Techno-Optimist #11
A lot happening with brain-computer interfaces, progress against Parkinson's, antiaging treatments are heading in the right direction, some good news from Mars...and a whole lot more!
Welcome to the eleventh edition of Techno-Optimist, your go-to destination for all the latest updates and commentary on space, science, technology, and a whole lot more. To the 34 new readers since last time, welcome aboard!
Alright, we’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s dive in.
“Nature is the biggest threat to humanity…The negative consequences of human activity pale in comparison with the dangers posed by natural planetary and cosmic events and processes…The only way to ensure the future of our species is through exponential increases in wealth and technological sophistication.”
Brain-computer interfaces. Last time, we talked about a man with ALS using a brain-computer interface (BCI) to control electronics. Now, engineers at UC David Health have used a different BCI to restore the ability to communicate to a man “with severely impaired speech due to…ALS. The man was able to communicate his intended speech within minutes of activating the system.”
This sort of technology could be live changing for those not just with ALS, but any disease or injury that makes communication difficult. A crazy example of where it could help is for people with brain injuries. New research using functional MRI scans and EEGs showed that about 25% of patients unresponsive due to brain injury are actually conscious. During the scans, 241 patients were given instructions such as ‘“imagine opening and closing your hand" followed, 15-30 seconds later by "stop imagining opening and closing your hand.”’ Scan responses showed that 60 of them did so, indicating something called cognitive motor dissociation, where someone can “understand language, remember instructions and can sustain attention, even though they appear unresponsive.” In a nutshell, they’re locked in—conscious but unable to communicate. A BCI could open the door for them to interact with the world again. Let’s hurry up and get this going!
Last but certainly not least, Neuralink has successfully implanted its device into a second participant. Like the first participant, Alex is also a quadriplegic, and has already made remarkable progress using the link to play video games and “use computer-aided design (CAD) software to design 3D objects.” Noland Arbaugh, who received the first Neuralink implant, experienced some retraction of the threads in his device, temporarily reducing his BCI abilities (software tweaks allowed his performance to recover, and even improved further). So far, no thread retraction has been observed from the second device. Looking forward, the company plans to improve and expand computer control for those with the link, and work to “enable the Link to interact with the physical world, allowing users to feed themselves and move more independently by controlling a robotic arm or their wheelchair.” (UC Davis Health) (Science Daily) (Neuralink)
Progress against Parkinson’s disease. Human trials have started after the successful testing in primates of a new treatment for Parkinson’s disease, which destroys dopamine producing neurons in the brain—leading to symptoms like rigidity, tremors, and slowness of movement. Traditionally Parkinson’s has been treated with drugs like L-DOPE, which increase dopamine production; but over time they lose their effectiveness. This new approach takes cells from the individual and turns them into pluripotent stem cells, which are then directed to become a type of brain cell called dopaminergic neuronal progenitor cells. These cells become dopamine producing neurons, and in monkeys’ “dopamine production increased dramatically, as did the monkeys’ motor skills.” Human trials are currently underway.
Another discovery could help prevent Parkinson’s from getting worse, and even restore function. Ecklonia cava polyphenols, a seaweed derived antioxidant, was able to bring back motor function in mouse models of Parkinson’s, according to a research team from the Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan. I hope they try it in humans asap, this could be a stop-gap at the very least until things like cell therapy I mentioned is widely available. (SciTechDaily) (Science Daily)
Antiaging treatments moving in the right direction. As we see more progress towards antiaging treatments, it’s encouraging that they seem to generally extend both lifespan and healthspan. Researchers in Connecticut found that by “removing certain inflammation-causing cells from mice every month, starting in their middle age, not only extended their lifespans but also improved their heart health and overall physical function throughout their lives.” The mice lived about 9% longer with the treatments and maintained their improved health right up until the end—which is exactly the sort of thing we want to see! This approach could actually extend the current maximum human lifespan too—the oldest mouse in the study died at 43 months, equivalent to about 130 years of age for a human.
My prediction? We’ll see all these advances—this is just the most recent—come together into a treatment cocktail that starts being available to the general public in the next 10 years or so. If I had to guess, it’ll probably add 10-20 years to lifespan, and at least that to healthspan; meaning 60 may really be the new 50 (or 40!), 80 the new 60, etc. (SciTechDaily)
News from Mars. It could be a lot easier to warm Mars up than we thought. A newly proposed method using the iron and aluminum in Martian regolith to make nanorods “designed to trap escaping heat and scatter sunlight towards the surface” would be far easier than other methods, and could warm the planet by over 50 °F (~28 °C). It would only require about 2 million tons of the particles per year, which sounds like a lot but really isn’t. It would work fast too, with noticeable effects in a matter of months. This wouldn’t create a breathable atmosphere of course, but it could warm things up enough for microbes and some plants to survive outdoors, which would then start transforming the atmosphere into something that we can breath. For those of you who were wondering, I actually did mention this in an earlier edition. But there’s some more info available now, so I wanted to talk about it again. Besides, can one ever talk too much about terraforming Mars??!? (@bradneuberg) (Science Daily)
That’s not all though—using data from NASA’s Insight Lander geophysicists found evidence for an ocean’s worth of water deep underground on Mars, enough to cover the planet to a depth of a mile. The water exists in a massive aquifer created by fractured crust about 6-12 miles (10-20 km) beneath the surface. While it’s probably too deep to get at (challenge accepted?), it could mean other huge reservoirs on Mars located closer to the surface might exist. Only one way to find out! (UC Berkely News) (BBC)
Exoplanet habitability. Using archived data from the decommissioned GALEX space telescope that watched the sky in UV-wavelengths between 2003 and 2013, astronomers looked at 300,000 nearby stars smaller than our Sun for flare activity. They had thought that relatively few stars had UV flares strong enough to impact habitability on orbiting worlds, but the study found that strong flares were far more common—and also that “far-UV emission from flares is on average three times more energetic than typically assumed, and can reach up to twelve times the expected energy levels.” This isn’t great news for habitability around red dwarf (M-type) stars, which are the most common in the universe, making up around 75% of all stars.
But the habitability situation is far from hopeless, with a new study using data from the Kepler space telescope suggesting that half of Sun-like stars could have potentially habitable planets in their systems. By habitable here, the researchers mean a planet between 0.5 and 1.5x the size of Earth, orbiting their star at a distance where liquid water could exist on their surface. What we really need now are better telescopes that can confirm or deny these models and give us answers. Based on the current lineup of more powerful telescopes, we should start to get some real data and answers to this question in the next 5-10 years. It’s going to be an exciting time! These studies also line up with where I already felt the evidence has been pointing, that to look for Earth 2.0 and life, Sun-like stars are your best bets. Maybe larger K-type and smaller F-type stars could be good candidates as well—these are stars respectively a bit smaller and a bit larger than G-type stars like our Sun. We’ll see what the data says over the next few years. (University of Hawai’i News) (Space.com) (SciTechDaily)
Some exiting spaceflights to look forward to:
The one on everybody’s mind right now is Polaris Dawn. With a launch date of Tuesday, August 27th, it’s the first of three planned missions in the Polaris Program. The four astronauts (two are SpaceX employees which is awesome) will hit a maximum orbital height of around 870 miles (1,400 kilometers)—higher than any human has flown since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Two of the crew members (Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis) will also make the first ever spacewalk done by a non-government program. I’m probably going to do an entire segment on this in my next newsletter, so don’t worry there will be more! (Space.com)
Another exciting upcoming mission run by SpaceX is Fram2, “which will be the first human spaceflight mission to explore Earth from a polar orbit and fly over the Earth’s polar regions for the first time.” It could be launched this year, but that might slip into early 2025. For anyone wondering (I was), the mission was named after the Fram, a ship that helped early explorers reach both the Arctic and Antarctic. (@SpaceX)
Starship flight #5 is ready to go according to SpaceX, they’re just waiting (and waiting, and waiting some more) on regulatory approval. Seriously, I know these regulators have a job to do, but if we fail to become a spacefaring, multiplanetary species it’ll be because of bureaucrats and politicians. (@SpaceX)
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is almost ready for its inaugural flight. Scheduled for October 13th, it will carry NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars—consisting of two small satellites that will orbit the red planet to better understand the plasma and magnetic activity around it, and how it relates to Mars losing its atmosphere. For a cool extra, have a look at this video of Blue Origin’s spacecraft production facility, with Jeff Bezos giving the tour. (Phys.org)
Space
Sometimes the best part is no part at all. SpaceX’s new Raptor 3 engine (sea level variant) manages to pack more thrust than its predecessors despite being smaller, lighter, and far simpler on the outside. SpaceX engineers internalized a lot of components, which Elon Musk noted means that the “Raptor 3 doesn’t require any heat shield, eliminating heat shield mass & complexity, as well as the fire suppression system.” The outside of the Raptor 3 is so slick that Tony Bruno, president of United Launch Alliance, thought that it was only partly assembled. Which prompted SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell to poke fun at him by posting a picture of a Raptor 3 engine ignition test with the caption “Works pretty good for a ‘partially assembled’ engine :) ” (@SpaceX) (@elonmusk) (@Gwynne_Shotwell)
China is looking to catch up to SpaceX’s Starlink megaconstellation of satellites with their own version called Qianfan (“Thousand Sails”). Its first launch on August 6th delivered 18 satellites to an 800 kilometer (500 mile) polar orbit. However, all did not go well, with the rocket’s upper stage breaking apart and creating “a cloud of over 700 pieces of debris” that could cause long term problems in that orbit. (Space News)
Lockheed Martin has published a novella and video of what life on the Moon might look like in the early 2040s. Water is key of course, being used for everything from life support to the manufacturing of rocket fuel. It also describes work being done to set up a permanent human base on Mars. I like it, let’s push this sort of vision forward! (Space.com)
It’s long been assumed that the Andromeda Galaxy—our nearest large galactic neighbor—will collide with the Milk Way in 4 or 5 billion years. New calculations suggest that’s it’s not a guarantee, with there maybe being only a 50% change of a collision and merger happening in the next 10 billion years. Sorry to mess with your long term plans! (@coreyspowell) (Phys.org)
If you’ve got some extra time on your hands, how about helping some astronomers from the Dutch Black Hole Consortium find newly formed stellar mass black holes? Their BlackHoleFinder app has now been released in 8 languages—including English of course—so that people from around the world can participate. If I had more time (which I do not) I’d give it a go. (Phys.org)
New data from the Gaia space telescope suggests that asteroid moons—a smaller asteroid orbiting a larger parent body—are far more common than expected. 352 of these binary asteroids have tentatively been found by combing through the data, bringing the total to about 850 known. But the astronomers think that close to 1/6 of all asteroids might have a moon in orbit, so there’s a lot more out there waiting to be found. (ESA)
AI, Energy, Engineering, & Physics
The Spence Copper mine in northern Chile—one of the world’s largest—has been operating 33 mining trucks and 5 drilling rigs in 100% autonomous mode for the past three months. “These operations, which moved 80 million tons of material, occurred with zero incidents.” The plan now is to expand these capabilities to other mines in Chile and elsewhere. (FutureTimeline)
Chinese special forces are training with bird-like drones that from a distance actually do look like a bird in flight—complete with flapping. You know if they're being public about this that they have better ones they're keeping secret. I’m assuming we have similar (or hopefully better?) drone technology. (Interesting Engineering) (@Nickatgreat1220)
Speaking of stuff that used to reside exclusively in spy novels: Space tech firm Ubotica has a satellite equipped with AI able to identify objects on the land or sea in real time—identifying 142 ships docked at a port in a matter of minutes. The satellite has the ability not only to identify ships, but “their size, and even their direction, all in real time.” This is a commercial company by the way, these are capabilities anyone can use now, which is awesome. (Interesting Engineering)
Computers are working towards chalking up another win against humans. A Google trained robot was able to beat 45% of players at table tennis (aka ping-pong), demonstrating that robots are rapidly improving in chaotic situations where speed and precision is required. While managing to paddle a number of beginner to intermediate players, the robot lost every match against advanced players. That said, the researchers thought just a few months ago that their system would probably lose every match even against humans that had never played before, so it’s making rapid progress. (New Atlas)
In a bid to bring more tech developed for space down to the rest of us, Helix Earth Technologies has built a dehumidification system based on one they developed to filter air on spacecraft. Their ‘Helix Micra’ filtration system is 6-8x more efficient than what’s available for commercial dehumidification systems, as well as being smaller and easy to 3D print. The plan is to retrofit it onto existing commercial HVAC systems, where it would dehumidify the air—part of the cooling process—far more efficiently than existing systems, reducing energy usage by half. Apparently (I did not know this), dehumidifying air can take up to 80% of the energy in air conditioning in humid environments. (New Atlas)
Grok-2 has been released! In Beta mode for now, xAI’s newest LLM is available to anyone with a paid account on X. According to the company its very comparable to, and even slightly outperforms, similar LLMs like Claude and GPT-4. With the goal of seeking truth and advancing “our collective understanding of the universe,” Grok doesn’t have the annoying politically correct restrictions and biases all that other mainstream LLMs seem to share. So kudos to xAI! According to Elon Musk, Grok-3 should be released by the end of the year. (xAI) (@elonmusk)
Medicine
In a big step towards a potential Alzheimer’s treatment, UCLA Health researchers have found and synthesized a compound that in mouse models of the disease restored cognitive functions by “jump-starting the brain’s memory circuitry.” If it works similarly in humans, it would be the first drug to actually restore memory and cognition in Alzheimer’s, instead of just slowing decline. (Medical Xpress)
Cell therapies involving genetically modified cells have huge potential to open up all sorts of medial avenues from emergency medicine to growing of 3D bioprinting organs. The biggest barrier so far to their widespread use is that you really need generic cells (aka immunologically invisible cells) that can be used in anyone without risk of rejection. Developing that would be faster and cheaper than modifying cells separately for every individual treated, making the technology practical. Making generic cells was actually done about a decade ago, but unfortunately the cells tended to become cancerous. That problem has now been solved with the creation of “cells which cannot proliferate unaided and which cannot therefore turn into malignant cells,” that are only able to divide “if they are supplemented with [the amino acid] thymidine, one of the building blocks of DNA.” (Science Daily)
Researchers have designed an injectable biomaterial that regenerates cartilage in joints by recruiting a growth factor called factor-beta1 in the body that “promotes cartilage repair.” Six months after injecting it into a sheep, the biomaterial “triggered noticeable cartilage growth and enhanced repair in the animals’ damaged joints.” More development is needed, but the hope is to move this treatment to use in humans. (Live Science)
Have any of you ever used those 24-hour blood pressure monitors? While helpful for the doctors to understand what’s going on, they’re rather annoying, sometimes uncomfortable, and often make sleeping difficult. A new device is a big improvement from that, using ultrasound to take your blood pressure. It works by using sound waves to “gently stimulate resonance in an artery and then using ultrasound imaging to measure the artery’s resonance frequency, arriving at a true measure of blood pressure.” The results are just as good as with standard blood pressure cuffs, and it sounds far more convenient and comfortable. It’s called resonance sonomanometry—someone might have to come up with an easier device name. (Science Daily)
Scientists have created a cheap bandage that uses an electric field to help speed up healing for chronic wounds, helping them heal 30% faster than those covered by normal bandages. It’s been well established that electric fields accelerate wound healing (we’re not entirely sure why), but they aren’t used as part of standard treatment practice. Why not? I honestly don’t know, but they should be! Hopefully this less expensive bandage makes them more accessible and normalizes their use. (Interesting Engineering)
Last time I told you about a prophylactic approach against HIV that was incredibly effective in the 2,000 women who participated in the study. Another development may have just created a “functional cure” for HIV. It takes a genetically engineered, “non-pathogenic version of HIV—lacking genes needed to replicate” that outcompetes the wildtype HIV and restrained the virus in macaques. (@SamuelBHume)
Biotech & Agriculture
Researchers have discovered a protein called DdrC (DNA Damage Repair Protein C) in a common bacterium that can completely stop DNA damage and facilitate its repair. The bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans, is able to survive in high radiation conditions—between 5,000 and 10,000 times what would kill a human cell. Its DdrC protein works by scanning “for breaks along the DNA and when it detects one it snaps shut—like a mousetrap.” This has the effect of neutralizing damage by stopping it from getting worse, and then acting like a beacon for other cellular repair mechanisms to come fix the problem. The researchers said that “in theory, this gene could be introduced into any organism—plants, animals, humans—and it should increase the DNA repair efficiency of that organism’s cells.” It’s early, but this might be really helpful for everything from cancer treatment to slowing down aging. Also, the potential for use as we travel more into space—where a higher dose of radiation is the norm—could be a huge boon. (Phys.org)
Human DNA has multiple levels of coding embedded in it. There’s the familiar one we all know comprised of A, T, G, and C that codes for genes; but that gene coding is only a small part of our entire genome. Much of the rest is still a mystery, though it clearly has a purpose. To search for and unravel the hidden information that we’ve missed so far, researchers have built GROVER, an AI trained by looking at human DNA—with a goal of “learning its rules and context to draw functional information about the DNA sequences.” (Science Daily)
Scientists at Columbia University have made a rather astonishing discovery: it turns out that contrary to everything previously known, bacteria have free floating, extrachromosomal genes—which are genes that exist outside of what we previously thought of as the genome. The discovery is part of a bacterial defense system against viral assault, generating a protein that prevents a virus from replicating. The really exciting question now is whether these free-floating genes exist in higher organisms. “There might be genes, or DNA sequences, that don't reside in any of the 23 human chromosomes. Maybe they're only made in certain environments, in certain developmental or genetic contexts, and yet provide critical coding information that we rely on for our normal physiology.” [Sidenote: these free-floating genes are different from plasmids]. (Columbia University)
A new method combining CRISPR with another approached called Single-Strand Annealing (together dubbed SEED/Harvest, don’t ask me why) was able to modify fruit fly genomes “more efficiently and without residual damage.” The technique could be useful for everything from studying living cells, to biotechnology and medial applications. (SciTechDaily)
Weird & Wonderful
Saudi Arabian megacity Neom is under construction. The planned completion is currently 2039, and despite concerns that things are progressing too slowly, they really are progressing. Recently the desert kingdom launched something called Ground X, consisting of over two million pictures and a large number of live views from the many construction sites. Unfortunately it’s not available to the general public, but you can check out the recent progress video above which is pretty cool too. There’s a number of previously released images of how various parts of Neom will look once completed that you should look at. Honestly, if they build even some of this it’ll be pretty incredible. (New Atlas)
In 2026 an organization called the Krafla Magma Testbed plans to drill 2 km (1.2 miles) into an active volcanic caldera in Iceland. They plan to establish “the world´s first magma centre – an international, open access research facility with in-situ access to a magma chamber for advanced understanding and experiments concerning magma dynamics, extreme geothermal energy, and volcanic risks.” Extreme geothermal indeed! (@coryspowell) (KMT)
Photos & Videos
An incredible shot from the JWST of two colliding galaxies, highlighting their warm “skeletons” of gas and dust. (@coreyspowell)
Have you ever wondered what it would look like to travel home to Earth from outside our galaxy? Data from the Gaia mission was used to create a video of exactly that. Watch on a full screen, a larger one if you can. There’s nothing like heading home after a long intergalactic voyage. (@apod)
Andrew McCarthy managed to get this incredible shot of Mars emerging from behind the Moon. There was a suggestion on X that NASA by the image rights and use it for their Moon-to-Mars campaign. I completely agree! (@AJamesMcCarthy) (@DrPhiltill)
An incredible shot of a Falcon 9 transiting the Sun, by John Kraus. Take a look at some of the Sunspots visible in the picture too, the smallest ones are about the size of Earth.
Volcanic activity is picking up again in Iceland with a spectacular new eruption! (@guidetoiceland)
Recommendations & Reviews
This time I’m going to recommend two other techno-optimist type newsletters that I’d add to a list of excellent techno-optimist publications like
, , and . When it comes to pro-human, pro-progress publications, in my opinion there can never be enough. There’s going to be some overlap I’m sure, but there’s also going to a be a lot of differences in content and style depending on what stands out to each author.First off is The Up Wing, by Tony Morley. It’s a good summery of interesting techno-optimist news, and Tony recently wrote a great article that caught my eye on the history of pineapples and how they became affordable. “The $6,374 Pineapple — Here's how free markets, globalization, and technological innovation turned a fruit worth its weight in gold, into a budget pizza topping.” (The Up Wing)
The second is Warp News, by The Angry Optimist (aka Mathias Sundin), which gives “Fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress - and stories about the people who create them.” Each newsletter is a great series of short summaries, each of which you can open up to get a more detailed mini-article. Check out his latest, Warp News #243. (Warp News)
That’s all for today, but Techno-Optimist will be back in your inbox a fortnight from now. Thank you all for reading, I hope you enjoyed it—and until next time, keep your eyes on the horizon.
-Owen
Excellent issue. The SpaceX’s Raptor engine…this is something that anyone can geek out on.
Just look photos of this engine! Raptor 1, btw, was the most advance engine…possible the most advanced machine…built by humankind. We are already on version 3 which looks so slick and simplified that its hard to believe it works.
That is why Tory Bruno, himself a smart guy, couldn’t believe it was actually a complete engine.
We shouldn’t be surprised, human progress is all about doing more with less. More output with less energy and fewer atoms!
I will be posting this one on my Facebook page as well: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61563015572000
Another great roundup. I've got to he honest I come here for the space and computer science type stuff because that's my area of interest. However the first section about brain-computer interfaces really struck me.
"New research using functional MRI scans and EEGs showed that about 25% of patients unresponsive due to brain injury are actually conscious."
This is crazy and a thought I find utterly terrifying. Being "locked in" scares me more than death. It must be horrific. Anything we can do to help these people is amazing.