Bloomberg Businessweek
The Ex-Con Inventor Disrupting Underwater Energy
Turbine tech is tough, because water is 800 times denser than air. Herbert Williams got rich engineering a brand-new approach.
EXCERPT: “While Williams was locked up, it would have been hard to imagine that one of his ideas would help power tens of millions of homes. Or that as a tinkerer with no engineering education, he would secure 80 patents or build technology for a business that competes against Lockheed Martin, Siemens, and General Electric. Nothing so optimistic entered his mind during his surreal first few months riding what he calls the diesel-therapy bus.”
Read the story here.
Bloomberg Businessweek
The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold
How hard is it for an independent inventor to sell an idea to a multinational? Try running a mile in Lenn Hann's shoes.
EXCERPT: “Three days before the Chicago Marathon, Hann bought industrial carbon fiber fabric and baked it in his kitchen. Once the fumes dissipated, he cannibalized the uppers of a pair of New Balance 763 running shoes for his prototypes. As he hacked off layers of EVA foam from the sneakers with a table saw, his hand slipped and the blade cut deeply into his thumb, embedding bits of blue foam into the wound. Hann rushed to the emergency room, then assembled the shoes the next day. Hann believes his prototype was responsible for shaving l7 minutes off his record in the marathon.”
Read the story here (online) or here (PDF).
Bloomberg Businessweek
Building a Better Mouse Cage
A startup aims to take humans out of labs that test drugs on mice. Instead of humans, Vium uses tiny sensors and high-definition cameras to observe lab mice.
Read the story here.
Wired
Creation Engine: Autodesk Wants to Help Anyone, Anywhere, Make Anything
Autodesk once made tools just for engineers and architects. Now it wants to help everyone make anything.
EXCERPT: “The culture clash is real: As maker spaces become more expensive and more geared toward entrepreneurs, the pure hobbyists worry they'll get pushed out. At Noisebridge, a competing space in San Francisco's Mission district (DO NOT HACK THE ELECTRICAL PANEL, reads a weary sign), I meet Will Sargent, who thinks that top-down pressure from companies like Autodesk can disrupt maker communities like TechShop and Instructables. "The more you tighten things up and push toward a specific goal, the more you lose casual interest," he says. "Communities always have a balance between acceptance and effectiveness. Companies tilt the other way."
Read the story here.
Makers: All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things in Garages, Basements, and Backyards (O'Reilly Media)
“Makers is a beautiful book that salutes the sometimes off-beat inventor we'd probably all like to be. Parks looks at dozens of "makers," those who have invented and created things out of the ordinary, and given them a short one- to two-page write-up on their invention, their story, and their motivation as to what makes them tick.” – review on Goodreads
Find the book here.
Popular Science
The Top 10 Worst Jobs In Science
These down-and-dirty labors are hard, dangerous, and outright gross—and people love them anyway
Read the article here.
Repossession agents have been fixtures of the auto industry since the rise of accessible credit in the 1920s. Banks hire them to collect a vehicle, sometimes the day it goes into default. The agent tows the car, and the bank pays between 300 to 800 bucks a claim. Successful agents have always had a head for numbers and facts, assembling a driver profile to predict the location of a parked car. But the ability to learn about drivers rapidly accelerated in the early 2000s.
By 2010, license-plate scanners had become standard equipment for most urban repo firms, and the number of plates stored in national databases was growing by tens of millions a month. Even though there are about a quarter of a billion vehicles in the U.S. total, cars are often scanned a dozen times or more in different locations. The richer the data gets, the easier it is to make predictions about a driver’s home address, workplace, gym, or favorite restaurant. Digital Recognition Network (DRN) has one of the largest plate-capture databases in the country, with a fleet of more than 2,000 affiliated trucks and upwards of 1.8 billion scans. According to DRN, the technology increases the number of cars repossessed by 14 percent. “It allows repossession agents to work more efficiently and to look at data insights to more effectively predict where the car may be,” says DRN’s CEO, Chris Metaxas, a former vice president of sales at Lexis-Nexis who oversaw its government division.
Spurred by success, repo firms have begun to make data collection an even greater part of their operations.
Read the story here.
TikToks on GBH’s Education channel:
“Finding New Exoplanets,” May 21, 2020
“How Far Away Are the Planets?” May 14, 2020
“NASA Does Quarantine Right,” June 25, 2020
