Sometimes you find gold in unexpected places. In this case, it’s from a video about the CH-53 helicopter. The CH-53 Sea Stallion first entered service in 1966. It’s a huge helicopter, capable of lifting immense amounts of weight. All that weight hangs from 6 (or 7 on some models) rotor blades. The problem was detecting problems with the blades before they grew into a catastrophic failure.
Much like a fixed-wing aircraft wing, the CH-53 rotor blades are designed with a spar as the main structural member. On early designs, the spar was extruded aluminum. The CH-53D and other variants moved to cold-formed titanium.
All of these blades shared the same problem – detecting tiny cracks in the metal before they grow into blade failure. Detecting cracks turned out to be rather easy. The blades are sealed and pressurized with nitrogen gas. Cracks allow the gas to leak out. A barber pole pressure indicator on the blades allows mechanics to tell at a glance if everything is ok.
That’s all fine and good on the ground, but if a blade begins cracking in the air, the pilots want to know about it immediately. What was needed was something akin to the tire pressure monitoring system on modern cars. A pressure sensor that would turn on a light in the cockpit. Modern automotive TPMS systems use wireless sensors inside the tire. In the early 60’s though, electronic components were not reliable enough to survive rotating on a helicopter blade. Wiring the sensors through the spinning rotor head using slip rings would be incredibly complex. Expecting wireless electronic components to survive life in a rotorhead would be even more problematic.
The solution turned out to be simple: Throw a little ionizing radiation into the mix. Called IBIS, short for Inflight Blade Monitoring System keeps the CH-53 safe. The magic happens in the same pressure indicator we mentioned earlier. Rather than just a shift from a green to a barber pole indication, the IBIS module also exposes a tiny amount of radioactive Strontium-90. The Strontium is a beta emitter, meaning its radiation can be detected by a Geiger counter inside the helicopter. It’s also relatively safe for humans as long as they don’t eat or breathe it in. No batteries, no electronics on the rotor blade. It’s a simple mechanical solution to a difficult problem.
The solution is so elegant it’s still being used today. The newest versions of the CH-53 of fiber optics to detect faults in the newest all-composite blades. The older variants? They’re still going with the nuclear option.
Speaking in June at the University of Washington Allen School commencement, AI pioneer Jeff Dean told computer science graduates how he “got the itch to join a startup in 1999,” landing at Google when it had a grand total of 20 people above what is now a T-Mobile store in Palo Alto.
Twenty-seven years later, now 58, the UW alum has the itch again.
Google announced Wednesday that Dean, its chief scientist, is leaving with three colleagues to launch Discovery Loop, a startup automating the process of scientific research: proposing experiments, running them, evaluating results, and iterating, thousands of times over.
“Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today,” they write on their website.
Discovery Loop is based in Palo Alto, with what it describes as a lean team of its own. Joining Dean are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, his collaborator of more than two decades; Google DeepMind research VP Oriol Vinyals; and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le.
Google is a founding investor and will supply computing power for at least the first year. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, with backing from Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures (a name Seahawks fans will recognize from the team’s incoming ownership group).
The departures came as part of a broader shakeup announced in a memo from CEO Sundar Pichai. Demis Hassabis is handing off day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind to become its chair and Alphabet’s chief scientist, while CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu steps up as SVP, overseeing Gemini model development. Alphabet shares fell about 4% after the announcement
“After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that,” Pichai wrote.
Dean, who earned his UW computer science Ph.D. in 1996, gave no hint of his plans at the Allen School commencement. He told Wired the idea came together only in recent weeks.
But the general theme was there. Listing problems he thought worth solving, he pointed the UW graduates toward “developing tools that accelerate scientific discovery and engineering.”
“One of the beauties of software,” he said during his commencement address, “is that small groups of people can build things that have enormous impact in the world.”
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