Eideard

China is set to start work on a novel design for a nuclear reactor with the help of a firm founded by Bill Gates.

Terrapower, founded and funded by the Microsoft chairman, is collaborating with Chinese scientists on the fourth generation (4G) reactor. Research into the 4G reactor over the next five years could top $1 billion, said Mr Gates. Developing such a reactor could take a long time because none have been built or tested yet.

“The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste,” said Mr Gates during a talk at China’s Ministry of Science and Technology during which he confirmed the tie-up with Terrapower…

Based in Washington state, Terrapower is working on a design for what is known as a travelling wave reactor. This uses depleted uranium as its power source and is believed to produce less nuclear waste than other designs.

“All these new designs are going to be incredibly safe,” Mr Gates said. “They require no human action to remain safe at all times…”

I’ve supported nuclear power generation since I first worked in the field before most of my readers were born. Cripes, I never thought I’d get old enough to be able to say that.

If Gates’ company can beat the costs of competing with large and small-scale projects from advanced firms like Toshiba and Areva – well, then, more power to him.

Five years ago, Bill Gates made an extraordinary offer: he invited the world’s scientists to submit ideas for tackling the biggest problems in global health, including the lack of vaccines for AIDS and malaria, the fact that most vaccines must be kept refrigerated and be delivered by needles, the fact that many tropical crops like cassavas and bananas had little nutrition, and so on.

No idea was too radical, he said, and what he called the Grand Challenges in Global Health would pursue paths that the National Institutes of Health and other grant makers could not.

About 1,600 proposals came in, and the top 43 were so promising that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made $450 million in five-year grants — more than double what he originally planned to give.

Now the five years are up, and the foundation recently brought all the scientists to Seattle to assess the results and decide who will get further funding.

In an interview, Mr. Gates sounded somewhat chastened, saying several times, “We were naïve when we began…”

He underestimated, he said, how long it takes to get a new product from the lab to clinical trials to low-cost manufacturing to acceptance in third-world countries…

That little won’t buy a breakthrough, but it lets scientists “moonlight” by adding new goals to their existing grants, which saves the foundation a lot of winnowing. “And,” he added, “a scientist in a developing country can do a lot with $100,000.”

Over all, he said: “On drawing attention to ways that lives might be saved through scientific advances, I’d give us an A.

“But I thought some would be saving lives by now, and it’ll be more like in 10 years from now.”

RTFA. A case study – series of studies – in developing philanthropy. Above all else, give the Gates’ credit for their commitment and dedication. It ain’t even easy to try to give money away to help people.

The mansion where the private banquet was held

After a night of wining and dining 50 of China’s richest people in the name of promoting philanthropy, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates told a horde of journalists on Thursday that the biggest difference between eating with Chinese tycoons and Western ones was the food.

Thus ended the two billionaires’ mission to promote charity in China, a journey that provoked weeks of breathless speculation here about whether this nation’s much-resented class of superrich was too miserly to measure up to Western philanthropic standards.

At a news conference, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates said the answer was an emphatic “no.”

“I was amazed last night, really, at how similar the questions and discussions and all that was to the dinners we had in the U.S.,” said Mr. Buffett, who had wisecracked about the food. “The same motivations tend to exist. The mechanism for manifesting those motivations may differ from country to country…”

On Thursday, the two men pronounced the dinner an unqualified success, saying that two-thirds of those who were invited had shown up, and that more than half of those at the dinner had offered their own ideas on how Chinese philanthropy should work…

China is widely reported to be second only to the United States in the number of dollar billionaires. Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett said the nation was unique in that its wealthy class had arisen almost wholly in the past 30 years, so philanthropic practices that are entrenched among European and American dynasties are new here, and open to change.

“What you have is a first generation of fortune,” Mr. Gates said, “and it’s natural that they’re thinking through, in this society in particular, ‘What do you do?’ ”

But Mr. Gates suggested that their philanthropic globetrotting was not yet over. “We may do an event in India,” he said.

I’ve worked on a number of homes for the nouveau riche who ended up choosing Santa Fe either as their primary residence or just a holiday home. Cripes, I worked on a “vacation cottage” that was 24,000 square feet in size.

I think a fair number of folks who earned their own way remember where they come from.

Ed Roberts, whose early Altair 8800 computer helped inspire Bill Gates and Paul Allen to start Microsoft, died Thursday. He was 68.

Though Roberts’ name is less well known than some other computing pioneers, the Altair is widely credited as the first personal computer and for helping inspire the modern computer industry. Roberts established Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), which introduced the Altair in 1975. An article on the Altair in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics caught the eye of a young Allen, who showed the story to Gates.

Gates and Allen quickly reached out to Roberts, looking to create software for the Altair. Landing a meeting, the pair headed to Albuquerque, N.M., where Roberts’ company was located. The two went on to set up Microsoft, which had its first offices in Albuquerque.

Though his impact on the industry was long lasting, Roberts left computing in the 1970s, selling MITS, going to medical school, and then setting up a medical practice in Georgia.

Allen said that Roberts was a mentor, and not just on the computing side.

“Ed was the first entrepreneur Bill and I spent time around, and we learned a lot about business from him,” Allen said in an e-mail…

“Ed was willing to take a chance on us–two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace–and we have always been grateful to him,” Gates and Allen said. “The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things. We will always have many fond memories of working with Ed in Albuquerque, in the MITS office right on Route 66–where so many exciting things happened that none of us could have imagined back then.”

Newcomers to New Mexico always wonder why Albuquerque newscasts always report on Microsoft as a “local” stock. Ed Roberts gets the credit – along with an ongoing commitment to computational analysis within so much of the geek community here.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The fight to end hunger is being hurt by environmentalists who insist that genetically modified crops cannot be used in Africa, says Bill Gates.

Gates said GMO crops, fertilizer and chemicals are important tools — although not the only tools — to help small farms in Africa boost production.

“This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two,” Gates said in his first address on agriculture made during the annual World Food Prize forum.

“Some people insist on an ideal vision of the environment,” Gates said. “They have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in recent years has turned its focus to helping poor, small-holder farmers grow and sell more crops as a way to reduce hunger and poverty…

“The next Green Revolution has to be greener than the first,” Gates said. “It must be guided by small-holder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.”

The Gates Foundation is working with research partners on drought-tolerant maize using both conventional crop-breeding techniques and biotechnology, Gates said, noting he hopes seeds will be available in two or three years.

The impact of those new varieties could help convince skeptics of the benefits of biotechnology, he said.

“The technologies will be licensed royalty free to seed distributors so that the new seeds can be sold to African farmers without extra charge,” Gates said.

He’s right, you know.

I’ll take science over religion – or skeptics whose religion is fear of science – any day. I’ve been an activist for science-based ecology for about 40 years, now. The kind of farming and animal husbandry my family has practiced for centuries has always been natural – which also means frugal – and absolutely willing to learn from sound science.

Hurricane experts are throwing cold water on an idea backed by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates aimed at controlling the weather.

Gates and a dozen other scientists have raised eyebrows by submitting patent applications for a technology to reduce the danger of approaching hurricanes by cooling ocean temperatures.

It’s a noble idea, given the horrible memories from Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast four years ago this week…

Skeptics applaud the motive of the concept but question its feasibility.

“The enormity of it, in order to do something effective, we’d have to do something at a scale that humans have never really done before,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…

Hurricanes are fueled by warm water, and cooling the waters surrounding a storm would slow a storm’s momentum.

According to the patents, many tub-like barges would be placed directly in the path of an oncoming storm. Each barge would have two conduits, each 500 feet long.

One conduit would push the warm water from the ocean’s surface down. The other would bring up cold water where it lies deep undersea.

RTFA. Perfectly understandable. As are the reasons why a lot of folks think it couldn’t work.

Microsoft founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates released a glass full of mosquitoes at an elite technology conference to make a point about the deadly disease malaria.

“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes,” Gates said while opening a jar onstage at the TED Conference — a gathering known to attract technology kings, politicians, and Hollywood stars.

“I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

While he asked the audience “How do you stop a deadly disease that is spread by mosquitoes?”, Mr Gates also noted that more money is spent finding a cure for baldness than eradicating malaria.

The release of the mosquitoes got everyone’s attention.

TED curator Chris Anderson quipped that when a video of the talk is posted on its website it would be headlined “Gates releases more bugs into the world.”

Always nice to see Bill Gates unleash his quiet sense of humor. And the TED conference appears to be as interesting and productive as ever.

Just months after his Microsoft farewell, Bill Gates is quietly creating a new company — complete with high-tech office space, a cryptic name and even its own trademark.

Public documents describe the new Gates entity — bgC3 LLC — as a “think tank.” It’s housed within a Kirkland office that the Microsoft co-founder established on his own after leaving his day-to-day executive role at the company this summer.

Is this Bill Gates’ next big business? A Gates insider gives an emphatic no — saying it’s not a commercial venture but rather a vehicle to coordinate the software mogul’s work on his business and philanthropic endeavors…

Federal trademark filings provide more clues – describing bgC3 as a think tank, under a generic trademark classification that corresponds broadly to areas including “scientific and technological services,” “industrial analysis and research,” and “design and development of computer hardware and software.”

Do you think we’ll ever see an IPO?