Transcriber: Bob Prottas Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
My name is Pablos.
I work in a lab called Intellectual Ventures.
If you guys -- Was anybody here last year?
A few of you. Okay.
So you remember what I was talking about last year.
(Laughter)
In part, you might remember this.
One of the things I wanted to do this year is show you
what we're working on in the lab.
It's a pretty unique place.
You can see here we're shooting mosquitos down with laser beams
because we thought it would be funny.
Then we found out that we could possibly save some lives doing that.
Malaria is killing about a million people a year in Africa.
Half of them are kids.
And this is our way of trying to do something about it.
What's going on is we're trying to find ways
to make invention into a legitimate career choice.
Probably not a single person in this room
has a business card that says 'Inventor' on it.
Probably not even Dean has that.
And we think that's wrong.
What we think is that invention should be celebrated
and people should specialize in that and get really good at it.
This is our lab where basically we hired
one of every kind of scientist in the world.
We bought one of every tool in the world,
stuck them all under one roof and started inventing crazy stuff
like lasers for mosquitos.
This is working really well.
It turns out by specializing we're getting pretty good at inventing.
We come up with ideas that nobody else would come up with
for all different kinds of problems.
Part of the way we do that is
we get the guy with the problem and we stick him in a room
and surround him with a nuclear physicist, a laser expert,
a computer hacker, a chemist.
And what we do collectively
is try to know as much as we can about every area in science and technology
so we can cross-pollinate that stuff and come up with crazy ideas
you wouldn't get working in the trenches.
We think everybody in the world should do this.
But it turns out we don't have much competition
because most big companies shut down R&D in the 80's.
And most other environments, like universities,
you don't have the same incentive to work with people from other areas
in science or other disciplines and backgrounds.
So it's turned out to be pretty neat.
We've come up with some various stuff.
I'm going to show you a couple of things we work on.
Wireless communications right now you all know sucks
because when you get the new iPhone,
it's fast for like three days until everybody else gets the new iPhone
and then they're raising the noise floor for wireless.
And what's happening is the little antenna in your phone
is just broadcasting noise getting in the way of everyone else.
We're trying to figure out how to solve that in the long run.
In satellite communication as an example,
you put a dish on the ground
and you point it at a satellite and it's fixed.
You don't have a satellite dish on your phone
because it would be really hard to keep it aimed at the satellite.
We came up with a new technology using metamaterials
that allows us to make a dish which is actually just a flat panel,
but it can electronically steer its beam.
So you can put it on an airplane, you can put it on a car,
you can put it on the back of a laptop or a phone,
and it can steer its beam directly at a satellite or a tower
and not interfere with everyone else around you.
This is a way that we can ultimately get
gigabit wireless to everybody all the time.
That's a kind of cutting edge area in science.
Metamaterials are materials that don't exist in nature
that have cool properties.
In this case it's given us
the ability to steer a beam.
In our lab we have a culinary scientists group
working on the science of cooking.
A lot of what chefs do is old wives tales, traditions.
But they don't necessarily understand
the science behind what's going on in cooking processes.
But we're trying to fix that.
We have a kitchen with a drill press and a bandsaw
and a pharmaceutical freeze drier that cost more than a Ferrari.
A rotary evaporator.
All things that George Foreman
will hopefully put in your kitchen someday.
But our team which consists of chefs
from the best restaurants in the world and chemists,
they're all spoiled now because they can't cook without a centrifuge.
But what they've learned is lots and lots and lots
about what's going on in cooking and how to optimize that.
They printed a 2400-page cookbook on the science of cooking.
It's 6 volumes.
It's the most expensive cookbook humans have ever made
or probably ever will make because we're a little crazy.
In the process, they describe a lot of these things
in ways that you can understand and the chefs can understand.
And they've done a lot of cool photography like this
where we cut kitchen tools in half in our shop,
so that we could show these cooking processes
and you can understand them.
We took about 180,000 photos to make this book
and it's pretty cool stuff.
Now that they're done with the book
I've been repurposing this group
to help me with the inventions around cooking.
So we can improve this stuff
and make food that is not only tastier
but healthier and more efficient.
One of the ways that we cheat at inventing
is by applying computers to almost everything.
This is applicable for you guys.
You can recognize that --
For me in the 80's I would say preposterous sounding things like
someday you'll have a computer in your car,
or someday you'll have a computer in your phone.
I sounded like a lunatic and at the time I probably was.
But we all take that for granted now. Right? We know that's true.
Computation has extended to the point where
it's going to be in everything.
What we do is we use a cluster of computers.
We have a 5,000-core cluster in our lab
which we do epidemiological modeling on.
Which means as an intervention for malaria
which is something Bill Gates asked us to work on,
we want to be able to test our ideas
in software, thousands of times
before we ever do it in the real world.
So this is computationally intensive stuff.
5 or 10 years ago, it would've been laughable to even try.
But now we have a surplus of computing power.
So what we do is we make a Monte Carlos simulation.
That means we have this model of Africa.
Here I'm just showing you Madagascar.
We model rainfall, travel of humans, the climate,
anything that can affect the transmission of the disease.
And we do that over time, over the course of years.
So, you'll see here we show for Madagascar
every pixel we have data for we can show what's happening.
You can see that cases of malaria -- This is the winter.
As you get into summer time,
all that red area is lots and lots of malaria cases.
In the winter it backs off again.
That part in the center is high ground.
Mosquitos don't live in higher altitudes.
So you're pretty safe if you're up there.
What we're trying to show is that if we sprinkle some bed nets here
or DDT there we can see what happens over the course of years to the disease.
We can do that in software before we ever do it in the real world.
That's the kind of capability that computers are changing.
We're doing this for epidemiology.
You could be doing it for marketing programs.
Every company in the world should be thinking about
how does this computational modeling capability that we have now
affect what we do.
You could get rid of these simple algorithmic models
like males 18-25 use so many condoms in a year
and change it to
This guy, age 18, uses this many condoms in a year.
Let's give him the right coupon or whatever it's going to take.
Make a marketing program for an individual.
We can do all that now because we have a surplus of computing power.
I worked on this project to try and figure out how to suppress hurricanes.
Again, a problem that's a little too big for most people to bother with.
What happens with hurricanes is they're fueled by heat
irradiating off the surface of the ocean.
Sun shines on the ocean, heats it up.
That heat rises and fuels hurricanes.
Well, if you could just cool off the surface of the ocean a little bit,
you wouldn't have hurricanes that were so bad.
That's of course a ridiculous notion because the ocean is really, really big.
But it turns out everywhere you have this problem
with hot water on top you have cold water below.
So if we could just stir it up real good,
we might be able to stop hurricanes.
Also a ridiculous notion
because it takes so much energy to stir up the ocean.
But again, coincidentally, we have a free source of energy
right there where we have this problem. Waves.
Tons and tons of energy in waves that we normally don't care about
because it's in the wrong form, it's not where humans are.
We came up with this really simple concept.
The waves push hot water
into a giant tube that we stick in the ocean.
That yellow thing you see is an artificial beach,
so waves crash over the top
and they add hot water to the top of the tube.
That creates a pump and the water gets pushed down below
a couple of hundred meters below where it mixes with cold water.
It's basically a giant tube made out of polyethylene like a trash bag.
Some recycled truck tires to hold it up.
There's no moving parts.
If you put a couple thousand of these in the Gulf and what do you know,
you could maybe turn your Cat 5's into Cat 4's or Cat 3's.
Huge scale project I admit, but the kind of thing we might need to do
because hurricanes are getting worse every year
and people aren't doing a very good job of moving away from the coast.
Which of course would be plan A.
There's always a plan A that's not getting done.
We just think let's try and come up with plan B or C or D.
Another plan C we've come up with
is what to do about global warming.
It turns out that the sun again --
we never blame the sun --
is heating up these greenhouse gases in our environment.
A natural way of affecting that is when volcanoes erupt,
they spit sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere
and reflect a little bit of sunlight.
So this is an artificial way of doing it.
You've got a hose on giant triangular helium balloons
hauling the hose up to the sky 12-miles up,
aerosolizing sulfur dioxide
to put out a tiny little bit of particulate up there
that reflects some sunlight.
Think of it as 1% of sunlight
getting reflected before it gets into Earth's atmosphere.
So we're finding an artificial way to replicate
a natural phenomenon like a volcano.
When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1992,
the temperature of the entire Earth was down about a degree
for a year after that.
This is very heavily instrumented geological event, so we know this.
This is not a way to solve global warming at all.
I said this is plan C.
This is a way to maybe buy us a little bit of time
while we transition off of the messy,
dirty, ugly fuels we're using now.
So these models will show a little bit --
These are computational models again but for climate.
Climate models showing what's going on with the temperature in the Arctic.
The next one's good.
On the left here the pink is what arctic ice conditions should be
on the North Pole.
Blue is what we actually have today.
That's showing what we could get
if we deployed one of these hoses in the arctic region.
We restore arctic ice conditions back to pre industrial levels.
We treat some of the symptoms
for maybe a few decades 50, 60 years or something
while we build more nuclear reactors
and solar panels and wind farms and all those things.
Speaking of nuclear,
these are stainless steel casks
left over from today's nuclear fuel enrichment program.
Each one contains a bunch of depleted uranium
and we don't really have a plan for what to do with that stuff,
so we put it in stockpiles.
So this is a stockpile in Kentucky.
700,000 metric tones of depleted uranium sitting there.
What you do is you dig uranium up out of the ground,
you put it through this elaborate enrichment process
involving centrifuges that terrorists are trying to steal,
and you generate a fissionable material.
So some enriched uranium.
You get about 3% of the energy out when you do that.
The other 97% sits in this stockpile right here.
Perpetually, until kingdom come,
we have no plan on what to do with that.
Then you take that enriched fuel
and you put it inside of a reactor or a bomb
and you get about 5% of that energy out.
That's OK because there's so much energy in nuclear fission
that we don't mind being so wasteful.
But the problem is we're creating this big mess.
We're not getting a lot of fuel efficiency out of it
and we have this proliferation problem of people trying to steal enriched fuels
make bombs out of them,
the other problem of them just making bombs.
And so what we do with that waste after we burn the enriched fuel
as we have these fuel rods, highly radioactive, very dangerous stuff,
we're all totally scared of --
We put it in a swimming pool next to the reactor.
And we leave it there forever and ever and ever.
And hope that nothing ever happens to it
because it's too scary to deal with.
So we don't have a plan for that stuff either.
So we invented a new type of nuclear reactor
that runs on nuclear waste.
What we do is we take that waste in the stockpile in Kentucky,
there are other stockpiles, that's just one big one.
And we put it in our reactor
and we enrich it inside the reactor
and burn it inside of the reactor.
So you never have a critical mass of fuel.
I'll show you how this works.
This illustration shows how nuclear fission works,
which I'm sure you're all totally excited about and familiar with already.
But basically, there's atoms and shit.
OK. (Laughter)
What happens is you've got some uranium.
It won't create a fission reaction.
It won't sustain a fission reaction until it's enriched.
That's what this green stuff is in our reactor.
The red stuff is a little bit of enriched fuel.
So like a candle, we light it up at one end.
The leading wave enriches the fuel,
that second wave burns the fuel
and from one end to the other over the course of about 60 years
in our current design.
So the entire time we've only got a little bit of fissionable material.
There's no moving parts.
The thing can't explode or melt down
in the way that a reactor today is capable of doing.
There's no fuel rods that have to be swapped out
which is a really sensitive and dangerous part of today's reactors.
We figure with the fuel I showed you
in that stockpile in Kentucky in our reactors
we can power the entire planet, including growth, for about 1000 years.
And that's before we ever have to dig up any more uranium.
Those are projects we're working on, that's the last I had to show.
(Applause)
Thanks.
(Laughter)