Stream video on your smartphone, or use its GPS for an hour or two, and you’ll probably see the battery drain significantly. As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features, battery life has become a concern. Now a technology developed by MIT spinout Eta Devices could help a phone’s battery last perhaps twice as long, and help to conserve energy in cell towers.

The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier, a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones’ antennas. Similar larger modules are found in wireless base stations, where they might use 10 or even 100 times the power.

Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time, the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage, eating away power — more than any other smartphone component, and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations — and wasting more than half of that power as heat. This means smartphone batteries lose longevity, and base stations waste energy and lose money.

But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones) and a shoebox-size module (for base stations) — based on nearly a decade of MIT research — to essentially “switch gears” to adjust voltage supply to power amplifiers as needed, cutting the waste.

“You can look at our technology as a high-speed gearbox that, every few nanoseconds, modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery,” explains Joel Dawson, Eta Devices’ chief technology officer and a former associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who co-invented the technology. “That turns out to be the key to keeping the efficiency very high.”

When trialed in a base station last year, Eta Devices’ module became the first transmitter for 4G LTE networks to achieve an average efficiency greater than 70 percent, Dawson says. “The highest number we’ve heard before that was 45 percent — and that’s probably being generous,” he says.

Backed by millions in funding, Eta Devices — co-founded by David Perreault, an MIT professor of electrical engineering, and former MIT Sloan fellow Mattias Astrom — has partnered with a large base-station manufacturer. The goal is to deploy the technology in live base stations by the end of 2015. The savings could be substantial, Dawson says, noting that a large carrier could save $100 million in annual electricity costs.

Eta Devices has also entered conversations with major manufacturers of LTE-enabled smartphones to incorporate their chips by the end of next year. Dawson says this could potentially double current smartphone battery life.

Besides battery life, Dawson adds, there are many ways the telecommunications industry can take advantage of improved efficiency. Eta Devices’ approach could lead to smaller handset batteries, for example, and even smaller handsets, since there would be less dissipating heat. The technology could also drive down operating costs for base stations in the developing world, where these stations rely on expensive diesel fuel for power.

And ultimately, it could impact the environment: If all midsized carrier networks were to replace current radio amplifiers with Eta Devices’ technology, he says, the reduction in greenhouse gases would be equivalent to taking about 5 million cars off the road. “There are so many ways to leverage high efficiency if you have it,” Dawson says.

In August, the World Economic Forum named Eta Devices the 2015 Technology Pioneer, a designation awarded previously to Dropbox, Spotify, and Twitter, to name a few.

In the mobile market

Eta Devices’ commercial success is, in part, a product of engineering ingenuity intersecting with business acumen at MIT.

In 2008, Dawson and Perreault, who directs the Power Electronics Research Group, submitted an early concept of the Eta technology — then called asymmetrical multilevel outphasing (AMO) — to an Innovation Teams (i-Teams) class that brought together MIT students from across disciplines to develop commercial products.

The AMO technology was a new transmitter architecture, where algorithms could choose from different voltages needed to transmit data in each power amplifier, and select the optimal choice for power conservation — and do so roughly 20 million times per second. This could be done on the transmitting and receiving end of data transfers.

This caught the eye of Astrom, who had come to MIT after working in the mobile industry for 10 years, “looking for the next big thing.” With help from Astrom, the professors started designing the technology for the mobile market — initially leaning toward base stations.

“At the time, I was suffering, as everyone else was, from my iPhone running out of battery at lunchtime,” Astrom says. “The iPhone was only a year old, but you could see how much data traffic would explode.”

Fleshing out a business plan from an i-Teams draft, the two professors earned a Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation grant in 2009, allowing for the first demonstration of the hardware, showing a 77 percent gain in efficiency over standard systems. (A paper detailing the technology was presented at that year’s IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.)

“That Deshpande Center grant was big in terms of the funding and connecting us with local venture capitalists, and really helping with being in that business mindset,” Dawson says.

Eta Devices launched in 2010, with Astrom as its CEO. From there, it’s been all rapid prototyping at Eta Devices’ Cambridge and Stockholm offices, as well as gathering customer feedback.

Spinning out a company has been the best way to validate the technology — especially with novel power-electronics hardware, Dawson says. “People in our industry take ideas a lot more seriously when there’s a company behind it,” he says. “We had impressive performance at MIT, but now we have a team of professionals working on the technology full-time. The resulting performance numbers are jaw-dropping. Now people are going back and frantically studying the original MIT research papers.”

Luckily, Dawson says, several significant changes were made to those old research projects in order to develop today’s ETAdvanced — so the secret ingredients of the technology are safe. “The joke I like to tell is: When I was a professor, I was going around the world trying to give the technology away,” Dawson says, laughing. “If I had succeeded, then there’d be no business.”

Future-proofing technology

Today, Eta Devices’ major advantage is that its technology is able to handle ever-increasing data bandwidths.

A few major smartphone manufacturers are now using envelope tracking (ET), which adjusts voltage to power amplifiers on the fly. But by adjusting that voltage continuously, ET efficiency falls apart for 4G/LTE and 802.11ac (WiFi) wireless standards, even up to 20 MHz bandwidth. ETAdvanced, in contrast, already accommodates ultrahigh bandwidths used by newer communication standards, such as LTE Advanced (up to 80 megahertz), and the next-generation WiFi standard (up to 160 megahertz).

Prepping for future communication standards is one thing that’s helped the company thrive, Dawson says. “As a small company, you’ll lose a fair fight with another technology — you have to have some overpowering advantage that they can’t match you on,” he says. “In introducing new hardware, you not only have to be better than the product of today, but also have to make compelling case for being future-proof.”

The discovery of Nova Delphini 2013, along with the data collected about it, could well sharpen or reshape our understanding of the nature of such blasts. The research appears online in the journal Nature.

Novae are found in solar systems with two closely orbiting stellar objects. The gravity from one star, a white dwarf, pulls in hydrogen from the atmosphere of another star, a red giant. This buildup of extra matter on the white dwarf’s surface eventually causes a nuclear detonation.

Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, had just arrived at California’s Mount Wilson Observatory when word came of a nova that exploded only hours earlier, on August 14, 2013. Boyajian and other researchers quickly put aside their own projects, in order to devote full attention to the phenomenon.

“It’s an opportunity we’ve never had before to see how novae expand,” Boyajian said. “There are all sorts of theories and models of how this material detonates and the processes that follow. But being able to see it happening makes this super, super special.”

What they found was startling in its magnitude. After one day, the size of the nova fireball was equal to the radius of Earth’s orbit. After 43 days, it was the size of our solar system.

The blast expanded at a speed of 1.3 million miles per hour, the research team calculated. In addition, researchers measured the fireball’s brightness and shape.

“A nova has never been studied this way, in this detail,” said Kaspar von Braun, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, another member of the team. “It all had to be done in express mode.” Almost on a nightly basis, von Braun said, astronomers reconfigured the six telescopes of the observatory’s CHARA Array to gather the necessary data.

The principal investigator for the study was Gail Schaefer, research scientist at the CHARA Array of Georgia State University.

Boyajian said the nova was impressive even without a telescope. “We went outside and we could see it with our eyes,” she said. “We were seeing a star that wasn’t there before. That was pretty awesome.”

At Yale, Boyajian is part of professor Debra Fischer’s team of exoplanet hunters. The team detects and characterizes planets located outside of our solar system.

How did life originate? And can scientists create life? These questions not only occupy the minds of scientists interested in the origin of life, but also researchers working with technology of the future. If we can create artificial living systems, we may not only understand the origin of life – we can also revolutionize the future of technology.

Protocells are the simplest, most primitive living systems, you can think of. The oldest ancestor of life on Earth was a protocell, and when we see, what it eventually managed to evolve into, we understand why science is so fascinated with protocells. If science can create an artificial protocell, we get a very basic ingredient for creating more advanced artificial life.

However, creating an artificial protocell is far from simple, and so far no one has managed to do that. One of the challenges is to create the information strings that can be inherited by cell offspring, including protocells. Such information strings are like modern DNA or RNA strings, and they are needed to control cell metabolism and provide the cell with instructions about how to divide.

Essential for life

If one daughter cell after a division has a slightly altered information (maybe it provides a slightly faster metabolism), they may be more fit to survive. Therefor it may be selected and an evolution has started.

Now researchers from the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLINT), Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark,describe in the journal Europhysics Letters, how they, in a virtual computer experiment, have discovered information strings with peculiar properties.

Professor and head of FLINT, Steen Rasmussen, says:

“Finding mechanisms to create information strings are essential for researchers working with artificial life.”

Steen Rasmussen and his colleagues know they face two problems:

Firstly long molecular strings are decomposed in water. This means that long information strings “break” quickly in water and turn into many short strings. Thus it is very difficult to maintain a population of long strings over time.

Secondly, it is difficult to make these molecules replicate without the use of modern enzymes, whereas it is easier to make a so-called ligation. A ligation is to connect any combination of two shorter strings into a longer string, assisted by another matching longer string. Ligation is the mechanism used by the SDU-researchers.

“In our computer simulation – our virtual molecular laboratory – information strings began to replicate quickly and efficiently as expected. However, we were struck to see that the system quickly developed an equal number of short and long information strings and further that a strong pattern selection on the strings had occurred. We could see that only very specific information patterns on the strings were to be seen in the surviving strings. We were puzzled: How could such a coordinated selection of strings occur, when we knew that we had not programmed it. The explanation had to be found in the way the strings interacted with each other”, explains Steen Rasmussen.

It is like society

According to Steen Rasmussen, a so-called self-organizing autocatalytic network was created in the virtual pot, into which he and his colleagues poured the ingredients for information strings.

An autocatalytic network is a network of molecules, which catalyze each other’s production. Each molecule can be formed by at least one chemical reaction in the network, and each reaction can be catalyzed by at least one other molecule in the network. This process will create a network that exhibits a primitive form of metabolism and an information system that replicates itself from generation to generation.

“An autocatalytic network works like a community; each molecule is a citizen who interacts with other citizens and together they help create a society”, explains Steen Rasmussen.

This autocatalytic set quickly evolved into a state where strings of all lengths existed in equal concentrations, which is not what is usually found. Further, the selected strings had strikingly similar patterns, which is also unusual.

“We might have discovered a process similar to the processes that initially sparked the first life. We of course don’t know if life actually was created this way – but it could have been one of the steps. Perhaps a similar process created sufficiently high concentrations of longer information strings when the first protocell was created”, explains Steen Rasmussen.

Basis for new technology

The mechanisms underlying the formation and selection of effective information strings are not only interesting for the researchers who are working to create protocells. They also have value to researchers working with tomorrow’s technology, like they do at the FLINT Center.

“We seek ways to develop technology that’s based on living and life-like processes. If we succeed, we will have a world where technological devices can repair themselves, develop new properties and be re-used. For example a computer made of biological materials poses very different – and less environmentally stressful – requirements for production and disposal”, says Steen Rasmussen.

“It took 50 years to show that this phenomenon indeed happens,” said Vesna Mitrovic, associate professor of physics at Brown University, who led the work. “We have identified the microscopic nature of this exotic quantum state of matter.”

The research is published in Nature Physics.

Superconductivity — the ability to conduct electric current without resistance — depends on the formation of electron twosomes known as Cooper pairs (named for Leon Cooper, a Brown University physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for identifying the phenomenon). In a normal conductor, electrons rattle around in the structure of the material, which creates resistance. But Cooper pairs move in concert in a way that keeps them from rattling around, enabling them to travel without resistance.

Magnetic fields are the enemy of Cooper pairs. In order to form a pair, electrons must be opposites in a property that physicists refer to as spin. Normally, a superconducting material has a roughly equal number of electrons with each spin, so nearly all electrons have a dance partner. But strong magnetic fields can flip “spin-down” electrons to “spin-up”, making the spin population in the material unequal.

“The question is what happens when we have more electrons with one spin than the other,” Mitrovic said. “What happens with the ones that don’t have pairs? Can we actually form superconducting states that way, and what would that state look like?”

In 1964, physicists predicted that superconductivity could indeed persist in certain kinds of materials amid a magnetic field. The prediction was that the unpaired electrons would gather together in discrete bands or stripes across the superconducting material. Those bands would conduct normally, while the rest of the material would be superconducting. This modulated superconductive state came to be known as the FFLO phase, named for theorists Peter Fulde, Richard Ferrell, Anatoly Larkin, and Yuri Ovchinniko, who predicted its existence.

To investigate the phenomenon, Mitrovic and her team used an organic superconductor with the catchy name κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu(NCS)2. The material consists of ultra-thin sheets stacked on top of each other and is exactly the kind of material predicted to exhibit the FFLO state.

After applying an intense magnetic field to the material, Mitrovic and her collaborators from the French National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Grenoble probed its properties using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR).

What they found were regions across the material where unpaired, spin-up electrons had congregated. These “polarized” electrons behave, “like little particles constrained in a box,” Mitrovic said, and they form what are known as Andreev bound states.

“What is remarkable about these bound states is that they enable transport of supercurrents through non-superconducting regions,” Mitrovic said. “Thus, the current can travel without resistance throughout the entire material in this special superconducting state.”

Experimentalists have been trying for years to provide solid evidence that the FFLO state exists, but to little avail. Mitrovic and her colleagues took some counterintuitive measures to arrive at their findings. Specifically, they probed their material at a much higher temperature than might be expected for quantum experiments.

“Normally to observe quantum states you want to be as cold as possible, to limit thermal motion,” Mitrovic said. “But by raising the temperature we increased the energy window of our NMR probe to detect the states we were looking for. That was a breakthrough.”

This new understanding of what happens when electron spin populations become unequal could have implications beyond superconductivity, according to Mitrovic.

It might help astrophysicists to understand pulsars — densely packed neutron stars believed to harbor both superconductivity and strong magnetic fields. It could also be relevant to the field of spintronics, devices that operate based on electron spin rather than charge, made of layered ferromagnetic-superconducting structures.

“This really goes beyond the problem of superconductivity,” Mitrovic said. “It has implications for explaining many other things in the universe, such as behavior of dense quarks, particles that make up atomic nuclei.”

The findings are published in the October 24 issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

A team of seven scientists from Yale’s Schools of Public Health and Medicine and the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in Liberia developed a mathematical transmission model of the viral disease and applied it to Liberia’s most populous county, Montserrado, an area already hard hit. The researchers determined that tens of thousands of new Ebola cases — and deaths — are likely by December 15 if the epidemic continues on its present course.

“Our predictions highlight the rapidly closing window of opportunity for controlling the outbreak and averting a catastrophic toll of new Ebola cases and deaths in the coming months,” said Alison Galvani, professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health and the paper’s senior author. “Although we might still be within the midst of what will ultimately be viewed as the early phase of the current outbreak, the possibility of averting calamitous repercussions from an initially delayed and insufficient response is quickly eroding.”

The model developed by Galvani and colleagues projects as many as 170,996 total reported and unreported cases of the disease, representing 12% of the overall population of some 1.38 million people, and 90,122 deaths in Montserrado alone by December 15. Of these, the authors estimate 42,669 cases and 27,175 deaths will have been reported by that time.

Much of this suffering — some 97,940 cases of the disease — could be averted if the international community steps up control measures immediately, starting October 31, the model predicts. This would require additional Ebola treatment center beds, a fivefold increase in the speed with which cases are detected, and allocation of protective kits to households of patients awaiting treatment center admission. The study predicts that, at best, just over half as many cases (53,957) can be averted if the interventions are delayed to November 15. Had all of these measures been in place by October 15, the model calculates that 137,432 cases in Montserrado could have been avoided.

There have been approximately 9,000 reported cases and 4,500 deaths from the disease in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea since the latest outbreak began with a case in a toddler in rural Guinea in December 2013. For the first time cases have been confirmed among health-care workers treating patients in the United States and parts of Europe.

“The current global health strategy is woefully inadequate to stop the current volatile Ebola epidemic,” co-author Dr. Frederick Altice, professor of internal medicine and public health added. “At a minimum, capable logisticians are needed to construct a sufficient number of Ebola treatment units in order to avoid the unnecessary deaths of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people.”

Other authors include lead author Joseph Lewnard, Martial L. Ndeffo Mbah, Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo, Luke Bawo, and Tolbert G. Nyenswah.

The National Institutes of Health funded the study.