October 15, 2019
SHARPER IMAGE
“We take care of people who have nowhere else to go,” says radiologist Michael Ambrosino of his employer, NYC Health + Hospitals. The New York provider is already a marvel. The nation’s largest public health system, NYC Health + Hospitals comprises a network of more than 70 locations and serves more than 1 million people every year, including some of New York’s most vulnerable populations. Still, the very size of the system presents its own challenge — when, say, a doctor at Bellevue needs to consult on a CT scan with a colleague in Coney Island. That kind of communication is about to get much easier, though: This fall, NYC Health + Hospitals entered into a $224 million agreement with GE Healthcare to replace imaging equipment across the entire system, creating a standardized radiology experience for the organization and its patients citywide.
PET project: Now medical staff, no matter where they are, will easily be able to get on the same page. Or screen, as the case may be. Already underway, the makeover will equip NYC Health + Hospitals with 230 medical imaging machines, including CTs, MRIs, PETs and X-rays. By standardizing the equipment across the system, uniform methodology and scan outputs will help ensure that an abdominal CT scan taken at Bellevue will be identical to one from Coney Island. The continuity enables doctors to make faster, more accurate diagnoses, Ambrosino says: “Our most fragile patients are going to have the most modern imaging technology available in the United States. That is saying a lot.”
Learn more here about NYC Health + Hospitals’ digital makeover.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
In the 1960s, as the United States and the Soviet Union were one-upping each other in the space race, another kind of international aviation contest was unfolding: to see who could develop the first supersonic transport (SST) jet. In 1962, the French and British governments formalized a joint technical team to develop the plane that would become the Concorde, and the Soviet Union soon began working on its own version, the Tupolev Tu-144. In 1964 the U.S. government launched a contest to develop a passenger jet that could fly faster than the speed of sound — and who better to team up on such a project than two iconic American companies? Engineers at Boeing and GE put their heads together and got to work.
The greatest plane that never was: The airplane that Boeing designed, called the 2707, called for “variable geometry” wings, which are straight at takeoff and then move closer to the fuselage at higher speeds. That paired well with the GE4 engine, based heavily on a design GE had cooked up for the Air Force’s high-speed XB-70 Valkyrie bomber. When the Boeing 2707 and GE4 engine were selected for the SST program in 1967, newspapers called the program America’s largest airplane project ever. The four-engine 2707 was designed to carry 350 people at 1,800 miles per hour. It would never be realized: The SST program was killed by Congress in 1971. With hindsight, though, the value of the SST program is clear. The technological advances that engineers made in their quest for faster flight have been powering GE Aviation innovation ever since — and carrying passengers all over the world every day.
GE Aviation isn’t just part of the history of supersonic flight — it’s part of its future, too. Learn more here.
BACK TO BASIC
In the beginning, the command was basic: “RUN,” a word typed at the same time into two separate computer terminals in 1964 at Dartmouth College. But that simple command, marrying “simultaneity and simple language,” marked “the birth of BASIC,” according to Dartmouth prof Dan Rockmore, referring to the programming language that paved the way for the leaps in technology that would enable in-home web browsing, word processing, email, gaming and, yes, Untitled Goose Game. The story of BASIC is anything but, involving not just Dartmouth but GE, a little bit of employee subterfuge and one of Hollywood’s most famous last names.
Father of invention: BASIC ran on the GE-225 mainframe computer developed in the late 1950s at GE’s Industrial Computer Department by a team that included Arnold Spielberg — yep, Steven’s dad. Though the team was under strict instructions to work on computers for industry only — it was right there in the department’s name — they built the GE-225, a business computer, as a kind of side project. When Ralph Cordiner, GE’s chairman and CEO, found out about it, he promptly fired the department leader. The horse was out of the barn, though. The team had already secured Bank of America as a customer for its newfangled business computer, which would turn out to be a smash hit when GE released it in the early 1960s — even at $250,000 a pop, or about $1.9 million in today’s dollars. Arnold Spielberg left GE in 1963; that same year, Dartmouth computer scientists visited GE to learn to program the machine. The following year BASIC was born.
The rest? It’s history. Read more here.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Out Of This World
A U.S. Navy engineer — last seen patenting the design for a conspicuously UFO-like flying object — filed a patent for a compact fusion reactor, long a holy grail of energy scientists: If realized, such a device could provide virtually limitless clean energy.
2. A Bigger Boat
Engineers at the University of Maine developed the world’s largest prototype polymer 3D printer, and what did they do with it? They created the world’s largest solid 3D-printed object: a boat.
3. The Way You Move
Engineers at the University of California San Diego found a way to make soft robots that are “compact, portable and multifunctional” by improving the way they move.
Read more about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“Good medicine used to mean bringing your black bag to the patient’s home and holding his or her hand and giving them whatever relief you can because you couldn’t do very much. Bringing this level of technology to the people who society has almost forgotten is very satisfying.”
— Dr. Michael Ambrosino, chief of radiology at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue
Quote: GE Reports. Image: GE Healthcare.
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