Cutting Edge

Can a $1 billion help save the environment? George Soros hopes so.

The billionaire financier and philanthropist plans to invest part of his wealth on clean tech to fight global warming. In a speech at the Project Syndicate editors' forum in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Saturday, Soros gave the keynote address announcing his new plans.

Soros said he will invest $1 billion in clean-energy technologies and will provide $100 million--$10 million each year for the next 10 years--for the new Climate Policy Initiative, a watchdog-type foundation to promote measures to combat climate change.

"Global warming is a political problem," Soros announced to the meeting of editors in Copenhagen, the same city where representatives from around the world will meet in December to try to hammer out a new climate agreement. "The science is beyond dispute," he added, "but how do we achieve the objectives we all know are necessary? That is a political problem."

The need for cleaner coal has been a critical issue for Soros, who has invested in so-called "clean coal" technologies. In April, he was part of a consortium that funded $50 million toward PowerSpan, a firm researching and developing methods for cleaner coal.

On another front, Soros announced last year that his investment fund would pour $25 million in funds toward Qteros, a company that can make cleaner ethanol from a single microbe.

Soros offered few details on where he plans to invest the $1 billion. But he said he will look for profitable opportunities, and also "insist that the investments make a real contribution to solving the problem of climate change."

Clean energy has been a key issue for Soros. The billionaire has given speeches and interviews promoting development of alternative energy as not just a necessary goal but one that could revive the global economy.

Of course, clean energy has become an increasingly popular sector all around. A recent report on venture capital funding found that more money is being invested in green tech than in software or biotech.

Born in Budapest in 1930, Soros survived both the Nazi and Communist occupations of Hungary. After fleeing to England where he studied economics, he eventually settled in the United States. Soros amassed his huge fortune as the chairman of Soros Fund Management. He was recently ranked by Forbes as the 15th richest American, with an estimated net worth of $13 billion.

Beam control optics in the Airborne Laser system stabilize and shape the beam emitted by the chemical oxygen iodine laser en route to the nose turret of the aircraft.

(Credit: Russ Underwood, Lockheed Martin)

The Airborne Laser may have lost favor in Washington, but it's still going strong at Edwards Air Force Base.

Boeing, the prime contractor for the directed-energy weapons system, said Thursday that the ABL's high-energy laser earlier this week was fired in flight for the first time--though not at an external target. Instead, in a flight over California, the laser beam traveled only as far as an on-board calorimeter, which measured the beam's power. Boeing didn't say what that measurement was, but the system is generally referred to as "megawatt-class."

The Airborne Laser in flight.

(Credit: Boeing)

The one-of-a-kind ABL was built to test out and ultimately show off what a laser beam can do to a ballistic missile fired in anger. The goal, if and when all systems are go, is for the laser-equipped aircraft to home in on an ICBM while it's still early in its trajectory, holding the laser beam on the missile long enough to rupture its skin and thus knock it out of commission.

Ambitious plans for the Airborne Laser, however, have been considerably scaled back. Earlier this year, in revamping the Pentagon's budget and operations priorities, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that a second prototype would not be built.

The core of the existing ABL is a chemical oxygen iodine laser, or COIL, and it's hardly man-packable machinery. The COIL system itself takes up the back half of a modified 747-400F, while the front half of the jumbo jet is given over to the beam control/fire control system.

Given that an aircraft in flight can be a fidgety beast, the ABL's ability to maintain precise alignments was a notable accomplishment, according to a Thursday press release from Northrop Grumman, which designed and built the high-energy laser:

ABL has to keep all of the powerful laser's optical components perfectly positioned as the aircraft vibrates and flexes during flight...Since we were unable to fly the kind of large concrete pads used to hold a ground-based laser's optics in place, we had to isolate the COIL's optics from the structure but also maintain alignment. So the team developed an optical bench isolation system that isolates disturbances caused by normal aircraft operations while maintaining alignment to the gain medium, or the source of a laser's optical power. It's like an automobile's 'smart suspension' that keeps the car riding smoothly at the same level over a bumpy road.

Last week, in a continuing series of piecemeal tests, the ABL engaged in an in-flight trial run against an instrumented target missile. The aircraft used its infrared sensors to locate the missile, then fired a pair of solid-state illuminator lasers that tracked the missile and gauged atmospheric conditions. "This test demonstrates that the Airborne Laser can fully engage an in-flight missile with its battle management and beam control/fire control systems," Michael Rinn, Boeing vice president and ABL program director, said in a statement. "Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task."

A number of increasingly complex tests still lie ahead for the ABL, including firing the high-energy laser through the Lockheed Martin-developed beam control/fire control system and out of the nose-mounted turret. Before the end of the year, Boeing expects to do a full-fledged intercept test against a ballistic missile.

A correction was made to this story. See below for details.

LIVERMORE, Calif.--The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a blast--literally.

I was lucky enough to join the few thousand people who were allowed Saturday to tour the world's largest laser system, which is located in this bucolic valley about an hour's drive from San Francisco.

The $3.5 billion facility was dedicated Friday by a host of dignitaries, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But family members and friends of lab employees were allowed to tour the NIF last weekend, many of whom started lining up early and waited more than an hour in a serpentine, Disneyland-like line to get into the 10-story-tall facility.

The NIF sports 192 lasers whose beams start out about the size of a 1-gallon gas can and are then filtered and amplified through optics and mirrors and simultaneously fired at a small beryllium sphere filled with hydrogen isotopes. The hydrogen atoms then fuse into helium, releasing thermonuclear energy equivalent to temperatures at the core of stars, or about 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

The lab said that in about three billionths of a second, the lasers create a pulse of ultraviolet light energy of 1.8 million joules. At its peak, it generates 500 trillion watts, roughly 1,000 times the electricity produced by the U.S. power grid.

The tour took us through the entire apparatus, including a peek at the firing target chamber at the system's core.

Unfortunately, the taking of individual photographs was verboten at Saturday's tour. Cameras and cell phones were prohibited from the grounds, and I wasn't going to even think about messing with the rules. Anyone who has ever been near this place knows its reputation for security--ask Martin Sheen; he is intimately familiar with the lab's security.

However, my colleague James Martin attended the dedication on Friday, when he was allowed to take the photographs featured in the audio slideshow below.

During my tour, I overheard a gentleman tell his son that this is the kind of place Hollywood comes to get its ideas. Despite comparisons to something you might expect to find at the core of the Death Star and comments about phase conjugate target tracking systems, this mega-tool has generated a lot less fear and paranoia than the Large Hadron Collider.

While much of the NIF attention is focused on expanding the nature of the universe and the origin of stars, the stated primary mission is keeping tabs on the country's aging stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The NIF is also expected to create clean energy based on the heavy isotopes of hydrogen, a virtually inexhaustible resource on Earth. If it succeeds, the lab expects to be able to take one gallon of seawater and create the equivalent energy of 300 gallons of gasoline.

Correction, 12:17 p.m. PDT: This story initially gave an incorrect figure for the thermonuclear energy produced by the NIF laser system. The correct temperature is 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

A clarification has been made to this story. See below for details.

Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion--nuclear energy like that which powers the sun--but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be cheap, limitless, and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything.

But then, just as quickly as it was announced, it was discredited. So thoroughly, that cold fusion became a catch phrase for junk science. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion--for many scientists today, cold fusion is hot again.

"We can yield the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The potential is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man," researcher Michael McKubre told "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley.

McKubre says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government.

McKubre is an electrochemist who imagines, in 20 years, the creation of a clean nuclear battery. "For example, a laptop would come precharged with all of the energy that you would ever intend to use. You're now decoupled from your charger and the wall socket," he explained.

The same would go for cars. "The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example. And you'd take it in for service every four years and they'd give you a new power supply," McKubre told Pelley.

"Power stations?" Pelley asked.

"You can imagine a one for one plug-in replacement for nuclear fuel rods. And the difference only would be that at the end of the lifetime of that fuel rod, you didn't have radioactive waste that needed to be disposed of," McKubre replied.

He showed "60 Minutes" just how simple the experiment looks; there are only three main ingredients. First, there is palladium, a metal in the platinum family. Second, one needs a kind of hydrogen called deuterium which is found in seawater.

"Deuterium is essentially unlimited. There is ten times as much energy in a gallon of sea water, from the deuterium contained within it, than there is in a gallon of gasoline," he explained.

The palladium is placed in water containing deuterium and the third ingredient is an electric current.

The experiment is wrapped in insulation and instruments. They're looking for what they call "excess heat." In other words, is more energy coming out than the electric current puts in?

No one knows exactly how excess heat would be generated, but McKubre showed "60 Minutes" what he thinks is happening.

A Northrop Grumman Space Technology engineer in Redondo Beach, Calif., monitors a solid-state laser, in a photo from January 2007.

(Credit: Northrop Grumman)

From the week gone by on the directed-energy weapons front: defense contractor Northrop Grumman reported that it got a solid-state laser to fire a beam with a potency of 105.5 kilowatts.

For the ray-gun wing of the military-industrial complex, the 100-kilowatt threshold is a major milestone, marking the entry point to weapons-grade laser weapons. Adding to the appeal is that solid-state lasers are much more compact, and less noxious, than chemical laser systems such as the one in the works for the 747-centric Airborne Laser.

The technical details of Northrop's achievement break down this way, starting with a modular, "building block" approach that bodes well for scalable systems, the company said:

For building blocks, the company utilizes "laser amplifier chains," each producing approximately 15kW of power in a high-quality beam. Seven laser chains were combined to produce a single beam of 105.5 kW. The seven-chain JHPSSL laser demonstrator ran for more than five minutes, achieved electro-optical efficiency of 19.3 percent, reaching full power in less than 0.6 seconds, all with beam quality of better than 3.0.

Adding an eighth chain that the system was designed for would increase laser power to 120 kilowatts, Northrop says.

Where this test saw five minutes of continuous operation for the laser, altogether the system has been operated at above 100 kilowatts for a total duration of more than 85 minutes.

The efforts are part of the Pentagon's Joint High Power Solid State Laser (JHPSSL) program.

Even though 100 kilowatts has long been the "proof of principle" sought for weapons systems, Northrop says that "in fact, many militarily useful effects can be achieved by laser weapons of 25 kW or 50 kW, provided this energy is transmitted with good beam quality, as our system does."

Of course, this is still a laboratory laser system and not a field-tested, ruggedized product. "It is still a little heavy and a little big," Dan Wildt, vice president of Northrop's directed energy systems program, told the LA Times.

Shiny on the outside, sparkly on the inside? This is Northrop's laser weapon system demonstrator.

(Credit: Northrop Grumman)

That's probably a significant understatement. Says Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room blog of the news from Northrop:

Does that mean energy weapons are a done deal? Hardly. There are still all sorts of technical issues--thermal management and miniaturization, to name two--that have to be handled first. Then, the ray gunners have to find the money. The National Academies figure it'll take another $100 million to get battlefield lasers right.

In a separate post, Shachtman reports on what's involved in getting specific laser systems ready to go over the next several years.

Earlier this year, Boeing said that it had used a "kilowatt-class" solid-state laser to shoot down a UAV from a ground-based system. The company hopes that the Airborne Laser, meanwhile, will do its first-ever aerial target shoot sometime in 2009.

There's still a lot of blue sky in Boeing's plans for directed-energy weapons like the Laser Avenger.

(Credit: Boeing)

Updated 2:40 p.m. with details on how the laser damaged the UAV and on the Laser Avenger's targeting system.

Boeing is seeing a glimmer of progress in its work toward fielding laser weapons.

The defense industry giant on Monday said tests of its Laser Avenger system in December marked "the first time a combat vehicle has used a laser to shoot down a UAV," or unmanned aerial vehicle. In the testing, the Humvee-mounted Laser Avenger located and tracked three small UAVs in flight over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and knocked one of the drone aircraft out of the sky.

Boeing didn't go into much detail about the shoot-down. In response to a query by CNET News, it did say this much about the strike by the the kilowatt-class laser: "A hole was burned in a critical flight control element of the UAV, rendering the aircraft unflyable."

While decades of Hollywood imagery may conjure up a vision of a target disintegrating in a sparkle of light, the actual workings of the laser beam are probably more prosaic. For instance, the beam from Boeing's much, much larger Airborne Laser, which is intended to disable long-range missiles in flight, uses heat to create a weak spot on the skin of the missile, causing it to rupture in flight. Boeing hopes to conduct the first aerial shoot-down test with the much-delayed 747-based Airborne Laser later this year.

In tests in 2007, the Laser Avenger "neutralized" improvised explosive devices (IEDs) like those that have been a deadly threat in Iraq, along with other unexploded munitions.

(Credit: ZDNet Asia )

Microprocessors capable of sniffing out and harnessing energy from the environment could very well be the answer to power scarcity, according to an expert in embedded systems.

Jack Ganssle, chief engineer at The Ganssle Group, has been developing embedded systems since the early 1970s. In the last three decades, he has managed more than 100 embedded products, ranging from deep-sea navigational gears to security systems for the U.S. White House, and sold off three electronic companies.

In Bangalore, India, last week for the Embedded Systems Conference, Ganssle sat down for an interview with ZDNet Asia to discuss the future of embedded systems and the role India can play in growing this industry.

Q: The embedded software industry is said to double every 10 months. How have things changed in the last one year?
Ganssle: Technology is changing all the time. In the last one year, the Apple iPhone has come in at nearly half the price, and it's all due to embedded technology. This has created a big change in the mobile phone market. Similarly, we have seen so many new products like the (iPod) Touch and the various MP3 players coming out in the market. Processors are changing every day.

Also, Microchip (Technology) plans to purchase Atmel. I think this will really reshape the industry. When most people think of embedded technology, they think of really fancy, high-end processors. Both Atmel and Microchip target the low-end market, and that's where the volume is. There are 9 billion processors sold every year, and most of these are low-cost.

What role can India play in the growth of this market?
Ganssle: India is a gigantic market. As a country develops and gets wealthy, the demand for electronics will grow.

India is creating its own embedded systems industry due to the availability of highly skilled engineering talent. I think India and China are going to be the engines of growth for this industry due to the strength of their domestic market.

Will the energy industry see a lot of development in embedded systems?
Ganssle: Absolutely. Power is scarce in a country like India, but people want their mobile devices such as mobile phone, MP3 players, and cameras, to run forever. To address this, there is a technology called energy scavenging, where the microprocessors steal energy from the environment. Energy scavenging harnesses any energy that is available in the environment. It could be anything ranging from energy radiated by power lines, heat in the coffee cup or the human body. There is a lot of research being done in this field.

In Japan, tips at a bar go down if your glass is allowed to be less than half-empty. I learned that in Japan, beer glasses come with embedded systems. So each time the beer goes down, the glass radios the bartender for a refill. In concepts like these, energy scavenging makes a lot of sense. The beer is cold and the environment is warm; so you can use the temperature difference to power the embedded system.

Energy scavenging is going to be the next big thing. We are tired of recharging our batteries. In the future, we are going to see less and less of that.

In the supply chain industry, are there any breakthroughs that can make a difference to technologies like RFID (radio frequency identification)?
Ganssle: The problem with RFID is that it still costs too much. For the price to go down, volumes will have to go up. One thing that India might be good at is exploiting technologies like IC (integrated circuits) fabrication to generate extremely low-cost RFID components. This will solve gigantic problems.

If everything had an RFID chip on it, you could go to any grocery story, fill up your cart, and just walk out the front door. As you walk out, each of those packages with an RFID chip will tell the RFID reader installed at the door what you bought. It then scans your wallet and gets your bank or credit card information, and debits the charges from your bank account. For grocery stores, it saves a lot of money since they don't need to hire people to man checkout counters.

So what does the future look like?
Ganssle: In the next five to 10 years, we will see thousands of microprocessors that sense virtually everything. We'll see microprocessors in desks, in beer mugs, clothes, and probably many other products that we never imagined.

The costs of embedded systems need to go down a lot further, and when that happens, it will become cost-effective to build smart sensors. You could just spread tens of thousands of small sensors that cost less than (2 cents). These could be used for some sort of mesh networking.

Mesh networking forms ad hoc networks with all the "smart dust," where the signals move from one dust particle to another, and back to a server somewhere. (Smart dust describes a network of wireless-enabled microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors or devices that are used to detect temperature, light or movement.) When sensors cost next to nothing, you can monitor everything. For instance, you can monitor global warming by dumping smart dust on an airplane. It can stay suspended in the aircraft for months and return data back to a central science laboratory.

And in your home, for example, you won't need a security system. Just spread the smart dust around and if somebody enters and his data doesn't match the preapproved identities, an alarm will be triggered.

Swati Prasad reported from India for ZDNet Asia.

The U.S. Air Force has awarded Boeing a new contract worth up to $30 million for the next phase of development on the Advanced Tactical Laser.

The ATL is a C-130H aircraft outfitted with a 12,000-pound high-energy chemical laser module that would be used as a weapon against ground targets. It's the smaller sibling of the Airborne Laser, a highly modified 747 under development that packs a similar weapon but that would be used against ballistic missiles.

The Advanced Tactical Laser will use a rotating ball turret to fire its laser weapon at ground targets.

(Credit: Ed Turner, Boeing)

While the 747-centric ABL is designed to fire its laser through a bulbous nose apparatus, the ATL totes a belly turret reminiscent of the manned versions used in some World War II bombers.

The new Extended User Evaluation contract marks the start of a transition for the ATL, which Boeing has been working on as an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration project. The EUE phase means another round of ground and flight tests, along with "hands-on operation" for the Air Force and other potential users.

Why use a laser when the Air Force already has a wide array of missiles and bombs at its disposal? (The standard gunship variant of the C-130 can already be equipped with 40mm and 105mm cannons.) "Little to no collateral damage," Boeing says, thanks to the laser weapon's "ultra-precision engagement capability." That is, think laser pointer with extreme prejudice.

In addition, the laser would presumably strike more or less silently--no thump-thump-thump or rat-a-tat-tat. (Note, 11:30 a.m. PDT: A reader writes in to say that high-power lasers operating in the atmosphere are anything but silent, perhaps because of ionizing the air - a la lightning.)

For use against missiles, mortars, and the like, laser weapons are intended to heat up and weaken the metal skin of the projectile, causing it to rupture while in flight. Against ground targets, the ATL could, say, zap fuel tanks or even vehicle tires--if it could hold focus long enough.