TOM SIMONITE

Friday, October 5, 2012

This summer Google set a new landmark in the field of artificial intelligence with software that learned how to recognize cats, people, and other things simply by watching YouTube videos (see “Self-Taught Software“). That technology, modeled on how brain cells operate, is now being put to work making Google’s products smarter, with speech recognition being the first service to benefit.

Google’s learning software is based on simulating groups of connected brain cells that communicate and influence one another. When such a neural network, as it’s called, is exposed to data, the relationships between different neurons can change. That causes the network to develop the ability to react in certain ways to incoming data of a particular kind—and the network is said to have learned something.

Neural networks have been used for decades in areas where machine learning is applied, such as chess-playing software or face detection. Google’s engineers have found ways to put more computing power behind the approach than was previously possible, creating neural networks that can learn without human assistance and are robust enough to be used commercially, not just as research demonstrations.

Google is now using these neural networks to recognize speech more accurately, a technology increasingly important to Google’s smartphone operating system, Android, as well as the search app it makes available for Apple devices (see “Google’s Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead“). “We got between 20 and 25 percent improvement in terms of words that are wrong,” says Vincent Vanhoucke, a leader of Google’s speech-recognition efforts. “That means that many more people will have a perfect experience without errors.” The neural net is so far only working on U.S. English, and Vanhoucke says similar improvements should be possible when it is introduced for other dialects and languages.

Other Google products will likely improve over time with help from the new learning software. The company’s image search tools, for example, could become better able to understand what’s in a photo without relying on surrounding text. And Google’s self-driving cars (see “Look, No Hands“) and mobile computer built into a pair of glasses (see “You Will Want Google’s Goggles“) could benefit from software better able to make sense of more real-world data.

The new technology grabbed headlines back in June of this year, when Google engineers published results of an experiment that threw 10 million images grabbed from YouTube videos at their simulated brain cells, running 16,000 processors across a thousand computers for 10 days without pause.

“Most people keep their model in a single machine, but we wanted to experiment with very large neural networks,” says Jeff Dean, an engineer helping lead the research at Google. “If you scale up both the size of the model and the amount of data you train it with, you can learn finer distinctions or more complex features.”

The neural networks that come out of that process are more flexible. “These models can typically take a lot more context,” says Dean, giving an example from the world of speech recognition. If, for example, Google’s system thought it heard someone say “I’m going to eat a lychee,” but the last word was slightly muffled, it could confirm its hunch based on past experience of phrases because “lychee” is a fruit and is used in the same context as “apple” or “orange.”

Dean says his team is also testing models that understand both images and text together. “You give it ‘porpoise’ and it gives you pictures of porpoises,” he says. “If you give it a picture of a porpoise, it gives you ‘porpoise’ as a word.”

A next step could be to have the same model learn the sounds of words as well. Being able to relate different forms of data like that could lead to speech recognition that gathers extra clues from video, for example, and it could boost the capabilities of Google’s self-driving cars by helping them understand their surroundings by combining the many streams of data they collect, from laser scans of nearby obstacles to information from the car’s engine.

Google’s work on making neural networks brings us a small step closer to one of the ultimate goals of AI—creating software that can match animal or perhaps even human intelligence, saysYoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal who works on similar machine-learning techniques. “This is the route toward making more general artificial intelligence—there’s no way you will get an intelligent machine if it can’t take in a large volume of knowledge about the world,” he says.

In fact, the workings of Google’s neural networks operate in similar ways to what neuroscientists know about the visual cortex in mammals, the part of the brain that processes visual information, says Bengio. “It turns out that the feature learning networks being used [by Google] are similar to the methods used by the brain that are able to discover objects that exist.”

However, he is quick to add that even Google’s neural networks are much smaller than the brain, and that they can’t perform many things necessary to intelligence, such as reasoning with information collected from the outside world.

Dean is also careful not to imply that the limited intelligences he’s building are close to matching any biological brain. But he can’t resist pointing out that if you pick the right contest, Google’s neural networks have humans beat.

“We are seeing better than human-level performance in some visual tasks,” he says, giving the example of labeling, where house numbers appear in photos taken by Google’s Street View car, a job that used to be farmed out to many humans.

 “They’re starting to use neural nets to decide whether a patch [in an image] is a house number or not,” says Dean, and they turn out to perform better than humans. It’s a small victory—but one that highlights how far artificial neural nets are behind the ones in your head. “It’s probably that it’s not very exciting, and a computer never gets tired,” says Dean. It takes real intelligence to get bored.

(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc said on Friday that it will spend more than $1 billion to buy its corporate headquarters in Seattle from Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen’s investment firm.

The world’s largest Internet retailer plans to buy 11 buildings, comprising 1.8 million square feet of corporate office space, for $1.16 billion. Amazon said it expects to close the deal in the fourth quarter.

Amazon had been leasing the space. But at the end of August, Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate, part of his Vulcan Inc investment vehicle, put the buildings in Seattle’s South Lake Union area up for sale.

Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with school friend Bill Gates, has been the central figure in revitalizing the South Lake Union neighborhood, which was a semi-industrial wasteland until recently, but is now a thriving center for tech firms and features a number of fashionable restaurants.

Amazon already has plans to build new offices nearby to house its growing staff.

(Reporting By Alistair Barr)

3:26PM EST October 2. 2012 – On the eve of the first presidential debate, a flurry of new polls suggest most Americans support clean energy and policies to reduce climate change — topics that have garnered scant attention on the campaign trail.

Nine out of 10 registered voters (92%) said it was “very” or “somewhat” important for the United States to develop and use solar power, according to an online survey of 1,206 adults released Tuesday by the independent polling firm Hart Research Associates. This support spanned the political spectrum, including 84% of Republicans, 95% of independents and 98% of Democrats.

“The consistency is very impressive,” Molly O’Rourke, partner at Hart Research, told reporters during a news conference. She noted similar results when voters were asked how they view solar energy (85% favorably) and federal incentives for the industry (78% supportive). The Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, commissioned the survey.

The results, along with those of two other recent polls, come as President Obama and his GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, prepare for their first debate Wednesday. So far, climate change and clean energy have not been major campaign issues, but nine environmental organizations delivered more than 160,000 petitions Friday to the debate’s moderator, Jim Lehrer, urging him to ask about them.

Another new survey found that 7% of likely voters remain undecided about how they’ll vote, and most of them say global warming will be one of several important factors determining that, according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change.

The undecideds are much more similar to likely Obama voters than likely Romney ones on climate change and energy-related attitudes and policy preferences, the survey found. For example, 80% say global warming is happening, compared with 86% for Obama backers and 45% for Romney supporters. The survey of 1,061 American adults, taken Aug. 31 to Sept. 12, was released Sept. 24.

Similarly, undecided voters in eight swing states — Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — favor presidential and congressional candidates who support clean air and clean energy policies over those who don’t, according to surveys of 22,412 likely voters released last week by Public Policy Polling.

By a roughly 2-to-1 ration (54% vs. 27%), these voters side with Obama’s view that the Environmental Protection Agency needs to set standards to lower carbon pollution, rather than Romney’s position that such limits would be bad for business and thus shouldn’t be imposed, according to the survey sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Fund Action Fund, an environmental group.

The poll, taken Sept. 14 to Sept. 20, found that 50% of likely votes in these states would cast their ballot for Obama and 44% for Romney; 6% remain undecided. It also found that the undecideds favor congressional candidates who support “standards to reduce toxic mercury pollution from power plants” over those who oppose them (59% to 23%).

The presidential candidates have largely avoided the controversial topic of climate change. Yet it did come up briefly at the recent political conventions.

Romney, who as a presidential candidates has expressed doubts about the causes of climate change and has called for a broad expansion of fossil fuel drilling, mocked Obama’s 2008 promise to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. “My promise…is to help you and your family,” Romney said, drawing applause.

Obama, who’s embraced an “all of the above” energy strategy that calls for renewable energy, nuclear power and limited oil and gas drilling, countered at the Democratic convention in September. “Climate change is not a hoax,” he told delegates, also eliciting cheers. “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children’s future.”

(Reuters) – Lending to small U.S. businesses rose in August for a second straight month, a report showed on Monday, a sign the economy may have been regaining its footing even before the U.S. central bank’s latest round of stimulus.

The Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index, which measures the overall volume of financing to small U.S. companies, rose to 109.9 from July’s upwardly revised 106.7, PayNet said. It was the highest level this year.

PayNet had initially reported the July figure as 103.8.

Borrowing was up 10 percent from a year earlier.

“We’ve got a winning streak going,” PayNet founder Bill Phelan said.

“These business owners are looking out three, to six, to nine months, and they are seeing some positive profit-producing opportunities: there must be something these business owners are seeing.”

The Federal Reserve last month unleashed a new round of bond-buying to lower borrowing costs and spur businesses to spend and, eventually, to hire.

PayNet’s lending index typically correlates to economic growth a quarter or two in the future.

Separate PayNet data showed companies were under less financial stress. Accounts overdue by 30 days fell to a new record low – 1.16 percent of the total – from 1.18 percent the previous month.

Longer-term delinquency rates also eased. Accounts behind 90 days or more, or in severe delinquency, dipped to 0.25 percent from 0.27 percent.

Accounts behind 180 days or more, which are considered in default and unlikely to be paid, fell to 0.32 percent from 0.34 percent.

PayNet collects real-time loan information, such as originations and delinquencies, from more than 250 leading U.S. lenders.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Dale Hudson)

First of five reports this week on the job outlook in key industries.

8:49AM EST October 1. 2012 – In 2009, Andrea Conaway was an X-ray technician whose career plan was showing a few fractures.

Hospitals were consolidating around Pittsburgh, so she went searching for oil, in a sense. She went back to school, got an associate’s degree in computer electronics, and in August, began a job as an associate systems analyst at EQT, a Pittsburgh-based natural gas driller.

“I figured this industry was the future,” says Conaway, who says she boosted her income to almost $50,000 a year from $38,000. “It’s growing like crazy around here. My friends were getting raises and great benefits, and I knew I wouldn’t be.”

GRAPHIC: Where the jobs are

Of all the places that America’s new jobs are, the emerging energy business, directly or indirectly, might be responsible for more of them than almost anything else.

Since 2002, the exploration of natural gas deposits embedded in shale, followed by oil drilling that began in earnest late in the decade, has created more than 1 million jobs, says Moody’s Analytics economist Chris Lafakis. That’s out of 2.7 million the whole country created.

“It’s really huge,” Lafakis says. “And the jobs pay very well.”

Jobs directly in the oil and gas extraction business pay an average of just under $150,000 a year, Lafakis says — almost exactly three times the national average.

Big jobs in small towns

Just counting positions directly in the energy industry, the shale boom has accounted for as many as 33,000 new U.S. jobs this year, according to Bright Labs, a San Francisco start-up whose website provides job-hunt data and tips.

More than 3,500 are in metropolitan Houston, Bright says. But the job expansion stretches through cities of all sizes. Oklahoma City’s 400 jobs are near the top of the list, Bright says. Denver, Pittsburgh, and Williston, N.D. — all near newly exploitable oil and gas deposits — are also seeing big changes from shale for shale-related jobs.

The most plentiful jobs — at least, of those that end up being advertised online — seem to be in engineering. Six of the top eight most-filled new jobs in the industry are for some kind of engineer, says Bright senior data scientist Jacob Bollinger.

Broad-based boom

But the shale job surge is more broadbased than those numbers alone would suggest, thanks to the energy industry’s complicated infrastructure and supply chain, researchers say. While oil and gas deposits are concentrated in a handful of places, more than 30 states saw oil and gas support employment, including suppliers and service companies that work with energy companies, rise at least 50% in the past decade, Moody’s says.

Because new rigs have to be built, and oil and gas have to be moved to market either via newly built pipelines or by truck and rail, new jobs abound at both drilling companies and their suppliers, says Tom Tunstall, research director for the Institute for Economic Development at the University of Texas San Antonio. It has closely studied the development of the Eagle Ford shale field that spans more than a dozen counties in South Texas.

In Pennsylvania, where officials say shale added 18,000 new energy industry jobs between 2008 and last year, another 5,000 jobs were added for freight trucking, and 500 more were created to build roads, according to a state-sponsored study this summer.

One company that’s gotten a big boost is the Union Pacific railroad, which now gets about 2% of its business from shale-based companies, hauling everything from tank cars of oil to sand used in the process of extracting gas and oil from deep underground, CEO John Koraleski says.

Rising U.S. energy production also is creating manufacturing jobs for everything from steel for piping to rail cars. Among the biggest: a $650 million, 350-job plant by French tubing manufacturer Vallourec to make products for shale drilling in Youngstown, Ohio, and a planned natural gas cracking plant outside Pittsburgh that could add 10,000 construction jobs and hundreds of permanent positions at Shell, if it goes forward.

“Every week, I see a billion-dollar investment,” Navigant Consulting energy economist Julie Carey says.

Teachers and vets may apply

Pioneer Natural Resources, an Irving, Texas-based driller, has hired 400 people in the South Texas area in the last two years, says Joey Hall, vice president in charge of Pioneer’s South Texas Asset Team.

About three-quarters of those are blue-collar workers in the fields, he said. But the company has retained at least another 1,000 outside contractors to build rigs, drive trucks and do other work.

On top of that, the company added scientists and engineers back at headquarters to support both Eagle Ford and other operations, he said. In all, the company added 850 staffers last year and another 500 so far this year — to a team of about 4,000.

“These are good, decent, honorable jobs,” Hall said. “People can and do leave satisfied and provide for their families.”

The picture is similar at ConocoPhillips, the nation’s biggest independent exploration company. Conoco added more than 500 jobs in Texas and North Dakota related to shale exploration in the last three years, spokeswoman Davy Kong said.

More than half were professional staff such as engineers, and the rest were field staff, such as mechanics and construction workers.

About 15% of the 54,000 new jobs expected in the Eagle Ford shale by 2021 will require a college degree, and a little more than 10% will require direct experience in the energy business, Tunstall said.

Community colleges and business groups are organizing training programs for those who need them. A federally funded $15 million program called ShaleNet plans to train pipeline operators and oil-field technicians nationwide, who are expected to follow work to new places as new fields open, said Laura Fisher, senior vice president for the Allegheny Conference, a business group in Pittsburgh.

At Pioneer, field hands and supervisors include everyone from military veterans to former schoolteachers, Hall said. Pipeline technician James Laake took about a $20,000 raise from his old job as a prison guard; the 24-year-old high school graduate, who has a welding certificate, said he needed only brief on-the job training.

“The transferable skills for veterans are leadership, logistics and working with large equipment,” Hall said. “Electronics are electronics, and a truck is a truck.”

Contractors and spinoffs

Because jobs related to shale are in more places, more job categories and more industries than you might suspect, figuring out which jobs are really caused by the shale boom is a bit tricky.

Only about a quarter of employment growth driven by the shale boom has happened at energy companies, Moody’s found. Another 308,000 have been “indirectly” created by the boom — those include the ones at transportation companies or equipment firms, Lafakis said. More than half a million are “induced” jobs — created to serve the needs of the other half-million people, once oil and gas brings more wealth to their towns.

The boom is causing everyone from law firms to banks to add white-collar staffers, as well — and to open everything from hotels to the Red Dog Ice House, a big- screen sports bar coming to Carrizo Springs, Texas.

At Huntington Bancshares in Columbus, Ohio, executives give shale drilling in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia much of the credit for the bank’s move to No. 3 among Small Business Administration lenders, from No. 15 three years ago, says CEO Stephen Steinour. The company has added 500 bankers, from loan officers to private bankers serving landowners whose petroleum-rich property turned out to be more valuable than they ever thought.

“It’s not all about shale, but shale is what’s driving the confidence to keep investing,” says Jim Dunlap, Huntington’s director of regional and commercial banking.

Hard to predict

Because the industry is still new, predicting its future growth is difficult, Lafakis said. Moody’s is projecting much less growth in the next decade than in the last one, but the firm’s analysts think it’s more likely than not those estimates will prove conservative, he added.

The big question mark is the price of oil and natural gas. Hiring for gas fields has slowed as drillers have pulled back in response to lower gas prices. Companies are moving money to developing shale oil instead.

Most agree that large-scale oil hiring has at least another year or two to run, before the infrastructure of the new fields is put into place, Hall says. Operating rigs will require less labor, and job growth will moderate, he adds.

Then keeping shale’s job boom going will depend on how many manufacturers in chemicals, autos and other energy-intensive fields will boost hiring by growing in the U.S., rather than abroad, thanks to energy oil prices lower than the world average, says George Schink, energy economist at Navigant Economics.

“We’ve done most of our hiring,” Pioneer’s Hall says. “But we’ll do some for another couple of years.”

The fuel-sipping cars have been unprofitable, but technological advances are changing that.

KEVIN BULLIS

Monday, October 1, 2012

As automakers work to comply with fuel-economy standards, they’re increasingly turning to hybrids. Last week, for example, Toyota announced that it would make 21 hybrid models by 2015, up from 12 now (see “Toyota Scales Back Electric Vehicle Plans” and “Stringent CAFE Standards Push Automakers“). Automakers have grown more enthusiastic about hybrids because the cost of making them has plummeted. Several years ago, Toyota’s Prius hybrid cost the consumer about $6,000 more than an equivalent conventional car—and even at that price, the company was losing money on every one it sold. The difference is now $2,500, and the car is profitable, says Mike Omotoso, an analyst with LMC Automotive. The drop in cost is due to an accumulation of incremental technology improvements, along with economies of scale. And advances going forward—better batteries, electric motors, and power electronics and transmissions—could cut costs by another 50 percent.

At Toyota, for example, the company shifted from a 500-volt electrical system to a 650-volt one, a decision that produced “a host of benefits,” says Justin Ward, advanced power-train program manager at the Toyota Technical Center. The company was able to reduce the cost and weight of copper wiring, use cheaper power transistors in the electronics that control the hybrid system, and make the electric motor cheaper and smaller.

Although other automakers have shifted to lithium-ion batteries, Toyota has stayed with nickel-metal hydride. But it’s made improvements to these batteries, such as shifting from cylindrical cells to flat ones to save space and modifying the cases to improve battery cooling. Simple changes like moving connectors from one side of a circuit board to the other can have big implications in terms of manufacturing, Ward says, making it possible, for example, to replace a worker with a robot for an assembly step.

Ford has helped develop motors that halve the required amount of dysprosium—the most expensive rare-earth material in its motors, used in part to give the magnets resistance to heat. Ford developed a better motor cooling system, which lessened the need for dysprosium. Simultaneously, its supplier, Hitachi, developed a better process for diffusing the material through a magnet, also allowing the use of less of it. This and other advances have helped Ford lower hybrid costs by about 30 percent.

Even as Toyota is increasing the number of its hybrid models, GM is dropping its conventional hybrids in favor of the much cheaper (and less fuel-efficient) eAssist vehicles—hybrids that use a motor together with a small battery that allows the engine to turn off whenever the car comes to a stop.

Will tablets that can transform into laptops challenge the iPad?

RACHEL METZ

Friday, September 28, 2012

The meteoric rise of Apple’s iPad has caused many people to neglect their laptops, or put off buying a new one. But many tablets released for Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system next month will attempt to make peace between the two formats—they’ll ship with snap-on keyboards.

Major computer manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard, Asus, Acer, and Samsung, are all readying convertible tablets. Of the many sleek slabs in black, white, or silvery gray shown off at an event in San Francisco on Thursday held by chip maker Intel to highlight its newest Atom processor, almost all will be available with a detachable keyboard.

Computer manufacturers are struggling to catch up with Apple, which essentially created the tablet market in 2010 with the release of the iPad. Tablets had been offered before by other companies, but Apple was the first to successfully sell consumers on the idea of a thin slab that operates somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop computer. Some analysts say there is evidence the iPad has eaten into the revenues of other computer manufacturers by causing people to decide against buying a laptop.

Samsung showed off the latest version of its Slate tablet, a grayish device with a bright touch screen measuring 11.6 inches at the diagonal. It comes with a pressure-sensing stylus called the S-Pen, and will sell with an optional detachable keyboard that uses magnets and latching hardware to stay in place. Unlike most of the devices shown at the event, the Slate had a price and release date: it will be available October 26, the same day Windows 8 launches, for $749 with the keyboard and $649 without.

Allison Kohn, public relations manager for Samsung Electronics America, said the company decided to pair the tablet with a keyboard to help users carry around fewer gadgets. “It simplifies your lifestyle, being able to consolidate your devices,” she said.

Asus displayed the Vivo Tab, along with an optional keyboard containing a battery that can add about nine hours to the tablet’s overall battery life. Intel says that tablets built with the latest Atom processor can get over 10 hours of battery life. The tablet, which has an 11.6-inch screen, will also go on sale on October 26. Asus was one of the first to experiment with convertible tablets, with a model called the Eee Pad Transformer, initially released in 2011. Spokeswoman Xi Min Sam said that 80 to 90 percent of people who bought the Transformer tablets bought the detachable keyboard, too, seeing it as extending the functionality of a tablet.

One presenter at the event whose new tablet won’t include a keyboard is Dell. Buyers of the Latitude 10—which has a 10.1-inch display and a removable battery—will also have the option to purchase a docking station, though, with a smattering of USB ports that will let you plug in, among other accessories, a keyboard.

(Reuters) – Wall Street advanced on Monday after a surprise expansion in U.S. manufacturing last month eased concerns about the economy and offset a gloomier outlook in Asia and Europe.

U.S. manufacturing expanded in September for the first time since May as new orders and employment picked up, an Institute for Supply Management report showed.

Financial stocks led the market’s advance with Goldman Sachs Group (GS.N) up 4 percent at $118.27 after the weekly Barron’s said Goldman shares could rise at least 25 percent in the next year as capital markets improve.

The ISM’s index rose to 51.5 from 49.6 in August, topping expectations for a reading of 49.7, according to a Reuters poll, and breaking above the 50 mark that separates expansion from contraction.

“Numerically that is a pretty small amount,” said Peter Jankovskis, co-chief investment officer at Oakbrook Investments in Lisle, Illinois. “But in terms of looking at the number, it’s the difference between seeing contraction and seeing growth. So psychologically that’s pretty important.”

The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI gained 143.88 points, or 1.07 percent, to 13,581.01. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index .SPX rose 11.61 points, or 0.81 percent, to 1,452.28. The Nasdaq Composite Index .IXICadded 13.16 points, or 0.42 percent, to 3,129.39.

The ISM figure came after a survey from Markit showed U.S. manufacturing ended its worst quarter in three years in September as foreign demand for U.S. goods fell sharply.

The U.S. data followed surveys in the euro zone that showed manufacturing slackened in the three months to September while Asia’s factories are continuing to struggle in the face of tepid demand from the United States and Europe. The data suggested the euro zone may be moving toward recession and showed a seventh straight quarter of slowing growth in China.

“The U.S. economy is growing at a slow pace but it is still growing. The ISM number suggests that things are not that bad,” said Adam Sarhan, chief executive at Sarhan Capital in New York.

The national ISM survey is especially heartening after some weak regional surveys last month. The Chicago PMI, a survey which measures business activity in the Midwest, showed its first contraction since 2009 in September.

Among stocks weighing on the Nasdaq, discount retailer Gordmans Stores Inc (GMAN.O) said it could miss analysts’ profit estimates for the first time since it went public in 2010 as slowing sales forced the company to cut its current-quarter outlook. The stock slumped 24.2 percent to $14.00.

Baidu Inc (BIDU.O) shares fell 3.7 percent $112.55 after Jefferies cut the stock to hold from buy and lowered the price target to $125 from $135.

The market’s gain on the first day of the final quarter of 2012 comes as stocks closed a strong third quarter, helped by stimulative measures from the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. The S&P 500 finished the quarter up 5.8 percent, its best third quarter since 2010.

“Despite a recent spate of weaker-than-expected data from across the world, markets are looking forward,” said Sarhan. “There is a lot of hope that the worst-case scenario is off the table not only for now, but for good.”

Ceradyne Inc (CRDN.O) shares gained 43 percent to $34.92 on news the company will be acquired by 3M Co (MMM.N) for $860 million.

The U.S. Defense Department on Friday awarded United Launch Alliance, which is a 50-50 joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) and Boeing Co (BA.N), a $1.17 billion contract to provide satellite launches using its Delta IV and Atlas V rockets. Boeing shares gained 1.5 percent to $70.62.

(Reporting by Edward Krudy; Additional reporting by Rodrigo Campos and Ryan Vlastelica; Editing by James Dalgleish)

TOM SIMONITE

The technology could enable therapeutic and diagnostic devices that are absorbed by body after they are no longer needed.