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Biotech / Medical : Dean Kamen and Ginger ??? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerry in Omaha who wrote (322)	1/6/2002 12:10:14 PM
From: Jerry in Omaha	Respond to of 377

A little back up for that last posting: Jerry in Omaha Ginger's Next Trick...Forget the scooter. The amazing engine that may eventually power it will be the real breakthrough. By Paul Saffo, February 2002 Issue business2.com After a year of ballyhoo, rumor, and a televised test-drive by Diane Sawyer, Ginger now faces the task of becoming a real product. Ginger, of course, is the gyro-stabilized personal transporter invented by Dean Kamen and his team at Segway. (Ginger is officially called the Segway Human Transporter, or HT, but "Ginger" will likely stick.) Riding Ginger is fun. Serious, giggling fun. Like a first ride on a bicycle, minus the learning curve. On my first test-drive, I was slaloming around potted plants and trying to ditch the Segway handler to head outside and jump curbs. Ginger has already won the hearts of early-adopters, but Segway is wisely deferring selling the product to consumers. Social acceptance of Ginger depends utterly on giving it a respectable reputation, and that means no hotdogging nerds cutting off drivers and terrifying pedestrians. The first Ginger-fliers to mix with the public will be in uniform: cops and postal carriers. If the public gets to ride the current Ginger at all, it will be at Walt Disney World, surrounded by clean-cut and slightly nervous escorts. Image-building aside, Ginger is not ready for retail. With 40 pounds of batteries and a projected sticker price of around $3,000, the current models are too expensive, too heavy, and too recharge-dependent to enter the consumer mainstream. (The basic models top out at 12.5 mph and run out of juice after 11 miles, on average.) No, what might turn Ginger into something truly amazing is a bit of technology Kamen almost certainly has up his sleeve: a special lightweight engine that would deliver nearly 10 times the power of Ginger's current batteries and would run so quietly you probably couldn't hear it. Called a Stirling engine, and conceived nearly two centuries ago in Scotland, it's a kissing cousin of the steam engine. The basic Stirling design relies on an external heat source to compress a gas inside a sealed chamber, driving a piston as the gas alternately heats and cools. While Stirlings cannot deliver quick bursts of power and have proven expensive to develop, they're extremely energy-efficient, virtually silent, and exhaust-free. Kamen -- who filed a Stirling-engine patent application in 1998 -- is likely betting that the engine's time is finally drawing near. Segway is mum about any plan to develop the Stirling. But obsessions speak louder than words, and Kamen is very publicly obsessed with engines in general and Stirlings in particular. If today's models were the whole story, Ginger would find a quiet niche alongside electric meter-maid carts and propane-powered delivery vans. It just isn't a big enough deal to justify the $100 million Segway has raised, much less explain the extravagant comments from those in the know. A Stirling-powered Ginger is probably at least three years away, but if Kamen delivers, Ginger will just be the wrapping around the real revolution. Sure, the Stirling could be to a future era of personal gyro-transport what the internal combustion engine was to automobiles. But the potential applications are much wider than that. The world is full of noisy, horribly polluting two-stroke engines running everything from scooters in Malaysia to lawn mowers on Long Island. If Kamen and Segway can produce an energy-efficient, eco-friendly alternative to these two strokes, they can have all the hype they want.

To: Jerry in Omaha who wrote (322)	1/6/2002 12:13:02 PM
From: Jerry in Omaha	Respond to of 377

Kamen as Pied Piper for bright youngsters. Jerry in Omaha It’s the FIRST goal — to show science can be fun By BENJAMIN KEPPLE -- Union Leader Staff theunionleader.com The organizers of the 11th annual FIRST Robotics Competition call their event an “engineering challenge” with good reason. It’s a challenge to take three boxes of parts and software and turn them into a 130-pound robot that is expected to perform complex tasks in competition with other robots. But that’s just what about 700 adult volunteers were ready to do at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester yesterday. Whether from as near as Manchester or as far away as Brazil, all in attendance seemed excited about the prospect of taking on such a daunting task. The competition brings together high school students, teachers, engineers, and other adult mentors to build a robot from the ground up. They have six weeks to do it. Then, in March and April, they’ll compete in one of 17 regional competitions around North America —and possibly FIRST’s national contest at the EPCOT Center in Florida. That will be held at the end of April. “I’ve been fired up for the past week and a half,” said David Ferreira, a mechanical engineering student at Community College of Rhode Island from Newport, R.I. He went through the program as a high-schooler in 1996, and has now returned as an adult mentor for it. “I absolutely love the FIRST program because it changed my life,” Ferreira said. Ferreira wasn’t alone in his praise. “I graduated in 1998, and I guess it’s what we call a FIRST-oholic,” said Shaun McNulty, an adult mentor from North Brunswick, N.J. “Even though I didn’t go into engineering, I got a lot of respect for engineering and what it does.” The mission of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is to create that type of enthusiasm about the sciences and engineering. The organization, which Granite State inventor Dean Kamen founded in 1989, held its first contest with about 40 teams of high school students and adult volunteers. This year, a record number of teams — about 670 — will take part. The program has grown so large that yesterday’s event was simulcast to eight locations across North America — where many high schools watched via satellite. “We’re not building robots,” said Kamen. “We’re building opportunities and awareness and knowledge and partnerships.” Kamen, the keynote speaker at the event, got an appreciative response from the crowd when he rode onto the stage in his latest invention: The Segway Human Transporter. He said the FIRST program would teach participants things they always would find useful. “It’s a set of skills you can keep building on for the rest of your life,” Kamen said. “That’s why I believe everyone who participates in FIRST wins.” Kamen thanked both individual volunteers and corporate sponsors of the event for their donations of time and money. Microsoft and Autodesk, software firms, both donated software. Freight transport firm Federal Express is shipping teams’ robots to competitions for free. The free shipping is worth about $1 million, Kamen said. Woodie Flowers, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and FIRST’s national adviser, said he hoped FIRST would help science and engineering gain more acclaim in the public eye. “Sports are wonderful but some perspective is appropriate,” he said, “and I hope FIRST is a vehicle for bringing that perspective.” Professionals helping out the high school students said the program helps teach kids critical thinking skills, about dealing with problems and project management. “It’s a great program to expose high school-level students to some of the real world,” said Archie Major, an engineer volunteering with students from the Goffstown Area High School. So did college officials. Stephen Reno, chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire, said the system would study how FIRST has affected colleges and universities that have sponsored teams of high schools. “If colleges and universities which aren’t currently sponsoring (teams) can see the benefit of working with FIRST, they can see how it is a vehicle for . . . encouraging young people to go into the fields of science, engineering and technology,” Reno said. Reno said Rob Toutkoushian, the system’s director of policy research, would work on the study. No budget for it has yet been set.