MIT professors are trying to put a gas turbine engine on a chip. No, not because they are disciples of Schumacher, but because they are trying to build a better mousetrap, err, battery. The DOD is interested because they want to be able to provide soldiers plenty of power in the wilderness, or at least in difficult to supply situations.

Their microengine is made of six silicon wafers, piled up like pancakes and bonded together. Each wafer is a single crystal with its atoms perfectly aligned, so it is extremely strong. To achieve the necessary components, the wafers are individually prepared using an advanced etching process to eat away selected material. When the wafers are piled up, the surfaces and the spaces in between produce the needed features and functions….

The MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second — 100 times faster than those in jet engines. A mini-generator produces 10 watts of power. A little compressor raises the pressure of air in preparation for combustion. And cooling (always a challenge in hot microdevices) appears manageable by sending the compression air around the outside of the combustor.

This is one reason I like engineers – when they have fun, we all benefit.

File this in the category of too good to be true: “A new research program by a Cornell computer scientist, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and University of Utah, aims to teach computers to scan through text and sort opinion from fact.”

That will revolutionize the pundit business. I’m thinking lots of people will be surprised to discover just how much they read is opinion, not fact. And not just on op ed pages, either. But I’m not hopeful that the tack the researchers are taking will be able to measure anything beside how well a writer disguises his opinion as fact:

The new research will use machine-learning algorithms to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion and teach them to tell the difference. A simplified example might be to look for phrases like “according to” or “it is believed.” Ironically, Cardie said, one of the phrases most likely to indicate opinion is “It is a fact that …”The work also will seek to determine the sources of information cited by a writer. “We’re making sure that any information is tagged with a confidence. If it’s low confidence, it’s not useful information,” Cardie added.

So it’s not like they are actually going to check the writing against facts; they are just going to look at how the information is presented, which means that ironically if you present opinion as fact the programs will take your word for it and flag it as fact. If you are careful and present your opinions as such, then the program will pick up on that and flag it as opinion.

In other words, the researchers are writing a program that uses the writer’s opinion to sort opinion from fact in the writers work. Won’t that be a great help. No word on a computerized sarcasm detector.

Here’s a bit of good news: More than 565 people were arrested in Europe and the US in a sweep targeting marketing fraud using the internet. So far, 61 convictions. Keep it up, we need to cut down on all the fraud. I’m tired of my inbox bulging with criminal intent all the time.