Challenges unmet: Unclaimed #prizes in #science and technology

http://www.geek.com/science/challenges-unmet-unclaimed-prizes-in-science-and-technology-1562333/

This month, after more than 30 years of waiting, a team of engineers finally claimed the Sikorsky Prize. The challenge was to build a human-powered helicopter, a goal that’s been called impossible since Da Vinci scribbled out a crude drawing of the goal hundreds of years ago.  The winners collected a purse worth a quarter of a million dollars, and set a new standard for light-weight aeronautical engineering. Would the goal have ever been reached without that prize on the table?

Forget the money involved. Science prizes have power because they engage the competitive spirit, turning previously unachievable goalsinto posts in a race. We move toward these goals by steps, competitors often becoming co-conspirators who build off each other’s innovations. Prizes like this have solved some of the oldest problems in mathematics, put humans into space with reusable spacecraft, and helped found the nascent civilian space flight industry. However, there are plenty of prizes still out there, driving innovation and inspiring hard work. Here is a selection of science challenges still waiting to be conquered.

Marathon Kremer Prize – £50,000

Since we began by talking about the Sikorsky prize, which challenged inventors to create a human-powered helicopter, let’s begin this list with a similar challenge: a human-powered plane. The Kremer Prize, marathon edition, asks engineers to create a human-powered aircraft that can travel roughly 42 kilometers (26 miles, or a full marathon) while weaving a figure-eight around two posts.

The course must be completed in under an hour and the aircraft must remain at least five meters above ground for the entire trip. Imagine sailing over your fellow commuters on the way to work — despite a threshold of just 26 miles per hour, the b-line efficiency a Kremer prize winner would allow might get you there faster, regardless.

Night rover challenge – $1.5 million

This challenge is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenge series, and it’s not hard to imagine why a space agency would be willing to shell out for the technology. Entrants must create a solar-powered robot that can store enough solar energy during the day to continue powering the robot through the night.

This is an especially promising idea for the exploration of Mars and of Earth’s moon, since neither have a thick atmosphere to block solar radiation. This would also allow longer excursions into the fabled dark side of the moon. And, of course, any great improvement in solar cell and energy storage efficiency would also have immediate applications here at home.

Lunar X-Prize – $20 million

This Google-sponsored version of the X-Prize puts up the largest purse in X-Prize history. The Lunar Challenge essentially looks to crowd-source the design, creation, launch, and operation of rovers. The rules are quite specific: the winning robot must land on the lunar surface and move no less than 500 meters to simulate exploration, then successfully transmit high-definition video and imagery back to Earth.

Of course, the hope is that it will be able to travel much further than 500 meters, but that threshold for a first success might make the project more achievable in the short time-frame NASA is pushing for. Interestingly, speed is such a priority that the $20 million grand-prize will reduce to $15 million upon the next successful government-funded mission to explore the lunar surface.

The N-Prize – £9,999.99

Despite a frankly obnoxious obsession with nines, this is one of the most interesting challenges on the list. The ‘N’ in the title refers to nano-satellite, and challenges teams to put a satellite weighing between 9.99 and 19.99 grams into space. The satellite must complete at least nine Earth orbits to win. Most interestingly, the whole project must cost less then £9,999.99 (US$15,315) making it the most budget-conscious entry on the list.

Any launch method is acceptable, from conventional rockets to slingshots, but the final mass must obtain an orbit stable enough to round the Earth 9 times. The satellite must only be technically a satellite, meaning that all it has to do is achieve orbit; getting a stone to do it would count. The launch mechanism is the main focus of this challenge, and the organizers will leave it to a later generation to figure out how to do something useful with a 10 gram orbiter.

Tricorder X-Prize – $10 million

Being a doctor on Star Trek looks pretty easy. In that future, you simply wave your magic diagnosis wand, and out pops the answer to virtually any answer you can to ask. The X-Prize foundation is handling Qualcomm’s new Tricorder challenge, which tasks engineers with inventing a diagnosis device with very similar properties.

It will be able to capture key “health metrics” like blood pressure, diagnose a set of 15 diseases, extract images of internal structures, and do it all totally noninvasively. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the weight restriction, which is set at 5 measly pounds. This is a tool that’s meant to be used in the home for accurate self-diagnosis. No more running to the emergency room to see if those gas pains are actually an appendix that’s about to burst!

Virgin Earth Challenge – $25 million

For many years, this was the largest science prize in history. With a former Vice President of the United States and a famous rich-guy at the helm, it could afford to put up a big purse, but the goal is hefty enough to justify the pot: figure out how to (hopefully) save the world.

If you think global climate change could have apocalyptic effects, you’ll be happy to know that entrants to the Virgin Earth challenge are tasked with figuring out how to permanently remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. Some have tried to achieve this with carbon capturing trees, others with air filters, and still others with net-negative emissions power plants. There’s no telling who will win, but the prize has led to some very promising innovations.

PETA’s In-Vitro Meat Challenge – $1 million

Would you eat test tube meat? Of all groups, PETA hopes you would. In an effort to make slaughterhouses obsolete, the animal rights activists have put up a million dollars in the hopes of motivating researchers to invent store-ready, lab grown chicken meat.

The big problem with growing meat has always been texture; we can get animal cells to grow in a culture, but getting them to form a juicy, delicious slab or breast or thigh meat has always been tough. It’s probably the best idea the group has ever had, moving toward replacing meat, rather than erasing it. While I eat meat without compunction, I would absolutely get the vast majority of my meat lab-grown, if the taste and nutrition were comparable. Not to mention that, with sophisticated enough growing techniques, there would be nothing inherently more expensive about growing a cut of Kobe-marbled goodness than a tough rump-steak.

For reasons of difficulty, the challenge is confined to chicken, but a breakthrough there would almost certainly lead to rapid development of even more types of test tube meat.

Archon Genomics X-Prize – $10 million

Yet another competition administered by the X-Prize foundation, this one takes an age-old problem and puts it to the crowd: sequence DNA better, faster, cheaper. In this case, the goal is 100 whole genomes sequenced rapidly, and with an unprecedented level of fidelity.

The 100 genomes in questions will actually be donated by the “100 over 100,” a group of centenarians who presumably carry some disease-resistant genes, though that’s just a side-point in the larger goal of improving sequencing technology.

Interestingly, this is one area where the market for genomics technology may outstrip the prize itself; despite the $10 million purse, there have been suggestions that potentially winning technologies are being held back for release via the conventional market. Unlike putting a rover on the moon, there are enough money-making opportunities in genomics to motivate research on their own. Why go for the $10 million when you can patent, and potentially make billions?

Sample Return Robot – $1.5 million

NASA has a problem: they can control their space-bots very well, but only when they can control them at all. There are plenty of complicating factors that muck with the ability to directly control every action of a rover, especially as we send them further and further afield. This challenge is to create an autonomous robot that can find, collect, and return scientific samples within a given time limit.

Interestingly, the challenge has already been run twice, but nobody has made it past Phase 1, the initial find and retrieve stage. Phase 2 is where the real money is, and consists of  a points-based system with rewards up to $1.5 million dollars. Points are doled out based on the difficulty rating of the samples collected, and how many can be returned within a single 2-hour period.

This is a very salient topic of research, considering NASA’s ambitions to send a life-finding rover to Mars within the next few years.

James Randi Paranormal Challenge – $1 million

This one really takes the concept of a “challenge” seriously. Rather than being an incitement to make progress, this is simply James Randi, magician turned professional debunker, making a point. A million dollars is up for grabs for anyone who can demonstrate actual paranormal abilities under laboratory conditions. This would include everything from water dousing to aura reading, prediction of the future to remote sight.

Many have tried, but none have succeeded. Several high-profile psychics and mediums have been challenged to take part, and accepted, but later backed out for a variety of reasons. Thanks to smart investing, the challenge account is now actually sitting at $1.3 million — how many psychics can boast that kind of return on investment?

These prizes all have one thing in common: they set incredibly lofty goals, goals which gall the creative human spirit into action. Was the world made all that much better by having a human-powered helicopter? Probably not. However, the engineering advances made in pursuit of that goal can be generalized, as can the method of inspiring them. The challenge model will persist for some time to come, and with 3D printing and other technologies bringing the cost of entry ever lower, it could be an even more important strategy, going forward.