Tech Talk

Scientists have harvested energy from a guinea pig's inner ear and used it to power a small wireless transmitter. With further design work, researchers could harvest this biological battery to power implanted devices near the human ear, such as molecular sensors and drug delivery vehicles for hearing loss and other disorders, according to a study to be published today in Nature Biotechnology.

It has been known for decades that the inner ear contains this biological battery, but until now, no one has harvested it. The authors of the paper, led by Anantha Chandrakasan at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Konstantina Stankovic at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, succeeded without damaging the guinea pigs' hearing. 

The inner ear's biological battery is located in a spiral-shaped auditory region called the cochlea. The electric potential in this region arises from the electrical difference between two different chambers in the cochlea, which contain charged particles such as potassium and chloride ions. A nearby specialized structure known as the stria vascularis transports the ions through its unique arrangement of electrogenic ion pumps, generating an electrochemical potential known as the endocochlear potential. 

At 70-100 mV, the electrochemical potential of the inner ear is the highest in the mammalian body. But it's still a very small amount of energy, and only a fraction of it can be extracted without disrupting hearing. To address this challenge, the researchers chose to power a specially designed chip equipped with an ultralow-power radio transmitter. 

In the experiments, the researchers implanted electrodes in the cochlea of anesthetized guinea pigs. The electrodes were connected to the chip, which was located outside the animals' ears. (It is small enough to fit in a human ear.) The chip included power-conversion circuitry that gradually builds up charge in a capacitor. To kick-start the control circuit, the researchers applied a one-time burst of radio waves. The device wirelessly transmitted measurements of the endocochlear potential to an external receiver. About 1 nW of power was extracted for up to 5 hours—long enough to enable the 2.4 GHz radio to transmit measurements every 40-360 seconds.

Harvesting energy from the human ear to power small electronic devices could be a huge breakthrough for people grappling with hearing loss and other disorders. Implantable electronics usually require large energy reservoirs to operate reliably over long periods of time. But human anatomy limits the size of implantable batteries, and often requires surgical re-implantation or cumbersome external wireless power sources. Harvesting enough energy from the body's own energy sources is a way to extend implant life, and maybe even allow it to operate autonomously, the authors report.

Images: Patrick P. Mercier

A lung-on-a-chip looks nothing like a human lung: It's a clear, flexible piece of silicone rubber that's smaller than your thumb, with human lung cells growing inside the microscopic channels carved into it. But researchers have shown that this gizmo can not only mimic the essential functions of a healthy human lung, it can also be used to reproduce the conditions inside a diseased lung. This proof-of-concept research shows that organ-on-a-chip devices can aid medical research and drug development, and may reduce the need for animal testing in the future. 

The researchers hail from Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, which is at the forefront of organ-on-a-chip research. We've covered prior triumphs from the Wyss researchers like their gut-on-a-chip, which mimicked human intestines and came complete with peristaltic motions, and their plans to link together ten different organ-chips to create a "human-on-a-chip." They describe their latest advance in the journal Science Translational Medicine. 

The lung-on-a-chip is fabricated using techniques learned from computer microchip manufacturing. Its channels have a porous matrix in the middle that host lung cells on one side, where air flows over them, and capillary cells on the other side, where a blood-like fluid flows over them. Vacuum pumps on both sides of the chip cause it to expand and contract, mimicking the way the human lung's air sacs expand and contract with every breath. 

In the latest research, the scientists reproduced the symptoms of pulmonary edema, a potentially deadly condition characterized by fluid and blood clots in the lungs. The cancer chemotherapy drug interleukin-2 (IL-2) is known to cause pulmonary edema in some patients, so the researchers introduced IL-2 into the lung-on-a-chip and watched to see what happened. Just as in a real lung, on the chip the drug caused fluid and proteins to cross over the matrix and leak into the air flow channel.

The researchers also tested a new class of drug that's being developed by GlaxoSmithKline to treat pulmonary edema symptoms. The drug was effective on the chip, and in a separate study the pharmaceutical scientists validated the results in animal experiments. These results suggest that organ-on-chip technology could soon reduce the need for animal testing, which is expensive, slow, and controversial. 

Donal Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute and a senior author of this study, spoke in a press release about the utility of this cutting-edge technology:

"In just a little more than two years, we've gone from unveiling the initial design of the lung-on-a-chip to demonstrating its potential to model a complex human disease, which we believe provides a glimpse of what drug discovery and development might look like in the future."

Images: Wyss Institute

President Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday in the U.S. Presidential election was not only predictable, it was predicted. The guy who got it totally right this time around was Nate Silver of the New York Time’s FiveThirtyEight blog (538 is the total number of votes in the Electoral College).

The guy who got it 100 percent right in 2004, and missed the final count in 2008 by a single vote, got one state wrong this time around—Florida. Sam Wang, of the Princeton Election Consortium, who we profiled back in September, knew he was on shaky ground in that state, and that state alone. Here’s what he wrote Tuesday afternoon:

Florida is a hard case.  Several new polls came out this morning, making the median basically zero. As a tie-breaker I resorted to mean-based statistics. I will be unsurprised for it to go either way. Nate Silver and Drew Linzer went the other way. We are all tossing coins. I am prepared to lose the coin toss.

The final election count is looking to be Obama 332, Romney 206. Wang’s final prediction total was Obama 303, Romney 235. The difference is Florida’s 29 electoral votes (which is still undecided as of this writing).

David Rothschild, an economist now working at Microsoft Research, has been studying—and prognosticating—the election all year. He was on IEEE Spectrum’s weekly podcast, Techwise Conversations, twice: in March and in October. Both times, he predicted an Obama win. In fact, the March prediction followed a blog post back in February that called the election with the same near-perfect accuracy. He blogged today,

“Last February, the Signal predicted that President Barack Obama would win reelection with 303 electoral votes to his opponent's 235--a prediction we made before the Republican party had chosen the identity of that challenger. 

Needless to say, Rothschild’s predictions varied between February and November—indeed, at some points, Romney was ahead. I asked him today what, then, was the point of advanced prediction. After all, if he’s going to brag about being nearly perfectly accurate back in February, he has to acknowledge that he was wildly wrong for much of the summer. Here’s what he said.

Forecasts serve two purposes which I believe we delivered on this cycle. First, they provide efficiency in a multi-billion dollar industry. For forecasts to be useful, they need to early, accurate, and consistent. Second, forecasts provide insight in how and why things happen. Granular forecasts, like mine, will help answer questions about the value of debates, big TV buys, etc., I look forward to pouring over the data in the coming weeks and months and hopefully provide answers to some major political science questions regarding campaigns and elections.

That makes sense. It’s not that the summer forecasts were wrong—Romney really was ahead, and the odds are, if the election had been held then, Romney would be president and the forecasts would have been right. Something else Rothschild told me today also makes a lot of sense:

The election was another vindication of scientific and statistical forecasting versus punditry. Polling, prediction markets, and the statistical models that surrounded them were extremely accurate on the final outcome.

If you want to know what’s going to happen, increasingly, don’t turn to MSNBC or Fox News. Go to sites like Rothschild’s The Signal, the Princeton Election Consortium, and FiveThirtyEight. Some things are predictable—if you go to the people who rely on data and not their gut.

Editor's note: this post was updated to reflect the still undecided outcome of the Florida vote as of this writing.

Image: Princeton Election Consortium

Does your table-top laser plasma accelerator (LPA) just sit there, taking up kitchen-counter space next to the unused toaster oven (too big for toast, too small for “oven”)?

Perhaps not. But the utility of LPAs—compact particle accelerators called “table-top” because they are only a few meters long, rather than a few kilometers—has been limited because their output is hard to calibrate. LPAs produce short, intense pulses of synchronized high-energy electrons, or jolts of terahertz, x-ray, or gamma radiation. Their output is around one gigaelectron volt (GeV) or less—about one ten-thousandth of the 7 TeV generated by a Large Hadron Collider main beam crossing, but more than enough to illuminate research into photosynthesis, catalytic chemistry, structural molecular biology, low-temperature superconductors, spintronics, and graphene nanostructures, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which is studying the devices.

LBNL’s experimental LPA (left, with a simulation of its wakefield) attains these energies by blasting a hydrogen plasma with an intensely bright laser, a 24-femtosecond  pulse from an titanium aluminum-oxide laser delivering more than an exawatt—10¹⁸ watts—per square centimeter. The sudden energy boost drives the plasma’s electrons and nuclei apart, creating enormously steep potential gradients—on the order of hundreds of billions of volts per meter, some five orders of magnitude higher than the paltry few million volts per meter attained by conventional accelerators. (To quote the Genie in Aladdin, “Phenomenal cosmic powers. Itty-bitty living space.”)

Electrons then “surf” (LBNL’s term) down this potential cliff, accelerating to near-light-speed in an instant to follow the laser pulse through the plasma, generating a beam of light and electrons. The result is a concentrated clump—physicists refer to it as a “bunch”—of highly synchronized relativistic electrons predicted to be about 0.1 micrometer in radius. Let’s see: a blob roughly 10^-7 meters in radius moving about 300 million meters per second…. Ah, this little bundle of high-octane joy comes and goes in roughly one-third of a back-of-the-envelope femtosecond.

The bunch’s high energy, small dimensions, and short duration make it difficult to measure any of its characteristics directly without disrupting its structure. It is especially difficult to measure the beam’s emittance, its tendency to spread in phase space—the key indicator of how much energy it can deliver to how tightly defined an area. A low-emittance beam will be tightly focused and the particles will have nearly uniform momentum.

The traditional approach is measuring emittance has been the “pepper-pot”—a sieve of small holes that splits the bunch into beamlets whose impacts can be measured individually via a CCD camera.  Unfortunately, running the electron beam through the pepper-pot destroys the beam—and possibly the pepper pot apparatus itself.

Now, however, an LBNL research team has hit upon a method for measuring electron-beam emittance without disturbing the electrons themselves.

The key is the background betatron x-ray radiation—radiation that all electrons produce as they accelerate through a plasma. These energetic photons join the electrons and the stimulating laser light in the energy stream pouring out of the LPA. Assigned to evaluate this x-ray background, one LBNL team member, UCLA post-doc Guillaume Plateau, realized that it would be possible to separate these streams and calculate the beam’s emittance from the betatron x-ray pulse.

Plateau, his LBNL colleagues, and collaborators from Germany’s ExtreMe Matter Institute and Jena Helmholtz Institute worked out a method (see diagram). First they used an electron spectrometer to curve the electrons’ path and divert them out of the beam.  Next, layers of plastics and beryllium filtered out the laser light, and a two-foot-thick concrete wall filtered out residual radiation, so that the x-ray beam could enter a high-performance CCD camera without destroying it. The camera collected the incoming x-ray photons and recorded their energy and positions.

By fitting the data back to theoretical curves, the LBNL team could confirm the theoretical calculations: the LPA delivers electron bunches 0.1 μm in radius. Combining the x-ray data with electron spectra, they calculated that the electron beam’s emittance is also in accord with the predicted value.

Good, now that I can measure bright and tight my LPA beam will be, I can get it off the kitchen counter and use it to tease the cat. His name, of course, is Schrödinger.

Images: (Top): Photos Roy Kaltschmidt;  simulation Cameron Geddes; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Bottom) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Hurricane Sandy’s power outages have certainly provided perspective on the progress of consumer electronics.  Though lithium-ion batteries are more capacious than ever, the gadgets they power are more voracious, too. It seems we’re hardly better off in a crisis.
 
In the ideal case, you’d be able to lobotomize your device to dumb or dumber: a plain cellphone with just enough on the ball to handle email. The standard in frugality is set by the humble pager, which needs just 90 and 70 mW to send and receive email, respectively.

Compare that to a smart phone, in which the ravenous display alone sucks around 400 mW. The non-display parts are none too frugal, either. In a 2010 analysis Aaron Carroll and Gernot Heiser of  the University of New South Wales, in Australia, found that those parts of a Samsung 2.5-G phone, the Openmoko Neo Freerunner, needed 610 mW to send an email message over the GPRS system—the telephonic one that you must resort to when you haven’t got WiFi. That figure drops to 302.2 mW when sending a text message.
 
How can phones and laptops be designed with emergency conservation in mind? If you’re into full-survival mode, you might want to prearrange for your phone to turn off its display and be dead to all but the most basic telephonic signals. You might send a single text message to a pre-arranged set of phone numbers saying:  “I am alive and can receive text messages, but I will turn on the display to read them only every few hours. If you absolutely, positively must reach me immediately, send the following text to my number, and it will sound an alarm.” 
 
This idea, refined considerably, is the gist of a 2011 proposal by Peter Cole, Suwannit Chareen and Hong Xie of the school of information technology at Murdoch University, in Perth Australia. (Hmm. Why are the Australians so prominent in disaster planning, seeing as they live on the most geologically stable part of the planet?)  To allow a phone to save power by going idle, thus deactivating circuits that handle signals from many different systems—4G, 3G, Wi-Fi, and so forth, the engineers suggest what they call a Wireless Interface Notification and Activation system, which would send emergency signals to phones that activated only the relevant wireless interface, which could then a message.
 
Of course, such a system would have the added advantage of making a charge last longer even when there’s no particular emergency. That means it could attract customers in times of plenty, while protecting them in times of want.
 
Meanwhile, those living in Sandy’s wake can do a little lobotomization by hand. First off, dim your display, the power hog par excellence. Next, turn off Wifi (probably useless anyway). Then revert to 3G- from your 4-G network, and so on.  Just strip away the smarts, much as Dave the astronaut did when he disabled Hal, the insane computer, in “2001: A Space Odyssey”—
 
“Dave, my mind is going,” pleaded Hal. “I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid.”
 

Back in August, a Wave Glider robot named Alex, from Liquid Robotics, headed out into the Caribbean on a mission to measure ocean temperatures and improve hurricane forecasting.

This week, Alex’s sibling robot, Mercury, battled directly through Hurricane Sandy 160 km due east of Toms River, NJ, and the now-decimated Jersey Shore. It met the storm at the point labeled 110 in the map below and traveled with the hurricane to the point labeled 100.

The wave-powered robot transmitted weather data in real time, recording a plunge in barometric pressure of over 54.3 millibars to a low of 946 millibars as Sandy approached the coast. (Typically, atmospheric pressure at sealevel is 1013 millibars). It clocked winds at up to 70 knots, or 130 km/hour.

Photo: top: a Wave Glider robot in the Pacific earlier this year. Below: Wave Glider Mercury's path during Hurricane Sandy. Credit: Liquid Robotics

Whether you vote Tuesday on a touch-screen voting machine or use a paper ballot, a host of computer systems are making it possible to collect and count your vote. These systems maintain registration databases, manage the information that goes on ballots and enable them to be printed, scan paper ballots, capture votes electronically, and collect and count scanned and electronic votes. And, for the most part, these different pieces of technology that together make up the U.S. voting process are made by a wide variety of vendors and handle data in diverse ways.

“In any one state, it could be a hodgepodge,” says John Wack, manager of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) common data format project and Vice Chair of IEEE Standards Project 1622 (more on that project in a moment).

“Because there is no common data format,” Wack says, “a state may have databases exporting in one format, being input by systems in another format, and exporting again in yet another format. A lot of proprietary software is being written in individual states to get these systems to talk to each other.”

IEEE Standards Project 1622 is working on electronic data interchange for voting systems. The plan is to create a common format, based on the Election Markup Language (EML) already recommended for use in Europe. This is a subset of the popular XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that specifies particular fields and data structures for use in voting.

The IEEE effort first started back in 2002, stalled, and then got going again in February of 2011. In January this year, the group published a standard for electronic distribution of blank ballots, and now is readying a draft of a standard for election results reporting.

“Election results reporting is very complicated,” Wack explained. “States look at how many ballots are cast, how many were overvotes [voting twice in a single contest], how many were undervotes [failing to vote on a specific contest], how many were cast absentee—they don’t just look at the winners. We are giving them a format that should ease life for them.”

Why is getting this standard adopted important? Wack says not having a standard format means it’s tough for states to switch voting systems vendors, and it’s tough for smaller companies to break into the market. The lack of a standard also slows the adaption of new innovations, such as online blank ballot distribution systems now being tested in several states, and use of iPads, being tested in Oregon.

“People developing these kinds of new technologies want a format for the ballot data; they’d rather not have to invent one,” Wack says.

While the standard is not complete, it will be introduced this year in one region of the country. “The D.C. Board of Elections was contacted by technologists at the Washington Post, who were looking for a way of simplifying the collection of election results from the various jurisdictions on which it reports,” said Paul Stenbjorn, the board's chief technology officer. Working with colleagues in Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, Stenbjorn settled on the same subset of the European EML being developed into the IEEE 1622 standard, and will use it to deliver election results in real time where possible on Tuesday evening.

Diagram: IEEE Project 1622 lays out the scope of its effort to create a CDF—Common Data Format—for election systems.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability issued a “situation report” summarizing Hurricane Sandy-related outages, plant shutdowns, and the like. Here are a few of the mostly grim highlights:

·      As of 9:00 am this morning, more than 8 million customers in 17 states plus the District of Columbia were without power. New Jersey residents have been by far the hardest hit, with nearly 2.5 million customers—62 percent of the state—having no electricity.

·      Three of the region's nuclear units—PSEG Nuclear’s Salem Unit 1 in southern New Jersey, Entergy Nuclear’s Indian Point Unit 3 in New York, and Constellation’s Nine Mile Unit 1 near Oswego, N.Y.—were shut down.

·     Two other nuclear plants—Exelon’s Limerick Unit 1 near Philadelphia and Dominion Resources’ Millstone nuclear Unit 3 near New London, Conn.—had their power reduced. The cause in each case was different. For example, Salem I’s shutdown was triggered by four of the station’s six circulating water pumps, which rely on Delaware Bay/River water, being unavailable due to Sandy.

·      Two oil refineries lost power: the Phillips 66 Bayway refinery in Linden, N.J.—the second-largest refinery on the East Coast—and the Hess refinery in Port Reading, N.J. Both had been shut down ahead of the storm, and as of Tuesday remained offline and without power. Four others, including the largest, Philadelphia Energy Solutions’ 330 000 barrel-a-day refinery, were operating at reduced levels.

·      Utility companies across the affected area have collectively mobilized tens of thousands of out-of-state workers and contractors. 

PHOTO: Betty Flowers. Taken on 29 October near the Wachapreague Marina in Virginia.

Hurricane Sandy has now made landfall along the central coast of New Jersey, and utility companies up and down the U.S. Eastern seaboard are scrambling to keep the lights on. Over the weekend, I spoke with Nicholas Abi-Samra, a 35-year veteran of the power industry and an expert on the effects of extreme weather on the electricity grid, to see how companies have been gearing up for this massive storm. Abi-Samra, chair of the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s San Diego chapter, is vice president of asset management at Quanta Technology, an energy consulting company headquartered in Raleigh, N.C.

Spectrum: From a grid operator’s perspective, what’s the biggest concern right now?

Nicholas Abi-Samra: This storm is packing three threats: high wind (even gale force), heavy rain, and high surges. High winds—and specifically their ability to bring down trees and produce airborne debris—are a threat to transmission and distribution lines and also to electricity poles. Studies show that tree-related failures increase exponentially when wind speeds are over 60 mph [100 km/h]. [At 9:00pm EDT on 29 October, Sandy had maximum sustained winds of 80 mph or 130 km/h.] Wind may cause conductors to slap together and short out. The fact that trees have not lost their leaves yet in a number of areas in the predicted path of the storm is a big concern, because they’re much heavier than bare branches, and so their impact on a power line or pole will be much greater. When you add rain, the leaves and branches become even heavier. Wind may blow tree limbs or entire trees into or across lines, either knocking them down and breaking them, or knocking them into each other and causing faults and interruption of service.

In the past 10 years, most utilities have made great strides in vegetation management—removing dead or diseased trees, so-called “hazard trees”—along their right-of-ways [the land immediately surrounding power lines and poles]. But in high wind situations, risk from airborne debris from trees outside the right-of-way (both “hazard” trees and normal-looking trees) can exceed the risk of trees within the right-of-way by a factor of 3 or even 4 to 1. This kind of secondary damage is really the prevalent cause of damage in many storms.

The expected storm surge is phenomenal, well above Hurricane Irene at the highest. And the storm’s coverage is way more extensive, as far west as Pittsburgh, so even lakes will be hit with high waves. Generating plants downstream from reservoirs or dams could be vulnerable. Flooding should be of concern to operators of coastal energy facilities, such as oil refineries and nuclear power plants. It’s not just power plants that might be affected, but also industrial facilities and of course residential areas.

Spectrum: What kinds of precautions do grid operators take at such times?

Nicholas Abi-Samra: Many utilities will take preemptive steps like shutting down some of their energy assets so that they can contain the damage. They will suspend routine and scheduled maintenance work and restore essential equipment that can be put back in service. They’ll move to storm operation mode, and they will arrange an off-site emergency communications control center just outside the storm area, in case it becomes too dangerous to remain on site. They’ll increase real and reactive reserves, have diesel-driven emergency generators at critical sites, and have emergency generators available for the pumps (and other important loads). They’ll also prepare for storm-related flooding, for example, by putting out sandbags.

For generator stations that are vulnerable to flood or sea-level surge, they’ll reduce the power output and be prepared to do a controlled shutdown of generating units ahead of the storm surge, to minimize damage and downtime. They’ll also be prepared to operate the units as an “island,” disconnecting from the rest of the grid, if all transmission is lost.

And they’ll take general precautions, like emptying and then securing dumpsters around substations, topping off the fuel tanks in utility vehicles, and making sure workers have spare batteries for their cell phones, since recharging may not be possible.

You really can’t do much about hardening the system at this point in the storm—and you can never harden 100 percent against extreme weather. Restoration is the important thing now, how to patch the system back together and minimize the outages resulting from Sandy. The affected utilities are getting assistance from other utilities. I know that employees from some of the west coast utilities, including here in San Diego, are deploying to the east. Our company does storm assistance, and we were contacted by some utilities as early as last week. And workers are coming in from neighboring states with trucks and tools, which is great. From past events like Hurricane Katrina, we know that mutual assistance is the king in terms of getting back on line. Otherwise you’re talking about outages that can last for weeks.

After Sandy, each utility will have to analyze the performance of its assets and how they fared. 

Spectrum: You written about the dangers of substation flooding. Why is that a big concern and why is it so costly and difficult to recover from that kind of event?

Nicholas Abi-Samra: A power substation is basically a place where you get the power from the transmission grid and distribute it to the distribution feeders and hence the end users. You have a number of components all concentrated in the same place: power transformers, breakers, capacitors, and so on. The breaker (and its associated relays) is a form of protection, designed to break fault current—the large volume of current that flows when a fault is detected on the system. It also has a secondary function, allowing the system operator to switch circuits in and out. You also have a lot of lead-acid batteries on site. And there’s the control house, which is the brains of the substation, with a lot of electronic and computer equipment. So a substation is a concentration of equipment that’s essential for the operation of the grid. Floods may inundate substations, and some utilities may be forced to shut them down to prevent major damage to the equipment, and therefore accelerate the restoration after the storm.

Trying to get the substation back in service is a very lengthy and laborious process, much more so than replacing a broken pole after a wind storm. And if you lose a number of stations at the same time, that’s obviously much worse.

In a substation, even minute quantities of moisture and dirt contamination can render some electric equipment inoperable or lead to catastrophic failure. After a flood, large amounts of water and mud can remain trapped, making repair a sizable task and lengthening the restoration task. For example, if a breaker is submerged for a long time, it’s necessary to completely disassemble the mechanism and clean each part. That means all the bearings, pins, cylinders, rings, latches, and triggers.

Repairing a transformer can also be a lengthy and expensive process. It takes anywhere from 18 months to a couple years to get a new transformer. This is why in an event like this some utilities try to minimize the number of energized transformers and thus decrease the risk of a damaging close-in short circuit (or fault) caused by flying debris.

Spectrum: Are grid operators better prepared for severe storms than they were, say, five years ago?

Nicholas Abi-Samra: Yes, they are. Today we see better communication between the utilities and their work crews and customers. A number of utilities are using storm-tracking software. And they have much better situational awareness of where the outages are and what needs to be done to bring things back online. In the past, you’d have to call the utility and report a problem; now it’s automated. And utilities are much better at taking the lessons learned from past storms and figuring out how to restore the system as quickly as possible.

Spectrum: How can smart grid technology help in preventing or recovering from storm power outages?

Nicholas Abi-Samra: A smart grid introduces automation so that you don’t need somebody to go and close a switch or breaker. And if you have an area that has a fault, the system is designed to isolate that area and then restore power automatically. You may have heard the term “self-healing”: that means the system can reconfigure itself to deal with outages. At the moment, that works best if you just have a limited event, like the failure of just one feeder—it can automatically switch to another feeder. But when the problem is larger, it won’t be as effective. The smart grid will however speed up system restoration.

There are logical limits. Remember that the smart grid is not replacing the existing electricity infrastructure, and in many cases [in the United States] those systems are well beyond their expected service life. You have some utility poles that are more than 80 years old, for example. A smart grid cannot fix an old transformer or a utility pole that has been there for 80 or 90 years. And as electrical equipment and systems get older, they deteriorate, leading to higher failure rates and making them unable to perform as needed during periods of high stress, such as extreme events like Sandy.

PHOTO: FirstEnergy Corp.

UPDATE: This post was revised at 10:45pm on 29 October 2012.

Hurricane forecasters are just about as good at predicting the precipitation and storm surges that come with a storm as they are at predicting the storm’s wind intensity. But last year, when the rain from Hurricane Irene inundated the East Coast of the United States, it didn’t seem like that. The massive flooding that came with what was, in hurricane terms, a fairly mild storm, seemed to take the public by surprise.

The problem, says Frank Marks, Director of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, was that while most people look to the National Hurricane Center for information on a coming storm, the rain impact comes from another organization, the National Weather Service Hydrometeorological Prediction Center. And storm surge prediction is a joint effort between the National Ocean Service and the National Hurricane Center. Unlike the detailed track and intensity maps on the National Hurricane Center’s websites, this information has been hard for the average storm Googler to track down. Not even the media knew to look to the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center for information.

So, while researchers have been flying into hurricanes for several years gathering detailed information about the guts of a storm and, since last year, using that information in operational forecasts to improve their predictions of storm intensity, some of the most important information coming from the sophisticated prediction tools wasn’t getting out to the public.

Marks, talking to IEEE Spectrum while en route to Tampa into the eye of Hurricane Sandy, says many of these problems have been fixed in time for Hurricane Sandy. Marks co-led an assessment of the “overall effectiveness of National Weather Service products and services, decision support, collaboration and communication, operational procedures, and preparedness activities” in Hurricane Irene. The biggest problem, the assessment found, was that the National Weather Service failed to adequately convey the threat of flooding; it had the information, but it wasn’t conveyed to the public effectively enough to catch people’s attention.

One improvement: the National Hurricane Center is listing the flooding and storm surge tools on its main hurricane web site and linking directly to graphics put out by the two other organizations involved.

Here’s what those graphics looked like midday Monday. The main National Hurricane Center site gives a number of forecast options (image, top).

Rainfall predictions, coming from the National Weather Service’s Hydrometerological Prediction Center, are one click away.

A zoom-in graphic on the National Hurricane Center site maps storm surge predictions.

The assessment report on Irene recommended that the National Weather Service use all the communications technologies of today, for example, building interactive online graphics to help users understand weather information, and tweeting and using other social media to get the word out.

And that process has started. On Twitter right now, you can follow tweets about the storm @NHCDirector. Marks and others are tweeting from within the eye of Hurricane Sandy @HRD_AOML_NOAA. On Facebook, you can follow the National Hurricane Center and the Hurricane Research Division.

And you can of course follow me on Twitter @TeklaPerry.