General Electric : The GE Brief – January 3, 2018

With dunes that stretch for days and plenty of powerful breezes, deserts in the Middle East and North Africa should be oases for renewable wind power. But turbines trying to function in the region often experience the same problems as humans do: Namely, it's too darn hot out there, and sand creeps into places it oughtn't. With temps in Oman, for instance, regularly exceeding 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), the oil that lubricates the turbines' gears can go runny, and their internal electronics start to malfunction. But engineers at GE Renewable Energy have found a way to optimize a standard wind turbine for the desert. Their efforts have paved the way for a new 50-megawatt wind farm whose construction just commenced in Oman. Hot, flat and uncrowded: The farm, which is being installed by developer Masdar, also signals the potential opening of huge swathes of otherwise barren desert land for renewable electricity generation. 'There are lots of sites across the region that have extreme hot weather and sandy areas, where wind may be an option now because of this design,' said Rebeca Calderon, a program manager at GE Renewable Energy in Barcelona. Calderon and her colleagues made a variety of fixes to a standard turbine in order to keep it spinning, including louvered openings in the turbine's nacelle - the box at the top of a turbine tower that houses the gearbox, generator and controller. Read morehereabout the inner workings of this self-cooling turbine.

Just after midnight on New Year's Day, NASA scientists got an extra reason to pop the champagne - and it came shaped like a champagne bottle or, depending on your perspective, a bowling pin or a snowman. However you look at it, the cause for celebration is an object 22 miles long, 9 miles across and some 4 billion miles from the sun. When NASA's New Horizons craft buzzed by it on Jan. 1, Ultima Thule became the most distant object ever visited by a human probe. New Horizons, meanwhile, became the second record-breaking spacecraft in as many months powered by GE technology. Space rock: Like Voyager 2, which last month became the second human-made object to leave the solar system, New Horizons draws power from a piece of GE tech called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Having observed Ultima Thule from a distance of 2,200 miles, the probe has plans to hang around through at least 2021 in the object's astronomical neighborhood: the Kuiper Belt, a collection of potentially hundreds of thousands of icy objects and an estimated trillion or more comets dating back to the birth of the solar system. The team working on the project included the astrophysicist Brian May - yep, that Brian May. In addition to the stadium anthem 'We Will Rock You' he penned as lead guitarist for the band Queen, May has now added to his oeuvre a tune to befit this particular occasion: 'New Horizons (Ultimate Thule Mix).' Does this news rock you? Learn morehere.

A 6.9-magnitude earthquake that hit the Indonesian island of Lombok in early August was just one of a series of strong quakes and tsunamis to strike Indonesia in 2018. The recovery from such devastation starts with the search for survivors but continues for months, as the afflicted areas rebuild and restore crucial services such as water and electricity. GE is among the many organizations helping Lombok recover. That includes a grant to help the afflicted area regain access to clean water, along with a less obvious but still crucial form of assistance: reliable electricity from GE turbines that power parts of the island. Power through it: At Lombok's Jeranjang power plant, workers scrambled after the August quake to prepare for a tsunami that could follow. None came, though, and the fact that the plant managed to stay online reduced the overall impact of the disaster. The plant is powered by two GE TM2500 natural gas turbines - essentially a ground-based version of the GE CF6 jet engine that powers numerous Boeing 747s, but re-engineered to generate electricity. The turbines can be used to provide fast, mobile power where needed, but they were installed permanently on Lombok in 2016 to supply juice for 250,000 homes. Staying online has been 'very vital for the continuation of businesses and lives in Lombok,' said Erik Erdiana, the site manager for state utility PLN. 'A lot of industries, particularly tourism, are dependent on it.' Read more about GE's efforts to support earthquake recovery in Indonesiahere.

A patient who hasn't moved in 80 years will generally raise a few red flags for doctors, but the specimen wheeled in 2018 into the diagnostics imaging department of Humanitas Gavazzeni, a hospital in Bergamo, Italy, was no ordinary medical case. It was a 500-year-old painting that had been in storage since the 1930s, when it was dismissed as a knockoff and subsequently forgotten. But when conservator Giovanni Valagussa came across the work while cataloging the collection of Bergamo's Accademia Carrara last May, he decided to take a second look. Valagussa suspected he'd happened upon the original version of 'The Resurrection of Christ,' by the famed Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna. That's where medical imaging technology - and GE Healthcare - came in. An artistic mystery:'The quality of the painting and some details were striking,' Valagussa said. 'They led me to believe it was an original Mantegna.' Valagussa presented his findings to an art expert who confirmed he had the honest goods. The reputation of 'Resurrection' thus redeemed, Valagussa said, 'it felt only right to commit to a full restoration' of the painting, now valued at nearly $30 million. That included employing GE Healthcare's Revolution CT computed tomography machine to examine the painting's interior, reading the wooden fibers, the tunnels of woodworms and the presence of foreign bodies such as nails; digital radiography, meanwhile, brought out the pictorial layers. Restored to full health, the patient can be viewed in London's National Gallery through the end of the month. Read more about the incredible journey of 'The Resurrection of Christ'here.

- VIDEO OF THE WEEK -

- QUOTE OF THE DAY -

'There are lots of sites across the region that have extreme hot weather and sandy areas, where wind may be an option now because of this design.' - Rebeca Calderon, a program manager at GE Renewable Energy

Quote: GE Reports. Image: Getty Images.

ENJOY THIS NEWSLETTER?
Please send it to your friends and let them know they can subscribe here.