This confidant of Bill Gates wants to reinvent how inventions are born. He created a huge patent library and a “start-up factory” that has produced prototypes of nuclear reactors, antennas and radars, but also 900 new bread recipes...
The golden loaves of bread cooling on the rack, the seven gleaming ovens and the 23-kilogram sacks of flour would look at home in a commercial bakery. But the chefs bent over tubs of dough also have a washing-machine-sized centrifuge, a freeze dryer and a fully outfitted photo studio at their disposal. And instead of bread for sale, the team of chefs and scientists at work in this cavernous kitchen in the suburbs east of Seattle are producing a 2000-page, vividly photographed book full of molecular research and recipes that will challenge traditional assumptions about how to produce the perfect loaf. The five-volume Modernist Bread: The Art and Science, coming to sturdy bookshelves in March 2017, is the latest tome from The Cooking Lab, the research kitchen and publishing house founded by Nathan Myhrvold.
Nathan P Myhrvold CEO/Co-Founder Intellectual Ventures Management LLC Discussing the current invention environment and what he looks for before investing in technologies like artificial intelligence.
The key to making effective flying cars is eliminating the need for a human pilot, according to Nathan Myhrvold, the co-founder and chief executive of Intellectual Ventures. "The problem with flying cars is that we're not all good enough to fly them," he said at a session at Bloomberg's 2016 Technology Conference in San Francisco. "The leading cause of plane crashes is pilot error."
More than 14,000 known asteroids zip through Earth’s neighborhood. They will all miss Earth in the coming decades. But hundreds of thousands more have not yet been discovered, and whether any of those are on course to slam into our planet, no one knows. So finding and tracking all the asteroids that could cross Earth’s path would allow officials to issue warnings and potentially provide time to deflect dangerous ones. The community of scientists contemplating such doomsday possibilities is small and usually cordial — at least until Nathan P. Myhrvold barged in.
Nathan Myhrvold cautions against drawing unsupported conclusions from dinosaur growth data
A new study by Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira and Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures concludes that about half of the warming occurs within the first 10 years after an instantaneous step increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, but about one-quarter of the warming occurs more than a century after the step increase. Their work is published in Environmental Research Letters.
Could replacing coal-fired electricity plants with generators fueled by natural gas bring global warming to a halt in this century? What about rapid construction of massive numbers of solar or wind farms, hydroelectric dams, or nuclear reactors—or the invention of new technology for capturing the carbon dioxide produced by fossil-fueled power plants and storing it permanently underground? Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures teamed up with Carnegie Institution’s Ken Caldeira to calculate the expected climate effects of replacing the world’s supply of electricity from coal plants with any of eight cleaner options.