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How to make(almost) anythingpage 37

The unexpectedsuccess of the laserpage 25

Software that tests new drugspage 23

June 11th 2005

TechnologyQuarterly

The sincerestform of flatteryWhen technology borrows

from biology

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The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Monitor 1

CROSS the popularity of a new me-dium with the demands of advertis-

ers, and the result can be a whole newgenre of entertainment. In the 1930s, thesponsorship of radio serials by makers ofhousehold-cleaning products led to thesoap opera. Listeners were enthralled byepisodic, melodramatic storylines, andadvertisers were guaranteed a big audi-ence. Today, the same thing is happeningwith another new medium. Video gameshave been crossed with advertising toproduce a new genre: the advergame.

Advergames appeal to both advertis-ers and gamers alike. Advertisers face theproblem that many young people arewatching less television in favour of gaming and internet sur�ng. A reportpublished last year by Nielsen, a market-research �rm, found that time spentwatching television was decliningamong American men aged 18-34, andwas decreasing even faster among gam-ers of the same age. Given that internetusers are �nding ways to avoid pop-ups,�ashing banners and spam, putting ad-vertisements into games is an obviousway to reach them. Perhaps surprisingly,gamers seem to feel positive towards in-game advertising. Football, driving andother sports games look more realisticwith real advertisement hoardings ratherthan generic ads for made-up products.

And the popularity of many advergamessuggests that gamers are evidently quitehappy to put up with advertising in re-turn for free entertainment�just as soap-opera fans were in the radio age.

In-game advertising is not new, butuntil recently it was limited to static pro-duct-placement, inserted rather awk-wardly into console games, says DeniseGarcia of Gartner, a consultancy. She estimates that less than 10% of consolegames carry such �embedded� ads, andthey account for a mere 0.25% of reve-nues at Electronic Arts, the world’s big-gest games publisher. In the long term,ads will be piped directly into games overthe internet, allowing games publishersto update in-game advertisements as of-ten as they want and to collect informa-tion about how in-game advertising isviewed. This may even lead to new, ad-vertising-supported pricing models.

Today, however, few games consolesare connected to the internet. So whilethere is vast potential for in-game ad-vertising on consoles, the near-termopportunity lies in advergames, whichare speci�cally designed around advertis-ing�the product is often the protagonist�and are either downloaded on to PCs orplayed inside web browsers. American�rms spent around $90m last year on ad-vergames, compared with $20m on in-

And now, a game from our sponsor

Gaming: As young people spend less time watching television and more timeonline and playing games, advertisers have devised a new way to reach them

Where America’s Army leads, Food Force follows

Monitor1 Advergames, a new way to cut

diamonds, searching video,technology and the elderly,pulling the plug on hurricances,more graceful walking robots,plastic bridges, the body asnetwork, �bre-optic sensors,and fashionable �ash drives

Rational consumer9 Why radio is worth watching

The new world of digital radio

Reports10 Technology, meet biology

Biomimetic designs that borrow from nature

13 Computers that test drugsHow biosimulation is helping thepharmaceutical industry

Case history15 A bright idea

The dramatic yet unexpectedsuccess of the laser

Reports18 When modern art shows its age

New materials and technologiesare changing art conservation

20 Flexible screensThe science-�ction technology isbecoming reality�but slowly

Brain scan22 How to make (almost) anything

Neil Gershenfeld dreams ofbuilding a universal replicator

Contents

On the coverIn �elds from robot design tomaterials science, engineersare increasingly borrowingmechanisms from nature�anapproach known as�biomimetics�. Nature’sdesigns are, after all, theresults of millions of years oftrial and error. How a newdatabase could make themeasier to copy: pages 18-21

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2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

game adverts and product placements,says the Yankee Group, a consultancy.

A successful early example of thegenre was �America’s Army�, an adver-game �rst released as a recruitment toolin 2002 which is based on �Unreal�, ashoot-’em-up. This strikingly realistic wargame, which covers basic training, tacti-cal planning and a variety of missions,now has over 5m registered players.About 100,000 people download thegame free every month. But advergamescan promote peace as well as war, as amore recent example, �Food Force�, dem-onstrates. This advergame, launched inApril by the United Nations World FoodProgramme, is intended to raise aware-ness of global hunger. Players are cast asemergency aid workers who must pilothelicopters, negotiate with rebels andhelp to rebuild communities.

Kris Oser, a video-game specialist atAdvertising Age, an industry magazine,says old-style television, print and radioadvertising �just throws brands at peo-ple�. Compare that with Dodge’s adver-game, �Race the Pros�, in which thecompany’s cars can be driven to victoryin a hyper-realistic simulation. Every Fri-day, real NASCAR race times areuploaded into the computer-controlledcars, and the track is dotted with the vir-tual billboards of dealerships close to theplayer (who must enter a zip code to takepart). Such driving advergames alsoneatly sidestep rules that prohibit boast-ing about a car’s top speed in TV adverts.

Richard Schlasberg, a Coca-Cola mar-keting manager based in Hellerup, Den-mark, says the beverage-maker, long afervent believer in television advertising,is now siphoning funds from its TV bud-get to maintain a regularly updated suiteof games. A 30-second prime-time slot onAmerican television can cost half a mil-lion dollars, whereas an advergamerarely costs more than $50,000 to de-velop and can be posted on the internetfor months or years. Mr Schlasberg notesthat, with television, potential drinkersjust stare, brie�y, at Coca-Cola. With ad-vergames, consumers are �actually play-ing you�, he says, and they then associatethe brand with fun.

The simple, browser-based games of-fered by Coca-Cola and other �rms maynot be as sophisticated as �America’sArmy�, but they have merits of theirown. They are easy to access and do notrequire players to download an enor-mous installer �le, so they are well suitedto casual play in lunch hours or co�eebreaks. Such games also have a broaderappeal than traditional games. They canbe found on mainstream websites, andnearly half of players are women.

Kimberly-Clark, a maker of femininesanitary products, launched an adver-game called �KT’s Impossi-Bubble Ad-

ventures�. The game avoids mentioningtampons altogether�girls have to keep abrutish brother from reading their dia-ries. But after the game, they are usheredto a page that does discuss tampons. Theadvergame, put on line in mid-February,was played 500,000 times in its �rst sixweeks. Given that it cost $25,000 to de-velop, that works out at a cost-per-play ofjust $0.05. Andy Stawski, a brand man-ager at Kimberly-Clark, says the game ishaving a signi�cant e�ect on sales.

Advergames have been used in someunlikely ways. America’s NationalChristmas Tree Association launched anadvergame last year to promote real treesover plastic ones. In Britain, the FoodStandards Agency launched a gamecalled �Sid the Slug� to encourage peopleto eat less salt. (This rankled the Salt Man-ufacturers’ Association, which has beenlobbying�so far in vain�to kill the game.)And excitement over the potential of ad-vergames has led some would-be pio-neers astray. Ian Bogost of PersuasiveGames, based in Atlanta, dreams ofbuilding games that go �outside thesphere of entertainment� into �rhetoricaltools�. One of his e�orts is �Activism, thePublic Policy Game�, which was paid forby the Democratic Congressional Cam-paign Committee. Alas, the slow-pacedaction of tax reform is neither motivating,fun, nor terribly educational. 7

WHILE a diamond may be for ever, itsvalue is far from set in stone. It de-

pends on the four Cs: carat, cut, colourand clarity. But while the �rst three canbe measured objectively, assessing a dia-mond’s clarity involves a certain amountof subjectivity and can leave experts dis-agreeing about the grade�and hence thevalue�of a stone. Now researchers atCambridge University’s Institute forManufacturing claim to have devised away to make the grading of diamondsand other precious stones more consis-tent. Tony Holden, the project’s leader,says automating this process could domore than just lead to more accuratevaluations. It could also make roughstones more valuable, by reducing theamount of waste during cutting.

Even a small improvement can yield asigni�cant increase in value, says Dr

Holden, who specialises in applyingtechnology to improve decision-makingin business. Together with his colleagueMatee Serearuno, he has developed anoptimisation system called iGem. Be-sides automatically working out thegrade of a rough diamond, it also sug-gests how best to cut it in order to maxi-mise the value of the resulting stones.

The system uses a set of rules, distilledfrom the judgments of four diamond ex-perts, to determine the clarity, and hencethe grade, of each stone. Each expert wasasked to classify 503 di�erent �virtualstones��computer models of stones con-taining di�erent types of �aws. The ex-perts’ verdicts were then boiled downinto a set of rules, so that when a newgemstone is presented to the system, itcan determine how the experts wouldprobably have graded it. Data from moreexperts could have been used, but fourproved to be enough to produce a robustand accurate system, says Dr Holden.

In actual use, the system is fed modelsof gemstones, which are produced byscanning the stones using a desktop X-raytomography machine. When a stone isidenti�ed as a borderline case betweentwo grades, the system uses an optimisa-tion technique, called a genetic algo-rithm, to explore the di�erent ways inwhich the stone could be cut to maximiseits value. Sometimes bigger is not neces-sarily better: removing imperfections,known as inclusions, may reduce the sizeand caratage of a stone, but could also el-evate it to a more valuable grade. Tests ofiGem showed that it could increase thevalue of a rough stone by as much as 23%.

For over 600 years lapidarists, orstone-cutters, have been using essentiallythe same techniques to cut diamondsand determine their value, says DrHolden. There is a great need for automa-tion, he says�a sentiment echoed withinthe industry. The Gemological Instituteof America, for example, is devising soft-ware to enable retailers and consumers tocompare diamonds of di�erent cuts bygrading the cut automatically.

The next logical step is to automate thephysical process of cutting the diamond,and Dr Holden seems to have found the

Diamonds thatare a cut aboveMaterials science: The combinationof an expert system and a novellaser-cutting technique could boostthe value of rough diamonds

Rough and ready

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The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Monitor 3

ideal partner. He is talking to CalibratedDiamonds, a company based in Johan-nesburg, South Africa, about combininghis optimisation techniques with an ad-vanced laser-cutting system. Tradition-ally, diamonds are cut and polishedusing other diamonds. But in recentyears, lasers have been introduced tomake rough cuts and to carry out �brut-ing�, the bevelling process used to give di-amonds their characteristic sharp-edgedshapes. John Bond, the founder of Cali-brated Diamonds, says his laser-cuttingmethod can make much more precisecuts and can even polish diamonds,though he is reluctant to explain how itworks. He believes that combining his la-ser-cutting with Dr Holden’s software,and automating the whole process, couldboth reduce waste dramatically and cutthe turnaround time from months todays. �Currently, people are losing up to70% of the diamond,� he says.

Mr Bond hopes that this combinationof technologies will help his home conti-nent to bene�t more from its naturalwealth. More than 60% of the world’srough diamonds come from Africa, hesays, but a lack of expertise and relativelyhigh labour costs means that the stonesare usually shipped overseas, to coun-tries such as India, for assessment andcutting. He hopes to have his �rst factoryup and running later this year. 7

FINDING text is easy, but �nding videois not. Imagine you wanted to �nd,

say, the episode of �The Simpsons� inwhich Homer makes psychedelic chilli.Type those keywords into a search enginesuch as Google, and you will �nd testa-ments to its side-splitting humour�butnot the episode itself. Not yet, anyway.Search is, however, coming to video. As itdoes, consumers will be able to type in afavourite line from a �lm and �nd it, saysSuranga Chandratillake, co-founder ofBlinkx, a video search-engine.

In anticipation, big websites such asGoogle, Yahoo! and AOL have started too�er basic video-search capabilities, andupstarts such as Blinkx and TVEyes(which has teamed up with Yahoo!) havepopped up as well. The opportunity isimmense�searching video content couldcreate a web-based television network,

just as Google uses its search engine to as-semble a virtual web-based newspaper.It could also be helpful in digital video re-corders (DVRs) such as the TiVo, by mak-ing programmes easier to access.

Searching video clips or streams is,however, much harder than searchingtext. There are three main approaches.The �rst, and simplest, is to search theclosed captioning, or subtitles, that arebroadcast alongside television pro-grammes. In America, most televisionprogrammes already include captions; bylaw, all will have to do so starting in 2006.In Europe, captions should be broadlyavailable by 2010. Such captions are notperfect, however, especially for live tele-vision, so searching using captions can bea hit-and-miss a�air. The second ap-proach uses software to �listen� to thevideo’s soundtrack. Turning spoken dia-logue into text requires fancy algorithmsand is not always reliable, as anyone whohas ever used a speech-recognition sys-tem can testify. But the resulting text isthen simple to search. The third ap-proach, called semantic tagging, involvesapplying tags to video clips, either man-ually or automatically. Tags may describethe genre of a clip, which actors appear init, and so on. The tagged video can thenbe easily searched.

These three approaches are each usedon their own or, more often, in conjunc-tion with one another to analyse, labeland then search through video content.Allen Weiner of Gartner, a consultancy,says the various methods work prettywell. The challenge is actually gettinghold of video to search. �We’re talkingabout content that does not originate onthe web,� he says. That content is mostlylocked up in the hands of broadcastersand studios, or on the hard disks of DVRs.

Still, the amount of available contentis growing. Mr Chandratillake says hiscompany has catalogued about 70,000hours of video, and adds about 200hours a day. Karen Howe, who becameAOL’s vice-president of audio-videosearch after AOL acquired Singing�sh, acompany she founded, says it is not un-usual to �nd 400,000 new streams a day(including audio). She says interest isgrowing, too�in a typical week, shenotes, one in four people over 12 willview video content on the web.

The business model for all this is,however, unclear. Mr Weiner, who saysthe video-search drama is still in its �rstact, thinks it will follow the same modelas television: whoever has the biggest au-dience wins. That suggests that the bigportal websites, with their huge audi-ences, are in the best position. But manyother opportunities could emerge for thetechnology. �I don’t know if search is go-ing to live in the television, if DVRs andTiVos are going to have smarts inthem�or whether it’s going to be at thehead-end of the cable or satellite com-pany,� says David Ivess of TVEyes.

There is at least one business modelthat works: real-time news indexing, thespeciality of Critical Mention, a �rmbased in New York. It takes feeds from 66television stations in America, works outwhat is being talked about, and then de-livers clips over the internet to its clients,which are big companies interested in�reputation management�. They use theservice as a form of early warning systemfor breaking news, and to see where theirnames are being mentioned.

What is striking is that despite all thebuzz around video searches, none ofthese companies actually searches the visual content of the video. That is be-cause actual video searching��nding allthe clips that show a red car, perhaps, orGeorge Bush�is an extremely complexproblem. IBM, which is doing research inthis area, is using a variety of techniquesto determine the context of a clip: indoor,outdoor, sports and so on.

In February, IBM made a test versionof its Marvel search engine available on-line. It uses a technique called �supportvector analysis� to classify clips into par-ticular categories, by scrutinising audio,video and transcribed speech. Havinglearned about a particular kind of con-tent, it can then recognise it in future. It is,in short, a step towards an engine that canactually search video. IBM is workingwith CNN, the BBC and other broadcast-ers to assemble a library of clips onwhich to train the system. John Smith, aresearcher in �intelligent informationmanagement� at IBM Research, thinks itcould be ready for commercial use withintwo years. But searching video is one�eld where seeing really is believing. 7

Google, meetTiVo

Search technology: The new frontierfor search engines is to make videoclips as easy to search as text. Butthat is more easily said than done

Here’s the haystack�now �nd the needle

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4 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

LIKE many middle-aged people thesedays, Edie Stern, who lives in New

York, often �nds herself worrying aboutan ageing parent. Her father, Aaron, is 87years old and lives on his own in Florida,hundreds of miles away. �He’s a very in-dependent soul,� she says. Many peoplein Ms Stern’s position feel torn: they wanttheir parents to continue to live in theirown homes and pursue their own lives,but are concerned about their parents’growing frailties. Unlike others, however,Ms Stern can at least feel she is doingsomething to help resolve this dilemma.As a researcher at IBM, a big computer�rm, she is one of many people develop-ing new technologies intended to make iteasier, less stressful and even healthierfor older folks to continue living at home.

Demand for such technologies couldbe enormous, since baby-boomers are onthe cusp of retirement. About 10% of theworld’s population was 60 or older in2000�but that �gure will more than dou-ble to 22% by 2050. Some countries willbe especially hard hit: 28% of the popula-tion in Italy and Japan will be over 65 by2030. In the rich world, there will be twoold people for every child by 2050.

Consider the daily chore of taking theright pills at the right time. As peoplegrow older, the combinations of medi-cines they must take often become elabo-rate cocktails. Pills are easily confusedand labels can be hard to read. So Medi-voxRx Technologies, a division of Wiz-zard Software, based in Pittsburgh, hasdeveloped Rex, the talking pill bottle.Pressing a button on its base plays backspoken prescription information, storedin a microchip, through a miniaturespeaker. This information can either begenerated automatically from prescrip-tion data, or recorded directly using adocking station: �Mum, take this arthritispill for your shoulder pain, but not morethan three times a day.� A new version ofRex, now in the pipeline, will warn if abottle is opened too many times in a day.

Similarly, Bang & Olufsen’s Medicomdivision is test marketing a device in sev-eral European countries that helps peopleremember how many pills they’ve taken.The Helping Hand device holds �blister-packs�, those cards of pills packaged un-der individual bubbles of plastic. When it

is medication time, Helping Hand beepsand �ashes, and sensors track how manypills have been taken and when. A read-out indicates prescription compliance�agreen light means the user is on track.Other products are still in the researchlabs, such as the system devised by Hew-lett-Packard (HP) to let pharmacists printbar-codes directly on to pills. They canthen be held up to a scanner the size of aco�ee cup, which says out loud what thepill is and when to take it. A second de-vice holds all of a person’s pills and dis-penses each one at the appropriate time.

Managing the chronic diseases that ac-company old age, such as arthritis, dia-betes and hypertension, involves morethan just popping the right pills, how-ever. Other new technologies focus on re-mote management of such chronicdiseases. Health Hero Network, for exam-ple, has developed the Health Buddy, adedicated computer that o�ers dailycoaching for some 45 health conditions.The latest version has a colour screen andports for connecting medical sensors,such as a device for measuring diabetics’glucose levels. Used by American health-care organisations to look after over5,000 chronically ill patients, the HealthBuddy plugs into the phone and sendsdata between patient and doctor everyday. A Japanese version is now in theworks, and approval is pending in the

Netherlands, a country with a particularenthusiasm for telemedicine. The �rmplans a British launch too.

At IBM’s research lab in Zurich, re-searchers are working on a mobile-healthtoolkit to link medical devices with wire-less networks. Called mHealth, the kitcould, for example, work with Bang &Olufsen’s Helping Hand so that a forgot-ten pill triggers a mobile-phone call. HP,meanwhile, is working on wearablewireless sensors, the size of sticking plas-ters, that could be used for remote moni-toring of heart activity and otherinformation. The idea behind all of thesemonitoring systems is to allow old peo-ple to remain in their own homes for aslong as possible, even when they are be-ing treated for chronic illnesses, ratherthan moving into a nursing home.

Another category of devices monitornon-medical activities: Has Mum got uptoday? Did Dad have any breakfast?Lance Larivee, who works in the softwareindustry and lives in Portland, Oregon, istesting a new system from Lusora, astart-up based in San Francisco. The Lus-ora Intelligent Sensory Architecture(LISA), which will go on sale later thisyear, is a collection of wireless devices in-cluding a wearable panic alarm and va-rious monitoring devices that are placedaround the home and detect motion,sound and temperature. Data from these

Home alone

Technology and the elderly: Theworld’s population is getting older.How can technology help old peoplelive independently at home?

Anti-hurricane technology

How can you slow down a hurricane? Moshe Alamaro, a scientist at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology, has a plan. Just as setting small, controlled �res can stop forest�res by robbing them of fuel, he proposes the creation of small, man-made tropicalcyclones to cool the ocean and rob big, natural hurricanes of their source of energy. Hisscheme, devised with German and Russian weather scientists and presented at aweather-modi�cation conference in April, involves a chain of o�shore barges adornedwith upward-facing jet engines. Each barge creates an updraft, causing water toevaporate from the ocean’s surface and reducing its temperature. The resulting tropicalstorms travel towards the shore but dissipate harmlessly. Dr Alamaro reckons thatprotecting Central America and the southern United States from hurricanes would costless than $1 billion a year. Most of the cost would be fuel: large jet engines, he observes,are abundant in the graveyards of American and Soviet long-range bombers.

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The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Monitor 5

IN RECENT years robots have gonethrough a rapid evolution: like their hu-

man creators, they have gone from craw-ling on the ground to walking upright ontwo legs. Indeed, the latest humanoid ro-bots, such as Honda’s Asimo and Sony’sQRIO, can climb stairs, dance, run andjump. Even the most advanced robots,however, still cannot move with thegrace, agility and �exibility of a human.

The problem with current robots is the�zero-moment point� (ZMP) algorithmthat controls them, says Jessy Grizzle ofthe University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.Although ZMP can produce some impres-sive results, its design requires a low cen-tre of gravity and �at feet, making itunable to emulate the speed and agilityof a human gait or to cope with unevensurfaces. Both QRIO and Asimo walk in acrouched position, with their knees per-manently bent in an awkward, consti-pated-looking manner. Their ability toclimb stairs is the result of careful chore-ography and laborious mapping of theenvironment, says Dr Grizzle.

The ZMP algorithm results in motionthat looks unnatural, says Dr Grizzle, be-cause it has no bearing upon how hu-mans actually walk. While taking a step,it requires that the supporting foot is �aton the ground so that balance can beachieved by exerting forces through theankle joint. Keeping one foot �at in thisway makes control of the robot relativelyeasy, at least in theory. A balance-of-

forces calculation at the ankle joint deter-mines the position of the shin, and theprocess is repeated at the knee to deter-mine the position of the thigh, and so on.

The problem is that the complexity ofthe calculation grows, roughly speaking,in proportion with the cube of the num-ber of joints in the robot, which quicklybecomes computationally unwieldy.This will make life increasingly di�cultfor the engineers in future as they attemptto add more complex behaviours to theirrobots’ repertoires, says Russ Tedrake, anexpert in bipedal locomotion at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.Which is why a new algorithm devisedby Dr Grizzle, called �hybrid zero dynam-ics� (HZD), is so clever. It simpli�es theproblem, producing reliable predictionsfor walking motions which can be ap-plied across a range of robot designs.

Walking humans roll their weight for-ward from the heel to the ball of the sup-porting foot, says Dr Grizzle. But whilepivoting on this supporting foot, theyhave no direct way to regulate the rate atwhich their bodies fall forward. The rateof fall can be regulated only indirectly, byartful positioning of torso and limbs, askill exempli�ed by some humans’ abil-ity to walk on stilts. So Dr Grizzle de-signed his algorithm to work with robotsthat do not have feet or ankles, but simplyhave two rigid legs, like stilts. Togetherwith Eric Westervelt, a doctoral student,he devised two simple equations. Onedescribes the motion of any complexwalking system as a form of invertedpendulum; the other describes how thisinverted pendulum will move. The sim-plicity of these equations, and their abil-ity to make very accurate predictions,ensure that the robot stays balanced.

Remarkably, Dr Grizzle does not havea robot of his own on which to test his al-gorithm. Instead, it was tested on a two-legged robot called Rabbit at the Labora-toire Automatique de Grenoble in France.Rabbit, it turns out, can walk and run, de-spite not having any feet. It can recoverfrom being shoved, and can even carry aload equivalent to 30% of its own weightwithout much reprogramming.

To be fair, Honda’s Asimo does not always require its feet to be �at, as thecompany points out. When Asimo is in itsrunning mode, both its feet lift o� theground between strides. Dr Grizzle responds that it all depends on what youcount as �running�. Asimo’s steps are lessthan half the length of its feet, and bothfeet are o� the ground for a mere �vemilliseconds, he notes. His algorithm pro-duces motion that is far more faithful tothe way humans run, with both feet o�the ground for 100 milliseconds and astep length of over 60 centimetres. The result, in short, is robotic movements thatare much less, well, robotic. 7

Walk this way

Robotics: Getting robots to walkgracefully on two legs is hard. But anew approach could make robotsmore elegant and versatile

devices can be accessed securely via theinternet. So Mr Larivee can, for example,check online to see if his 87-year-oldgrandmother�who lives alone in Los Al-tos, California�has opened the refriger-ator yet today.

Living Independently, a �rm based inNew York, last year began selling a simi-lar system, called QuietCare, the develop-ment of which was funded in part byAmerica’s National Institutes of Healthand Ageing. It too combines motion de-tectors with a secure website where cus-tomers can check activity. But the systemis also backed up by ADT Security Ser-vices, a home-security �rm. ADT is toldwhat patterns of activity�or lack of activ-ity�should trigger particular pre-deter-mined responses, such as calling for anemergency doctor.

Such systems need not rely on elabo-rate cameras and sensors, however. Anyelectronic device that is central to thedaily routine can potentially be used as abarometer of well-being. In Japan, over2,200 people use the i-pot system devisedby Zojirushi, Fujitsu and NTT. As its namesuggests, the i-pot is an internet-con-nected kettle. Whenever it is used�whichis several times a day in tea-loving Ja-pan�it sends a wireless signal to a centralserver. Usage records can be checked on asecure website, and the pot also sends atwice-daily summary by e-mail to a fam-ily member or other designated recipient.

Back at IBM, Ms Stern is working onsomething called the Friends & FamilyPortal, which could tie many of theseconcepts together. Bringing togetherhealth updates, a listing of doctor’s ap-pointments, chronic disease data andother information, the portal is designedto house everything those concernedabout an elderly person would want toknow. A �buddy list� keeps everyoneconnected via e-mail or instant messag-ing. Ms Stern’s father, for example, couldupload his glucose readings to the portalso that his doctor in Florida, his daughterin New York and his son in Denver couldall see that he is keeping his diabetes incheck. Patients who know that other peo-ple are paying attention, says Ms Stern,are more likely to follow doctor’s orders.�It’s a virtuous circle,� she says.

While the demand for all these tech-nologies seems certain to grow, this kindof monitoring inevitably raises the ques-tion of privacy�a prickly issue that hasderailed other technologies in the past.Will the elderly tolerate a barrage of devices monitoring and tracking them,revealing everything down to when theyhad breakfast or last had a cup of tea?Richard Jones, the boss of Lusora, responds with a question of his own:�What’s a greater loss of privacy thanmoving out of your own house?� He hasa good point. 7

1

DATA networks can take many forms.They can be constructed using

towers with coloured �ags, carrier pi-geons, electric pulses travelling alongwires, or bursts of laser light whizzingalong optical �bres. But perhaps strangestof all is the idea of using the human bodyitself as a network. While it sounds bi-zarre, systems that use the body to link updi�erent devices are already available�and they might even be quite useful.

First in line is Matsushita, a Japaneseindustrial giant. Last September itlaunched a �Touch Communication Sys-tem� under the slogan �Data transfer via�ngertips�. It allows users to pick up in-formation from a device simply by touch-ing it. The information is then stored in acompact gadget worn on a wristband,and is transferred when the user touchesanother device. Very weak currents areused to transmit data across the skin’ssurface, and the data-transfer rate, a mere3.7 kilobits per second, is much slowerthan a dial-up modem.

Even so, Teraoka Seiko, a Japanese�rm that makes measuring instruments,has begun to incorporate the technologyinto its line of electronic scales, registersand printers. The resulting keyless data-entry systems are being targeted at sales-men who handle bulk merchandise thatis unsuitable for labelling with bar-codes,such as big chunks of meat and �sh. Thetechnology is on trial at several stores,says a Matsushita spokesman, and thecompany has high hopes for it. It plans tosqueeze all the required circuitry on to asingle chip by the end of the year.

Skinplex, devised by Ident Technol-ogy, a German start-up, is a similar sys-tem designed with security applicationsin mind. You carry a device with a uniqueidentifying code on your body, perhapsembedded in your watch or glasses. Thecode is transmitted via your skin as soonas you touch a receiver, embedded in acar door, for example. This is more securethan a wireless key fob, says Stefan Donatof Ident, since the signal cannot be inter-cepted by a nearby eavesdropper.

As well as having potential securityadvantages, transmitting data from onedevice to another via the user’s skin alsosidesteps the problem of radio interfer-ence as other �personal-area network�

Data with ahuman touch

Computing: The idea of using thehuman body to interconnectelectronic devices sounds like agimmick�but could have its uses

BRIDGES must always be epic engi-neering projects involving years of

construction work and vast amounts ofsteel and concrete, right? Wrong. New de-sign and construction techniques meanthat bridges can be put together in a mat-ter of days�and they can even be madeout of plastic. Consider the InfraCorebridge, a design launched in January byComposieten Team, a �rm based in Rot-terdam. The designers’ goal was to shavemonths, or years, o� the commissioningof new bridges, a process that typicallyentails lengthy rounds of sketching,specifying and contracting.

Standardising the design and produc-tion processes, says Jan Peeters, one of theengineers behind the new design, makesordering a bridge as easy as buying a car.With a few clicks of the mouse, softwareadjusts the bridge �recipe� to a client’sspeci�cations. The bridge’s size, colour,and options such as handrails are chosenon screen, and because engineers no lon-ger need to design each bridge fromscratch, the �nished product can be de-livered within a week. The lightweightplastic even �oats, and a two-man crewcan install a small bridge in a few hours.

This is just the latest example of thegrowing use of plastics in bridge con-struction. Bridges made of �bre-rein-forced polymers have been around sincethe late 1990s, and several hundred plas-tic bridges now dot the globe, mainly inEurope and North America. They traverseeverything from rivers and railways to in-

dustrial fa-cilities and

highways. Someare even tough enough

to support a Sherman tank,as was theatrically demon-

strated during the inauguration in2002 of a road bridge in Shrivenham,

England. Its 11-metre deck was made byFiberline Composites, a Danish �rmwhich, like Composieten Team, makesplastic bridges to order.

Plastic bridges have advantages overboth concrete and steel ones. They re-quire minimal maintenance during theirlifespans (estimated at over 60 years forthe InfraCore), whereas traditionalbridges often need a costly overhaul afteronly a decade or two. Plastic bridges areimpervious to common problems such ascorrosion, frost, mould and insects,which eliminates the need for specialcoatings. Adding a new composite deckcan extend the life of an old bridge thatwould otherwise not be worth repairing.And plastic bridges can even be madefrom discarded co�ee cups and detergentbottles: a 14-metre span built over NewJersey’s Mullica River in 2002 consists ofrecycled polyethylene and polystyrene.

Technologically, says Mr Peeters,many of the plastic bridges that are nowpopping up around the world could havebeen built ten years ago. It has simplytaken time for civil engineers�a naturallycautious bunch who are used to buildingbridges out of concrete, steel andwood�to come round to the idea of usingplastic in bridge construction.

But enthusiasm for plastic bridges isnow growing. In November, Fiberlinesupplied the materials for an all-compos-ite tra�c bridge in Klipphausen, nearDresden. Indeed, the former East Germany, notes Finn Jerno of Fiberline,was an unsung pioneer of the use of ad-vanced plastics in construction. Five ofKlipphausen’s wooden bridges were de-stroyed in the massive European �oodsof 2002, and replacing the originalswould probably have meant disruptiverepair work every ten years. After consid-ering the long-term costs, the mayor de-cided to build the new bridges usingFiberline’s glass-�bre-reinforced plasticinstead. The plastic design has anotherbene�t, too: the next time catastrophicweather threatens, Klipphauseners cansimply disassemble their new plasticbridges at a moment’s notice�and thensnap them back together once the stormhas passed. 7

Materials science: As unlikely as itsounds, plastic is becoming anincreasingly popular material fromwhich to build bridges

A bridge too far?

6 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

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The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Monitor 7

FIBRE optics are most commonly asso-ciated with communications�and

with the telecoms crash that followedwhen too many �rms built too manyidentical �bre-optic networks, and thetra�c to �ll them never materialised. But�bre optics can do more than just act aspipes for transporting data; they can alsobe used as sensors that can gather data.Compared with electrical sensors, theyare smaller, cheaper, longer lasting andcan operate at much higher temperatures(600°C rather than 125°C). And unlikeelectrical sensors, �bre-optic sensors arenot susceptible to electromagnetic inter-ference and can therefore be reliably usedin power plants, magnetic-resonance im-aging laboratories and other situationswhere such interference abounds.

Fibre-optic sensors are not new�theyhave been around since Corning Glassand Bell Labs �rst started developing op-tical �bres for the telecoms industry backin the 1960s. But a happy consequence of

the telecoms boom is that prices havetumbled, so �bre-optic sensors can beused more widely, and in new ways.

The most common type of �bre-opticsensor in use today is called a �Bragg grat-ing�, which is the �bre-optic equivalentof a strain gauge. A Bragg grating is a re-gion of a �bre where the refractive indexhas been modi�ed so that it varies in aprecise, periodic way. This causes thegrating to re�ect light of a speci�c wave-length (ie, a speci�c colour). As the �bre isstretched or compressed, the wavelengththat is re�ected then changes accordingly,and the strain can be determined.Changes in temperature also change the�bre’s properties in predictable ways. Byincorporating several Bragg gratings intoa single �bre, each tuned to re�ect a di�er-ent wavelength, it is possible to measurethe variations in strain or temperaturealong the �bre’s length.

Bragg gratings are used to measurestrain in things like turbine blades, andare now cheaper than conventionalstrain gauges. Indeed, �bre-optic sensorsare replacing electrical sensors in manyareas of engineering, science and medi-cine. But Julian Jones, a professor of engi-neering optics at Heriot-Watt Universityin Edinburgh, says that the spread of thistechnology from the laboratory into ev-eryday use has barely begun. In collabo-ration with researchers at AstonUniversity and the University of Shef-�eld, he is currently working on severalnew types of �bre-optic sensor.

The �rst is a �bre with multiple cores,an idea that was originally intended to in-crease �bre-optic capacity, but whichwas soon abandoned. Dr Jones foundthat such �bres can be used not just tomeasure strain, but also to measure thedegree of bend and its direction. Bragggratings are etched into each core of afour-core optical �bre. When the �brebends, some of the gratings are stretchedand others are compressed, and thewavelengths they re�ect change accord-ingly. It is then possible to calculate thedirection and the angle of bend. This ap-proach is ideal for monitoring structuressuch as aircraft wings and yacht masts,and a single �bre can do the work of hun-dreds or even thousands of electrical sen-sors, says Dr Jones.

Another new type of sensor is basedon a conventional optical �bre, the end ofwhich has been modi�ed in variousways. In one example, a small hole, justan eighth of a millimetre in diameter, isdrilled into the end of a �bre using a high-powered laser. A copper membrane is ap-plied, creating a small air cavity insidethe �bre. The optical properties of the �-bre then vary depending on the pressuredi�erential across the membrane. The re-sult, says Dr Jones, may be the fastest re-acting pressure sensor ever made: it is

From dumb pipesto smart sensors

Materials science: Optical �bres arewidely used to pipe data around athigh speeds. But �bre optics can beused as sensors, too

devices, based on the established Wi-Fiand Bluetooth wireless technologies, pro-liferate. So why is the technology notmore popular? For one thing, it is stillquite new: Microsoft was awarded its pat-ent for skin-based data transmission onlyin June last year, for example. Anotherproblem is the need to maintain directcontact with multiple devices. Sendingmusic to a set of headphones via the skinmakes sense�but means that the music-player must be touching the skin too. Andhealth worries over mobile phones andother sources of radiation mean that peo-ple are not quite ready to accept the ideaof signals being transmitted via skin, saysThomas Zasowski, a researcher at theSwiss Federal Institute of Technology inZurich. Besides, the data rates achievablemay simply be too low.

Many of these drawbacks are beingaddressed by NTT, Japan’s telecomsgiant. Instead of passing an electric cur-rent through the skin, its �RedTacton�technology, announced in February,works by inducing tiny �uctuations inthe body’s existing, but very weak, elec-tric �eld�in much the same way that a ra-dio modulates a carrier wave to transmitsound. This means that the transmitterneed not be in direct contact with theskin, but can be in a pocket or purse: thetechnology works through multiple lay-ers of clothing, up to 20 centimetres fromthe body. The receiver is based around anelectro-optic crystal, the optical proper-ties of which change in sympathy withthe body’s electric �eld. These variationsare detected by a laser and an optical sen-sor, and the transmitted data can then beextracted. NTT says a data rate of 10megabits per second is possible, makingthe user’s body equivalent in capacity toan o�ce Ethernet network.

The technology could have all sorts ofuses, since it also works with inanimateobjects such as walls, �oors, furnitureand even water. Music could be transmit-ted from your PC to a music-player in

your pocket when you sit downat your desk, for example; or youcould unlock a door by touching

it. NTT boasts that there is no needto insert smart cards or mess around

with cables to get two RedTacton devicesto talk to each other.

Ian Pearson, a futurologist at BT, Brit-ain’s incumbent telecoms �rm, says thefuture for body-based communicationslooks good. Eventually, he says, it will bepossible to make very sophisticated de-vices that live in or on a person’s skin,and that talk both to each other and toother, nearby devices outside the body.Just as the roll-out of broadband internetaccess depends on bridging the �lastmile� between telephone exchange andsubscriber, human-body networkingcould carry data across the �last metre�.

Well, maybe. �Whether using the elec-tric �eld of the body to transmit bits willbe compelling is really open,� says Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Micro-soft’s Bay Area Research Centre in SanFrancisco. �I’m a bit sceptical.� But wewon’t know for at least �ve years, headds, since it will take time for a standardto emerge. That raises the question ofwhat the standard will be called. Wi-Skin,perhaps, or Body-Fi, or Blueskin? 7

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8 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

STRANGE but true: memory chips havebecome fashion items. Well, sort of.

Flash drives�also known as thumb, key,pen or jump drives�which can store me-gabytes of data, and are simply slottedinto a computer’s USB port, have dis-placed old-fashioned �oppy disks as theeasiest way to carry your data around. As�ash drives become more popularamong students and business people,and not just computer-support sta�,more attention is being paid to their de-sign. Some people have even taken towearing their �ash drives around theirnecks, like jewellery�a trend boosted bythe launch earlier this year of Apple’siPod Shu�e, the �ash-drive version of itsiconic and fashionable music-player.

According to the USB Flash Drive Alli-ance, an industry body based in Silicon

Valley, �ash-drive necklaces are mostpopular among men in wealthy Asiancountries. The bestselling models in Asiaare cute and shiny with brightly contrast-ing colours. SanDisk, a �rm based in Sun-nyvale, California, that pioneered �ashdrives, recently launched new modelswith vibrantly coloured rubber casings,which are selling briskly in Asia. Otherdecorative casings are on the way. MikeMorgenstern, a marketing manager atSanDisk, says the �coolness factor� ofcustomisable mix-and-match covers iscurrently driving sales, and he shouldknow: SanDisk’s products account fornearly half of all �ash drives sold.

Rappers and hip-hoppers bear someresponsibility for the rise of the wearable�ash drive. Their enthusiasm for heavy,metallic neckwear made it acceptable formen�who own 80% of �ash drives�towear chunky pendants. But �ash drivesaimed speci�cally at women are on theway too. PNY, a New York-based manu-facturer with a product line that includesa �ash drive hidden inside a pen, willlaunch a collection this autumn of driveswith �feminine� shapes, colours and ma-terials. �A fashionable drive needs to beshown o�,� says Stephane Rouveyrol ofPNY. Similarly, Maastrek, a �rm based inHildesheim, Germany, that already sells�ash drives built into watches, is design-ing a line of �ash-drive earrings andbracelets, and a series of necklaces in theshapes of tigers, birds and �sh. They willgo on sale later this year.

The �ash-drive market is now worthabout $4 billion annually, and it isroughly doubling in size every year, according to Rafael Achaerandio of IDC, amarket-research �rm. He says the tech-nology is a fun �rst step toward the elec-

tronic clothing and wearable computersof the future. Much of the growth is com-ing from business people. Rather thanhanding out bulky folders of sales mate-rial, they now dish out cheap �ash drivesinstead, preloaded with electronic �lesand emblazoned with company logos.

The latest �ash drives can store four gi-gabytes of data, though 512-megabytedrives, which cost around $50, are morecommon. Weighing slightly more than apen, a 512-megabyte �ash drive can storeabout 15 albums or ten music videos. The��ash memory� technology that gives�ash drives their name does not requirebattery power to preserve its contents.Unlike �oppy disks, �ash drives slip eas-ily into a pocket, and are far more robust.SanDisk’s Titanium drive can survive be-ing driven over by a car, and weathers thewashing machine, too, in spite of its re-tractable but unsealed connector.

For the cognoscenti, a �ash driveserves as an invitation to share and pro-vides an easy way to exchange music orphotos. Roland Mouret, a French designerwho has incorporated laptops into fash-ion collections, says �ash drives are giv-ing mobile urbanites the opportunity toabsorb culture wherever they go. Even so,Cathleen Laporte, president of the BlackFashion Designers Association in NewYork, says that �ash drives have yet to hitcatwalks on either side of the Atlantic.

Fashion-conscious Italians, however,are not so keen on the technology. KimCoston, who teaches at Polimoda, a fash-ion school in Florence, says Italians prefernot to exhibit what they consider to be asymbol of American corporatism. But Italy aside, the �ash drive is undeniably�and unexpectedly�moving from geektoy into the realm of fashion. 7

Flash and carry

Computing: Flash drives, which allowhuge amounts of data to be carriedaround easily, are changing fromgeek toys into fashion items

The iPod Shu�e, prêt à porter

ideal for measuring such things as blastwaves. �In the current climate, there’s ahuge demand for technology whichcould help to design bomb-proof build-ings,� he says. Data gathered using thesesensors in explosion experiments canshow how blast waves interact withstructures, leading to a better understand-ing of blast damage and its mitigation.

Researchers at the Centre for Pho-tonics Technology at Virginia Tech, inBlacksburg, Virginia, are pursuing a simi-lar approach. They have also developednew ways to get a single �bre to functionas a very large number of independentsensors. In one experiment, Anbo Wangand his colleagues demonstrated a tech-nique that can read 1,000 di�erent Bragggratings along a single �bre.

A very short laser pulse is launchedinto the �bre, and each grating re�ects asmall amount of the pulse. Re�ectionsfrom nearby gratings arrive sooner thanthose from gratings at the far end of the �-bre, and the intensity of each re�ectionreveals the local temperature or strain.Analysis of the timing and intensity ofthe re�ections results in a temperature orstrain pro�le for an entire bridge, dam orpipeline from a single embedded �bresensor. Optical �bres have alreadyslashed the cost of communications. Evi-dently their ability to reduce costs whiledelivering ever increasing amounts ofdata extends to sensing, too. 7

TELEVISION has changed dramaticallyin recent years. You can now sit down

in front of a wide, �at-panel screen, andcall up hundreds of channels in an in-stant. You can pause and rewind livebroadcasts and record every episode ofyour favourite programme using a per-sonal video recorder (PVR) such as a TiVo.And in some parts of the world �video ondemand� services enable viewers to callup programmes when they want to watchthem, rather than when broadcasters de-cide to transmit them. All this has beenmade possible by digital technology,which has visibly transformed television.At the same time, however, a similar�ifless remarked upon�transformation isunder way in radio. It is going digital too.

The latest digital radio receivers,launched this month in Britain, featureTiVo-style pause, rewind, programmeguide and timed recording functions.Some digital-satellite receivers, which arebecoming increasingly popular in Amer-ica, also o�er pause, rewind and record-ing features, as well as access to dozens ofchannels. Such features will become com-monplace as sales of digital radios in-crease, from 4m receivers in 2004 to anestimated 23m units in 2008, according to�gures from In-Stat, a market-research�rm. In Britain, sales of digital receivershave overtaken sales of analogue radios,according to Dixons, a retail chain.

Di�erent digital-radio technologies arebeing deployed in di�erent parts of theworld. Outside the United States, the lead-ing standard is called DAB. It is alreadypopular in Britain, Germany and Canada,and is spreading in Europe and Asia. DAB

signals are transmitted separately fromconventional analogue FM signals, butmany receivers can switch to a station’sFM signal in the event of the digital signalbeing lost (in a moving car, for example).

In America, there are two kinds of digi-tal radio: subscription-based digital satel-

lite services (XM and Sirius) and atechnology called HD Radio that allowsdigital signals to piggyback on standardFM transmissions. Satellite radio now hasaround 5m subscribers and can be foundin 4% of households, and the number ismore than doubling each year. The grow-ing clout of satellite radio is illustrated byits exclusive content deals, such as thosestruck by XM with Major League Baseball,and by Sirius with Howard Stern.

Then there is an emerging global digi-tal-radio standard called Digital RadioMondiale (DRM), which uses digital en-coding to deliver near-FM audio qualityin the long-wave and medium-wave fre-quency bands, which have a far longerreach than FM signals. DRM transmis-sions are already under way in some partsof the world, though receivers are still ex-pensive, as DAB receivers were initially.But cheaper DRM radios are on the way.

Finally, digital radio can also be de-livered via the internet, in the form of au-dio streaming. According to �gures fromForrester, a consultancy, 16% of Americanhouseholds have listened to streamingaudio online. The latest twist is podcast-ing, the audio equivalent of blogging,which allows anyone to post audio �lesonline for downloading by others.

Tuning in to the futureAll of this means greater choice and con-trol for listeners, says Michelle Abrahamof In-Stat. Digital radio o�ers better soundquality than analogue, and its more e�-cient use of the airwaves means there isroom for more channels, and hencegreater variety. (XM and Sirius o�er doz-ens of genre-speci�c music channels, forexample.) Digital-radio listeners tend tobe more promiscuous in their listeninghabits, says Andrew Moloney of Radio-Scape, a British �rm that develops digital-radio technology. Since it is easier to �ickbetween stations�some radios even havea �back� button for quick switching�lis-teners do more channel-hopping.

As well as improving quality andchoice, digital radio can do things that an-alogue cannot. Music stations can trans-mit artist and track information, andnews stations can transmit scrolling head-lines to the radio’s screen. Digital also al-

lows radio stations to broadcast multiplestreams, which appear as sub-channelson the tuning menu. In future, car radioscould store a tra�c bulletin in memoryand play it back when the driver hits a�tra�c news� button, says Ms Abraham.Forthcoming radios with colour screenscould display a map during the weatherforecast, or a sponsor’s logo during a par-ticular show. �When the advertising guysget hold of this, goodness knows whatwill happen,� says Mr Moloney.

Broadcasters and advertisers are, saysMs Abraham, rubbing their hands at thenew business models made possible bydigital. Satellite radio has demonstratedthat subscription-based charging canwork in radio, as it does in TV. More tar-geted channels, sub-channels and onlinechannels will allow broadcasters to reachspeci�c audiences more easily, whichshould enable them to charge more for ad-vertising. And the ability to send otherforms of data alongside audio means thatbroadcasters could, for example, delivermobile-phone ringtones or discount cou-pons alongside particular shows: only bylistening to the whole programme canyou receive the download, which canthen be transferred from the radio to yourmobile phone. There is even talk of usingglobal-positioning technology in digitalreceivers to deliver adverts speci�c to thelistener’s location.

There is a paradox here, observes TedSchadler of Forrester. Broadcasters seedigital as an opportunity to increase ad-vertising revenue, but the success of satel-lite radio in America is partly the result oflisteners’ desire to escape from advertis-ing: many satellite music channels are ad-free. �Consumers say they hate advertis-ing, but they also say they won’t payenough to make it go away,� he says. Digi-tal radio will o�er a wider range ofchoices, however, and �consumers willpick the business model that gives themthe programming they want at the lowestcost.� Charging more for advertising de-pends on attracting speci�c audiences,and that will require investment in betterprogramming, says Mr Schadler. So as ra-dio goes digital, choice will improve�andboth listeners and broadcasters ought tobe able to get more of what they want. 7

Why radio is worth watching

Consumer electronics: Digitalradio broadens choice forlisteners and opens up newpossibilities for broadcasters

The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Rational consumer 9

AFTER taking his dog for a walk one dayin the early 1940s, George de Mestral,

a Swiss inventor, became curious aboutthe seeds of the burdock plant that had at-tached themselves to his clothes and tothe dog’s fur. Under a microscope, helooked closely at the hook-and-loop sys-tem that the seeds have evolved to hitch-hike on passing animals and aidpollination, and he realised that the sameapproach could be used to join otherthings together. The result was Velcro: aproduct that was arguably more thanthree billion years in the making, sincethat is how long the natural mechanismthat inspired it took to evolve.

Velcro is probably the most famousand certainly the most successful exam-ple of biological mimicry, or �biomimet-ics�. In �elds from robotics to materialsscience, technologists are increasinglyborrowing ideas from nature, and withgood reason: nature’s designs have, by de-�nition, stood the test of time, so it wouldbe foolish to ignore them. Yet transplant-ing natural designs into man-made tech-nologies is still a hit-or-miss a�air.

Engineers depend on biologists to dis-cover interesting mechanisms for them toexploit, says Julian Vincent, the director of

the Centre for Biomimetic and NaturalTechnologies at the University of Bath inEngland. So he and his colleagues havebeen working on a scheme to enable engi-neers to bypass the biologists and tap intonature’s ingenuity directly, via a databaseof �biological patents�. The idea is thatthis database will let anyone searchthrough a wide range of biological mech-anisms and properties to �nd natural so-lutions to technological problems.

How not to reinvent the wheelSurely human intellect, and the deliberateapplication of design knowledge, can de-vise better mechanisms than the mind-less, random process of evolution? Farfrom it. Over billions of years of trial anderror, nature has devised e�ective solu-tions to all sorts of complicated real-world problems. Take the slippery task ofcontrolling a submersible vehicle, for ex-ample. Using propellers, it is incrediblydi�cult to make re�ned movements. ButNekton Research, a company based inDurham, North Carolina, has developeda robot �sh called Madeleine that ma-noeuvres using �ns instead.

In some cases, engineers can spend de-cades inventing and perfecting a newtechnology, only to discover that naturebeat them to it. The Venus �ower basket,for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge,has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are re-markably similar, both in appearance andoptical properties, to commercial optical�bres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a re-searcher at Lucent Technology’s Bell Lab-

oratories in New Jersey. And sometimesthe systems found in nature can makeeven the most advanced technologieslook primitive by comparison, she says.

The skeletons of brittlestars, which aresea creatures related to star�sh and sea ur-chins, contain thousands of tiny lensesthat collectively form a single, distributedeye. This enables brittlestars to escapepredators and distinguish between nightand day. Besides having unusual opticalproperties and being very small�each isjust one-twentieth of a millimetre in di-ameter�the lenses have another trick ofparticular relevance to micro-optical sys-tems. Although the lenses are �xed inshape, they are connected via a networkof �uid-�lled channels, containing a light-absorbing pigment. The creature can varythe contrast of the lenses by controllingthis �uid. The same idea can be applied inman-made lenses, says Dr Aizenberg.�These are made from silicon and so can-not change their properties,� she says. Butby copying the brittlestar’s �uidic system,she has been able to make biomimeticlens arrays with the same �exibility.

Another demonstration of the powerof biomimetics comes from the gecko.This lizard’s ability to walk up walls andalong ceilings is of much interest, and notonly to fans of Spider-Man. Two groups ofresearchers, one led by Andre Geim atManchester University and the other byRon Fearing at the University of Califor-nia, Berkeley, have independently de-veloped ways to copy the gecko’s abilityto cling to walls. The secret of the gecko’s

Technology that imitates nature

Biomimetics: Engineers areincreasingly taking a leaf out ofnature’s book when looking forsolutions to design problems

10 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

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The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Reports 11

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success lies in the tiny hair-like structures,called setae, that cover its feet. Instead ofsecreting a sticky substance, as you mightexpect, they owe their adhesive proper-ties to incredibly weak intermolecular at-tractive forces. These van der Waalsforces, as they are known, which exist be-tween any two adjacent objects, arise be-tween the setae and the wall to which thegecko is clinging. Normally such forces arenegligible, but the setae, with their spat-ula-like tips, maximise the surface area incontact with the wall. The weak forces,multiplied across thousands of setae, arethen su�cient to hold the lizard’s weight.

Both the British and American teamshave shown that the intricate design ofthese microscopic setae can be repro-duced using synthetic materials. Dr Geimcalls the result �gecko tape�. The technol-ogy is still some years away from com-mercialisation, says Thomas Kenny ofStanford University, who is a member ofDr Fearing’s group. But when it does reachthe market, rather than being used tomake wall-crawling gloves, it will proba-bly be used as an alternative to Velcro, orin sticking plasters. Indeed, says DrKenny, it could be particularly useful inmedical applications where chemical ad-hesives cannot be used.

While it is far from obvious thatgeckos’ feet could inspire a new kind ofsticking plaster, there are some �elds�such as robotics�in which borrowing de-signs from nature is self-evidently thesensible thing to do. The next generationof planetary exploration vehicles beingdesigned by America’s space agency,NASA, for example, will have legs rather

than wheels. That is because legs can getyou places that wheels cannot, says DrKenny. Wheels work well on �at surfaces,but are much less e�cient on uneven ter-rain. Scientists at NASA’s Ames ResearchCentre in Mountain View, California, areevaluating an eight-legged walking robotmodelled on a scorpion, and America’sDefence Advanced Research ProjectsAgency (DARPA) is funding research intofour-legged robot dogs, with a view to ap-plying the technology on the battle�eld.

Having legs is only half the story�it’show you control them that counts, saysJoseph Ayers, a biologist and neurophysi-ologist at Northeastern University,Massachusetts. He has spent recent yearsdeveloping a biomimetic robotic lobsterthat does not just look like a lobster but ac-tually emulates parts of a lobster’s ner-vous system to control its walkingbehaviour. The control system of the scor-pion robot, which is being developed by

NASA in conjunction with the Universityof Bremen in Germany, is also biologi-cally inspired. Meanwhile, a Finnish tech-nology �rm, Plustech, has developed asix-legged tractor for use in forestry.Clambering over fallen logs and up steephills, it can cross terrain that would be im-passable in a wheeled vehicle.

Other examples of biomimeticsabound: Autotype, a materials �rm, hasdeveloped a plastic �lm based on thecomplex microstructures found in motheyes, which have evolved to collect asmuch light as possible without re�ection.When applied to the screen of a mobilephone, the �lm reduces re�ections andimproves readability, and improves bat-tery life since there is less need to illumi-nate the screen. Researchers at theUniversity of Florida, meanwhile, havedevised a coating inspired by the rough,bristly skin of sharks. It can be applied tothe hulls of ships and submarines to pre-

The hook-and-loop mechanism (left) of burdock seeds (centre) inspired Velcro (right)

Madeleine, a swimming robot modelled on a �sh

12 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

2 vent algae and barnacles from attachingthemselves. At Penn State University, en-gineers have designed aircraft wings thatcan change shape in di�erent phases of�ight, just as birds’ wings do. And Dr Vin-cent has devised a smart fabric, inspiredby the way in which pine cones open andclose depending on the humidity, thatcould be used to make clothing that ad-justs to changing body temperatures andkeeps the wearer cool.

From hit-and-miss to point-and-clickYet despite all these successes, biomimet-ics still depends far too heavily onserendipity, says Dr Vincent. He estimatesthat there is only a 10% overlap betweenbiological and technological mechanismsused to solve particular problems. Inother words, there is still an enormousnumber of potentially useful mecha-nisms that have yet to be exploited. Theproblem is that the engineers looking forsolutions depend on biologists having al-ready found them�and the two groupsmove in di�erent circles and speak verydi�erent languages. A natural mechanismor property must �rst be discovered by bi-ologists, described in technological terms,and then picked up by an engineer whorecognises its potential.

This process is entirely the wrong wayround, says Dr Vincent. �To be e�ective,biomimetics should be providing exam-ples of suitable technologies from biologywhich ful�l the requirements of a particu-lar engineering problem,� he explains.That is why he and his colleagues, with

funding from Britain’s Engineering andPhysical Sciences Research Council, havespent the past three years building a data-base of biological tricks which engineerswill be able to access to �nd natural solu-tions to their design problems. A search ofthe database (available on the web atwww.bath.ac.uk/˜ensab/TRIZ/) with thekeyword �propulsion�, for example, pro-duces a range of propulsion mechanismsused by jelly�sh, frogs and crustaceans.

The database can also be queried us-ing a technique developed in Russia,known as the theory of inventive pro-blem solving, or TRIZ. In essence, this is aset of rules that breaks down a probleminto smaller parts, and those parts intoparticular functions that must be per-formed by components of the solution.Usually these functions are comparedagainst a database of engineeringpatents, but Dr Vincent’s teamhave substituted their databaseof �biological patents� instead.These are not patents in the con-ventional sense, of course, sincethe information will be avail-able for use by anyone. By call-ing biomimetic tricks�biological patents�, the re-searchers are just emphasis-ing that nature is, in e�ect, thepatent holder.

One way to use the system is tocharacterise an engineering problem inthe form of a list of desirable features thatthe solution ought to have, and anotherlist of undesirable features that it ought toavoid. The database is then searched forany biological patents that meet those cri-teria. So, for example, searching for ameans of defying gravity might produce anumber of possible solutions taken fromdi�erent �ying creatures but described inengineering terms. �If you want �ight,

you don’t copy a bird, but you do copy theuse of wings and aerofoils,� says Dr Vin-cent.

He hopes that the database will storemore than just blueprints for biologicalmechanisms that can be replicated usingtechnology. Biomimetics can help withsoftware, as well as hardware, as the robo-lobster built by Dr Ayers demonstrates. Itsphysical design and control systems areboth biologically inspired. Most currentrobots, in contrast, are deterministicallyprogrammed. When building a robot, thedesigners must anticipate every contin-gency of the robot’s environment and tellit how to respond in each case. Animalmodels, however, provide a plethora ofproven solutions to real-world problemsthat could be useful in all sorts of applica-tions. �The set of behavioural acts that alobster goes through when searching forfood is exactly what one would want a ro-bot to do to search for underwater

mines,� says Dr Ayers. It tooknature millions of years of

trial and error to evolvethese behaviours, he says,so it would be silly not totake advantage of them.

Although Dr Vincent’sdatabase will not be capableof providing such speci�c re-sults as control algorithms, it

could help to identify naturalsystems and behaviours that might be

useful to engineers. But it is still early days.So far the database contains only 2,500patents. To make it really useful, Dr Vincent wants to collect ten times asmany, a task for which he intends to askthe online community for help. Building arepository of nature’s cleverest designs,he hopes, will eventually make it easierand quicker for engineers to steal and reuse them. 7

The robot scorpion being evaluated byNASA (above) and a robolobster (right)

A Venus �ower basket has spiny skeletal outgrowths very similar to optical �bres

FIVE years ago, when the �rst draft ofthe human genome was unveiled and

the dotcom boom was in full swing,hopes were high for the union betweenbiology and computing. The deluge of ge-nomic information would, the theorywent, be funnelled into powerful com-puters, which would then be able tomodel biological systems, �gure out howthey went wrong, and design drugs to �xthem. Test-tubes would give way to mi-crochips; biology would go from �in vi-tro� to �in silico�.

All of this promised to bene�t not justthe health of patients, but of drug compa-nies too, by improving the predictability,and hence the economics, of drug de-velopment. It would prevent costly�sometimes tragic�surprises late in clini-cal trials, or worse, long after drugs hadreached the market. In other industries,after all, computerised models and simu-lations of new products are common-place. Chipmakers simulate new designsbefore committing them to silicon; non-

existent cars can be driven and aircraft�own in virtual reality. But none of thiscan be said of the drug industry, whichmay explain why it spends nearly 25% ofits revenues on research and develop-ment, or about twice as much as mosthigh-tech industries.

Worse, as the industry spends more, itseems to get less. According to an oft-quoted �gure from the Tufts Centre for theStudy of Drug Development, in Medford,Massachusetts, developing a drug typi-cally costs $900m and takes 15 years. Onlyone in 1,000 compounds tested makes itinto human trials, and only one in �ve ofthose emerges as a drug. Few industrieshave such a low hit rate. In-silico biologypromised to improve things: in 1999,PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy,estimated that it could save $200m andtwo to three years’ development time foreach drug. So how is it doing? Alas, thehigh hopes of a few years ago have yet tobe realised. But there are some hopefulsigns that the technology might, at last, bestarting to prove its worth.

The �eld is a crowded one. Some �rms,such as Gene Network Sciences (GNS),Entelos, and Rosetta Biosoftware (ownedby Merck), specialise in modelling biolog-ical systems and processes. Others, suchas Spot�re, Simulations Plus, Select Bio-sciences and Lion Bioscience, are more fo-

cused on creating three-dimensionalimages from the resulting data. There is �alot of confusion, even among scientists�about how to demarcate the �eld, saysCristiano Migliorini of Roche, a drug giantbased in Basel, Switzerland. Drug compa-nies have concluded that so far, no one in-silico �rm has all the pieces needed in thedrug-development puzzle, so they havecontracts with several of them. �Becauseof the overpromising of genomics, thereis still a lot of confusion about where eachof us �ts into drug development,� saysColin Hill, the boss of GNS.

In-silico biology technologies are be-ing applied to a number of drug-develop-ment challenges. But the technology thatseems most likely to improve the eco-nomics and predictability of drug de-velopment is software that simulates theworkings of biological processes. Thereare many factors that a�ect health anddisease, so the trick is to �nd out whichmatter most and how to in�uence them.�Biosimulation� can help both to identifypromising targets and to determine thedegree to which a drug can a�ect them.

In the April issue of Drug Discoveryand Development, an industry journal,several drug companies including Roche,P�zer, and Johnson & Johnson, o�eredhigh praise for this approach. Roche saidthat biosimulations had helped it to �ndadditional uses for Pegasys, its hepatitis-Cdrug. P�zer noted that America’s medi-cines regulator, the Food and Drug Ad-ministration (FDA), had speci�callymentioned that computer models �pro-vided con�rmatory evidence of e�cacy�for Neurontin, a drug that treats the painexperienced after a bout of shingles.

You will be simulatedBiosimulation software is based on inter-connected sets of mathematical equa-tions, calibrated to represent particularbiological and physiological behaviours,which respond realistically when theirnumerical parameters are adjusted to imi-tate a particular medical condition or theintroduction of a drug. It is still not possi-ble to give a virtual drug to a virtual pa-tient and instantly determine whether itwill work against a particular disease�but it is possible to draw some useful con-clusions from biosimulation.

Consider a recent example from Ente-los, a �rm based in Foster City, California.Its technology, called the MetabolismPhysioLab, is based on a mathematicalmodel of the human metabolism. It simu-lates carbohydrate, lipid and amino-acid

Models that take drugs

Biosimulation: Designing drugsin computers is still some wayo�. But software is starting tochange the way drugs are tested

The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Reports 13

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14 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

2 metabolism, and models the actions ofthe gut, the absorption of intestinal nutri-ents, insulin release, and nutrient cyclesin muscle, connective tissue, liver andother tissues. Entelos researchers created125 unique virtual patients, to representthe variability seen in real-world patients,and then ran a simulation to evaluate anexperimental approach to asthma treat-ment for P�zer. The simulation deter-mined that while potential drug targetswere involved in more than 50 processesin the respiratory system, only three of the26 known e�ects and one of the hypothe-sised e�ects had a clinically signi�cantimpact. The simulation thus determinedwhich physiological processes and drugtargets were worth concentrating on. Itwould have cost P�zer several years andmillions of dollars to get this answer us-ing its standard techniques.

As well as helping in the discoveryprocess�the search for and validation ofpromising drug candidates�biosimula-tion can also help with development,when the drug enters clinical trials. Ente-los ran another simulation that helpedJohnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Re-search & Development (J&JPRD) deter-mine the safety limits for a new treatmentfor type-2 diabetes. The original plan forthe trial was to administer di�erent dosesto �ve groups of patients. The biosimula-tion, again using a group of virtual pa-tients, suggested that the drug would notcause an �adverse event� regardless of thedose. So Entelos recommended that thetrial need only test the highest dose. Thisenabled J&JPRD to eliminate four-�fths ofthe trial, reducing the total number of re-cruited patients by 60% and shorteningthe trial’s duration by 40%.

A big limitation of biosimulation,however, is that not all physiological pro-cesses are known, so not all are includedin the various software models. GNS,based in Ithaca, New York, combines thebottom-up simulation of physiologicalprocesses with a top-down �inferencemodelling� approach based on the analy-sis of clinical-trial data. Using machine-learning and data-mining techniques,which sort through mountains of datalooking for patterns, it is possible both tocon�rm known behaviours of biologicalsystems, and to predict other, unknownbehaviours. The �rm’s clients include No-vartis, Merck and Johnson & Johnson.

Another area where computationalmodelling can help is in the design of clin-ical trials�a �eld in which models de-veloped by Pharsight, of Mountain View,

California, have become so useful that theFDA itself is adopting them. Pharsight’s�computer-assisted trial design� systemmodels and simulates clinical trials to de-termine the optimal number of patients,dose amounts, and dosing frequency, allof which have for years mostly been de-termined through time-consuming andcostly trial and error. Pharsight has con-tracts with big �rms including P�zer andIBM Life Sciences.

Getting from here to thereWhile in-silico biology has come a longway over the past �ve years, it still has alot to prove. �Its importance will increaseover time,� says Henri Theunissen of Or-ganon, a drug �rm based in Oss, in theNetherlands. But, he says, �we’re cur-rently still in the validation phase ofmany of these technologies.� One pro-blem is that the computer models are stillonly as good as the data on which they arebased, and those data are still incomplete,or are scattered around in scienti�c jour-nals. Nothing would speed the advance-ment of biosimulation more than datafrom clinical trials. Despite public pres-sure, drug �rms and medical journals arereluctant to make such data available.

Dr Hill, the boss of GNS, says his tech-nology delivers to the best of its ability,but needs more information about mo-lecular pathways and mechanisms of ac-tion. He reckons that scientists onlyunderstand about 5% of the processes in-volved in drug-cell interaction wellenough to model them, create simula-tions and predict drug behaviour. �The

human genome project gave us a parts listfor biology, molecular biology taught ushow individual parts of the cell work, but‘known biology’ is still trailing the ‘un-known biology’,� he says.

As well as the need for more data, DrMigliorini of Roche notes that for the �eldto live up to its promise, the process ofdrug development will also have to beoverhauled. �Without a change in pro-cesses,� he says, �any large productivitygain is missed.� But, he adds, �the indus-try is certainly now learning how to usethese tools intelligently, creating successstories that will pave the way to processchanges in the future.�

Hans Winkler, senior director of func-tional genomics at J&JPRD in Beerse, Bel-gium, says that pathway analysis, betterunderstanding of biological interactionsand a greater availability of empiricaldata all mean that the industry can do alot better than it could �ve years ago. Butthe in-silico biology �eld is, he says, still10-20 years from reaching what those inthe �eld say is a key validation point. �Weall still have a dream to do something likea gene-expression experiment to analysehow a compound in�uences apoptosis,�he says. This would involve taking a mea-sure of which genes were active in a par-ticular form of cancer, plugging it into asimulation, and then being able to deter-mine which pathways were active, andexactly what the impact of a particulartreatment would be. �This is still not pos-sible,� laments Dr Winkler. So althoughin-silico biology is starting to show pro-mise, it still has a long way to go. 7

And not a test tube in sight

The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Case history 15

FOR several years after the invention ofthe laser, Charles Townes’s colleagues

teased him about its seeming irrelevanceto the real world. They told him bluntlythat it was �a solution looking for a pro-blem�. But Dr Townes, who later receiveda Nobel prize for his work in developingthe technology, has had the last laugh.Over the past four decades, he haswatched the laser emerge from the obscu-rity of the laboratory to become a ubiqui-tous technology that is used in anamazing diversity of applications. Laserscan now be found in everything fromDVD players to weapons systems, tele-phone networks to operating theatres.

Lasers pack a powerful punch, andhave had a huge impact on society. To-day, they guide missiles, point miningequipment in the right direction and en-able astronomers to take clearer picturesof the heavens. They also perform myr-iad mundane tasks, such as powering of-�ce printers, removing unwanted bodyhair and carrying voices from one tele-phone to another. Lasers are synony-mous with precision, from industrialcutting machinery to sights for sniper ri-�es. Yet the creators of the laser were notso sure what they were aiming at when

they began working on the technologyback in the 1950s.

The grandfather of the laser was Al-bert Einstein. In 1917, the great physicistpostulated that atoms could be per-suaded to emit tiny packets of energy,called photons, in an organised mannerthough a process of �stimulated emis-sion�. But how could this be achieved inpractice? The answer came in a �ash ofinspiration on a park bench, or a middle-of-the-night �Eureka!� moment�depend-ing on whose story you believe.

A tale of two epiphaniesAs Dr Townes tells it, he had his epiphanyshortly after dawn on a spring morningin 1951, as he was sitting on a bench inFranklin Park in Washington, DC. Hequickly jotted down his idea on a scrap ofpaper he found in his pocket. �It is per-haps a hackneyed device among drama-tists to have a scientist scribble histhinking on the back of an envelope, butthat is what I did,� he later wrote.

In essence, lasers work by setting up achain reaction, in which photons of a par-ticular wavelength prompt other atomsto emit further, identical photons. For allof this to work, a suitable material, calleda �gain medium��which can be a solid, aliquid or a gas�is required. To get the pro-cess started, the gain medium is�pumped� using a burst of light or anelectrical discharge. This excites the at-oms in the medium, some of which thenemit photons of a speci�c wavelength.When a photon encounters an excitedatom, it may then cause it to emit an iden-tical photon�a process called �stimulated

emission�. This causes a cascade e�ect, aseach photon stimulates the emission ofadditional, identical photons. The gainmedium acts, in short, as an ampli�er oflight: hence the name laser, an abbrevia-tion of �light ampli�cation by stimulatedemission of radiation�.

Laser light has several unusual prop-erties. It is monochromatic, since it ismade up of identical photons of a spe-ci�c wavelength, and the wavelength oflight is what determines its colour. Next,laser light is coherent, which means thepeaks and troughs of the light waves arealigned. The light is also emitted in atight, concentrated beam.

Dr Townes, who was the head of theColumbia University Radiation Labora-tory in New York, applied his idea to gen-erate an invisible beam of microwaveradiation, rather than visible light, usingammonia as the gain medium. His teamcalled their device a maser, which is shortfor �microwave ampli�cation by stimu-lated emission of radiation�. Their �rstmaser was not capable of continuousoutput, but two Soviet scientists, Nikolai Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, cameup with a solution to this problem. Theysubsequently shared the Nobel prizewith Dr Townes in 1964.

Following the invention of the maserin 1953, the big question was whether thesame technique could be applied to visi-ble light. Dr Townes and his brother-in-law Arthur Schawlow, who worked atthe legendary Bell Laboratories, laid outmuch of the theoretical basis for such an�optical maser� in a paper that appearedin the scienti�c journal Physical Review in

An unexpectedly bright idea

Lasers: Few innovations of thepast century have changed asmany aspects of everyday life asthe laser. A laboratory curiosityat �rst, there now seems nolimit to its usefulness

Charles Townes with the �rst maser (left), and his rival and former student Gordon Gould (right)

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16 Case history The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

1958. In particular, they had the idea ofputting mirrors at each end of the gainmedium to cause photons to bounceback and forth. But by another man’s ac-count, the crucial insight that made laserspossible came in the middle of a mild November night in 1957. Gordon Gould, adoctoral student at Columbia under DrTownes, sat up in bed when the idea hithim. He says that the �urry of inspirationlasted several days, and he �lled over sixpages of a notebook with the details ofhow the light-emitting device wouldfunction. In his notes, he was the �rst torefer to this device as a �laser�; Dr Townesstill preferred the term �optical maser�.Dr Gould rushed o� and had the pagesnotarised at a local sweet shop. But he didnot apply for a patent: he wronglythought he would have to build a work-ing prototype of his design �rst.

Over the course of a patent war span-ning the next 30 years, Dr Gould toldcountless courtrooms that Dr Towneshad appropriated his ideas. He also ar-gued that he had always seen the laser’spotential in real-world applications�which were poorly outlined in the laserpatent granted to Dr Townes and DrSchawlow. In the 1970s and 1980s, DrGould won several important legal bat-tles, and was awarded a number of pat-ents relating to lasers. Neither Dr Townesnor Dr Gould constructed the �rst work-ing laser, however. That happened in1960, when Theodore Maiman, a physi-cist at the Hughes Research Laboratoriesin Malibu, California, �nally hit upon thecorrect con�guration of mirrors, gain me-dium and pumping mechanism to makea working laser�beating Dr Townes’sown team at Columbia, and Dr Schaw-low’s at Bell Labs, in the process.

Beaming with successIt is not surprising that Dr Townes and DrSchawlow could not predict what the la-ser would be used for, since its applica-tions have been so many and varied.�Asking how lasers have in�uencedmodern life is like asking how electricityhas in�uenced modern life,� says LouBloom�eld, a physicist at the Universityof Virginia in Charlottesville. To startwith, it seemed that lasers would be mostuseful in industry and in scienti�c re-search: the �rst examples had been de-vised for use in spectroscopy, to probethe properties of matter. But the adventof small, cheap, low-power semiconduc-tor lasers meant they could be incorpo-rated into mass-produced consumer

products. Today, such lasers are the mostnumerous: they can be found at the heartof hundreds of millions of CD and DVD

players, PCs and games consoles.In an optical drive, a laser beam is fo-

cused on to the microscopic bumps andpits on the disc’s surface. The bumps andpits are formed by injection-mouldingthe plastic disc; its surface is then coveredwith a very thin re�ective coating, andthe whole thing is encased in a transpar-ent protective layer. As the disc spins, thelaser’s light is re�ected o� the bumps andpits, each of which re�ects the light di�er-ently. These di�erences are detected us-ing an optical sensor, which produces astream of digital information correspond-

ing to the sequence of bumps and pits.CD and DVD players work in essen-

tially the same way, but DVDs can con-tain more information, since they areread using laser light of a shorter wave-length (650 nanometres, as opposed to780 nanometres in the case of CDs). Thisshorter wavelength allows smallerbumps and pits to be distinguished,which means more of them, and hencemore data, can �t on the disc. The nextgeneration of optical drives will be basedon blue lasers (with a wavelength of 405nanometres), providing enough storagecapacity for high-de�nition movies.

Compared with videocassette play-ers, which rely on magnetic tapes andcontain lots of complicated and expen-sive moving parts, laser-based gadgetsuse cheaper o�-the-shelf components,explains Paul Jackson of Forrester, a con-sultancy. As a result, the prices of DVD

players fell far more quickly than those ofVCRs. The DVD player became one of thefastest-adopted products in the history oftechnology: the �rst players appeared in1997, but around half the households inthe developed world now have one, andthe cheapest models cost a mere $40.

Seeing well and looking goodAs well as bringing crisper images to tele-vision screens, laser technology has alsomade it easier for people to see themwithout the help of glasses, thanks to thedevelopment of laser eye-surgery. Asearly as the 1960s, the possibility of usingthe technology in medicine had occurredto researchers such as Leon Goldman, of-ten called the father of medical lasers. Hehad been asked to evaluate the safety ofindustrial lasers, and his investigationsinto the biological e�ects of lasers ledhim to consider their use in surgery.

In 1965 doctors �rst used an argon la-ser to repair a detached retina, a sight-threatening condition in which the light-sensitive layer of the inner eye becomesseparated from its supportive tissue. Fo-cusing a laser on to the retina and makingtiny burns produces scar tissue that�welds� the retina back into place. To thelaser’s inventors, this application of thetechnology was a completely unexpecteddevelopment. �I had never heard of a de-tached retina,� says Dr Townes.

More recently, an increasing numberof people have put aside their glasses andcontact lenses to take advantage of aspeedy procedure known as �laser-as-sisted in situ keratomileusis�, betterknown as LASIK. Around 2m people in

�It is not surprising that the pioneers of the lasercould not predict what it would be used for, since itsapplications have been so many and varied.�

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The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Case history 17

America alone will undergo the opera-tion this year to correct near- or far-sightedness. During LASIK surgery, an in-strument cuts a thin �ap in the outerportion of the eye, called the cornea. This�ap is then peeled back, allowing laserpulses to vaporise and remove a micro-scopic portion of the underlying tissue,thus reshaping the cornea. Since it is theshape of the cornea that determines hownear- or far-sighted someone is, this re-shaping has the e�ect of correcting thepatient’s vision and reducing the need forglasses or contact lenses.

Lasers have many other surgical uses,too. They have been adapted to zap awayspider veins, warts and wrinkles. �Theimpact of lasers and laser-like technol-ogy in dermatology over the last 20 yearshas been nothing short of miraculous,�says David Goldberg, who is the directorof laser research at the Mount SinaiSchool of Medicine in New York. A tinybeam can be used to heat up a wrinkle,for example, and collagen proteins,which have a �rming e�ect, are then pro-duced as part of the skin’s healing mecha-nism. As people become older, richer andvainer across the developed world, re-searchers are devoting a lot of attentionto improving such cosmetic procedures.

Lasers also have less frivolous medicaluses, of course, not just improving peo-ple’s appearances, but also saving lives.

A light for sore eyes

They can be used to zaptumours, remove polypsand stem bleeding. Lasersare more precise than con-ventional surgical instru-ments, doing less damage andallowing for faster healing and re-covery. By directing a beam along a �exi-ble optical �bre, they can even be usedinside the body.

Laser pulses travelling along optical �-bres can heal, but are better known forcarrying information. In 1988 the �rsttransatlantic �bre-optic cable went intoservice, and such cables have since rede-�ned the economics of telecommunica-tions. �If you look at a world map now,it’s just a spider web of these underseacables,� says Paul Shumate, executive di-rector of the Laser and Electro-OpticsSociety at the Institute of Electrical andElectronics Engineers (IEEE). �In 1975there wasn’t a �bre in the telephone net-work. Now, 30 years later, there’s hardlyany copper except at the last connectionfrom the curb.� Stephen Anderson, edi-tor-in-chief of Laser Focus World, an in-dustry journal, points out that peoplehave forgotten the challenges of makingtransatlantic calls. As recently as 40 yearsago, such calls required a lot of organisa-tion. �Bookings were made two days inadvance, and you were lucky if you couldunderstand one another,� he says. Dur-ing the 1990s, enthusiasm for �bre net-works led to an enormous overbuild,huge overcapacity, and plunging prices.The result was meltdown for the tele-coms industry, but far cheaper and easiercommunications for its customers.

Using several lasers, each with a di�er-ent wavelength or colour, it is possible tosend multiple streams of data down a sin-gle optical �bre�a trick called �wave-length division multiplexing�. Improvingthe precision with which particular col-ours of laser light can be generated�inparticular, through careful temperaturecontrol�therefore has the e�ect of in-creasing the capacity of a �bre. At the be-ginning of the 1980s, �bres carried asingle stream of data at 45 megabits persecond, says Dr Shumate. The capacity ofeach stream has since increased to 10gigabits per second, and researchers haveachieved speeds of 40 gigabits per sec-ond in laboratory conditions. Sendingdozens of such streams, using manyslightly di�erent wavelengths, down asingle �bre increases its capacity to sev-eral terabits (millions of megabits). Im-provements in laser technology, in short,

have increasedthe capacity ofnetworks with-

out the need tolay any new �bre.New ways to use

lasers continue to prolif-erate�and one of them might

even be coming to a supermarket nearyou. Retailers already use laser scannersto read bar-codes. But Sherwood Technol-ogy, a �rm based in Widnes, Britain, hasdevised a system called �DataLase� thatuses lasers to write prices, dates andother information on to fruits, vegetables,pills and even confectionery. An edible,light-sensitive coating is applied to thesurface and then drawn on using a low-power laser, which causes the coating tochange colour. It is yet another exampleof the way that new uses continue to bedeveloped for lasers, decades after theirinvention.

The lesson of the laserAnd therein lies a lesson. The technologywas originally developed for use in spec-troscopy, and its myriad other uses werean unexpected bonus. �People just didn’timagine the many applications whichnow seem so obvious,� says Dr Townes.�But that’s a characteristic of most reallybrand new ideas.� Dr Schawlow has evensuggested that trying to anticipate thepossible uses for the laser might havehindered its development. �We had noapplication in mind,� he said in 1981. �Ifwe had, it might have hampered us andnot worked out as well.�

Some people worry that the researchclimate that produced this fundamentaltechnology�one that allowed brightminds to pursue abstract ideas�has be-come regrettably rare. Dr Bloom�eld,who himself once worked at Bell Labs,feels that today’s corporate research lab-oratories tend to have a shortsightedview, focusing only on the next sixmonths. �More and more, everyone’swaiting for someone else to do the pio-neering work and hoping to take advan-tage of other people’s foresight,� he says.

The laser is an object lesson in thevalue of blue-sky research, and a re-minder that even a seemingly obscuretechnology can go on to have an extraor-dinary range of uses. So has Dr Townesventured back to the Franklin Park benchsince the morning he came up with hisbreakthrough idea? No, he admits, butperhaps it would lead to new insights. �Iprobably ought to go back,� he says. 7

2

HOW long can a tiger shark dunked informaldehyde last? Damien Hirst’s

peculiar creation is, alas, deteriorating.Since being unveiled in 1991, the liquidhas become murkier and the shark skinlooser. What to do? The artist has madeno public pronouncements, and conser-vators are divided. Perhaps the shark’srotting guts should be removed. Or theformaldehyde could be strengthened. Butwould such measures change the mean-ing of the work, whatever that is? Happilyfor Mr Hirst, worries about the work’s lon-gevity seem tangential to its value: it wassold earlier this year for $12m.

Modern and contemporary art can behard going for conservators. Their job is tomaintain each piece in its original gloryfor as long as possible. But so many newmaterials have come into use in recentyears that tried-and-trusted methods areoften outdated. Painters use umpteen va-rieties of synthetic pigments and binders,not the straightforward oils and varnishof their forebears. Sculptors rely on muchmore than just marble or bronze. Digitalart�from videos and slides to the in-ternet�further complicates matters.

Worries about the durability of o�-beat materials are not altogether new. Asconservators are quick to point out, artiststhrough the ages have faced such pro-blems. Many centuries ago, oil on canvaswas an experimental technology. Worksthat could not be saved from rot or rust arelong gone: those that survive are the onesthat conservators �gured out how to treat.Even Leonardo da Vinci, that great inno-vator, lost some gambles. He daringlypainted his �Last Supper� on a dry plasterwall, not the customary egg tempura onwet plaster. The wall �aked, leading to500 years of conservation headaches.

Still, the amount of choice todayseems greater than ever. Chocolate, lardand yogurt can all show up in contempo-rary art, says Shelley Sturman, who is incharge of object conservation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,DC. So too can items such as vacuumcleaners or pills; and when these showwear and tear, should the conservator runto the shops to buy new ones, or let the oldones age gracefully?

Such problems are particularly acutewith latex, a type of rubber popular for its�exibility and beauty. Eva Hesse’s �RopePiece� from the late 1960s, a cascade ofrope from metal hooks, can be only rarelydisplayed by the Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art in New York. Its latex coat-ing has �aked and discoloured in places.Another work owned by the Whitney,Tim Hawkinson’s life-size �Balloon Self-

Portrait� (1993), has had to have its latexcase recreated for display. Also troubled isPaul Thek’s �Fishman� (1968), owned bythe Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington,DC. This life-size body of a mostly latexman in a tree has grown brittle, is torn inplaces and has sometimes been shownoutdoors, which hastened its deteri-oration. In all these works, conservatorsmust decide whether the latex should beleft on, or replaced or removed�thus al-tering the work in order to extend its life.

Another challenge is scale. Some of to-day’s �nest sculptors produce enormousworks. In 2001 the National Gallery of Artunveiled a sculpture weighing nearlynine tonnes by Frank Stella, an Americanartist. To clean this knot of twisted steel,aluminium, �bre-glass and carbon �bre,the museum had to hire a boom lift with a60-foot arm. Fortunately, the squirrelsthat had been nesting there found an-other home before they had to be evicted.

The good news is that many modernmaterials are actually more durable thanhistorical materials. Paints are a prime ex-ample. Acrylic emulsion, a form of plas-tic, is the medium of choice for artists attheir easels today. This and other syn-thetic paints came along only last cen-tury. Because they dry faster and yellowmore slowly than traditional oils, they ap-pealed as house-paints; they can also becleaned with water. Artists adopted themtoo�and, says Tom Learner of the Tatemuseums in Britain and co-author of�The Impact of Modern Paints�, they haveresisted ageing well.

Swings and roundaboutsBut there are still plenty of unknownsabout modern paints. For one thing, a�staggering array� of new pigments andbinders has been created over the past 70years, according to the Getty Conserva-tion Institute in California. Variety hasmeant opportunity, with room for allsorts of new colours and degrees of tran-sparency. So, for example, Morris Louisused acrylic�solution, not emulsion�forhis starkly coloured vertical lines. MarkRothko used the new paints for his power-ful single-colour patches. But each of thehundreds of new pigments, in combina-tion with binders such as nitrocellulose oracrylic, has its own chemical and physicalproperties. There are also additives�thickeners, defoamers, bu�ers, antifreezeand so forth. More complicated still,paints are not the only things on paintingsthese days. Alberto Burri, a 20th-centuryItalian painter, had a fondness for burned

When modern artshows its age

Art conservation: Contemporaryworks of art, based on modernmaterials and technologies, areproving hard to maintain

18 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

1

2 plastics�a �nightmare for conser-vators�, says Giacomo Chiari, chiefscientist at the Getty.

What does the explosion of newpaints mean for conservation, cleaningand display? Learning more about them,and identifying their exact compositions,is high on the agenda. Much also de-pends, says Mr Learner, on how eachpiece is displayed or stored. Syntheticpaints can expand, soften or get stickywhen hot; they can grow brittle whencold. At the Getty laboratories, conserva-tors observe samples under high-inten-sity light and various temperature andhumidity conditions.

There is also the matter of how best toclean the new paints. Dirt can accumulatesurprisingly quickly�a particular pro-blem for monochrome paintings fa-voured by the likes of Rothko, where anyo�-colour patch stands out. Experimentaltreatments for cleaning acrylics, usingsuch things as lasers, enzymes and liquidcarbon dioxide, are due to be tested by re-searchers at the Tate, who are also work-ing with conservators at the Getty toboost their knowledge of paints.

An even trickier area is digital art, or�time-based media� in art-world lingo.Anyone with an old computer gatheringdust in the attic can spot the problem:hardware goes out of date in a �ash. Fix-ing old models is expensive at best, im-possible at worst. But often the originalequipment is necessary to display the

work just as the artist intended.Just imagine keeping up with the work

of Nam June Paik, a proli�c Korean-bornvideo artist. One of his best-known earlyworks, �Exposition of Music-ElectronicTelevision� (1963), involves 12 televisionsets strewn around the exhibition room,some of them overturned. Another piece,�TV Buddha� (1974), involves an ancientBuddha �gure gazing at a television moni-tor that shows his own image�an unset-tling union of western and orientalthemes. Such sculptures, says Glenn Phil-lips, a curator at the Getty’s research insti-tute, must use the monitors from the1960s and 1970s in order to stay true to theoriginal piece. Yet cathode-ray tubes areneeded to run conventional monitors,and their availability is diminishing as�at-panel displays proliferate.

Similar worries a�ect works that useslides and slide projectors, which are fastgoing out of stock. But some artists actu-ally like using the old stu�. Cory Arcangel,a Brooklyn-based artist known for hack-ing Nintendo game cartridges, huntsdown old computers and video-game sys-tems from eBay (or the occasional �eamarket or charity shop). He then recon�-gures the systems with new music or soft-ware. One recent work, �Japanese DrivingGame� (2004), Mr Arcangel took o� thecars from a racing game, and plugged thegame back into the Nintendo. Now itplays like an empty road that simplypasses by for ever, with no cars.

Surely digital media are easier to pre-serve, since they can be so easily copied?Mr Paik’s videotapes, for example, mightbe stored on a modern DVD but displayedvia old-fashioned equipment. Digitising a

tape can stop it from being de-graded, says Mr Phillips of theGetty. But DVDs too can de-grade�and information can belost (or changed) in the compres-sion process, thus changing theoriginal work, says Pip Laurenson,a conservator at the Tate. Old �lminstallations, such as those by Dan

Graham, an American artists whogot his start in the 1960s using closed-circuit television footage, should al-ways be shown on �lm, she says.

An even newer area is web art.Artists have exploded into this me-dium, creating images, animation,video clips and much more online.

But only the very simplest works, suchas a straight animation, are likely to sur-vive, says Amy Stone, head of the (online,of course) Museum of Web Art. The pro-blem is that pieces are rendered by webbrowsers in di�erent ways, especially ifthey use rapidly evolving technologiessuch as Flash. Each new version of abrowser can change the way things look.

Creative destructionWhat do artists think of these hazards? Ascontemporary art has expanded its range,the de�nition of conservation seems to bechanging. Whereas the deterioration ofOld Masters is seen as tragic, plenty of art-ists today accept that their work serves adi�erent purpose than as a �precious col-lectible item�, says Andras Szanto of Co-lumbia University. Many artists do noteven worry that their work may expiresomeday, though attitudes can changewhen their works start selling.

Some artists have escaped conserva-tion problems in the only way they knowhow�more creativity. Conveniently,some of the trendiest installations in re-cent years have been self-destructing. In�Breakdown� (2001), Michael Landyspent two memorable weeks smashingup his possessions in a London depart-ment store, as a comment on consum-erism. Mr Arcangel, the pop artist keen onold machines, is bullish on his favouritemedium, Nintendo. The technology �is al-ready 25 years old�it’s lasted quite a bit,�he says. Even if the hardware does eventu-ally fail, he notes, it is always possible toresort to emulation, or software mimicryof the old machines. Evidently, conserva-tors will require a wide range of skills inthe future. As Mr Phillips of the Gettysays, �Probably some of the most di�cultconservation challenges are things thathave not yet occurred to us.� 7

Has Nam June Paik’s dog had its day?

�Fishman� is not as �exible as he was

The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Reports 19

FLEXIBLE video displays, like jet-packsand talking robots, are a science-�ction

staple: think of the self-updating newspa-pers in �Minority Report�, or the videowallpaper in �Total Recall�. For years, re-search laboratories, big companies andstart-ups have been working hard to turnthe idea into reality. Flexible screenswould have a number of advantages.They would be lighter and more robustthan the glass-based screens currentlyused in laptops. And roll-up screens thatcould be unfurled when needed wouldbe one way to solve the problem thatwhile the technology to store and processinformation has become smaller andcheaper�as demonstrated by the vaststorage capacity of an iPod, or the process-ing power of a portable games console�display technology has not kept pace.

Proponents of �exible displays imag-ine a device as thin as a piece of paper thatcan be stored in a folder, and then act as avideo display for a mobile phone orhandheld computer. Or how about asmart blueprint that can be scribbled onat a building site, with the modi�cationsbeing automatically copied back to a data-base at head o�ce? �There’s a huge vol-ume of information that isn’t making itsway to people on the move because theydon’t have a suitable device to display it,�says Karl McGoldrick, the boss of PhilipsPolymer Vision, one of several �rms mak-ing �exible displays. He is focusing on themobile-phone market to start with, be-cause he believes that light, robust and�exible displays solve a real problem (see

concept design, above left). Yet as �exible displays inch towards

the market, their initial uses are likely tobe more prosaic: on shelf-edges and signsin shops, says Kimberley Allen of iSuppli,a market-research �rm. �What you wantin a �exible display is something that cango on a shelf-edge display or be wrappedaround a post, is light and looks cool,� shesays. One idea is to update labels on shelf-edges over wireless links. This would letshops update their prices more quicklyand cheaply than is currently possible.They could then try out new price regimesin individual locations, or quickly re-pricegoods to clear them at the end of the day.There would be similar advantages forlarge signs, which could be quickly up-dated to re�ect changing circumstances orto promote special o�ers.

�The question is how a �exible displaywould �t in with the current consumermarket,� says Charles Spear of Intertech,another market-research �rm. He thinks�exible-display �rms need to focus onniche applications, where they can makea name for themselves, rather than tryingto displace liquid crystal displays (LCDs),the dominant form of �at-screen technol-ogy at the moment. �If developers try tofollow the substitute path then they’ll endup with a near zero market in �ve years,�he says. �If they start in novel marketsthey will have a $300m to $500m mar-ket.� But while the technology has come along way in the past few years, it still facesa number of challenges. What makes a�exible display so di�cult to build?

Most displays consist of two main ele-ments: a �backplane� that controls whichdots in the display (called picture ele-ments, or pixels) turn on and o�, and a�frontplane� that either emits light, orcontrols the �ow of light from anothersource. Ideally, the backplane shouldhave a transistor under each pixel, so that

the pixel can be turned on and o� withouta�ecting its neighbours. (This is what dis-tinguishes �active matrix� LCDs fromblurry �passive matrix� ones.) But transis-tors must be made of a material with rea-sonable electronic properties if they are toswitch fast enough for the display to showvideo. The usual approach is to depositsilicon on the backplane and then etch thetransistors into it in the usual way, but thiscan only be done if the backplane is madeof glass with a very high melting point.Try this approach with a �exible plasticbackplane, and it will simply melt.

How to be more �exibleOne promising way around this problem,being pursued by Philips Polymer Vision,Plastic Logic and other �rms, is to makethe transistors themselves out of plastic�speci�cally, out of organic polymers. Both�rms have developed organic electronicmaterials that are soluble and so can bedeposited using screen printing and ink-jet technologies. Transistors and other cir-cuitry can then be printed on to a �exibleplastic substrate.

So much for the backplane; the front-plane presents its own challenges. With atraditional LCD, the frontplane is alsomade of a rigid piece of glass, and the �cellgap� between it and the backplane mustbe precisely maintained. (Press gently ona large LCD display, and you will see why:small variations in the size of the gapcause a visible rippling e�ect.) Maintain-ing a constant cell gap is hard enougheven with large, rigid displays, let alone�exible ones. But �exible LCDs are not im-possible. Philips Research has devised a�self-stratifying� LCD technology, inwhich a blend of liquid crystal and a po-lymer-forming material is applied to a�exible substrate. The material is exposedto ultraviolet light through a mask pat-terned with the outlines of cells. Wher-ever the light hits the material, it hardensinto a polymer, creating a grid of cells fullof liquid crystal. A subsequent exposureof the whole surface closes the cells bycreating a polymer cap across each one.

Another approach is to abandon LCD

technology, in which the pixels act as tiny

On a roll?

Electronics: Flexible-displaytechnology is coming�but itstill falls far short of thescience-�ction ideal

20 Reports The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

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The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Reports 21

2 shutters for a separate light source, in fa-vour of emissive materials, in which eachpixel actually emits light. But these ma-terials also face challenges. Organic light-emitting polymers of the type pioneeredby Cambridge Display Technology (CDT)are steadily improving in e�ciency andoperating lifetime, and have begun to ap-pear in mobile-phone and digital music-player displays. But these materials arevulnerable to moisture, making it criticalthat they are completely and perma-nently encapsulated. The search for ma-terials that can both �ex and provide verystrong encapsulation is continuing. Ac-cordingly, CDT is touting its materials asthe basis for large area displays to chal-lenge LCDs, rather than as �exible dis-plays in portable devices.

So-called electrophoretic frontplanetechnologies are another alternative, butthey have their own limitations. In elec-trophoretic displays, tiny white and blackpigment particles are given opposite elec-trical charges and encapsulated in micro-capsules of about the diameter of ahuman hair. When an electric �eld is ap-plied to a microcapsule, the pigment par-ticles within it move, turning one side ofthe capsule white and the other black. Themicrocapsules can be suspended in a car-rier medium, so that they can be screen-printed on to surfaces including glass,plastic, fabric and even paper. Sony hasintroduced an e-book reader that useselectrophoretic materials to provide ahigh-resolution, high-contrast display.

The drawbacks of electrophoretic dis-plays are that they have slow responsetimes, since the pigment particles taketime to move, and that colour versions arestill in development. But the technology isstill improving, notes Mike McCreary,vice-president of research and advanceddevelopment at E Ink, a pioneer of elec-trophoretic displays based in Cambridge,Massachusetts. As well as being used forin-store signage, E Ink’s technology pow-ers Sony’s e-book reader, and in April,Seiko, a watchmaker, unveiled a digitalwatch built around an E Ink display. DrMcCreary says he has monochrome dis-plays in the laboratory that can showvideo at 20 frames per second, and laterthis year the �rm plans to demonstrate acolour display for the �rst time.

Even so, it would seem that full colour,fully �exible displays that can switch fastenough to show video are still some wayo�. But the combination of organic elec-tronic backplanes and electrophoreticfrontplanes could produce truly rollable,

albeit monochrome, displays in the not-too-distant future. Plastic Logic, which en-tered into a co-operation agreement withE Ink in December, has already producedbackplanes with a resolution of 100 pix-els per inch (ppi), the same as a laptopLCD. It is now installing equipment to en-able it to make such backplanes at paper-back (A5) size, and then plans to move onto 150ppi displays at magazine (A4) size.�There’s been a lot of talk and research re-sults over the past several years, but thisyear you’ll see real product prototypes,�says Dr McCreary. �Then you’ll see realproducts in volume within two years.�

Ready to rollMr McGoldrick says his �rm is workingon displays, also based on E Ink’s front-plane technology, that are just 0.1mmthick and can be rolled up into a tube just15mm across. �Sooner rather than laterwe’ll show a working device with a rolla-ble display to wake people up to the factthat this is a real technology, ready to bedesigned into applications,� he says.

Further evidence of growing interestin �exible displays came in February,when Arizona State University opened anew Flexible Display Centre. America’sArmy Research Laboratory is providing$43.7m of direct funding over �ve years,with the option of another $50m over afurther �ve years. The centre plans to de-velop full-colour �exible displays that can

be integrated into soldiers’ clothing orfolded up into their pockets. Its �rst proto-type, a small, semi-�exible colour display,is due later this year (see mock-up at topof previous page).

Oddly enough, Lunar Design, an in-dustrial-design �rm based in San Fran-cisco, came up with a very similarconcept when it turned its attention to theconsumer potential of �exible displays.Designers mocked up a cycle courier’sjacket covered in �exible-display material(below). Using satellite-navigation tech-nology, the courier’s current locationwould be displayed on a map on thejacket’s wrist. The team also proposedmaking jackets that could act as bill-boards, or could be subscribed to a de-signer’s �pattern of the day� service.

�The next magical step is when the dis-play leaps out of the product and be-comes the wrapper, eliminating theframe,� says John Edson, the president ofLunar Design. �When I look at my phonedisplay, it is like I am looking at the tele-phone number through a peephole. Ifyou can pull that information out on tothe surface it’s very intuitive.�

Clearly, the science-�ction dream ofthe �exible display continues to captivatethe imagination. But until some substan-tial technical challenges are overcome,you are more likely to see such displays onshelf-edges and signs than wrappedaround a member of the digerati. 7

�Full colour �exible displays that canshow video are still some way o�.�

22 Brain scan The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005

AFEW weeks ago, on a crisp spring evening in Washington, DC, Neil

Gershenfeld walked up to the podiumbefore a modest crowd at the Library ofCongress, adjusted his black, thick-rimmed glasses and told his audiencethat the world was about to shift beneaththeir feet. Before long, he explained, peo-ple will own inexpensive desktop ma-chines that can print objects in threedimensions just as e�ortlessly as desktopcomputers can already print pictures andwords in two dimensions. Such �per-sonal fabricators� would, he explained,transform us into magicians, capable ofconjuring up precisely what we want,when we want. We might design ourown mobile phones, clothes or appli-ances, or we might download designsfrom the internet and modify them to ourliking, like recipes. Either way, wewouldn’t be going to a shop and pickingitems from shelves full of identical, mass-produced products.

Yeah, right. Yet Dr Gershenfeld is not ascience-�ction writer, but an engineer,and his magical vision of the future ismore than just a �ight of fancy. He is atwork now, making it happen. Back in2001 he founded the Centre for Bits andAtoms at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massa-chusetts. He �rst began exploring ways tocreate working electronic gizmos fromscratch with students enrolled in his pop-ular class �How to Make (Almost) Any-thing�. He soon found that when he gavehis students a few electrical parts, somefancy manufacturing equipment (such aslaser and water-jet cutters), and severalboxes of computer chips, there was noend to the fascinating, some might say bi-zarre, inventions they would cobble to-gether. �I was amazed with what theycame up with,� says Dr Gershenfeld,shaking his head of unruly black hair.

It was as he watched his students en-thusiastically create their wild inventionsthat the idea of personal fabricators be-gan to take shape. He could see, in the so-called �fab lab� he had developed for hisclass at MIT, glimmerings of a futurewhere people could make whatever theywanted. Then, when asked how some of

the $13.75m grant made to his centremight be directed to educational out-reach, Dr Gershenfeld and his colleagueshad a thought: what if machines likethose used in his class were made morewidely available? Perhaps a good way toreach out and educate would be to createmore fab labs, and see what people in dif-ferent parts of the world did with them.

The answer, it turned out, was thatlike MIT’s students, they were outra-geously creative. By 2004, fab labs werepopping up around the world, from in-ner-city Boston to the coast of Ghana torural India. Each was made available tolocal residents so that they could use thelabs to work on whatever problems theyfelt were important. Far above the ArcticCircle in Norway, herders began develop-ing radios to track their sheep and rein-deer in the mountains. In the Boston lab,children remade scrap materials intosaleable jewellery, and started makingand selling antennae with which to setup neighbourhood wireless-internet net-works. A fab lab in Pabal, India, nowmakes a device to test the quality of milkto ensure that farmers get a fair price.

Why fab labs are fabIn each case, Dr Gershenfeld credits vi-sionary activists and community leadersfor seeing how the fab lab might best beput to use�people such as S.S. Kalbag inPabal, Mel King in Boston and NanaAgyekum, a Ghanaian tribal chief whohad, uncharacteristically, worked in thetechnology industry in America. Theywere the driving forces in the communi-ties where the fabs took root. �It’s anamazing group of people that have madeall of this possible,� says Dr Gershenfeld.

He admits that his far-�ung fab labsare not the advanced molecular ma-chines he foresees proliferating in thenext 20 years on a desktop near you, butjust clunky precursors. Nevertheless, hesays, they hint at the transformativepower of giving ordinary people the abil-ity to make whatever they want. Whenvisiting each of the labs, he found thatparticipants were �passionate unlike any-thing�, driven by the sudden power tosolve problems unique to their lives. Hepicks up the book he has just writtenabout his experiences, �Fab: The ComingRevolution on Your Desktop�From Per-sonal Computers to Personal Fabrica-tion� (Basic Books, 2005) and opens it to apicture of a seven-year-old girl beamingand holding up a string of cut metal thatshe created using fab-lab machines. It

How to make (almost)anything

Neil Gershenfeld wants to builddevices that do for atoms whatPCs do for bits�make themcheap and easy to manipulate

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The Economist Technology Quarterly June 11th 2005 Brain scan 23

spells out her name. �That smile says itall,� he says, pointing at the book.

Dr Gershenfeld believes that themarch he foresees towards personal fabrication will be a social revolution asmuch as a technological one�a democ-ratisation of the ability to manipulatematter, just as personal computers havedemocratised the ability to manipulateinformation. Fabricators will, he says, be-gin migrating from factory �oors into ev-ery home, just as computers evolvedfrom room-sized mainframes to the lap-tops and mobile phones that billions ofpeople now use to run their lives.

Dr Gershenfeld was a child who, byhis own admission, operated in his own�little world�, was not much of a student,but loved to tinker. �Mostly I was better attaking things apart than I was at puttingthem together,� he recalls. He remembersthe schools he attended in PlymouthMeeting, a community outside Philadel-phia, as dismal, boring places where heseemed to get either As or Fs, dependingon how passionate he was about the sub-ject. But while life was boring in school, itwas very di�erent at home. Conversa-tions at the dinner table were intellectualboot camps where the young boy and histwo brothers discussed the cases theirparents were handling in their jobs aslaw professors and arbitrators. Simplyspouting opinions on the cases being dis-cussed wasn’t good enough: �You had toback up your thinking with solid logic,�says Dr Gershenfeld. Occasionally thefamily also took �sabbaticals� in othercountries, including Jamaica and Eng-land, where they lived for a year.

When the time came for him to go tohigh school, Dr Gershenfeld had �a realknock-down, drag-out �ght� with his par-ents. He wanted to go to the technical sideof the high school where he could take�shop� and make real things. His parentswanted him to take a more academic ap-proach. �That struck me as punitive,� hesays. Making three-dimensional objectsseemed much more sensible than sittingin a classroom, but in the end he did ashis parents wanted and subsequentlywent on to Swarthmore College, not be-cause his grades were particularly good,but because he won a swimming scholar-ship. He earned a degree in physics andthen completed a PhD at Cornell beforeheading to Bell Labs in 1981. There he re-turned to tinkering, but he was now ableto use his knowledge of physics and com-plex systems to put electronic devices to-gether in interesting ways, rather than

simply taking them apart. By the mid-1980s he had made his

way to MIT’s Media Lab, where he got in-volved in a project called Things ThatThink. He developed shoes, for example,that generate power for other devices asyou walk. He created an all-digital cellofor Yo Yo Ma, a virtuoso musician, whichturned out to be devilishly di�cult butwas ultimately successful. Along the way,Dr Gershenfeld wrote two physics text-books and a popular book that describedhis attempts to build objects with mindsof their own, �ttingly entitled �WhenThings Start to Think�. In the mid-1990she collaborated with several colleaguesto create a quantum computer using athimble of chloroform and a nuclearmagnetic resonance imaging machine. Itsuccessfully solved a simple problem in asingle computational step, lending cre-dence to the idea that quantum comput-ers may some day be able to operate farfaster than current computers. A com-mon theme runs through all of this work:combining information and atoms, andembedding intelligence in objects.

Bits to atoms, ideas to objectsDr Gershenfeld remains as rebelliousand unconventional as he was when hewas growing up, and is undaunted bythose who say his ideas are novel but im-practical. He is now exploring the cre-ation of mini venture-capital funds tocreate more fab labs, which cost around

$20,000 each. His goal is to turn the labsinto self-sustaining operations that canhave real local impact and generate reve-nue to fund more inventions. �Any of theemerging fabs are full of the little projectsthat could be businesses,� he says. Thesemight not satisfy huge global markets,but they might pro�tably provide villagesand rural areas with tailor-made pro-ducts that big �rms will never make be-cause the markets are too small.

In some ways, Dr Gershenfeld’s workis just an extension of his boyhood loveof tinkering as a form of self-expression.Fab labs empower people by giving themthe means to turn ideas into working,concrete objects. In time, he says, the sep-arate, clunky machines of today’s fabswill morph into a single, universal fabri-cator that can make almost anything.

Whether you believe that such amachine is just around the corner, ormany decades away, its implications aretruly mind-boggling. Fabricators wouldgive people the power to make whatevercomes into their heads and then share theplans over the internet�leading perhapsto a sort of Napster for real-world objects,or a new world of �open-source� manu-facturing. People have asked Dr Gershen-feld if there is an opportunity inbecoming the Microsoft of personal fabri-cators, but he says it makes no sense.After all, once you can make a machinethat makes anything, who needs thecompany that makes the machine? 7

�Today’s clunky machines will turn into a universalfabricator that can make almost anything.�

At work in the fab lab

2