Washington Lawyer - December 2017 - 14

GOVERNMENT & GAVEL

TECH
INNOVATION
A History of Government-Funded

By Tracy Schorn

id you know these familiar,
innovative technologies are
the result of U.S. government
research and development? Thank
a government scientist today!
ACCELEROMETER
This gizmo measures changes in speed.
You might know it as the technology in your
Wii gaming system that detects changes in
movement, but government funding originally
helped to develop it for guided weapons. These
devices are also used in airbag technology -
when a car comes to sudden, screeching halt,
accelerometers signal that it's time to deploy
the airbag.

BARCODE

GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM

The ubiquitous barcode, used to scan and
identify merchandise, has been around since
the 1970s. The National Science Foundation
(NSF) helped fund research into improving the
devices that read barcodes. With the barcode
system, businesses can keep detailed, real-time
data on products, how well they sell, and can
track their distribution. Barcodes endure because
they're inexpensive and infinitely more accurate
than humans.

Blame military innovation for that annoying voice in
your car intoning "recalculating" every time you make
a wrong turn. GPS began as a U.S. Department of
Defense project in 1973 and became fully operational in 1995. GPS works by providing geolocation
and time information to a GPS receiver anywhere
there is a clear line of sight to four or more GPS
satellites. The system is owned and maintained by
the U.S. government, operated by the Air Force, and
is free to anyone in the world with a GPS receiver.

GOOGLE

INTERNET

You can also thank the NSF for Google,
which began as a student research project.
With the support of an NSF graduate student
fellowship, in 1996 Stanford PhD students
Larry Page and Sergey Brin created an algorithm
that ranked web pages according to their
relevance and relationship to other websites.
They went on to found Google in 1998. Today
Google is such a part of our everyday life it's
a verb!

Okay, so Al Gore didn't invent it - but the origins
of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the U.S. government in the 1960s to
build a communication system via computer
networks. (The word "Internet" is short for "internetworking.") In 1986 the National Science
Foundation Network allowed researchers to have
access to supercomputer sites in the United
States, sparking all sorts of innovations, and by
the early 1990s, there were commercial Internet

BABY
FORMULA
Versions of baby formula have been around since
the 19th century, but thanks to NASA funding,
researchers studying algae at Martek Biosciences
Corporation in Columbia, Maryland, were able to
identify the fatty acids in human breast milk essential to infant development - docosahexaenoic
acid and arachidonic acid. The scientists were
looking at how algae, through photosynthesis,
could be used as a way to create oxygen in outer
space. This in turn led to the incidental discovery
of the fatty acids, which have been manufactured
and used in baby formula since 2002.
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WASHINGTON LAWYER

* DECEMBER 2017

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Lawyer - December 2017