One of the super-cooled tubes that make up the Large Hadron Collider

Sunday, 18 July 2010

After decades of bending atoms around giant rings and smashing them apart in search of the secrets of the universe, scientists at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, are reviving a 1960s technology and going straight.

Their latest ring, the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), only got up to speed in March, yet physicists meet in Paris this week to discuss plans for a new $6.7bn (£4.4bn) experiment – the International Linear Collider (ILC), which they hope to start building in 2012.

The new machine will be a straight-line tunnel, 31km long, and will use super-conducting magnets to accelerate electrons and positrons, their antimatter equivalents, towards each other at close to the speed of light.

“To explore what the LHC discovers in more detail, you need an electron collider,” says Professor Brian Foster, the European director of the ILC project. Part of the report to the Paris conference will be “a blueprint for how you would set up an ILC lab”. More than 700 people at 300 laboratories and universities around the world are already working on the accelerator. The only other high-energy linear electron smasher is the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California, a 3.2km track built in 1962.

Both the existing LHC and the planned ILC are trying to solve fundamental physics questions, including – what happened in the Big Bang? Where did all the antimatter go? How many dimensions does space have? Why are there so many different sub-atomic particles? And, most famously, what does a Higgs particle look like?

While the 12 subatomic components of matter have all been found, including quarks and neutrinos, the Higgs has proved more elusive. The leading theory of how the universe works says that the Higgs gives matter mass, and therefore gravity. Its discovery could point the way to unifying the two great 20th-century theories of physics – quantum and general relativity.

It may also help solve the mystery of the missing 96 per cent of the universe. When astronomers estimate the mass of galaxies, including stars, planets, nebulas and black holes, they find that they are so light they should fly apart as they spin. The extra mass needed to keep them together is thought to be hidden in as yet undiscovered “dark matter”.

Although a location for the new device has not been decided, Cern is a likely contender, if only because most of the physicists who might want to use it are already there, along with the infrastructure they need.

Cern’s LHC uses protons made from atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, by stripping off their electrons in a strong magnetic field, and accelerating them to 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light.

By the time they enter the LHC, Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, is in play. Since the protons can’t be made to go any faster, pumping additional energy in makes them more massive. In the LHC, they can be pushed to 7 trillion electron volts. When two beams, rotating in opposite directions, cross, the energy released from a single pair could be as high as 14 TeV.

But proton crashes are “dirty”. “It’s like colliding two oranges together at 45mph,” says Professor Foster. “Sometimes the pips hit each other, but usually it’s just a spray of juice.” The pips, in his analogy, are the trio of quarks that make up a proton and which cause the most interesting smashes. Typically, only one quark from each proton in a collision will hit head on, while the other four will miss each other.

Worse, although scientists know how much energy they’ve put into each proton, they don’t know how it is distributed between the pips. One quark could have most of it, or all three could have roughly equal amounts. At best, researchers can tell the maximum amount of energy a collision might involve. Still, the LHC produces billions of bangs a second so they know roughly what energy levels give them interesting results.

But for a more precise exploration of the high-energy frontier, they will need the ILC. Electrons are 2,000 times smaller than protons, and do not have an internal structure. When two of them run into each other, the energy released is known exactly.

But electrons are not perfect. When particles are bent by magnetic fields, they emit X-rays. For relatively massive protons, this is not a problem, but for the lighter electrons it’s a huge obstacle. Most of the energy pumped into an electron in the LHC would merely replace that lost to radiation.

And so, scientists are returning to the linear design of half a century ago. The exact specifications will have to wait until the LHC has identified which energy ranges are of interest, but the ILC as envisioned will have energy levels of around 0.5TeV.

Construction of the new accelerator is expected to take seven years. No one would be surprised if, during that time, plans emerge for an even more powerful, next-generation accelerator.

Sunday, 12 September 2010

The acrobat was performing the Spanish web, winding down from the ceiling on a red ribbon in a move many Britons will remember from an advert promoting BBC1. But the people clustered around the stage weren’t watching Berlin’s Cosmic Artists directly. Instead, they peered through special spectacles at TV screens showing the action live in 3D.

The giants of the television hardware business, Samsung, Sony, LG, Toshiba and Panasonic, were all pushing stereoscopic screens (and accompanying goggles) at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin last week. Panasonic, for example, featured not only the live acrobats, but 3D clips from the Blue Man Group, Universal’s Despicable Me, a promo for the London Olympics, and, on a more high-brow note, a trailer for the forthcoming Wim Wenders film about the late dancer Pina Bausch.

Crucially, after Avatar’s success, film-makers and broadcasters are piling into the technology. A flurry of films including Alice in Wonderland, Shrek Forever After and Toy Story 3 followed the sci-fi blockbuster. And as Sky says of its new channel, due in homes before Christmas: “3D is the next revolution in television.”

The new technology is not just for content professionals, either. Panasonic’s headline-grabbing gadget this year is a 3D home camcorder – a world first – for under €1,500 (£1,250). Wedding videos will never be the same.

But a bigger contributor to the Osaka company’s bottom line will be the one million 3D sets it expects to sell. “It’s like the switch to colour,” says Panasonic’s president, Fumio Ohtsubo. “Once they’ve tried colour, no one wants to go back to monochrome. When you compare it with the pleasure of 3D, the inconvenience of wearing glasses is next to nothing.”

In a Spartan conference room above one of the vast exhibition halls at Berlin’s Messe complex, Mr Ohtsubo is holding forth in Japanese, his voice soft and his demeanour calm. He’s wearing a blue striped shirt with a white collar and two small badges on his jacket lapel: one says simply “Panasonic”, the other is a green leaf with the slogan “Eco ideas”. And there-in lies a contradiction. For while Panasonic’s marketeers are focused on television’s latest magic, Mr Ohtsubo wants to talk about a less sexy product – batteries.

Like companies from Marks and Spencer to Shell, Panasonic has an environmental plan, in this case called GT12 (Green Transformation 2012). “We want to bring everything under the eco umbrella,” he says.

Central to that plan is Panasonic’s 100 per cent takeover of its home-town rival, Sanyo, launched this summer after it bought a 50.2 per cent stake for £2.8bn last December. The attraction, says Mr Ohtsubo, is not Sanyo’s wide range of consumer products, from mobile phones and (2D) television sets to refrigerators and washing machines. Instead, the allure is its expertise in alternative energy generation – particularly solar power – and storage, a low-profile field that he believes has huge potential. “Even without subsidies, we think the solar business will grow,” he says.

The company that is now Panasonic was founded in 1918 by Konosuke Matsushita, his 22-year-old wife, Mumeno, and her brother, Toshio Iue, 15. Its first product was an improved light-bulb socket. Nearly 30 years later, while Japan was occupied by US forces, Mr Iue borrowed a disused Matsushita factory and began to manufacture bicycle lamps. His business later became Sanyo.

So was Panasonic’s acquisition a fraternal rescue or a predatory pounce on a weakened rival? Sanyo has been plagued with bad luck for the past decade. First it got caught selling under-powered solar cells in the subsidised Japanese market. Then, in 2004, a devastating earthquake crippled its semiconductor plant in Niigata plunging it into a financial crisis. A ¥300bn (£2.3bn at today’s exchange rates) restructuring in 2006 left its banks holding five out of nine board seats.

Even the company’s battery division was not immune. In 2006, shortly after the collapse of a proposed joint venture with Nokia to make handsets, it recalled 1.3 million mobile phone batteries when they demonstrated a tendency to overheat. Efforts to sell the semiconductor division were abandoned in 2007 after the credit crunch hit. Mr Iue’s son, Satoshi, stepped down as chairman for personal reasons in March that year and the grandson of the founder, Toshimasa, resigned as president in April.

By then, Sanyo was embroiled in a US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation (since settled) for allegedly failing to report a $1bn loss. By November 2008, Sanyo’s new president, Seiichiro Sano, was in talks with Mr Ohtsubo.

There are several possible explanations for Mr Ohtsubo’s dedication to greenery and interest in Sanyo. Cynics might argue that it’s just greenwash. But the price he’s paying for his rival, though well below peak, is far too much if all he wants is a lick of green paint to satisfy investors on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Another explanation is that Mr Ohtsubo has spotted, or thinks he’s spotted, a genuine growth market and is seizing the opportunity. If so, he’s got nerves of steel, because this is a huge gamble. Solar power installations are not profitable without subsidy, and in tough economic times, government handouts are vulnerable. Spain, Europe’s solar power leader, cut its photovoltaic subsidy – worth €3bn (£2.5bn) last year – by up to 45 per cent this summer amid howls from the industry.

Rechargeable batteries, where Panasonic-Sanyo now leads the world, with 43 per cent of the market, is also a long-range bet. The company likes to show off the battery packs it makes for hybrid cars. But while it’s true that hybrid market share is growing fast, it’s doing so from a low base, 3 per cent in Europe last year. This is a market driven by the desire of some people to “do something” about the environment rather than by calculated self interest. The sales growth could have a low ceiling.

To succeed in either of these fields, Panasonic will have to improve its technical performance. This, it seems, is Mr Ohtsubo’s strategy. “There’s a lot more we can do to improve our technology in order to increase capacity and speed up charging time,” he says. “Everyone knows petrol will be replaced by electricity.”

What nobody knows, though, is how quickly this will happen. The tipping point will come when electric cars undercut the price of those with internal combustion engines. And that will depend not only on Panasonic’s technology but on innovation by car makers and how long supplies of cheap oil last.

Initially, investors took a dim view of Mr Ohtsubo’s decision to buy Sanyo and another part-owned energy subsidiary outright in an ¥800bn deal. The move sent Panasonic shares tumbling 11 per cent. And the firm had only just pulled out of a two-year slump.

But the buy-out did make sense to some analysts. “Panasonic faces fierce competition from Samsung and Sony in consumer electronics,” Yuji Fujimori of Barclays Capital in Tokyo told Bloomberg at the time. “Its rivals are not as competitive in the energy-related products and household-electrics systems that Panasonic aims to strengthen.”

Oddly, Mr Ohtsubo does not justify the acquisition by pointing to juicy profits so much as matters of principle. “A company is only viable when it is useful to society,” he says. “Each company has a role to play, and the role Panasonic should play is to cope with the most important issues of the time. At the global level, that’s how human beings can co-exist with the environment.”

At Panasonic, the idea that the company has a higher social purpose was being taught to employees long before Western management gurus invented CSR. “At the base of our vision is the principle and philosophy of our founder,” says Mr Ohtsubo.

That principle was set out in 1932 in an address by Mr Matsushita to his assembled employees: “Our mission as a manufacturer is to create material abundance by providing goods as plentifully and inexpensively as tap water,” he said. “This is how we can banish poverty, bring happiness to people’s lives, and make this world a better place.”

And nearly 80 years later, Mr Ohtsubo is eager to take up the challenge. “We have so many things to do,” he says. “This is giving us much pleasure.”

It is more than 1,000ft high, but so unobtrusive that most people in the UK never even realised it existed, let alone that it held a European record. Now, Belmont Transmitting Station, one mile west of the quiet village of Donington on Bain, is about to divest itself of the only thing that made it notable. 

The tower has dominated the skyline of the Lincolnshire Wolds for almost half a century, delivering television signals to viewers as far away as Doncaster. It is the tallest structure in the UK, and also claims for Britain the title of tallest structure in the European Union. But not for much longer.

The 387.75m (1,272ft) tubular steel tower is about to lose its record. Not because anyone is building a bigger one, but because its owner, the telecoms company Arqiva, plans to shorten it by 36m when a new digital aerial is installed in the autumn.

The height reduction will hand the title to the American military’s 370m Torreta de Guardamar radio mast in Spain, followed by towers in Germany and Latvia. Britain’s tallest structure will then be the 365m TV transmitter in Skelton, Cumbria, with Belmont slipping to 14th in the EU tower stakes.

Attempts by a handful of locals to stir up pride in the tower have failed. English Heritage refused to list it and planning approval for the change was granted last month despite two objections. A bemused Bruce Randall, an Arqiva spokesman, said: “Usually we get complaints when we try to make masts taller.”

Some 50 tall transmission towers dot the British landscape, plus more than 1,000 shorter repeater stations. But Belmont has never been much of a tourist attraction. Indeed, its very unobtrusiveness seems to have sealed its fate in the end.

Rejecting the bid to keep Belmont, a spokesperson for English Heritage said: “Although the tower may be of local interest, there are a large number of transmitters in operation in Britain, some of them listed, which have greater architectural quality, evidence of structural or engineering innovation or historic significance.”

The tower has been appreciated by some. One resident quoted in a local newspaper said: “We have restoration programmes trying to preserve pieces of our history from early Roman to the present day: works of art are preserved; museums keep artefacts from past industrial ages; but what about our technological age? Lincolnshire is not awash with technological masterpieces – for goodness sake, keep what you’ve got.”

The last time the tower made the news was during a bitter storm in the winter of 1969 when its sister tower at Emley Moor, Yorkshire, collapsed. Most staff were evacuated from the transmission station at the base of Belmont as it leant five degrees to one side due to the weight of ice on its guy wires, but it survived.

The removal of the lattice section at the top of the tower and three of its 18 guy wires will not be a simple operation. A crew will have to climb up the core of the tower (there is a lift in the 9ft-wide tube but it will not be used) and a derrick and winch will have to be set up at the top. A helicopter may also be required.

The shortening is necessary because the new digital aerial is heavier than the old analogue equipment, and must begin lower down to prevent the tower keeling over.

The new transmitter is not due to take over until 2011, but Arqiva has left itself plenty of time in case poor weather forces it to delay completion of the project into next year. Tower-spotters are advised not to delay.

For the lucky, a check-up at the GP consists of nothing more sophisticated than a blood-pressure cuff, an icy stethoscope and a jar to pee in. For those with bigger problems, it can involve medicine’s heavy artillery, from bedside ultra-sound devices to giant metal doughnuts that generate magnetic fields several times stronger than the Earth’s.

Medical imaging has come a long way since Wilhelm Roentgen took the first X-ray of his wife’s hand in 1895. Until then, doctors had no way to tell what was going on inside a living body. Autopsies (often illegal) could show them where organs were but not their functions.

If today’s scanning technologies – X-ray, positron emission, magnetic resonance (MRI), computer-aided tomography (CAT), ultrasound and single photon emission – seem impressive, tomorrow’s promise to be wondrous. Doctors will be able to detect not just large-scale structures but the microscopic interplay of proteins and enzymes as they react to diseases and treatments. Early screening will spot many problems before they become terminal. Diagnostic scans will predict which therapy will work best on a given patient, while follow-up images will determine whether all is going to plan.

From biotech start-ups to pharmaceutical and medical equipment giants, all want a piece of this new action, but one British-based company seems particularly well positioned. GE Healthcare, formerly Amersham, the first company to be fully privatised by Margaret Thatcher in 1982, was sold to the Americans in 2004 for $10bn. Back then, some in the City professed confusion about a company with a wide range of businesses lumped under the catch-all heading “diagnostic life sciences”. They may still be nonplussed, but one set of numbers is crystal clear. GE Healthcare’s sales have soared from $9bn in the year before the sale to $17bn in 2008.

“We’re at a tipping point,” the company said in a paper last May, comparing the coming transformation to that brought about by Thomas Edison when he invented the light bulb. “To take healthcare into the future, we do not have to wait for technologies that will be available in 2025. We need only look at the technologies we have today and act.”

GE Healthcare’s main campuses are scattered around the Chalfonts, a huddle of leafy villagesnorth-west of London. Dr Patrick Grove, then a 26-year-old organic chemist, established the company at Chilcote House in 1940 to refine radium for instrument dials on aircraft and ships. After the Second World War, it became a national centre for the development of radioactive materials and is still a licensed nuclear site.

Chilcote House is now the campus reception centre; security is tight and before visitors can enter some buildings, they must pin on a dosimeter to measure their radiation exposure. The office of Dr Marivi Mendizabal, GE Healthcare’s head of discovery, is in a less glowing building. Still, the main room is divided in half by a glass wall inscribed with a double helix at waist height, with her lab on the far side. In a soft Spanish accent, Dr Mendizabal introduces a series of techniques, some developed in-house (the R&D budget is $1bn), some by partner companies, and others licensed from academia. They range from products approved for use to those still in early trials. What they share is a simple logic – better imaging means earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment.

While hardware has improved, the big change is in what Dr Mendizabal calls “wet science”. One characteristic of chemistry, and particularly large biological molecules, is that they have counterparts that fit like keys in locks. Find the right key and it will latch on to a particular lock. It’s the same technique used by the body’s immune system to send antibodies after the antigens on invading cells. “It’s not just antigens, though,” she says. “This works on other molecules too.”

Consider AH118635, a synthetic molecule invented at GE Healthcare that’s so new it doesn’t even have a catchy name yet. It reveals whether cancers are growing or not by latching on to a marker called integrin alpha 5 beta 3, which regulates blood-vessel growth. Most tumours are only alive near their surface; the centres die because they can’t get enough blood, says Dr Mendizabal. AH118635, if it gets regulatory approval, will be able to tell how successful a tumour is at building new vessels, both by itself and after it’s attacked with drugs designed to disrupt the process, such as Roche’s Avastin.

Or take Hexvix, a chemical which accumulates in tumour cells and glows when exposed to blue light. Developed by PhotoCure, a Norwegian company, and distributed globally by GE Healthcare, Hexvix is already in clinical use. It increases the number of potentially cancerous cysts detected during optical bladder inspections, reducing the risk to the patient.

Another collaboration, this one with InSightec, combines two technologies, MRI and ultrasound, to replace the knife in treating uterine fibroids, a condition which often leads to hysterectomy. Instead, surgeons locate the fibroids on an MRI scan and focus a beam of high-intensity ultrasound to raise their temperature until it destroys the cells. The procedure takes just three hours and the patient is off work for a day, as opposed to four to eight weeks after a hysterectomy.

Even Roentgen’s X-rays are becoming more useful. Nano agents, the first major development in X-ray technology since the invention of computer-aided tomography 30 years ago, promise to give doctors 1mm resolution of soft tissues as well as bones. The trick is to bundle up a tiny but dense ball of iodine atoms in a shell. Injected into the body, the iodine atoms act as tiny shutters, blocking the X-rays and revealing the internal shapes of organs.

Elsewhere in the Chalfonts, Robert Dann is showing off a virtual colonoscopy. Early treatment of colon cancer is 90 per cent successful, compared with 10 per cent if it is caught late. But the screening process is intrusive and unpleasant, so the take-up rate is low. The virtual colonoscopy turns a CAT scan of the large intestine into a movie, allowing the doctor to “fly” through the colon looking for colour-coded, pre-cancerous polyps. If this raises the screening rate from 30 to 100 per cent, more than 10,000 lives a year could be saved in the UK alone. 

Saving lives is the popular measure for medical successes, but cutting costs is also important. The new wave of scanners promises to do this in two ways. By helping researchers evaluate drugs at an earlier stage, they reduce the cost of pharmaceutical development. And by catching diseases earlier and allowing more targeted treatments, they reduce direct clinical costs.

After generations in which technology drove the cost of medicine ever higher, it’s about time the pendulum began to swing the other way.

The company – which uses barcodes and a bank of computers at a secure facility in Britain to check for fake medicines – already has operations in Belgium, Greece and Italy and is looking to roll out its system in another three to four markets this year, said managing director, Gary Noon.

Its expansion into Ireland involves hooking up all 1,500 chemists in the country. Initially, pharmacists will only be able to confirm the batch that the medicine comes from, but within a year, each individual packet will have a unique 74-digit number.

Spun off from PA Consulting two years ago, and backed by venture capital outfit Ipex Capital, Aegate offers a secure system similar to those used by banks to confirm debit and credit cards used in shops and cash machines.

Counterfeiters have built on their success in selling fake Viagra over the internet and are now targeting the world’s top-selling drug, Lipitor, as well as medicines to treat heart attacks, cancer and even schizophrenia. Some packaging is so convincing that it takes a lab test to show that the pills inside are phoney.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 1 per cent of drugs sold through legitimate channels in the developed world are counterfeit. In Britain, over the past three years, the authorities have identified 14 batches of drugs as fakes.

Half a million counterfeit medicines were seized at the EU’s borders in 2005 and officials expect recent figures to be higher. The WHO estimates the illegal trade will be worth $75bn (£50bn) globally by 2010.

If, as expected, Günter Verheugen, the EU enterprise commissioner, recommends legislation requiring point-of-sale authentication in his pharmaceuticals proposal due to be published in April, Aegate is in a strong position. While several other companies have tested systems, the British firm is the only one in Europe with operations up and running.

Nigel Mason is apologetic when he arrives at GE’s British head office in Berkeley Square, central London. This isn’t his building, explains the boss of GE Healthcare UK as we wait for security to sign him in. Once his visitor’s badge has been clipped to his jacket, we’re ushered into G4, an ultra-modern but poky little room. By then, though, he’s done saying sorry. And by the time we get to the subject of the much-criticised NHS computerisation project, he’s bridling a bit at the very suggestion that he should be on the defensive.

“I’m proud of our role,” he insists. “It’s a positive story.”

Mason has been head of GE Healthcare International’s Public-Private Partnership team since 2004, two years before he added the title of country manager to his job description, and he clearly takes the project personally.

His company is responsible for the picture archive and communications system (Pacs) in the southern cluster, one of five broad NHS regions. Every one of the hospitals had their Pacs delivered both on time and on budget, he claims.

“As a result of the successful roll-out, we were asked to take an active part in the North-west and West Midlands, where a previous incumbent had been struggling.”

Pacs has had two technical failures in the past 18 months, he admits, but in both cases the backup kicked in immediately and the medics using the system to look up patients’ X-rays or scans weren’t even aware there was a problem.

GE Healthcare, which has its global HQ in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, is one of the biggest players in the medical technology sector, supplying a wide range of equipment including big-ticket items such as magnetic resonance (MR), positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) scanners. Since 2004 when it bought Amersham – the first company privatised by Margaret Thatcher – GE has also had a presence in the pharmaceutical side of medicine. Worldwide, it has earnings of $17bn (around £8.5bn); in the UK, it has 2,800 employees.

And even in with recession starting to bite in the US, the American conglomerate is unlikely to retrench in its core market. “The UK is relatively small in global terms, less than 10 per cent of our business. But what that masks is the importance of the international market relative to the US. We genuinely do see ourselves as a global company, rather than a US company doing business overseas, which is what it might have been five years ago.”

Mason’s job is to figure out which of a dizzying range of technologies is best suited to a particular task, and then persuade NHS trusts to see things his way. “Healthcare cannot go on expanding its budget for ever,” he says. “For example, we produce six diagnostic tools that can be appropriate for coronary artery disease.”

He starts ticking them off on his fingers without pausing to explain what they do, let alone how they work: “echo cardiography, stress ECG, myocardial scintigraphy, multi-slice CT, cath lab and PET”. Each is understood well individually, but until recently there has been no assessment of their relative merits. Mason’s team has now developed a model showing which works best for patients in different risk groups, and will be sending it out to cardiologists for trials within the next few months.

Appropriate technology is also central to GE Healthcare’s response to the Government’s proposals for polyclinics – super surgeries with 20 or 30 doctors. Although critics complain that these would herald the end of personalised GP services, Mason thinks they would have the opposite effect, bringing medicine closer to patients.

“After you see your GP, if you need anything more elaborate than a pill, you have to get an appointment and go to a hospital five or 10 miles away,” he explains. “But patients who don’t need to go into an acute setting should never go there. This will be a lot better for the patient and from a cost point of view.”

The only question is whether a given polyclinic will need its own MR scanner (price tag £700,000) or just a bone densitometer – a low-level X-ray machine that can detect osteoporosis or identify “tofis”, people who are Thin on the Outside and Fat Inside. “Potentially, people like me, who look relatively slim, could be at risk because they have a build-up of fat around key organs,” he says.

In his late forties with a thick head of silver hair, Mason prides himself on being a walking endorsement of “early health”, and still pursues windsurfing – a sport he took up at university. His other great interest is restoring and racing classic cars. In 1998 he co-drove a blue 1959 Jaguar Mark 9 in the classic Monte Carlo Rally, finishing a respectable 36th out of 200.

Such competitive, adrenalin-fuelled sports just add to Mason’s image as a confident, go-ahead corporate executive. But hidden inside is something less common. Unlike most people at his level, his degree was not in business or finance but science, specialising in nuclear medicine. “I studied biophysics [at York] in the second year it was offered, before it was even known as a viable subject,” he says.

His Masters thesis, completed while he was working at Barts hospital in London, was the development of a “tissue equivalent phantom for CT” – in essence a three-dimensional test card for the scanners. Although he demurs when it is suggested that he actually understands all his products, Mason admits to deriving pleasure from being able to keep up with developments in his field.

He is also enthusiastic about ultrasound and uses it to illustrate several of his points, such as the pace of miniaturisation and convergence. “Five years ago, ultrasound was the size of a domestic fridge, wheeled around on a trolley,” he says. “Now it’s not much bigger than my portfolio here and soon it will be the size of my BlackBerry.”

Images of Dr McCoy’s tricorder on Star Trek spring to mind, but Mason immediately brings me back to Earth. “Several ambulance trusts are looking at ultrasound,” he says. “It could be life-saving with appropriate training, but we don’t want to put this diagnostic tool out into the hands of anybody.”

By convergence, he means that separate technologies are being used together to get results that neither could achieve alone. One example is the combination two years ago of PET scans and CT scans. “PET looks at function, down to molecular pathways, but you end up with a bright dot in the middle of blackness. That’s not much use to a surgeon,” Mason explains. “By using a CT scanner, which gives good spatial resolution, he’s able to see that hotspot in full three-dimensional context. Ultrasound could be next, he says, combining with the catheters and X-ray machines used in cath labs to investigate heart function.

Other than that hint, Mason is cagey about what his fellow scientists are working on in their labs. But he’s optimistic that the pipeline of ideas will continue to flow. “We’re moving from a world of ‘I believe our technology can do that’ to ‘I can prove our technology can do that’.”

Once 3D entertainment meant fumbling aroundwith a pair of multi-coloured spectacles that made you dizzy, before settling down in the cinema to watch a plotless film that involved a giant plastic shark coming out of the screen to get you.

But not even desperate 1980s cinematic experiences such as Jaws 3-D were enough to kill off our desire to feel part of the action. Now, after almost two decades on the audio-visual scrapheap, 3D is mounting a comeback… straight into your living room.

This summer, owners of a specific model of plasma TV screen will be able to marry it to a PC for the price of a couple of video games and create an instant 3D multi-media centre capable of showing films, games, TV programmes and eventually web pages. The sense of depth promises to be so realistic that viewers will want to reach out and grab the images, say the firms behind the technology.

A whole range of new films are being made as the new wave of 3D cinema allows such realism to be created on much lower budgets than in the past.

And while viewers will, for the next few years at least, have to wear a pair of glasses, the manufacturers promise that these bear little resemblance to the geeky goggles with red and green plastic lenses that fell between the cinema seats all those years ago. A recent demonstration of the product by Samsung in Seoul, revealed the pictures to be sharp, and the company insists that you can watch for hours without getting a headache.

The system is expected to attract hard-core gamers. New titles such as Medal of Honour are already 3D-enabled. But much broader appeal is predicted. Last week, one of Hollywood’s biggest studios threw its weight behind the 3D revolution. Disney subsidiary Pixar has announced that all its future films will be in 3D, with the first release, Up, set for July 2009. It follows in the footsteps of Shrek creator DreamWorks, which made a similar decision in 2007.

“I have seen the future of movies, and this is it,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks’ CEO, said at an industry event last summer. “I couldn’t be any more confident or certain about it.”

Live-action Hollywood also sees huge commercial potential in 3D. For example, a big-budget family version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth is set for release in July.

The BBC is also at the 3D cutting edge. It used pairs of special cameras to film Scotland’s victory over England in the Calcutta Cup rugby international at Murrayfield earlier this year. 3D images were beamed to a cinema at its Riverside studio in London. The audience reported it was much more like being at the game than watching it on ordinary television.

‘Fore!” When Tiger Woods smashes the ball straight for their heads, most people flinch – some duck – until the point-of-view pulls back to show trees hurtling past along the fairway. The simulacrum of the world’s greatest golfer is a bit dodgy, but the ball he has just smacked at your head is convincing. And it will be sailing out of a screen in a living room near you by this summer. After a century and a half of intermittent research, three-dimensional television is so close, you may feel you can reach out and touch it.

Some people watching the demonstration at Samsung’s digital media and telecoms research park in Suwon, an hour south of Seoul, do try to grab the animated images of approaching spacecraft, anthropomorphic cars and blobby aliens. It makes them look even sillier than the oversize goggles they have to wear to get the 3D effect. But the experience is so riveting that none of them cares. “It feels really real,” declares one normally sceptical French technology journalist as he tries on the goggles for a third viewing.

The target early adopters for 3D TV are, anyway, the affluent young men who have redefined cool to include computer games. No longer geeky, this business will be worth $46.5bn (£23.6bn) by 2010, almost half as much as the $104bn filmed-entertainment market, and it’s growing faster. High-end games, like most animated films today, are created using CGI (computer- generated images), and making them 3D is child’s play: you just instruct the computer to calculate each frame from two slightly different angles. The result is an illusion of depth which, whether you’re roaring around Monte Carlo in your F1 Ferrari or quarterbacking the Dallas Cowboys to NFL glory, makes a huge difference to the feel and enjoyment of a game.

That Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest consumer electronics firm, should want to take the lead in 3D TV is not surprising. From entering the flat-screen sector 16 years ago, without any technical support from the Japanese companies that had pioneered liquid crystal displays, it has risen to sit among the dominant players in the industry. In Europe alone it is number one for TVs, with 22.3 per cent of the market.

And the company is just one of more than 50 that make up Samsung Group, South Korea’s biggest conglomerate, responsible for fully one-fifth of the Asian Tiger’s economy. That’s 20 per cent of a big pie: Korea joined the trillion-dollar club in 2004 and today it has a GDP per head similar to Spain or Greece.

Size brings with it problems, however. To operate efficiently, different companies within the group have to act independently, sometimes developing incompatible strategies. For example, Kim Hunsuk, vice-president for research at the visual display division of Samsung Electronics, who still wears the company’s tan and blue bomber jacket, sees no new niches for his product to exploit – a view not shared by the LCD division that supplies his screens. At Tangjung, 40 minutes from Seoul by high-speed train, close to 100 robotic production lines are churning out the latest LCD screens in pristine conditions – guests have to wear plastic slippers over their shoes just to look through windows at the sealed units on the shop floor. Here there is much talk about new uses for flexible flat screens, made with plastics instead of glass, such as compact screens to which you can download today’s newspaper before rolling it up and carrying it to the Tube.

The family-owned chaebol – as South Korea’s biggest conglomerates are known – has other woes. An independent counsel investigating corruption allegations against Samsung Group demanded that its reclusive chairman, Lee Kun-hee, his wife, Hong Ra-hee, and son, Lee Jae-yong, appear earlier this month to answer questions. Mr Lee was questioned for 11 hours during his first visit to the counsel’s office, and was called back again a few days later. The investigation, into accusations made by the group’s former top lawyer, Kim Yong-chul, involves an alleged 200 billion won (£100m) in slush funds, below-value sales of convertible bonds and the purchase by Mrs Hong of 60bn won of artworks in a single year. No charges have been laid, but the notoriety alone must be deeply upsetting for Mr Lee, who almost never speaks publicly.

In Suwon, however, no one wants to talk about the parent company’s legal troubles. The fifth floor of the research centre is packed with flat screens, LCDs, plasmas and even a few organic light-emitting diodes, stacked inches apart, sometimes with the cases removed to reveal the circuit boards inside.

Lab benches seem to be in such short supply that three young techs have partially blocked the main corridor, just outside the glassed-in laboratory, with a trolley-mounted screen. Crouched round it, they conduct their tests oblivious to the gaggle of Western journalists filing by into a conference room where Michael Zöller, senior marketing manager for televisions at the European head office of Samsung Electronics, is explaining a chicken and egg problem: “Who’s going to buy a 3D TV if there’s no content for it, and who’s going to make 3D content if no customers are equipped to watch it?”

Samsung Electronics is trying to break that impasse. Instead of waiting five or 10 years for the next generation of 3D technology to become widely available, it is bringing out a souped-up version of a very old technology in the hopes that when the switch comes, its brand will already be established as the dominant player.

Sir Charles Wheatstone, a Victorian scientist, invented stereo-scopy, as it is formally known, in 1840. Sir Charles recognised that 3D vision is an illusion created by the brain using various clues, most importantly the stereoscopic images collected by the eyes. Hold a finger close to your face and shut first one eye and then the other – your finger jumps, and the size of that jump is a reliable gauge of how far away it is. With both eyes open, the brain erases the jump, but keeps the information to tell it how distant things are.

The future technology that everyone is hoping for will most probably involve angled beams that deliver slightly different images to each eye. The drawback is that the viewer has either to sit in exactly the right place, or the television must identify faces, locate the eyes, and aim its beams at these precisely chosen points. The former is a non-starter; the latter is still years away from going on sale at an affordable price.

In Samsung’s system, as with earlier 3D technologies, both images are displayed but light heading for the wrong eye is blocked – as it was, most famously, in the Seventies by the red and green filter cardboard spectacles given away in cinemas showing 3D films.

The Korean company’s innovation is to have the television screen flicker between images for the left eye and right eye, at the same time that the lenses of their goggles flicker between opaque and transparent. To ensure that the viewer doesn’t notice this, it has to be done very fast, 120 times a second – more than twice as fast as images appear on ordinary television screens and five times as fast as in movies. This only became possible with the latest generation of plasma screens.

Samsung’s 3D TV system has three components: a 120Hz plasma screen; the PDP 470 – not cheap, but attractive on its own for anyone who wants the large-screen plasma experience; a computer, which most people have already; and a 3D kit consisting of goggles, software for the computer and a little infrared emitter that sits on the television and ensures that goggles and screen are synchronised.

“The kit will cost about as much as two new games,” says Mr Zöller, picking just the right comparison to appeal to his target market. After games, content is expected to flow from films, television and websites.

Like any big electronics company, Samsung Electronics has numerous other technological tricks to promote, most of which will be standard fare in the industry within a year. The main selling point of the PDP 470 is that it makes moving images look sharper, particularly during the high-speed movements you get in live sports.

My own favourite innovation is a modest function that keeps the sound volume level when you’re channel hopping. Others may prefer the limited interactive content, including built-in recipes and children’s programming and even static displays of famous paintings by artists such as Matisse – though a poster from the National Gallery would be a lot cheaper.

Gannon and Gage Swanston are already pioneers of the 21st-century media era at the tender ages of seven and four. When they visit friends’ homes, they don’t understand why SpongeBob SquarePants can’t be put on hold while they go to the bathroom or get a glass of milk from the kitchen. In their house, as in a quarter of American homes, programmes are managed by TiVo, a device that allows the brothers to pause, replay or store shows at the push of a button. “They will never know a time when TV was one way,” says their father, Matthew, the director of business analysis at the Consumer Electronics Association. “This will be the first analogue-free generation. They’ll be intolerant of their content being trapped or delayed.”

One happy consequence is that when the weather is fine, the boys prefer to play outdoors, knowing that their favourite programmes will be waiting for them later. It’s a far cry from the mid 1960s, when I was their age, and a delayed trip home from Grandma’s meant that I missed Thunderbirds and my parents endured an unexpected back-seat tantrum. In those days, television had only two channels, and if you missed something, it evaporated in the ether. The telephone, with a proper dial, sat on a table in the hallway. Music was a collection of scratchy 78rpm classical records. Clocks and watches had to be wound up every day.

Even a decade ago, things were dramatically different from today. The internet was still a novelty and debate raged over whether business could or even should try to colonise it. More of my colleagues had pagers than mobile phones. DVDs existed, but Blockbuster was still stocked to the rafters with video cassettes. Now, even the Queen is on YouTube.

What, then, will things look like a decade from now, let alone in 2048? The short answer is that even Bill Gates doesn’t really know. The Microsoft boss became the richest man in the world by placing a winning bet on the future of personal computers in 1981 when everyone thought mainframes were the way to go. But even with the backing of a $7bn-a-year R&D department, he’s made some howlers.

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show (which he opens this weekend in Las Vegas), Gates has for a decade provided a glitzy peek into his digital crystal ball. Among the many announcements he’s made that you almost certainly don’t remember was Bob, a $100 program launched in 1995 that replaced desktop icons with cartoon characters in a virtual house. In 2002 he predicted that “entertainment would never be the same” thanks to Mira, a wireless touch screen that you could carry around the home with you. And if the pronouncements from on high at the CES aren’t enough, there’s his famous declaration at the 2004 World Economic Forum in Davos that the problem of spam would be solved within two years. You can understand why, when he steps down as chairman of Microsoft later this year, he’ll also be giving up his starring role at the mammoth trade show. His last appearance will be tonight at 6.30pm Pacific Time (1.30am GMT tomorrow).

Even predicting what will be revealed at the CES this week is a mug’s game, except to say that the volume of announcements will be huge. The Las Vegas Convention Center, the Sands Expo and Convention Center, the Venetian and the Hilton will play host to 2,700 exhibitors from around the world, not to mention celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Kevin Costner and a gaggle of rap artists, Rick Wagoner, the chairman of GM, and even the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. Britain’s delegation numbers 41, with companies ranging from Airsound of Torquay to Zetex Semiconductors of Oldham.

Rumours about deals between content companies, service providers and hardware manufactures are widespread in the industry press, but official confirmation, particularly of new gadgets, is scarce. “It’s an intensely competitive industry,” says Swanston. “They sit on things until the last minute. Then it’s like a fashion show. They put out a lot of designs and the ones that pull crowds and get a lot of questions determine what’s going to stick. Some products never make it.”

Even so, with the able advice of Mr Swanston and an IoS research budget of, admittedly, slightly under $7bn a year, here are 10 predictions of the sorts of products and trends you’re likely to see downloaded from Las Vegas to Dixons and Currys in coming years. If, however, your “triphibian atomicar” or “ultrasonic cycloplane” don’t materialise in the shops by 2018, don’t blame me, Matt or Bill, OK?

1 Led by Apple’s success in making hardware as stylish as the music, videos and games it hosts, the industry is scrambling to look cooler. Samsung is working with Armani, and LG has formed a partnership with Prada, while Dolce & Gabbana added its touch to a limited-edition Motorola Razr phone. “Japan is almost becoming the new Italy in terms of style and fashion,” says Swanston. “They’re not ashamed of their technology. They’re proud of being geeks.” So how long can it be before we get a Kate Moss laptop?

2 The phone, already the most important fashion accessory for many people. In America, which has always been behind the curve on what they call cellphones, hormones are being stirred with talk of mobile video conferencing, apparently unaware of the technology’s commercial belly flop in Britain. Pundits talk of the kind of wristwatch videophone seen in Warren Beatty’s 1990 film Dick Tracy. More plausible is the idea that while people want to carry around a single device, with lots of functions, they won’t all want the same options. Some will choose to combine their phones with MP3 players, web browsers or cameras. But few people will want a phone that can do everything. I, for example, used the video camera function on my 3G phone exactly once, to record a five-minute clip of my pocket.

3 Batteries. Boring, admittedly, but crucially important. While the rest of the technology has been getting smaller, lighter and more powerful by exponential leaps, battery technology has been, by comparison, plodding along. “Battery tech has been slowing down the industry for years,” says Swanston, adding that it’s one reason people still carry more than one device. “I don’t like killing the battery on my phone playing music or video.” That will probably change over the next five to 10 years, but don’t expect it to come with a lot of hype.

4 Robots are finally emerging from decades of industrial slavery, and years in the toybox. Robot cars successfully navigated their way around mock city streets for the US army last year. And in Las Vegas, their domestic cousins will be demonstrating skills such as vacuuming, lawn-mowing and pool-cleaning. Rosie, the Jetsons’ mechanical maid, must surely be on her way to a kitchen near you. And no worries about her visa status.

5 Televisions the size of your wall. Any wall. “Architects are going to have to redesign homes with fewer doors and windows to make room for them,” says Swanston. Just a few years ago, screens were all CRTs, the last surviving dinosaur from the age of the vacuum tube. Now consumers have a choice of flat-screen devices using technology such as plasma, liquid crystal, LED and digital light processing, which involves microscopic mirrors mounted on chips.

6 E-books. We’re out on a bit of a limb with this one, since early versions failed to take off, but the companies seem determined., and Swanston is convinced. “The industry is coming back to the written word. Amazon’s new ebook, Kindle, looks and feels like a real book,” he says.

7 PCs will look less like PCs. The Microsoft Surface, for example, is embedded in a table top like a sink in a counter. The beige box is already on its way out. What will replace it is harder to predict, but the iMac is not the last word.

8 Internet gaming. Connecting players around the world sounds like a great idea, but in practice the lag in transferring data drives players mad. You really don’t want to get frozen in mid-swing when the dragon you’re fighting is taking a deep breath. Higher bandwidth and better data compression will soon make this a viable option, though.

9 WiMax. Like Wi-Fi but over a much wider area. This technology promises to rival phone lines and cable for delivering broadband to the home. Expect opposition from those who fear it will damage their health.

10 The wired home. A perennial whose time to bloom may have arrived. ZigBee, for example, is an alliance of companies promoting a common standard for wiring up a house to automate everything from the hall lights to the fridge. Expect Sarah Beeny’s Property Ladder and the like to feature hi-tech rewiring, making it the central heating of the 21st century.