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Cellect Plastics demos oil spill cleanup tech
BP hones skills through MIT programs
Mass. metal developer aims for more fuel efficient cars
Think back to your childhood, those days when you just had to know how that remote-control car or toy walkie-talkie worked. If you’re like most tech junkies, you took it apart and tried to put it back together again. Or you hacked it and made a new toy. Your love of technology began as a curiosity, as a desire to understand something mysterious, a need to explore the unknown and make sense of it (or improve upon it). As you got older, you took on (ie., took apart) more complex things. Next you knew, you had built your own PC from spare parts. Or you networked your college dorm with spare telephone wires.
The downside to such reverse engineering is that what begins as a mystery — as something considered almost beautiful in its ability to puzzle us — eventually becomes simple, almost ordinary.
Luckily, new technologies are being created so quickly that there’s always something new to take apart. And, at the same time, human imperfection continues to create opportunity for technology to come to the rescue of man-made problems. One look at the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico can attest to that. The question is whether we marshal the technological resources and engineering know-how to solve the problems we ourselves create.
In this issue, we don’t pretend that New England innovators have all of the answers. But when we started looking for some local technologists working in and researching the science and technology of oil and deep water, we were surprised at the plume of innovation our region is capable of producing. Undersea robots, water purifiers and separators, oil extractors, weather predictors, alternative fuel producers — they’re all here in New England.
Some of them are already helping to solve the gulf oil crisis. And some are just waiting to be asked. MHT
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