The industrial fringe of Greenville, South Carolina, isn’t the most obvious place to go looking for a glimpse of things to come. But tucked behind railroad tracks and boxy factories you’ll find GE Power’s new Advanced Manufacturing Works, which officially opened Friday. The following images provide a glimpse of the new facility.  Read more: What Happens…

In 1997, Cathy Hutchinson suffered a brainstem stroke that left her paralyzed from the neck down. But in 2011, she was able to pick up a Thermos filled with coffee, bring it to her mouth and drink from it again. Hutchinson, who was 58 at the time, didn’t regain control over her hands. She did…

How rare is platinum? Imagine that making an ounce of it is so difficult that even exploding stars called supernovae, the crucibles whose high energies forge most chemical elements, can’t do it. In fact, if the latest theories are correct, it takes a collision of two massive neutron stars – objects so dense that a…

In the not-too-distant future, airplanes will scythe into the wind with an airframe that can virtually streamline its shape using nothing but air. In pursuit of this goal, researchers at NASA and Boeing moved a vertical tail from an old 757 inside the world’s largest wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center in California to…

The Panama Canal is a full century old, but it’s going through a growth spurt. The 48-mile-long waterway that cuts across “the backbone of the Western Hemisphere” is going through the final year of a massive expansion. When work is completed this year, bigger locks will allow the giant “New Panamax” class of container ships…

Henry Ford was fond of saying that “nothing was particularly hard if you divided it into small jobs.” He followed his own advice, built the world’s first large-scale assembly lines that cranked out millions of Model Ts every year, and left his competitors in the dust. Engineers are now taking Ford’s advice to the extreme…

Humans have been fascinated with robots and automatons for millennia, or, at least, since Talos, the mythical bronze giant made by the Vulcans that guarded Crete. But despite their allure, robots are still relatively rare. Scott Eckert, chief executive of Rethink Robotics, says that some 90 percent of manufacturing tasks still don’t use automation. “Traditional…

When a blast of icy weather hit a Canadian wind farm two winters ago, its chill lingered a month. The storm covered almost three dozen wind turbines with ice and they had to shut down. “The cold weather [was] not an issue,” the farm’s manager Mark Hachey told CBC News. “They can run in rain,…

In 1942, a group of GE engineers working in secret for ten months built America’s first jet engine. Their mission was to win the war, but they ended up shrinking the world. “They called us the Hush-Hush Boys,” says Joseph Sorota, one of the last living veterans of the project, who just turned 95. The team…

The picturesque Romanian city of Oradea dates back at least 900 years. Some locals joke their heating system is just as old. Large portions of the city, which sits near Romania’s western border with Hungary, have relied on a district heating plant that opened in 1966, one year after Nicolae Ceaucescu consolidated power. The plant…

In the century following the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903, planes have gone through three materials revolutions: wood and fabric fuselages gave way to aluminum and, eventually, to light and strong carbon composites used to make the bodies of the latest planes like Boeing’s Dreamliner and the Airbus A350. But a new and unusual…

Thomas Edison lost much of his hearing when he was still a child. “I have not heard a bird sing since I was 12 years old,” he once remarked. But that did not stop him from inventing the phonograph, a device that for the first time recorded sounds and played them back, in 1877, when…

Like many inventors, Thomas Edison started out as a teenage tinkerer with empty pockets. But his work on improving the telegraph led him to a better stock market ticker and a valuable patent, which he sold for $10,000 to Western Union. He used the money to build a lab in Menlo Park, N.J., and amp…

Quartz glassware is the secret ingredient to many scientific experiments. It handles heat and cold without cracking, remains inert to most chemicals and does not interact with light, a quality that makes it perfectly transparent. It doesn’t change shape and remains hard when cold, but becomes flexible when hot. “Fused quartz implies crystals, but it’s…

When GE opened its first research center in 1900, it employed three people and fit inside a barn behind the chief engineer’s house in Schenectady, N.Y. It burned down a year later. The lab then relocated to “safer premises” and become a dynamo, powering GE’s innovation, gathering thousands of patents and even employing several Nobel…

2014 was in many respects a pivotal year for GE, in which the company delivered on plans to bulk up its industrial core and grow its services by connecting machines to the Industrial Internet. By 2016, GE plans to reap 75 percent of earnings from industrial businesses, with the rest coming from GE Capital, its…

There are many luxuries that separate first class fliers from their fellow travelers going coach in the back of the plane, but in-flight entertainment isn’t one of them. The personal multiple-choice video screen standard on most long-haul flights has democratized the passenger deck and allowed anyone to binge on Big Bang Theory, European art house…

One of the many characters in Melville’s Moby Dick is Bulkington, an intrepid sailor for whom “land seemed scorching to his feet” and who on a “shivering winter’s night” thrust the mighty ship Pequod’s “vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves,” as it set out on its fatal whale hunting expedition. Bulkington would be right at home on…

GE will sell its Appliances business to Sweden’s Electrolux in a strategic move that boosts the focus on the company’s core industrial units. The $3.3 billion, all-cash deal follows GE’s recent bid to acquire the power and grid businesses of the French industrial giant Alstom. Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO said that the transaction…

Engineers at the Italian aerospace company Avio have developed a breakthrough process for 3D printing light-weight metal blades for jet engine turbines. READ:  Electron Gun Builds Jet Engines The method builds the blades from a titanium powder fused with a beam of electrons accelerated by a 3-kilowatt electron gun.

As power outages go, the iguana affair was a mundane one. On July 27, a hapless lizard shorted a piece of electrical equipment in the middle of the Florida Keys and knocked out power for 11,000 local residents. It was an act of nature no outage prevention system would have been able to predict. But…

GE and Pivotal said they built the first industrial-scale “data lake” system that could supercharge how companies store, manage and glean insight from information harvested from machines connected to the Industrial Internet. The system, which has already tracked more than 3 million flights and gathered 340 terabytes of data, can analyze data 2,000 times faster…

Sweat can be a smelly messenger, but one that also carries a trove of valuable information about how our bodies are feeling. Scientists at several labs are now trying to pick its lock with nanotechnology, including know-how transferred from GE’s jet engine research, to develop flexible, Band-Aid-like wireless sensors sensitive enough to detect a drop of biomolecules…

Sweat can be a smelly messenger, but one that also carries a trove of valuable information about how our bodies are feeling. Scientists at several labs are now trying to pick its lock with nanotechnology, including know-how transferred from GE’s jet engine research, to develop flexible, Band-Aid-like wireless sensors sensitive enough to detect a drop of biomolecules…

One sunny Thursday afternoon last October, Lyman Connor climbed on his bicycle and pedaled from his Roanoke, Va., home for a ride along the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. He didn’t make it back that day. Riding down one of the parkway’s steep hills at nearly 40 mph, a car suddenly braked in front of Connor.…