Second Annual EurekaFest Showcases Young Innovators

Credit: Lauren Rugani

At today's second annual EurekaFest, top high-school innovators from around the country gathered at MIT to demonstrate their inventions. One of the most notable was a motorcycle designed to be both safer and greener than the average 'cycle: it's electrically powered and built with an enclosure fitted with compressible brackets--"crush zones"--in case of a collision.

The motorcycle operates on five lithium-ion batteries and can recharge in three hours from a standard wall outlet. It weighs only about 220 pounds and is designed with a low center of gravity for stability. It can reach about 60 miles per hour and can go 40 miles without a recharge, which can be done onboard. The first prototype cost around $12,000 to build, but the team that invented it, from Saint Thomas Academy, in Minnesota, expects that subsequent models will be about half the price, since part of the cost was designing and developing custom molds.

This year's $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, around which EurekaFest is organized, will be presented tonight to Joseph DeSimone, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has done work developing polymers for medicine, particularly drug delivery, and green manufacturing. Martin Fisher, CEO of KickStart, won the $100,000 award for sustainability research for his work on human-powered irrigation pumps.

GM's Lithium-Ion Hybrids

Toyota's Prius hybrid has been more successful than GM's hybrid offerings. Today at the International Geneva Motor Show, GM announced its intention to upgrade the battery packs in its basic hybrid system to deliver more power. Maybe that will help improve sales.

GM's basic hybrid system uses a souped-up alternator to add brief bursts of power during acceleration. It runs in reverse during braking, converting some of the kinetic energy of the vehicle into electricity. At best, the system improves fuel economy by 20 percent--just a handful of miles per gallon. But it's less expensive than more sophisticated hybrids like the Prius or GM's new two-mode hybrids, and it can be incorporated into almost all of GM's vehicles. As a result, it could be more widespread. GM plans to make about 100,000 of the vehicles a year.

The new battery pack, a lithium-ion pack made by Hitachi, combined with an improved alternator-generator, can deliver three times more power than the company's older system, which used nickel metal hydride batteries. GM claims that this system will be a perfect complement to another fuel-saving strategy: downsizing the engine and adding a turbocharger for bursts of power. The turbocharger doesn't kick in right away, and it doesn't work well at low engine speeds. But the battery and motor kick in right away, compensating for the so-called turbo lag.

The vehicles will go on sale in 2010. At about the same time, GM will offer two other types of vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries. The most notable is the Volt, an electric vehicle with an onboard gasoline generator for extending driving range.

In the past, lithium-ion batteries were thought to be too dangerous for large battery packs. But new chemistries (in some cases) and elaborately engineered safety systems (in others) are changing this. Lithium-ion batteries are lighter and more compact than the batteries currently used in hybrids.

Potential Market for Plug-in Hybrids

A new study shows that when consumers understand what plug-in hybrids are, they want them. The vehicles, which have large onboard batteries, can be recharged overnight by plugging them in, storing enough electricity to power daily commutes. For longer distances, a gasoline engine kicks in, assisting the electric motor and recharging the battery. The major automakers do not yet offer plug-in hybrids, but several are developing them. For those consumers who can't wait, a handful of companies offer conversion kits for conventional hybrids.

Of the more than 3,000 consumers asked if they would consider buying a "grid-connected hybrid," the term used for plug-in hybrids in the survey, only 24 percent said that they would, according to the survey by Synovate Motoresearch. But when they were told what such a car could do, that figure nearly tripled, to 64 percent. That's well above the percentage of people who would consider buying an ordinary hybrid, like the Toyota Prius, which doesn't have extended battery-powered range. Scott Miller, the CEO of Synovate Motoresearch, presented the survey's results this week at the Advanced Automotive Battery Conference in Long Beach, CA.

The results suggest that consumers like the idea of the plug-in hybrid--but that so far, car companies are doing a lousy job of getting the word out. That's not the case with flex-fuel vehicles, though. These cars, which can burn either gasoline or a mixture of 85 percent ethanol, scored high on the desirability charts--that is, until consumers were told more about them. Flex-fuel vehicles have been the subject of heavy promotion by automakers. But the marketing campaigns have fallen short of providing all the details: consumers thought that flex-fuel improved fuel economy, Miller said. Actually, the opposite is true. Ethanol contains much less energy than gasoline does, so miles per gallon will be significantly lower, as will range on a tank of gas. When consumers were told this, the percentage of people who would consider buying the cars dropped from 52 to 33 percent.

It remains to be seen if the desirability of plug-ins is enough to overcome their steep price tag. They could cost thousands of dollars more than a conventional hybrid, which already comes at a premium. Still, consumers are willing to shell out thousands of dollars more for SUVs than for minivans because of their perceived advantages. So if the word gets out and the cars get built, plug-ins might just be the next big thing.

SXSW Day 1: Merging Art and Technology

Thousands stream into the Austin Convention Center at the start of the SXSW Interactive Festival. Once they're registered, the hunt is on for outlets--because most attendees come packing several devices. Credit: Brad King

There are nerds with plugs scattered throughout the 900,000-square-foot Austin Convention Center.

That's not entirely accurate. There are nerds with cords. Many of those cords are attached to battery packs, but there are a sizable number of other cables. I know this because I am one of them. I'm sitting in Ballroom E with my Dell Latitude (and power cord), my Kodak EasyShare Z740 (with lithium-ion battery and PC connector cord), my PalmTreo 650 (with power and sync cords), and my Logitech USB Headset 350 with Microphone (and the attached USB cord).

It's the first day--the first hours--of registration at this year's South by Southwest (SXSW) Music, Film, and Interactive Conferences and Festivals, a 10-day confab that runs from March 9-18, and the nerds have already staked out the corners and crannies near power outlets.

It's strange. While consumer electronics and software have changed immensely in the 13 years of the conference, there is one thing that hasn't changed: the need for batteries and power cords to recharge them. Throughout the next week, tens of thousands of people will find their way to the convention center, and there won't be enough outlets for everyone.

In his seminal book Being Digital, MIT's Nicholas Negroponte described the cords and batteries he packed when he traveled the world. That pack, he wrote, was nearly as heavy as the gadgets he took with him. And today, it's still a horrific problem for those who have gone mobile, who rely on their technologies to connect them with their equally mobile peers.

When I worked at Technology Review, I dubbed editor Kevin Bullis "Battery Boy" because he'd just started writing about battery and fuel-cell technologies. I found (and continue to find) his stories fascinating and necessary because anyone who travels knows that lugging around cords and battery packs is awful. Deep into the technology revolution, when I'm supposed to be untethered, I'm sitting here next to an outlet because my computer only has two hours of juice.

However, there's more to the SXSW experience than simply staking out areas of the convention center. SXSW held the inaugural Music and Media Conference and Festival in 1987. The event showcased smaller, independent groups and acts from small labels. For a time, it was the event for those of us who covered music. The major record labels and national media were quick to pick up on two things: the weather in Austin is better than the weather where they lived (San Diego excluded), and the networking opportunities (read: parties) were amazing. By 1994, SXSW had grown so much that the company decided to launch two other programs: the SXSW Film Conference and Festival and the SXSW Interactive Festival.

It's a bit difficult to see how these three disparate ideas can work together. Music and film are creative endeavors. Technology is not. At least, that is what I've been told. I disagree, but more important, the SXSW folks did too.

The interactive festival and conference not only celebrates creative Web-based applications and design, but this year it will focus on three main areas: mainstream media's toe dipping in the "new media" realm (complete with a keynote by Dan Rather, famously smacked by bloggers who questioned CBS News's reporting on President George W. Bush's war record), Web 2.0 applications, and virtual worlds with interactive storytelling (which includes The Sims creator Will Wright discussing Spores, his latest project).

It's the interactive storytelling panels that are most intriguing for me. The deeper I've gone into the Web, the more "stories" have become important, whether it's the story of a website and its graphical design or the story of a backend content management system (CMS). I'm working with a programming team at Northern Kentucky University to build a flexible, interactive CMS for news organizations that will facilitate traditional and citizen journalism. As we designed the databases and mapped out the functionalities, we had trouble understanding how each component works together--and how it must interact with other sections of the database no matter which way a user comes into the system--until we started looking at nonlinear storytelling, such as that found in games like The Sims.

These interactive narratives are similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were popular in the eighties. As we've started to deconstruct narratives (in our CMS project, the story is the functionality of each section of the database), we've been able to better understand how the system should work. Is that a story in the traditional sense? I'm not sure if I can answer that question yet. My gut as a writer says no. My nerd brain, though, says that there are enough similarities in how you construct a website's graphical user interface, how you construct a database, and how you tell a story to blur that definition. The only difference that I can see is that the tools used are different: Photoshop, words, and code.

That may be a bit too esoteric for most attendees (and possibly even for me). There are far more common crossovers among the interactive, film, and music festivals and conferences. There is a big push to educate artists, small studios, and independent labels about Net neutrality. Henry Jenkins, MIT's Comparative Media Studies chair, will be speaking about distribution and the importance of maintaining a free and open Internet pipeline that creators can use.

Of course, this being Austin, there's also a push to integrate emerging energy technologies into the festival. This year, SXSW is making a move to be "carbon neutral," which means the organization is working to overhaul how the entire affair is powered. For instance:

1. Texas Energy audited the main offices of SXSW, which led to an overhauling of the heating, cooling, and lighting units;

2. the Festival and Iconology Action of Austin will be recycling the piles of waste generated during the evening parties;

3. the generators and production trucks will all run on biodiesel; and

4. the festival purchased $5,000 in wind energy credits.

There's much more to tell (and we'll do that over the next week in the blogs); for now, though, my battery is about to die and I need to go stake out my little corner of the convention center.

Nanobatteries and Moore's Law

A company that makes DSL broadband equipment, mPhase Technologies, based in Little Falls, NJ, has been touting its new nanotech-based battery with a flurry of press releases and, most recently, a video on YouTube.

The video begins with a voice-over complaining, rightly enough, that although the cost and performance of computer chips have been increasing and improving, respectively, very quickly, following Moore's Law--that the number of transistors on a chip will double every couple of years--batteries haven't been keeping up. So is the company's new tech the battery world's answer to Moore's Law?

Unfortunately, the company's battery doesn't seem to be the breakthrough that cell-phone users and electric-car enthusiasts have been looking for. Although mPhase is marketing the battery as a long-awaited revolution in battery design, the company isn't touting doubled energy capacity or tripled power output. And it's not trumpeting slashed prices or even long calendar life, both important features if electric cars are ever going to dominate the roads.

What's exciting here, apparently, is that the battery can sit unused on the shelf for decades and, after that, work just like new. This is accomplished by keeping the electrolyte out of contact with the battery's electrodes until the moment power is needed. The nanotechnology involved is a pattern of nanorods that keep the electrolyte suspended above the electrode materials until a voltage is applied.

The battery could very well be an excellent advance--but for some pretty specific applications, such as active RFID tags and smart munitions, which might sit for months or years in warehouses and bunkers before being used.

Meanwhile, advances in energy capacity and calendar life are coming from improvements in electrode materials, sometimes using nanoscale particles. (See "3M's Higher-Capacity Lithium-Ion Batteries," "Powering GM's Electric Vehicles," and "Battery Breakthrough?") These might lead to a doubling of energy capacity within a decade, which could go far toward improving electronic devices and cars. Battery performance could double in the next 10 years, according to one MIT scientist. (See "How Future Batteries Will Be Longer-Lasting and Safer.") That's no Moore's Law, but, combined with more-efficient devices, it could make a big difference.