video games, a growing segment of the $30-billion-a-year gaming industry. The problem was participation. There were plenty of opportunities online to watch gamers, but streaming a video game requires a lot of data—so much that no app allowed you to watch a game without a substantial delay. That delay ruined the possibility of interaction. By the time you tell gamers that there's an enemy around the corner, or change their weapons, they've already moved on.
Boehm and Salsamendi had little experience in streaming. But they didn't care. They found that most existing apps relied on a sort of faux live feed, streamed in short chunks of video stitched together. They approached the issue as if it were web conferencing. "It all boils down to building Skype, but for thousands of people," Salsamendi says. And it worked. Salsamendi and Boehm achieved latency of less than a second.
At the beginning of 2016, they used the technology to launch a company called Beam. Salsamendi presented Beam at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition held in New York in May 2016. It won, and Beam amassed 100,000 users in the first three months of beta testing. A month later, both men were named fellows in bajillionaire Peter Thiel's program that pays students to skip college. Two months after that, Microsoft bought their company.
Now called Mixer, the technology was transferred to Xbox and Windows 10 PCs and is used by millions of fans of watching and participating as other people play games. With absolutely no delay.—James Lynch
A New Way To Stimulate Cancer Drugs
Roberta ZappasodiAge: 36Research scholar, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer CenterThe current situation in cancer research is a little strange: Suddenly, the most sought-after researchers are people who spent more time in school learning about T-cells (the immune system's killer cells) than about tumors. Researchers like Roberta Zappasodi, who works at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Her focus, immunotherapy, is a new type of cancer treatment that involves hacking a sick person's immune system so that it can recognize and kill cancer the same way it would fight a cold.Though immunotherapies work so well in some cases that they can bring patients back from the brink of death, they don't work for everyone, and doctors often spend valuable time waiting to find out which patient falls into which category. With Zappasodi's work, they don't have to. "What I do is find biomarkers, which are signs that the drug is doing its job immunologically," she says. She develops tests, essentially, that can tell whether a particular therapy is working.That would be significant enough, but next Zappasodi tries to find out if those biomarkers give doctors any insight into the treatment itself. Her biggest success so far: finding out that a popular immunotherapy drug that targets the protein CTLA-4 increases a previously ignored subgroup of T-cells that actually suppresses the immune system. If that group of T-cells gets too large in response to the medication, it reduces the immune system's ability to attack the cancer and helps the cancer resist treatment. When that happens, administering another drug decreases the suppressive T-cells and allows treatment to resume. "Based on the quantity of this cell subset in the blood, we can combine the two drugs better," she says. Administer one drug if the population gets too high, and another if it drops too low. This may not sound like a monumental discovery, but in cancer—a disease which every day turns out to require more precise, individualized care to defeat—it can mean the difference between life and death.—Jacqueline Detwiler
Roberta Zappasodi
Age: 36
Research scholar, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
The current situation in cancer research is a little strange: Suddenly, the most sought-after researchers are people who spent more time in school learning about T-cells (the immune system's killer cells) than about tumors. Researchers like Roberta Zappasodi, who works at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Her focus, immunotherapy, is a new type of cancer treatment that involves hacking a sick person's immune system so that it can recognize and kill cancer the same way it would fight a cold.
Though immunotherapies work so well in some cases that they can bring patients back from the brink of death, they don't work for everyone, and doctors often spend valuable time waiting to find out which patient falls into which category. With Zappasodi's work, they don't have to. "What I do is find biomarkers, which are signs that the drug is doing its job immunologically," she says. She develops tests, essentially, that can tell whether a particular therapy is working.
That would be significant enough, but next Zappasodi tries to find out if those biomarkers give doctors any insight into the treatment itself. Her biggest success so far: finding out that a popular immunotherapy drug that targets the protein CTLA-4 increases a previously ignored subgroup of T-cells that actually suppresses the immune system. If that group of T-cells gets too large in response to the medication, it reduces the immune system's ability to attack the cancer and helps the cancer resist treatment. When that happens, administering another drug decreases the suppressive T-cells and allows treatment to resume. "Based on the quantity of this cell subset in the blood, we can combine the two drugs better," she says. Administer one drug if the population gets too high, and another if it drops too low. This may not sound like a monumental discovery, but in cancer—a disease which every day turns out to require more precise, individualized care to defeat—it can mean the difference between life and death.—Jacqueline Detwiler
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Body Armor That Heals You
Matthew A. LongAge: 21Marine corporalAn enemy round tears through the Marine's Kevlar vest, passing through the Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI)—ceramic trauma plates held against his chest, back, and sides—through a small protective cushion, through his uniform, and into his flesh. Between 2001 and 2011, nearly 1,000 U.S. troops died of potentially survivable injuries because they couldn't get to a treatment facility in time. But this Marine is wearing his treatment facility. The layer of cushion is filled with packets of gel and a painkiller. When pierced by a bullet or shrapnel from an IED, the cushion releases the gel, which turns into a foam sealant and forces the painkiller down into the wound, staving off shock and stanching blood loss.The palliative cushion is the vision of Marine Corporal Matthew Long, a 21-year-old motor transport mechanic stationed in Albany, Georgia. In 2016, he submitted his idea to the Marines' first ever Logistics Innovation Challenge. He was one of 17 winners. The idea is currently being developed, and Long is working with the lab as a consultant. "When implemented, it will revolutionize the way combat medical care is conducted," Long says. "It will save lives."—Eleanor Hildebrandt
Matthew A. Long
Age: 21
Marine corporal
An enemy round tears through the Marine's Kevlar vest, passing through the Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI)—ceramic trauma plates held against his chest, back, and sides—through a small protective cushion, through his uniform, and into his flesh. Between 2001 and 2011, nearly 1,000 U.S. troops died of potentially survivable injuries because they couldn't get to a treatment facility in time. But this Marine is wearing his treatment facility. The layer of cushion is filled with packets of gel and a painkiller. When pierced by a bullet or shrapnel from an IED, the cushion releases the gel, which turns into a foam sealant and forces the painkiller down into the wound, staving off shock and stanching blood loss.
The palliative cushion is the vision of Marine Corporal Matthew Long, a 21-year-old motor transport mechanic stationed in Albany, Georgia. In 2016, he submitted his idea to the Marines' first ever Logistics Innovation Challenge. He was one of 17 winners. The idea is currently being developed, and Long is working with the lab as a consultant. "When implemented, it will revolutionize the way combat medical care is conducted," Long says. "It will save lives."
—Eleanor Hildebrandt
The Shrinking Beacon
Darmindra ArumugamAge: 34Research technologist and program manager, JPLThe oxygen tank weighs 27 pounds. The jacket, pants, boots, radio, and hand tools add another 22. The axe, six. When a firefighter enters a burning building, he carries as much as 75 pounds of gear. There's no room for extra bulk.Darmindra Arumugam, a research technologist and program manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, knew this when he and his team developed the Precision Outdoor and Indoor Navigation and Tracking for Emergency Responders (POINTER). The device uses magnetic fields instead of higher-frequency radio waves, such as those used in GPS, that are often blocked by building walls to track first responders.Radio waves bounce off the electrical signals given off by almost everything in our world. Relatively few things, however, give off magnetic energy. POINTER uses magnetic fields to locate emergency personnel up to three miles away, even in the gnarliest environments. When it debuted in 2016, Arumugam knew the size would be a problem for firefighters counting every ounce. But he also knew it would save lives. So this year he shrank it.The updated system swapped individual transmitters for low-power receivers that pick up signals from a single transmitter. They're much smaller, the size of a cellphone, and cheaper, at less than $5 each. Plus, bomb technicians won't be sending out dangerous signals as they work. POINTER is currently limited to first responders, but in a few years consumers will be able to buy them, too.—J.L.
Darmindra Arumugam
Age: 34
Research technologist and program manager, JPL
The oxygen tank weighs 27 pounds. The jacket, pants, boots, radio, and hand tools add another 22. The axe, six. When a firefighter enters a burning building, he carries as much as 75 pounds of gear. There's no room for extra bulk.
Darmindra Arumugam, a research technologist and program manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, knew this when he and his team developed the Precision Outdoor and Indoor Navigation and Tracking for Emergency Responders (POINTER). The device uses magnetic fields instead of higher-frequency radio waves, such as those used in GPS, that are often blocked by building walls to track first responders.
Radio waves bounce off the electrical signals given off by almost everything in our world. Relatively few things, however, give off magnetic energy. POINTER uses magnetic fields to locate emergency personnel up to three miles away, even in the gnarliest environments. When it debuted in 2016, Arumugam knew the size would be a problem for firefighters counting every ounce. But he also knew it would save lives. So this year he shrank it.
The updated system swapped individual transmitters for low-power receivers that pick up signals from a single transmitter. They're much smaller, the size of a cellphone, and cheaper, at less than $5 each. Plus, bomb technicians won't be sending out dangerous signals as they work. POINTER is currently limited to first responders, but in a few years consumers will be able to buy them, too.—J.L.
Startups With the Resources of Giant Corporations
Daniel GrossAge: 26Partner, Y CombinatorDaniel Gross wants to fund the next 1,000 great artificial intelligence startups. That's why, earlier this year, the 26-year-old left a director job at Apple and started YC AI, an artificial intelligence group at the business accelerator Y Combinator. When he was working at Apple, Gross noticed that machine-learning projects were getting easier within big companies, but that startups were having trouble keeping up. That's because companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook have the money to hire the best A.I. researchers, the computer power and capital to train machine-learning models, and access to huge amounts of data. Startups typically don't. "What we try to do is give startups access to those things that previously were only accessible within large companies," Gross says. Which means YC AI doesn't just provide capital. It also helps startups connect with the best A.I. researchers at larger tech companies, provides access to powerful computer processors, and acquires important data that teach artificial intelligence how to behave.Gross—who sold his own A.I. startup, a personal assistant app called Cue that scanned your various accounts to add events to your calendar, to Apple for more than $40 million in 2013—also started AI Grant, a nonprofit that funds A.I. research projects that are important but not necessarily profitable. His overall goal, at both Y Combinator and his nonprofit, is to accelerate the entire field of artificial intelligence and bring it to "every vertical on the planet, from manufacturing to agriculture to design to healthcare to banking."I think A.I. will make the Industrial Revolution look small," Gross says. "It has the potential to unlock a whole new quality of life for the average person, and I think it could be the thing that makes the next great 10, 20, 30 thousand companies."—L.S.
Daniel Gross
Age: 26
Partner, Y Combinator
Daniel Gross wants to fund the next 1,000 great artificial intelligence startups. That's why, earlier this year, the 26-year-old left a director job at Apple and started YC AI, an artificial intelligence group at the business accelerator Y Combinator. When he was working at Apple, Gross noticed that machine-learning projects were getting easier within big companies, but that startups were having trouble keeping up. That's because companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook have the money to hire the best A.I. researchers, the computer power and capital to train machine-learning models, and access to huge amounts of data. Startups typically don't. "What we try to do is give startups access to those things that previously were only accessible within large companies," Gross says. Which means YC AI doesn't just provide capital. It also helps startups connect with the best A.I. researchers at larger tech companies, provides access to powerful computer processors, and acquires important data that teach artificial intelligence how to behave.
Gross—who sold his own A.I. startup, a personal assistant app called Cue that scanned your various accounts to add events to your calendar, to Apple for more than $40 million in 2013—also started AI Grant, a nonprofit that funds A.I. research projects that are important but not necessarily profitable. His overall goal, at both Y Combinator and his nonprofit, is to accelerate the entire field of artificial intelligence and bring it to "every vertical on the planet, from manufacturing to agriculture to design to healthcare to banking.
"I think A.I. will make the Industrial Revolution look small," Gross says. "It has the potential to unlock a whole new quality of life for the average person, and I think it could be the thing that makes the next great 10, 20, 30 thousand companies."—L.S.
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A Protective Coating for Nuclear Fuel
Kurt TerraniAge: 32Senior staff scientist, Oak Ridge National LaboratoryThe meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011 happened because of a massive earthquake. But there might have been another reason: the zirconium alloy cladding that protected the plant's fuel rods. As the damaged reactor heated up, the cladding reacted with the water around it and generated hydrogen gas, which exploded. Although no one could have predicted the accident, Kurt Terrani, a nuclear engineer and materials scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, near Knoxville, says that it wasn't exactly a surprise that the cladding failed in such an extreme situation.Since commercial nuclear power plants were first developed in the late '40s, thanks to a rocky political landscape and the economics of building power plants, many aspects of how they work—including cladding materials—haven't changed. So in the wake of Fukushima, Terrani and his team at Oak Ridge started looking for better cladding options. They focused on something called oxide-dispersion-strengthened, or ODS, alloys. "The small oxide particles dispersed in the material increase its strength and resistance to deformation under stress at high temperatures," Terrani says. The technology itself has been around since the 1970s, but only recently has anyone figured out how to produce, weld, or shape these alloys with any consistency. They perform better at the high temperatures of a nuclear reactor, and are slower to react with water. After three years of testing, in 2018 Terrani's team is starting a pilot of iron-clad fuel rods at the Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Power Plant in Georgia. It will be the first time since the 1950s that rods without zirconium cladding are used in a commercial nuclear power plant.The reason we can still get away with using zirconium cladding is that current reactors reach temperatures that zirconium can handle, except in freak accidents. But the new generation of reactors won't use water as a coolant and may look nothing like the reactors we're used to. One design, called a sodium-cooled fast reactor, won't work with zirconium—it'll require one of Terrani's new alloys. Another, the high temperature gas-cooled reactor, won't work with steel at all. It promises better efficiency than today's plants, but can't be built without radiation-resistant ceramics. Terrani's team is working on those, too.—K.D.
Kurt Terrani
Age: 32
Senior staff scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011 happened because of a massive earthquake. But there might have been another reason: the zirconium alloy cladding that protected the plant's fuel rods. As the damaged reactor heated up, the cladding reacted with the water around it and generated hydrogen gas, which exploded. Although no one could have predicted the accident, Kurt Terrani, a nuclear engineer and materials scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, near Knoxville, says that it wasn't exactly a surprise that the cladding failed in such an extreme situation.
Since commercial nuclear power plants were first developed in the late '40s, thanks to a rocky political landscape and the economics of building power plants, many aspects of how they work—including cladding materials—haven't changed. So in the wake of Fukushima, Terrani and his team at Oak Ridge started looking for better cladding options. They focused on something called oxide-dispersion-strengthened, or ODS, alloys. "The small oxide particles dispersed in the material increase its strength and resistance to deformation under stress at high temperatures," Terrani says. The technology itself has been around since the 1970s, but only recently has anyone figured out how to produce, weld, or shape these alloys with any consistency. They perform better at the high temperatures of a nuclear reactor, and are slower to react with water. After three years of testing, in 2018 Terrani's team is starting a pilot of iron-clad fuel rods at the Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Power Plant in Georgia. It will be the first time since the 1950s that rods without zirconium cladding are used in a commercial nuclear power plant.
The reason we can still get away with using zirconium cladding is that current reactors reach temperatures that zirconium can handle, except in freak accidents. But the new generation of reactors won't use water as a coolant and may look nothing like the reactors we're used to. One design, called a sodium-cooled fast reactor, won't work with zirconium—it'll require one of Terrani's new alloys. Another, the high temperature gas-cooled reactor, won't work with steel at all. It promises better efficiency than today's plants, but can't be built without radiation-resistant ceramics. Terrani's team is working on those, too.—K.D.
How to Convert the World to Digital Electricity
Chris Doerfler and Anatoli Oleynik
Age: 38, 33
3DFS Power Solutions
We waste more than two-thirds of the electricity we generate. Look at your cellphone. It has very different power requirements than a refrigerator, yet we plug them into the same outlet. It's like filling pint glasses with a fire hose. Also buckets, and eyedroppers. And while the fire hose is bluntly effective, it's also messy. When fluorescent lights hum, or the cube at the end of your phone charger gets hot, that's wasted electricity. Chris Doerfler and Anatoli Oleynik, cofounders of 3DFS in Pittsboro, North Carolina, want to stop that waste.
Ideally, you'd dose each device with the precise power that it needs at any moment. To execute that mission is a two-part challenge. First, you have to precisely measure the flow of electricity in real time, because you can't fix the waste if you don't know how much you might be wasting. This required 3DFS to invent software that can sample 295 million data points per second—50,000 times faster than any measuring technology currently used. The second part is correction. Because we use three-phase power (three levels of power coursing through a single line), electricity travels through the grid as a trio of sine waves. Right now, those waves are ragged. The spikes and sags represent inefficiency—electrical energy converting to thermal. We can use only a fraction of that wave. But if that wave were smoothed out, say by the 3DFS VectorQ2 power controller, a cube the size of a breadmaker that plugs in between the grid and your building, removing or adding current as needed? Ninety-five percent efficiency, or three times the current performance.
With precision power like this, a battery can be charged to its exact needs, increasing its lifetime by 250 percent. Generators can be smaller and more fuel-efficient. You'll even know when your server or lightbulb is about to fail, because its digital fingerprint will change. "Over time, failure in the grid is going to be 100 percent preventative," Doerfler says. You replace a transformer before it blows, with one designed for digitally processed power. And that one lasts 150 years.
The first VectorQ2s go into a new data center this fall. The military is also keenly interested. But 3DFS is a fledgling private company attempting to push past a precarious moment—they're ready for public adoption, not venture capital, but their initial product costs about $30,000 and is aimed at a relatively small audience. These guys think digitized electricity is inevitable, but first they need to convince the world to solve a problem it didn't know it had.—Ezra Dyer
The Astronaut Tracker
Cody Kelly
Age: 30
Post-landing survival equipment subsystem manager for NASA's Orion spacecraft
Cody Kelly is the man in charge of just about every facet of astronaut safety when they come back to Earth. His team created the Advanced Next-Generation Emergency Locator system, or ANGEL. It deals with the unexpected—the unfortunate moments when returning astronauts are dropped in the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, and we can't find them.
Using an increasingly vast web of satellites and a new, more durable, wavelength capable of cutting through oceanic and atmospheric interference, ANGEL relays a signal from astronauts to national rescue control centers. There, powerful computers process the information and send it out to recovery ships and helicopters. In just 30 minutes ANGEL can locate distressed astronauts to within ten feet—anywhere on the planet.
"Launches are optional," Kelly likes to say. "But landings are mandatory." After a complicated mission, the landing should almost feel like an afterthought. It's crucial to get it right.
In the next few years ANGEL will spread from the bounds of space to local applications. Which is good news for all of us. If ANGEL can find astronauts in the middle of the Pacific, it shouldn't have a problem finding a lost hiker on the Appalachian trail or a boater stranded at sea.—J.L.
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5 More 2017 Breakthroughs
AUTOMATED CRICKET FARMS
As protein, crickets can be raised using 12 times less feed and 2,000 times less water than cattle. But production takes a lot of oversight, which means a lot of money. This summer, the Aspire Food Group opened a new facility in Austin that is almost fully automated. On a 24-hour optimized schedule, robots feed the crickets and monitor the eggs before they are hatched and harvested. The system has already significantly reduced Aspire's manpower expenses and increased the plant's output by 1,000%.
THE FIX FOR MUTATED EMBRYOS
In August, for the first time ever, researchers successfully repaired a gene mutation in a human embryo. Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University and his team used the CRISPR gene-snipping tool and modified in-vitro fertilization techniques to produce a healthy fertilized egg whose future offspring would also be mutation free.
COMPRESSION IGNITION FOR GAS ENGINES
A gasoline engine without spark plugs is the cold fusion of internal combustion: an idea that hasn't gone anywhere. But in August Mazda announced that it will bring a gasoline compression ignition engine to production in two years. Called Skyactiv-X, it will still have spark plugs for cold starts. Otherwise, combustion is triggered by the heat of compression, upping efficiency by 30%.
YOUTUBE'S ANTI-TERRORIST MOVEMENT
To combat online religious and racist radicalization, this summer YouTube announced that it would use machine learning to better detect and remove hateful content. The company also launched a program that, in response to extremism-related key words, automatically redirects users to videos that debunk hateful theories and rhetoric.
IMMEDIATE CONCUSSION DIAGNOSIS
One of the primary signs of a concussion is a lag between brain signals and eye movement. SyncThink's Eye-Sync, a lightweight scanner based on Samsung's Gear VR platform, is the first piece of equipment that measures eye motion to determine if an athlete is concussed. And it does so in only 60 seconds. After a year of testing by PAC-12 football programs, version two of the device is now wireless and Cloud-connected, and being expanded to more teams this season.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/news/g3237/2017-popular-mechanics-breakthrough-awards/
