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The air in the cleanroom is the purest you’ve ever breathed. It’s class 10 purity, meaning that for every cubic foot of air there can be no more than 10 particles larger than half a micron, which is about the size of a small bacteria. In an exceptionally clean hospital OR, there can be as many as 10,000 bacteria-size particles without creating any special risk of infection. In the outside world, there are about 3 million.
The cleanroom is nearly silent except for the low hum of the “tools,” as Intel calls them, which look like giant copy machines and cost as much as $50 million each. They sit on steel pedestals that are attached to the building’s frame, so that no vibrations—from other tools, for instance, or from your footfalls—will affect the chips. You step softly even so. Some of these tools are so precise they can be controlled to within half a nanometer, the width of two silicon atoms.
It’s surprisingly dark, too. For decades, Intel’s cleanrooms have been lit like darkrooms, bathed in a deep, low yellow.
Callahan, a celebrity caterer credited by Martha Stewart with inventing the bite-sized slider, bought his first 3-D plastics printer two years ago to wow guests at a holiday party. Today, he has his sights trained on printing the food itself. He imagined drumsticks with edible bones; could they be made of celery? Blue cheese? Hot sauce? Callahan already makes an edible cracker spoon to use with caviar, but he envisions an entire line of cutlery, plates and menus that could be printed and consumed at parties. He sees mini-milk cartons made of chocolate and Asian-style takeout boxes formed from wontons.
Natural Machines uses fresh spinach, beetroot and carrot for this Alvar Aalto-inspired, edible vase.
This may look like a fun tree house. But look closer and you find all kinds of high-tech security including a biometric fingerprint lock
“Unique to this project was the high site security required by the client. “Someone from the client’s security detail remained with our craftsmen at every moment — even to the toilet or while waiting outside of the door to enter. My staff was required to hand in their passports, mobile phones and cameras to armed security personnel at the main entrance,” says Payne.”
better materials, autonomous navigation systems, and other technical advances have convinced a growing body of smart, wealthy, and apparently serious people that within the next few years we’ll have a self-flying car that takes off and lands vertically—or at least a small, electric, mostly autonomous commuter plane. About a dozen companies around the world, including startups and giant aerospace manufacturers, are working on prototypes. Furthest along, it appears, are the companies Page is quietly funding. “Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the underlying technology,” says Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who’s spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA. “What appears in the next 5 to 10 years will be incredible.”
A self-driving John Deere tractor rumbles through Ian Pigott’s 2,000-acre farm every week or so to spray fertilizer, guided by satellite imagery and each plot’s harvesting history. The 11-ton behemoth, loaded with so many screens it looks like an airplane cockpit, relays the nutrient information to the farmer’s computer system. With weather forecasts and data on pesticide use, soil readings, and plant tissue tests pulled by various pieces of software, Pigott can keep tabs on the farm down to the square meter in real time without ever leaving his carpeted office.
“This is becoming more standard,” says Pigott, who grows a rotation of wheat, oilseed, oats, and barley on his farm in the rolling Hertfordshire countryside an hour north of London.
5000th post!
This blog was born on March 7, 2005. Facebook had a different name then. The social network had 3 million, mostly casual users. Today it counts over 1.6 billion. No one had heard of the iPhone. The Google Car. Uber. Or Amazon Web Services.
It has been an amazing run over the last 11 years. And innovation keeps accelerating. This is what Florence must have felt like during the European Renaissance.
And the innovation is spreading globally. Search the blog and you find entries on Rwanda, Kazakhstan, Antarctica and plenty more places off the innovation beaten path.
The blog has influenced 4 of my books. It has helped many of my consulting clients as I “raise the bar” for what they can expect from technology
I am grateful to my sponsors for their continued support. I am thankful to many friends who send me story ideas for posts. And especially thankful to readers who have made this blog part of their regular diet.
Here’s to the next 5000 posts!
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June 30, 2016 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)