Media Files for PmmWS

Below are media files related to the Passive Millimeter Wave Spectrometer, which won a 2007 R&D 100 award as "one of the 100 most technologically significant products of the year [globally]". (If you do not know what the R&D 100 awards are, the Chicago Tribune called the R&D 100 awards the "Oscars of Invention". [1] Maybe someday I will post the pictures from the awards banquet.) InventorSpot picked our project as #4 in their pick of the top 10 of the R&D 100 inventions for that year. [2]

After the R&D 100 winners were announced, the anniversary of 9/11 was approaching. To show an example of what the lab was doing for homeland security, Argonne featured our project as the feature article on the homepage for several weeks. As a result, news media doing articles on 9/11 picked it up and ran interviews / articles about us. Below is a collection of media from various sources on our project.

See the Press Release page for more detail on the press releases.

[I'm including this for people who can still view Flash objects] This flash object accompanied the online version of the Daily Herald's article about the project, Smoking Out Terrorism (PDF). A print friendly version accompanied the newspaper article.

WDCB did a radio interview with Sami about the project, which aired on 9/11/2007 at 5:35 AM. (MP3/ WMA) The host completely slaughtered Sami Gopalsami's name.

The interview aired again as the lead story in their evening news wrap-up at 6:07 PM. (MP3/ WMA) (The interviews are identical, only the lead-in and lead-out segments are different, with a different host reading Sami's name correctly this time.)

As an anecdote, the interview was conducted over the phone, and three of us were there that day. (Paul Raptis was on travel.) Sasan and I assumed we would be connected by conference call and waited in our offices, but Sami believed we were all going to be interviewed individually, and the interviewer only needed his questions answered once, so noone ever connected us.

CNN aired a segment called "Preventing the Worst" during The Situation Room on Christmas eve that featured our project among a couple of others. Jeanne Meserve came to Argonne and conducted an interview with Sami, and we demonstrated what we could of the project. (Alas, it was deemed too risky to actually release NO gas while visitors were there. Some silly reluctance about lungs melting, etc...) Unfortunately, the audio of our interview was cut, but they still showed the instrument and some data collection. (We did not have a silly anecdote like coming up with the idea while changing diapers.) I got all of 2 seconds of background-walker screentime, woohoo! hehe. (transcript)

NOTE: Since CNN appears to no longer be hosting this file on CNN.com, I put it up here. Also, the aspect ratio is the ratio CNN used, so everything is stretched out horizontally.