Malcolm Gladwell talks about scientific discovery in biotech

Malcolm Gladwell spoke last night at this event (Daily coverage is here) about the role of serendipity in drug discovery, focusing on the story of Synta, a biotech company in Boston. The story was later published in his New Yorker column here.

or download the MP3 here.

The approach that Synta is using is essentially high-throughput screening, which is nothing new for the pharmaceutical industry; what’s interesting, though, is seeing combinatorial/high-throughput experimentation techniques starting to be applied to chemistry and materials science – for discovering catalysts, LED phosphors, superconductors, thin-film solar cells, and battery electrodes. Unlike a century ago, when Thomas Edison and his team had to go through 6,000 iterations of light bulb filaments without much scientific understanding to guide them, today there’s simulation software available which can help direct the most promising experiments to conduct – MaterialsGenome and MaterialsStudio come to mind. Companies like Wildcat Discovery and Intermolecular even offer such combinatorial/high-throughput experimentation services, targeted towards the semiconductor and energy industries. What I’d like to see is a hardware platform coupled with open-source software that would allow you to do all the basics – synthesis (sputtering, CVD, or electrodeposition with masks/shutters), processing (inert-gas furnace), analysis (XRD, optical microscopy), and robotic handling for under $10,000.

Tesla Motors’ CTO talks about the roadster & batteries

JB Straubel, the CTO of Tesla Motors, gave a talk to a packed Stanford CarLab forum a few days ago. Some of the interesting tidbits from his presentation:

• the battery pack in a Tesla roadster costs around $25,000
• battery technology is improving at 8% per year in terms of gravimetric or volumetric energy density
• there are approximately 12,000 fuses in the battery pack
• in terms of well-to-wheel efficiency, electric cars can currency reach 85% efficiency.
• hydrogen systems eke out 32% efficiency, through combined losses from electrolysis (70% efficient), hydrogen compression during storage (90% efficient), and fuel cells (50% efficient)
• an acre of solar cells can take a car 36x the distance than an acre of ethanol
• quoted Sheikh Yamani, a former Saudi oil minster stating “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

or download the MP3 here.

Adeo Ressi talks about startup funding in Silicon Valley

Adeo Ressi, a seasoned entrepreneur and founder of theFunded.com, spoke recently to a group of students and CEOs on campus about startup fundraising in the current climate:

or download the MP3 here.

Steve Squyres talks about the Mars rovers

Prof. Steve Squyres from Cornell delivered an awe-inspiring lecture a few months ago about his work on the NASA Mars rovers, and later signed his book for the audience.

or download the MP3 here.

It was cool how he made a point of answering questions from children in the audience first – a true successor to Carl Sagan. I wanted to ask him how they navigate if there is no GPS system on Mars – it seems like this is the answer, which would have to be supplemented with visual calibration of some sort.  As Mars has days shorter than here on Earth, every team member had specially-designed watches made that would run on Mars time, bringing them into work half an hour earlier every day!

You can download and play around with the software that the engineers at NASA use to control the rovers, using real data.  You can fly around Mars as well, using digital elevation data with software like this or this.  Astronomy is becoming more accessible now thanks to Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope and Google Sky.

Most of the deep-space probes actually only send data using a single radio sideband in order to save power, and are received through the Deep Space Network (I visited the Goldstone site in the Mojave desert outside L.A. a few years ago, which is actually situated on the live-fire Ft. Irwin military base).

Here are some of the pictures/videos from his slide deck:

sunset on Mars:

dusty solar panels:

purgatory dune (video of the wheels burning rubber here)

the landing site:

soil test:

parachute testing in the wind tunnel at Moffett Field (they have great tours)

Mars rover petals unfolding

wheels burning rubber

dust devils on Mars:

the Mars 2020 video referred to in the Q&A session is here.

Martin Hellman talks about crypto & eliminating nuclear weapons

Prof. Martin Hellman gave a talk recently about the rationale behind his decision to work on “foolish” problems.  The first of which resulted in the discovery of public-key cryptography with Diffie and Merkle, which is now used to secure all modern communications – from email (PGP) to credit card transactions (SSL) and phone calls (Skype).  The prevailing wisdom at the time was that there was no point doing the research because the the NSA had probably already done it (they’re the largest employer of mathematicians in the world), and even if one were to to find something out, the government would classify it.

This is the best analogy I’ve seen for how it works, in the form of a puzzle:
“

You’re living in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule.  You’ve been jailed and sent to the gulags, but you must tell your wife in St. Petersburg to arrange for your release.  You’re afraid, however, that your mail will be read by the secret police, so you think of using a lock (assume that it’s not going to be broken due to the time it would take to do so).  The problem is, your wife doesn’t have the key.  This is how you’d do it: Put a lock on the package you send to your wife.  On the outside of the package, enclose a message that instructs her to put a second lock alongside your lock, and mail it back.  When the package is returned, remove your lock, then mail it once again to your wife.  When she receives it, she can then unlock it with her own key.

”

or download the MP3 here.

His “fools errand, version 2″ refers to his new project related to the elimination of nuclear weapons – he’s asking for help changing the “conventional wisdom” about nukes through online advocacy (he’s already got signatures from former heads/deputy heads of the NSA and CIA, respectively).