NEI Nuclear Notes

Although IBM is largely focused on computer science issues, it has labs all over the world that do all kinds of things – after all, IBM is also focused on making money. This page contains a good slice of what IBM is doing in the energy sphere. But I was most interested in its battery technology project for electric cars. IBM correctly notes drivers’ range anxiety, the fear that they’ll be in the middle of nowhere when the battery runs dry. Using today’s lithium-ion technology, electric cars can get about 100 miles on a charge – with the air conditioning blasting, 4 miles (kidding.) So that’s the problem. Here’s the proposed solution : Recognizing this [range anxiety], IBM started the Battery 500 project in 2009 to develop a new type of lithium-air battery technology that is expected to improve energy density tenfold, dramatically increasing the amount of energy these batteries can generate and store. Today, IBM researchers have successfully demonstrated the fundamental chem...

IBM makes specialized computers to demonstrate advances in computer science – and doubtless to make a few sales, too. When it created its chess playing behemoth, Deep Blue (blue is IBM’s corporate color), it kept it functional long enough to beat grand master Gary Kasparov, but didn’t do any rematches after that. IBM had proved its point – why muddy the achievement? So I figured when its game playing computer Watson won a Jeopardy tournament against Kasparov equivalents in the Jeopardy sphere, that was it. Time to move on. But IBM has kept Watson going – and the computer promptly got smoked by a puny human – well, not so puny, really, definitely human . Defending humans against future Terminators, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) defeated IBM's Watson in a special congressional edition of "Jeopardy!" The victory by Holt, a nuclear physicist, came Monday night after the super-computer had trounced other champions of the information game show, including Ken Jennings and ...