Techno-Optimist #9
Hints of life are found on both Mars and Venus, a new gene editing tool goes way beyond CRISPR, tiny microbots manipulate individual cells...and a lot more!
Welcome to the ninth edition of Techno-Optimist, your beacon for the latest news and insightful commentary across the fields of space, science, technology, medicine, energy, AI, and more. To the 31 new subscribers who are excited about the future and weary of all the doomerism, welcome aboard! I’m sending this one out a little later in the day than usual, but it’s a real banger, so hopefully worth the wait.
I was thinking about energy more than usual last week, and just wanted to remind everyone that every materially good thing about our civilization is downstream of abundant, reliable, and affordable energy. Energy is the foundation on which it all gets built, and enables everything else. This picture is a great way of visualizing it, as wealth is a pretty good proxy for all the physical things that enable human beings to flourish, and energy directly provides the necessary means for generating that wealth. No matter what “experts” say about how our way of life is possible without high energy use, don’t believe them. Reality says that you cannot have a wealthy, low-energy country.
Alright, lets dive in.
"You name it, more energy helps...the first myth we need to bust is that humans need to consume less energy. That belief, which has held sway over the past 50 years has caused countless deaths and untold human suffering. It's held humanity back from reaching our potential. It should make you angry. More energy means more human flourishing. Nothing else translates quite so directly." –Packy McCormick
Hints of life on Mars and Venus. NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover has found a rock that may be evidence Mars hosted past microbial life. Analysis by onboard instruments indicate that the rocks “exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water.” In addition to having organic compounds, the key features on the rock are dozens of small, irregularly shaped light-colored patches ringed by darker material—somewhat resembling leopard spots. On Earth, “these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”
To confuse things, olivine crystals are present. Olivine forms out of magma, so if it formed at the same time as the leopard spots, then microbes can’t have been present. But it’s thought that the olivine might also be related to rocks formed (presumably at a different time) further up the crater rim, and might have been eroded from their original home and introduced to this rock later on. For now, Perseverance has done all the tests it’s capable of doing. These samples need to be brought back to Earth where we can do far more detailed analysis. That, or we need to send humans to Mars with lab equipment. I vote for that second option personally, a group of humans could do more research in a month than a fleet of rovers could in a decade.
Far closer to the Sun, a new detection of phosphine has been made in the atmosphere of Venus using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. Originally detected back in 2020 and subject to intense debate, it seems increasingly likely that the molecule really is present in the Venusian atmosphere. Which is exciting because there is no known abiotic process on terrestrial worlds that produces it. While not completely conclusive of life—it’s always possible some unknown abiotic process generates it—finding phosphene is extremely suggestive that life could be present in the clouds of Venus. This new detection shows a few parts per million of the gas between 55 and 57 kilometers (34–35 miles) above the planet’s surface. Strengthening the case for phosphine is reanalysis of old data from the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe launched back in 1978, which found “compelling hints for the presence of phosphine at around 55 kilometers (34 miles) of altitude in the clouds.”
Upgrade. Has anyone read Upgrade by Blake Crouch? That's the somewhat dystopian (but very entertaining) version of what this groundbreaking research could lead to. The new gene editing tool is a step well past CRISPR, and is essentially a ‘word processor’ for DNA. Based on jumping genes, the new system—being called both ‘bridge editing’ and ‘seekRNA’—is able to “cut, paste, and flip any DNA sequence.” Unlike CRISPR, it does this without breaking DNA strands, which can cause unintended mutations or failures to insert the desired new sequence. Essentially what this new tool does is allow scientists to “specify a genomic location as well as what sequence should go there,” and then add or swap in large segments of DNA—including whole or even multiple genes.
According to its creators, the tool is “allowing us to make flexible genome manipulations beyond what’s possible with CRISPR…the bridge recombination system gives us precise control over large scale DNA rearrangements, enabling a new generation of genome editing and design.”
So far this technique of bridge editing has only been used in bacterial cells, so it’s not yet known whether it works in humans. But if I was a betting man, I’d say that a way will be found to make it work, opening up an entire new field for gene editing and curing disease.
Using this tool alone doesn’t quite get you to ‘Upgrade’ style edits, but all you’d need to do is combine it with a partner tool capable of making smaller precise edits easily. Here’s one that allows you to make multiple small edits simultaneously in a single step.
I’ve gone back and forth over whether to be worried about this. But my position is that while both good and hard will be done with it, on balance technology has been an overwhelmingly positive force for humanity. This won’t be any different.
Speaking of Upgrade: tweaking a single gene leads to better than normal hearing and auditory processing in the brain in otherwise normal mice, according to a new study. The obvious first application here is to help people with age or injury related hearing loss, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be used for healthy people as well. (Singularity Hub) (Arc Institute) (New Atlas)
Fusion energy updates. The Fusion Industry Association 2024 report is out now! Some of the highlights include continued workforce growth, and another billion dollars of funding in the past year, mostly private. The pace of growth does need to speed up though if we want to hit our goal of power plants in the early 2030s.
An experiment by Realta Fusion and the physics department at UW-Madison has produced “the highest ever steady magnetic field in fusion plasma.” Dubbed WHAM (Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror), the experiment “formed and held a plasma with a magnetic field strength of 17 Tesla.” The magnets were from Commonwealth Fusion Systems, another private company working towards fusion energy.
The Fusion Energy Act (part of the ADVANCE Act) was signed into law on July 9th, and will provide an important regulatory framework for fusion energy, regulating it similarly to particle accelerators, not existing fission reactors. In a nutshell, it’s a very good thing, and lays the groundwork for the rapid commercialization of adoption of fusion energy.
Thankful for private fusion companies keeping innovation and progress in the industry moving forward. Unfortunately, we can’t depend on ITER for that (if we ever could). They recently announced a much slower timeline, with operations not starting until 2034—assuming no further delays—and full power not happening until almost 2040. I think it highlights the problems inherent with large, multinational scientific programs. Not all of them are this bad of course, but it’s a hazard. (Fusion Industry Association) (@is_fusion) (PR Newswire) (TC) (@Fusion_Industry)
Drone updates. What do you call a group of drones? A flock I guess, but we should come up with something cool. A flock of ravens is a murder, a flock of owls a parliament, etc. Perhaps a flock of drones is a buzz? Researchers in Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary have just done an autonomous drone “traffic control” field test involving 100 drones zipping around without crashing into each other. This was a live test, but simulations show the system could handle up to 5,000 drones simultaneously.
Taking their inspiration from how certain geckos land on trees, a surveillance drone has been built that crashes into trees nose first, then wraps its wings around it to ensure a stable perch.
Lastly, Dawn Aerospace has been given permission for it’s Mk-II Aurora suborbital spaceplane—an unmanned drone—to do test flights at unlimited speeds, i.e. with no speed restrictions. It’s expected to be “the first privately funded UAV to break the sound barrier.” (Interesting Engineering) (ELTE) (New Atlas)
Space
I sometimes criticize Europe for their overregulation and what often seems like an anti-tech stance. But credit where credit is due, the ESA’s next big space mission is the PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) telescope, scheduled to launch at the end of 2026. It’s big news because it will really be the first telescope capable of finding an Earth analogue around a Sun-like star. “PLATO's goal is to search for exoplanets around stars similar to the Sun and at orbital periods long enough for them to be in the habitable zone…One of the main mission objectives is to find another Earth-Sun equivalent pair.” In other words, we could find Earth if we were looking at it with this telescope. The hunt begins for real. (Royal Astronomical Society) (@esascience) (ESA)
In 2029 the asteroid Apophis will make a close pass by Earth, coming just with 20,000 miles (32,000km) of our planet—closer than some satellites. There’s no danger of a collision, but the scientific opportunities to study a near Earth asteroid at close range is priceless. Several missions are planned, including the rechristened OSIRIS-APEX that will rendezvous with it as it passes Earth. A newly announced mission will join the scientific bonanza, the ESA’s Ramses spacecraft—which will follow Apophis before, during, and after its flyby. The ESA is on a bit of a role with scientific missions, keep it up! (ESA) (@ExploreCosmos_)
Apollo 11 Moon landing, July 1969 | NASA July 20th was an important day, marking 55 years since 1969 when “men from Earth first set foot upon the moon.” As glorious as that achievement was, the last footprints we made on the lunar surface were just 3 years later, in 1972. We need to go back, and I think it would be shameful if we don’t return (this time to stay!) before the last men who walked on the moon pass away. There’s only 4 left, so let’s get a move on! (@NASA) (@TheRealBuzz) (NASA)
Future Lunar bases could be built in caves formed from old lava tubes. They would provide protection from radiation, ameliorate extreme temperature swings, and make it easier to pressurize large volumes of living space. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has just used radar data to confirm that the shaft of a known structure—Mare Tranquillitatis Pit, near where Apollo 11 landed—does in fact connect to large tubes at its base. (New Atlas) (@MarioNawfal) (Port San Antonio)
Forecasting solar weather and geomagnetic storms has just taken a leap forward, with scientists saying “it is now possible to predict the precise speed a coronal mass ejection (CME) is travelling at and when it will smash into our planet—even before it has fully erupted from the Sun.” Such storms can damage electronics in space or even on the ground if severe enough, so accurately predicting them is an important part of preparation and mitigation. (Eureka Alert)
Planets to be redefined again. The current definition of a planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is rather problematic, and had the unfortunate consequence of demoting Pluto from planet to dwarf planet (which I’ve steadfastly ignored). It also says that a planet must orbit our Sun, which doesn’t make much sense. The new proposed definition sets an upper and lower mass limit for a planet, and that it “may orbit one or more stars, brown dwarfs or stellar remnants.” Just for interest, the mass limit ranges from about 1/6 that of Earth to 13x that of Jupiter. (Science Daily)
While I generally stay away from politics in this newsletter, I think it’s worth talking about it briefly here. The GOP has released their platform which they would work to enact if elected, and I think it’s important to at least be aware of the position held by a possible incoming administration. What does it say about space?
“Expanding Freedom, Prosperity and Safety in Space Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.”
That actually sounds pretty good to me, but follow through will harder. Actions speak louder than words. (@GregWAutry) (Payload)
NASA’s JWST “has confirmed—with extraordinary precision—the differences in temperatures and cloud cover between the two sides” of a tidally locked gas giant planet. WASP-39 b is 1.3x larger than Jupiter (but with a smaller mass), orbiting a red dwarf star 700 light years away. By observing the zones of eternal sunrise and sunset, they confirmed that the evening is several hundred degrees hotter than the morning; likely caused by searing winds from moving from the day to night side, and cooler winds moving from night to day at the dawn boundary. This is a gas giant of course, but it’s probably a more extreme example of typical conditions on any tidally locked worlds that do manage to retain an atmosphere. (NASA)
AI, Energy, Engineering, & Physics
Sailors and beachgoers will be pleased to hear that a new AI model has been built that can accurately predict giant rogue waves up to five minutes in advance. These waves can be far larger than the ones surrounding it, and between 2011 and 2018 are thought to have killed 386 people and sunk 24 ships—until now there was no way to predict them. Currently the program has 70-70% accuracy depending on the lead time, the hope is that continued improvements will get it closer to 100%. (ScienceNews)
One of the problems with wind turbines is they actually have to be turned off during high winds to prevent damage. While this makes sense, they’re missing out on some of the best conditions to generate energy. New designs from wind turbine maker Mingyang Smart Energy aim to solve this with their new OceanX, a massive turbine capable of using winds from Cat 5 hurricanes to generate electricity! (New Atlas)
A recent review found that “Amazon Prime Day [far busier than usual ]is a major cause of injuries for warehouse workers.” My suggested solution? Bring in the robots! Yes, this will mean less human jobs in warehouses, but long term are these really the sorts of jobs humans need to be doing anyways? There will probably always be a few humans needed to supervise the robots or to deal with new situations the AI running the robots haven’t encountered before. But in the long run this will leave humans free to do more “human jobs.” Exactly what all falls into the human jobs category is up for debate, but shuffling boxes around in a warehouse probably isn’t one of them. (TechXplore)
Africa’s largest desalination plant has broken ground in Morocco. No new technologies here, but I think we often overlook the application of existing technology in new places to increase human flourishing. This is progress. (@HumanProgress)
While sometimes progress is simply the application of existing technology in new places, other times it’s relatively small and “boring” advances that make important differences. Here it’s a new coating that “virtually eliminates friction in metal parts.” It could lead to “better fuel economy, extend the lifespan of moving parts, and deliver enormous savings in myriad industries.” Few people will ever be aware of this new coating, but if it works as advertised, it could have a measurable positive impact on global GDP. (New Atlas)
A factory is operating in China that builds phones at an average rate of one smartphone per second. The only line workers? Robots. The facility will operate “without live workers, revolutionizing phone manufacturing.” While this is the first factory to do this, I’m quite sure it won’t be the last. Sooner than we think, most factories will only have human supervisors, with the main work all being done by robots. That includes factories where robots make robots. (@MarioNawfal) (@IterIntellectus)
Car inspections usually take time, but possibly not anymore. A new, “hands free” system in Hawaii uses tech sim
ilar to an MRI “performs a 360° scan of a vehicle to identify issues using AI.” Cheaper, faster, probably catches things a human would miss? Sounds good! (Interesting Engineering)
Medicine
Things are getting Fantastic Voyage-esque, with tiny microbots now able to “gently trap and move single cells without causing damage.” More videos here, worth watching. Medical applications are almost infinite. (@AdvSciNews) (Advanced Materials) (video from Advance Materials)
A new study shows that an antibody drug that blocks a cytokine called interleukin-11 extends lifespan by 20-25% in mice, and also significantly increases health. While the cytokine is important for normal functions in humans (and mice), it increases as we get older and leads to higher levels of inflammation. It may also “flip several biological switches that control the page of ageing.” Mice given the drug looked visually healthier and had increased muscle mass, less cholesterol, longer telomers, better mitochondrial health and insulin sensitivity, and were overall less frail than mice their age not given the drug. It sounds like the drug is already being tested in humans, looking forward to those results! (@SamuelBHume) (@Dr_Singularity) (BBC)
There’s been a lot of progress made against diabetes recently, and it looks like it’s continuing with a new drug combo that boosts the number of insulin producing cells by 700%, essentially reversing the disease in mice. It works by growing and multiplying the number of insulin producing beta cells in vivo. There is still the problem of the immune system attacking the new beta cells as foreign, but this could be solved by coaxing ones own cells to become beta cells, then multiplying them—research that’s already been done sucessfully. (New Atlas)
Lupus is an autoimmune disease the affects over 1.5 million Americans, and many more around the world. It’s often serious, and can cause life threatening organ damage; but until now nobody was quite sure of the root cause. Now a new molecular pathway that seems to drive the disease has been identified, resulting in “insufficient activation” of a pathway controlled by a receptor called AHR. Adding “AHR-activating molecules to blood samples from lupus patients…seemed to reprogram these lupus-causing cells into a type of cell that may promote wound healing from the damage caused by this autoimmune disease.” The next step is to find a way to get these molecules safely into humans. This could be the beginning of a cure. (Northwestern Now)
Researchers from Georgia State University used “llama-derived nanobodies to broadly neutralize numerous strains of HIV-1, the most common form of the virus.” It seems that the shape of antibodies from camelids like llamas are “nimbler and more effective at identifying and neutralizing foreign objects” than many antibodies in our own immune systems. While this specific study looked at HIV, it looks like the applications for these modified llama antibodies could be useful far more broadly for fighting everything from microbes to cancer. (Science Daily)
Cobra bites still kill thousands every year. Antivenom exists, but is expensive and not available everywhere. A new study suggests that a common blood thinner, heparin, can be repurposed to stop the necrosis that occurs from cobra bites—something the existing treatment sometimes fails at. Heparin has a very similar structure to some of the venom targets within the body, so by “flooding the bite site with ‘decoy’ heparin sulfate or related heparinoid molecules, the antidote can bind to and neutralize the toxins within the venom that cause tissue damage.” (University of Sydney)
Biotech & Agriculture
Startup company Savor is making butter “out of thin air,” using CO2 from the atmosphere and hydrogen from water to make fats and turn them into butter—without any animals, plants, or farmland required. Bill Gates is an investor in the company, and after trying their product said he couldn’t believe he wasn’t eating real butter, and that it tasted like the real thing, “because chemically it is.” We’ll see if it catches on, but it does looks real. (IFL Science)
There’s a pest called fall armyworm that attacks over 350 plant species, including many crops, and can lower yields by half in many cases. Currently fighting it involves a lot of pesticides, pheromone traps to reduce mating, biopesticides (bacteria, fungi, or viruses that specifically target it), or engineering crops to produce compounds toxic to the worm. But honestly I think the easiest solution would be to gene drive the pest into extinction. It’s a solution we could use for a lot of agricultural problems that would have better effects while reducing costs and environmental impacts. (@simonmaechling)
Weird & Wonderful
Dinosaurs were a diverse bunch, filling almost every environmental niche in their world—including burrowing underground. The newly discovered dinosaur, Fona herzogae, lived in the mid-Cretaceous, 99 million years ago in what is now Utah. It possesses some distinguishing features common to burrowing or digging animals, such as “large bicep muscles, strong muscle attachment points on the hips and legs, fused bones along the pelvis – likely to help with stability while digging – and hindlimbs that are proportionally larger than the forelimbs.” There have been a number of finds with excellent preservation, “preserved in the original death pose, chest down with splayed forelimbs.” All more likely if the animals were in an underground burrow at the time. (SciTechDaily)
There’s a push to bring back woolly mammoths being led by Colossal Biosciences, and it may have just received a boost from the discovery of the 3D chromosomal structure preserved in some newly discovered freeze-dried mammoth skin. Tissue from the 52,000 year old woolly mammoth was frozen so quickly after death that its DNA was preserved in a glass-like state, allowing the structure to be seen. This is important because it gives insight into the mammoth epigenome, and helps identify which genes were active and inactive in the preserved skin cells. It also preserved huge segments of the genome, allowing about 1 million times more to be sequenced than previous ancient mammoth DNA. (Science Daily) (Singularity Hub) (@jrotwitguez)
Photos & Videos
One of the best physics memes I’ve seen. (@DylanoA4)
Have a look at this beautiful photo galley of nature from the island of Tasmania. (New Atlas)
A very cool visualization of what happens with plasma inside a tokamak fusion device. You can see the video by tapping on the picture. (@ExploreCosmos_)
Celebrating two years of incredible science with the James Webb Space Telescope, here’s 2 galaxies: a Penguin (NGC 2936) and its Egg (NGC 2937). (@NASAWebb)
I love modern technology that lets us take a picture on the surface of Mars, then see it on our phones a few hours later. Which this one was, I saw it on July 16th, the same day it was taken. (@ThePlanetaryGuy)
Recommendations & Reviews
Today I’ve got two sites for you to check out. One a website (also on X), the other exclusively on X.
First is the Astronomy Picture of the Day. An excellent place that publishes spectacular and interesting images along with detailed information, and they do it each and every day. If you’re looking for pictures to use as background on your computer or phone, it’s a great place to start. (@apod) (Astronomy Picture of the Day)
The second is a guy named Jordan Taylor on X. He posts great threads on all sorts of engineering topics. I’d highly recommend checking him out. Here’s a great one on building things on Mars. Here’s a giant ‘thread of threads’ if you want to browse through all his stuff for the last two years. (@Jordan_W_Taylor)
That’s it for today, but Techno-Optimist will be back in your inbox two weeks from now. Thank you all for reading — and until next time, keep your eyes on the horizon.
-Owen
The concern with that graph is that what people purchase, with more money, is often, more energy - more air flights is a popular excess-money spend.
I can't think of a way to tease out energy needed to create wealth, from energy you're just tossing away with your wealth. After all, the extra vacations create wealth from the airline's point of view.
Because I keep getting older and weird stuff keeps happening to my body as I do, I am always fascinated by the medical discoveries. Now, they have to hurry and offer everything to the public before it's too late for me. 😄