Hey readers, we’re back in your inbox with the first White Pill of 2024. Hope you had a restful break with friends and family. In this issue, we go deep on a few space items: the meaning of a HD cat video sent to Earth from deep space, agricultural discoveries that could help us colonize Mars, and the 2024 slate of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts grant recipients. Our section on energy, engineering, and AI includes updates on Tesla’s Corpus Christi lithium refinery, a mosquito gene drive, and a few more items. In medicine this week, we have an AI that’s 100% accurate at identifying autism in kids by looking at images of their eyes, a new tool called “molecular jackhammers” to battle cancer, and more. Also in this issue (of course): the White Pill Investment Index, and fun stuff at the end.

And please don’t forget, White Pill has a Twitter account. Follow, like, share, retweet, even quote tweet if you please.

OK — let’s get to it.

Space

To boldly go where no cat video has gone before. NASA’s Psyche probe streamed a high definition (HD) cat video from deep space — 19 million miles away, or about 80x the distance from Earth to the Moon — to Earth by laser, which travels at the speed of light. This is the farthest distance from which HD video has been sent, and is also notable because the transmission rate was as good or better than terrestrial bandwidth speeds.

The physics NASA ‘overcame’ to get this result are super interesting. While off-world data transmission via laser was demonstrated as early as 2014, in-space laser data transfer has so far been done at ‘comfortable’ distances from Earth — mostly from low earth orbit (LEO), an area surrounding our planet at an altitude of about 100 miles and up to 1,200 miles. A primary challenge of sending a laser from farther than that is known as signal attenuation, which describes the spreading out of a tightly focused laser beam over long distances (visualize how the radius of a flashlight beam pointed at a wall gets bigger while the beam’s strength gets smaller as you move the flashlight farther away from the wall) such that, in practical terms, fewer photons reach the receiving end. NASA resolved this attenuation with a cryogenically cooled superconducting nanowire photon-counting array receiver, which is capable of literally detecting single photons, and by using advanced signal processing algorithms to extract information from the weakened signal, correct for errors, and reconstruct the data. Really cool!

Ultimately, NASA’s HD cat video indicates that — among other things — off-world high definition video (think: a probe approaching the surface of Titan, Martian weather, a Enceladus flyby capturing its cryovolcano eruptions, a Blue Origin astronaut’s video tour of the moon base) is now on the menu. Get your popcorn ready! (JPL)

Accidental agricultural discoveries may help us grow food on Mars. As I detailed in my interview with Mars Society’s Robert Zubrin, it’s not entirely obvious how we’re going to be growing food on the surface of Mars. From the piece:

“An Iowa corn field produces 12 tons per hectare, per year,” [Zubrin said.] “That boils down to 30 kg per day of corn. So if you fed [Martians] with nothing but a kilogram of corn a day, which would be a pretty lousy diet, that means a hectare could support 30 people. If we make the diet more interesting, with some fruits and a little bit of meat, let’s say the hectare would support 20 people. That means if you wanted to have a 20,000-person Martian colony — the size of a pretty small town — that’s 1,000 hectares. 10 square kilometers. Over six square miles. That’s huge for a small town. And for a million people — a medium-sized city — you’d need 50,000 hectares. This is unthinkable on Mars. And that’s assuming you have the same productivity in Martian sunlight as you do on Earth. But Martian sunlight is only half as strong as Earth sunlight!”

If it’s not clear yet, endless Iowa-style cornfields stretching to the Martian horizon aren’t on the menu, at least in our lifetimes. It’s not just that the planet gets under half the amount of sunlight that Earth does. Because Mars’ atmospheric pressure is less than a percent of Earth’s, liquid water would immediately boil away when exposed to the Martian air. The Martian atmosphere is composed mostly of carbon dioxide, with virtually no oxygen, and plants require oxygen for respiration. During daytime, temperatures at the Martian equator can reach up to around 70°F (20°C). However, they can plummet sharply once the sun sets, dropping to values as low as -80°F (-62°C) during the night, which would be fatal to any crop.

In light of these challenges, Zubrin thinks genetically engineering staple crops may offer solutions for Martian agriculture. But here on Earth, scientists out of Sweden just published a paper demonstrating a 50% increase in plant growth when its root systems are stimulated by an electrical current. The method works in a hydroponics setting, meaning that it could easily be used to grow food on Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System, not just Earth. The scientists aren’t sure yet why electricity caused increased growth, but application often precedes understanding (so let’s just start using this immediately and figure out exactly why it works later).

And in another serendipitous breakthrough, University of Tennessee researchers treated seeds with ethylene gas and found it significantly increased both their growth and tolerance to stress. This is important because genetic modification for higher yields often has the unfortunate result of lowering stress tolerance in a plant — it’s like the plant has to “choose” between putting more energy into growing seeds, or dealing with environmental stressors, but can’t do both. Getting around this problem could be a game changer, both on and off Earth. Best of all, the plants kept up their faster rate of growth throughout their entire life, not just when germinating. (SciTechDaily)

New NASA grants. NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program announced 13 concept-level small grants — maximum of $175,000 per project — for making initial inquiries into future tech concepts. This year’s recipients are working on such designs as (my commentary added):

• “Detoxifying Mars: The Biocatalytic Elimination of Omnipresent Perchlorates” — ubiquitous on Mars and toxic to humans, perchlorates are chemical compounds present in Martian water ice. Exposure to perchlorates causes hypothyroidism, and would basically make Martian settlers weaker and less functional over time. In other words, you can’t drink Martian water unless perchlorates are eliminated; this project wants to do that. Read about the concept here.

• “Electro-Luminescently Cooled Zero-Boil-Off Propellant Depots Enabling Crewed Exploration of Mars” — liquid hydrogen (LH2) as rocket propellant has one of the highest specific impulses (ISP), which you can think of as efficiency of thrust by volume of fuel. The problem with liquid hydrogen, though, is its extremely low boiling point: at anything over -423°F (-253°C), it’s unusable vapor. This project will explore technology for keeping liquid hydrogen cold enough in cislunar space and orbital environments to enable in-space rocket refueling depots. We need stuff like this to travel more often, for cheaper, to places like Mars, and to establish a space-based economy (read more about this in my discussion of using lunar regolith for propellant that orbital refueling depots would use); read more about this proposal here.

• “Swarming Proxima Centauri: Coherent Picospacecraft Swarms Over Interstellar Distances” — Proxima Centauri, the closest known star to the sun, is 4.24 light years away from us, and around it orbits Proxima b, an exoplanet in its goldilocks zone, meaning it could harbor life. Unfortunately, even the closest star to us is essentially out of reach due to how fast we can go; the fastest we’ve ever gone — with the Parker Solar Probe — is 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h), which is just 0.064% the speed of light. Meaning that the fastest we could possibly get a probe to Proxima b would take over 6,000 years. But this concept envisions using a laser to propel a swarm of thousands of gram-scale autonomous probes at light speed (remember, lasers go light speed) to get to to Proxima b and back (though I couldn’t tell how they will get them back) in eight years! This stuff is so fun. Read more about the concept here.

All the concepts getting funding from NIAC are super cool. Feel free to wormhole-out on them here.

Energy, Engineering, AI

Tesla’s Corpus Christi lithium refinery is coming together. In September, new evidence suggested that a site at Thacker Pass in northern Nevada may be home to the biggest known lithium deposit in the world. When we covered the news in an issue of the White Pill, I wrote that “this is good, though not necessarily huge news, as having a vast lithium resource is just one piece of the complex puzzle of battery manufacturing — China controls over half the world’s lithium refining, a necessary step in battery production, and the US refines very little.” Recent video that emerged on X provided a sneak preview on the progress Tesla is making on addressing this challenge, showing their in-progress lithium refining facility that’s expected to be operational this year, and begin delivering lithium to the company’s Austin gigafactory thereafter. Watch it here. (@SawyerMerritt)

More:

• Scientists in Burkina Faso are working on a gene drive that would cause female mosquitoes to produce all male offspring, thereby reducing and potentially even eliminating species of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This isn’t the first time such a gene drive has been worked on, but maybe this time, because it’s “home grown” it will have more support in Africa. We hope so, let’s wipe out those mosquitoes! (CNN)

• Mike Solana’s Dominion is required reading on gene drives.

• Scott Lowe (@tropicalstation) produced some amazing shots of the B-2 Spirit when it flew over the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. One is above, see them all here.

• Not sure exactly what is going on in this boulder emerging crushing and cracking video that someone made with Stable Diffusion but I definitely like it.

The White Pill Investment Index

The White Pill Investment Index tracks investments in companies developing interesting, exciting, forward-thinking products. Deals are sourced using a combination of Pitchbook and reach outs to each company.

• Autonomous, industrial mowers — Vector Machines, a Dutch company building driverless mowers that use “sensors and GPS technology and artificial intelligence to determine the mowing route and mow the grass,” raises an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Noordelijke Ontwikkelings Maatschappij

• Satellite imagery marketplace — SkyFi, a company that allows organizations and individuals to easily purchase near-real-time satellite data (they call themselves “the world’s geospatial hub”), raises a $19.52 million Series A from undisclosed investors

• Live sounds subscription — Oda, a company that aims to sell a “seasonal membership for live listening” (translation: it’s a beautiful wooden speaker that plays live, curated audio from across the globe), raises an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Seven Seven Six

• Detecting crime with sound — NoiseVu, a company developing technology that can detect crimes — say, a car break-in or gunshots — and pinpoint their location using only audio, raises an undisclosed amount of venture funding from GOS Capital

• Car accident detection using radar — Omnisight, a company developing AI-enabled radar sensors that can detect and report auto collisions as they happen, raises a $1.5 million seed from undisclosed investors

• 3D-printed braces — Braces On Demand, a company that allows dentists to print custom braces right in their office, raises a $1.5 million Series A from undisclosed investors

• Autonomous security drones — Sunflower Labs, a company that offers security drones for businesses and homes (it deploys from a drone-in-a-box launcher, and can respond to activity on any part of a 4-acre property in less than 30 seconds), raises $2.01 million of venture funding in the form of SAFE notes from Wakestream Ventures and undisclosed investors

• Lights that improve sleep quality — XTi, a company developing “Pulsed Alternating Wavelength” lights that they say stimulate cells to improve reduce inflammation, increase melatonin production, and promote relaxation, raises a $2.85 million Series B from undisclosed investors

• Robotic cart-haulers for crop-harvesting — Burro, a company developing smart robots that can follow fieldworkers and carry loads of harvested goods, raises a $24 million Series B from undisclosed investors

• Simple, cheap rockets — ABL Space Systems, an El Segundo company developing cheap, simple rockets “for the high-cadence, low-cost future of orbital launch,” raises $40.65 million of venture funding from undisclosed investors

• AI fighter jet pilots — Shield AI, a company building defense tools including a solution that allows existing fighter jets to be fitted for autonomous use, raises a $500 million of Series F venture funding

Medicine

Molecular jackhammers. Cancer treatment just got a very effective new tool in its arsenal with the creation of “molecular jackhammers” that are able to destroy up to 99% of cancer cells they encounter. They found that aminocyanine molecules — already used as dyes in bioimaging scans to detect cancer — vibrate incredibly fast when activated with near infrared light. The molecules “have an arm on one side, helping to connect the molecules to the cancer cell membranes while the movements of the vibrations bash them apart.” When the “the approach was also tested on mice with melanoma tumors… half the animals became cancer-free.” Still, the Rice University, Texas A&M University, and University of Texas researchers noted that it’s early days yet. But the approach looks promising; (Science Alert)

Machine learning finds new and effective antibiotics. AI built at MIT discovered a new class of antibiotics able to kill antibiotic resistant Staph bacteria, proving once again the power of AI as a tool for biological discovery and drug development — and we’re just barely getting started. To understand what a potential breakthrough this is, these bacteria alone kill approximately 50,000 people in the US every year, so new and more effective treatments are desperately needed. The newly invented compound is also only mild toxic to human cells, a prerequisite for any drug. The team previously used deep learning to discover a compound capable of targeting a different species of common antibiotic resistant bacteria, and plans to design “additional drug candidates based on the findings of this new study, as well as using the models to seek compounds that can kill other types of bacteria.” (Future Timeline)

More:

• Aspect Biosystems in Vancouver, Canada says they’re getting close to treating Type 1 diabetes by 3D printing pancreatic tissue. Instead of waiting for donor tissue and having to take antirejection drugs (one of the current treatments), pancreatic tissue that produces insulin is engineered so it can evade the body’s immune system, then 3D printed into “insulin-producing tissues that can be implanted anywhere in the body.” Human trials are expected to start soon. (Quartz)

• South Korean researchers developed AI that was able to diagnose autism with 100% accuracy based solely on photographs of children’s eyes (the retina specifically) in a study with 958 participants. Photographs used in the study were from children as young as four. (New Atlas)

Finally, the fun stuff

Volcanic eruption in Iceland. Start out 2024 with some fiery images of volcanic splendor in Iceland. One of the fissures that opened at Sundhnúkar crater is nearly 2.2 miles (3.5 km) in length, about 4x the size of one from an eruption in July 2023. The videos taken from helicopter and drone are pretty spectacular; this one in particular (still above) is nuts. (Iceland Monitor)

• And if you click on one link in this issue of the White Pill, I suggest it’s this link of a video showing a little robot fighting a crab. 🦀

Touch grass this weekend.

-Brandon Gorrell