Oct 31 2024
An easier-to-use technique for storing data in DNA is inspired by our cells 

It turns out that you don’t need to be a scientist to encode data in DNA. Researchers have been working on DNA-based data storage for decades, but a new template-based method inspired by our cells’ chemical processes is easy enough for even nonscientists to practice. The technique could pave the way for an unusual but ultra-stable way to store information. 

The idea of storing data in DNA was first proposed in the 1950s by the physicist Richard Feynman. Genetic material has exceptional storage density and durability; a single gram of DNA can store a trillion gigabytes of data and retain the information for thousands of years. Decades later, a team led by George Church at Harvard University put the idea into practice, encoding a 53,400-word book.

This early approach relied on DNA synthesis—stringing genetic sequences together piece by piece, like beads on a thread, using the four nucleotide building blocks A, T, C, and G to encode information. The process was expensive, time consuming, and error prone, creating only one bit (or an eighth of a byte) with each nucleotide added to a strand. Crucially, the process required skilled expertise to carry out.

The new method, published in Nature last week, is more efficient, storing 350 bits at a time by encoding strands in parallel. Rather than hand-threading each DNA strand, the team assembles strands from pre-built DNA bricks about 20 nucleotides long, encoding information by altering some and not others along the way. Peking University’s Long Qian and team got the idea for such templates from the way cells share the same basic set of genes but behave differently in response to chemical changes in DNA strands. “Every cell in our bodies has the same genome sequence, but genetic programming comes from modifications to DNA. If life can do this, we can do this,” she says. 

Qian and her colleagues encoded data through methylation, a chemical reaction that switches genes on and off by attaching a methyl compound—a small methane-related molecule. Once the bricks are locked into their assigned spots on the strand, researchers select which bricks to methylate, with the presence or absence of the modification standing in for binary values of 0 or 1. The information can then be deciphered using nanopore sequencers to detect whether a brick has been methylated. In theory, the new method is simple enough to be carried out without detailed knowledge of how to manipulate DNA.

The storage capacity of each DNA strand caps off at roughly 70 bits. For larger files, researchers splintered data into multiple strands identified by unique barcodes encoded in the bricks. The strands were then read simultaneously and sequenced according to their barcodes. With this technique, researchers encoded the image of a tiger rubbing from the Han dynasty, troubleshooting the encoding process until the image came back with no errors. The same process worked for more complex images, like a photorealistic print of a panda. 

To gauge the real-world applicability of their approach, the team enlisted 60 students from diverse academic backgrounds—not just scientists—to encode any writing of their choice. The volunteers transcribed their writing into binary code through a web server. Then, with a kit sent by the team, they pipetted an enzyme into a 96-well plate of the DNA bricks, marking which would be methylated. The team then ran the samples through a sequencer to make the DNA strand. Once the computer received the sequence, researchers ran a decoding algorithm and sent the restored message back to a web server for students to retrieve with a password. The writing came back with a 1.4% error rate in letters, and the errors were eventually corrected through language-learning models. 

Once it’s more thoroughly developed, Qian sees the technology becoming useful as long-term storage for archival information that isn’t accessed every day, like medical records, financial reports, or scientific data.  

The success nonscientists achieved using the technique in coding trials suggests that the DNA storage could eventually become a practical technology. “Everyone is storing data every day, and so to compete with traditional data storage technologies, DNA methods need to be usable by the everyday person,” says Jeff Nivala, co-director of University of Washington’s Molecular Information Systems Lab. “This is still an early demonstration of going toward nonexperts, but I think it’s pretty unique that they’re able to do that.”

DNA storage still has many strides left to make before it can compete with traditional data storage. The new system is more expensive than either traditional data storage techniques or previous DNA-synthesis methods, Nivala says, though the encoding process could become more efficient with automation on a larger scale. With future development, template-based DNA storage might become a more secure method of tackling ever-climbing data demands. 

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Oct 30 2024
Exosomes are touted as a trendy cure-all. We don’t know if they work.

There’s a trendy new cure-all in town—you might have seen ads pop up on social media or read rave reviews in beauty magazines. Exosomes are being touted as a miraculous treatment for hair loss, aging skin, acne, eczema, pain conditions, long covid, and even neurological diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. That’s, of course, if you can afford the price tag—which can stretch to thousands of dollars.

“They’re magic!” claims one YouTube review. One US clinic exhorts: “Unlock the fountain of youth with exosome therapy.” “All aspects of skin health improve with exosome therapy,” states one UK clinic’s website, adding that “this is as cutting-edge as it gets.” Exosome particles could be used to treat “any inflammatory disease you could think about, which is almost all of them,” the founder of an exosome company says in a video on YouTube.

But there’s a big problem with these big promises: We don’t fully understand how exosomes work—or what they even really are. 

We do know that exosomes are tiny particles that bud off from cells and that their contents can vary hugely, depending on the source of the cell (some popular options include human umbilical cords, salmon testicles, and roses) and how healthy or stressed it is. Even cell biologists can’t agree on what, exactly, is inside them, and how beneficial—or dangerous—those contents may be.  

The world of exosome treatments is being likened to a “Wild West” by some researchers. Rigorous trials have not been conducted, so we don’t know how safe it is to spray on or inject these tiny mystery blobs. Exosome products have not been approved by regulatory agencies in the US, UK, or Europe, where the treatments are growing in popularity. Nor have they been approved for medical uses in Japan or South Korea, two other countries where exosome treatments are popular. Still, “exosomes have emerged as a sort of panacea for almost everything,” says Leigh Turner, a bioethicist and public health researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who tracks direct-to-consumer marketing of unapproved health products. “Risks are commonly minimized, and benefits are commonly exaggerated.”

This hasn’t stopped customers from flocking to the growing number of aesthetic centers, stem-cell clinics, and medspas offering exosome treatments, hoping for a miracle fix. The global market for exosome skin-care products was valued at $256 million in 2023 and is forecast to grow to $674 million in the next six years. 

Mystery blobs

Technically referred to as vesicles, exosomes are made inside cells before being released. They’ve long been mysterious. The term “exosome” was introduced in the 1980s. Before that, tiny particles that are now thought to have been exosomes were described as “platelet dust” or “matrix vesicles.”  

At first, scientists assumed that exosomes functioned as trash bags, shuttling waste out of the cell. But research in 1996 suggested that exosomes might also work to help cells communicate by delivering signals between them. If a cell is dying, for instance, it could perhaps send a signal to neighboring cells, giving them a chance to produce more protective substances in order to save themselves from the same fate. Cancer cells, on the other hand, could potentially use exosomes to send signals that co-opt other cells to support the growth of a tumor. Still, it’s not fully understood what signals are actually being sent.

Another major mystery is what, exactly, is inside exosomes. “It depends who you ask,” says James Edgar, who studies exosomes and similar vesicles at the University of Cambridge, UK. Cell biologists agree that exosomes contain proteins, lipids, and other molecules that result from cell metabolism. Some believe they also contain DNA and RNA, but not everyone is convinced. “It’s just very difficult to prove or disprove,” says Edgar.

That’s partly because exosomes are so small—only about 70 nanometers wide, around one-hundredth the size of a red blood cell. While the first images of them were published in the 1970s, we still don’t even know for sure what they look like; Raghu Kalluri at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and his colleagues are studying the shape of exosomes to figure out if they are round, oval, or rod-like, for example.

Further complicating all of this, cell biologists don’t know what triggers the release of an exosome from a cell. Most cells release them at a relatively steady pulse. Some cells release a lot of exosomes; others release a relatively small number. Immune cells, for example, release more exosomes than cancer cells. “We don’t really understand why that’s the case,” says Edgar.

“Fundamentally, we don’t know enough,” he adds. “We don’t quite know yet where these things go when they hit cells, and if they’re released into that cell—or how any of it happens, basically.”

Exosome explosion

Despite these enduring questions, exosomes have taken off as a beauty and health treatment. Turner has been tracking stem-cell clinics both in the US and globally for years. When he and his colleagues assessed US clinics offering direct-to-consumer treatments in 2016, exosomes “just didn’t pop up at all,” he says. When he did the same analysis in 2021, he identified around 100 clinics in the US offering exosome therapies.

It’s not clear why exosomes are taking off now. “It’s not as though there’s an overwhelming amount of safety and efficacy data,” says Turner. “I think it might be more of a buzz kind of phenomenon. This seems to be kind of a moment for exosomes.”

There are many different types of exosomes available on the market. Some are from human cells, including those from the placenta or umbilical cord. Some companies are selling exosomes from plants and animals. In the US, exosomes are regulated as drugs and biological products when they are “intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease” and “intended to affect the structure of any function of the body of man or other animals,” according to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medicines in the US. 

Clinics get around this by using them as cosmetics, defined in law as “articles intended to be rubbed, poured, sprinkled, or sprayed on, introduced into, or otherwise applied to the human body … for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance.” What practitioners are not allowed to do is make claims about the health benefits of exosomes. After all, even anti-dandruff shampoo, which purports to treat a skin condition, is considered a drug by the FDA.

Dev Patel offers exosome treatments at his “anti-aging and skin rejuvenation” clinic, Perfect Skin Solutions, in Portsmouth, UK. Over the last 10 years, he says, he has noticed a trend: Customers are less interested in injectable treatments that merely give an impression of youth, like fillers and Botox, and more interested in the idea of treatments that can rejuvenate their skin. The demand for devices like lasers, which create heat on the skin and trigger repair, has “gone through the roof,” he says. Now, exosomes are catching on too.

Patel—who has a medical degree, served in the Royal Navy, and holds a postgraduate diploma in dermatology—left his job in the UK’s National Health Service to start his clinic around 10 years ago. He didn’t start offering exosome treatments until 2020, after he heard about them at a meeting for aesthetic clinicians. 

The first treatment he offered involved unapproved exosomes derived from human fat cells—making them illegal to sell in Europe, he says. Patel says that he didn’t realize this until after he’d bought the exosomes and started using them, partly because of the misinformation he’d been fed by the distributor. He says some of the sellers were telling doctors that they were allowed to use the exosomes topically (on a person’s skin) and then inject them as part of an “off-label” use. Patel won’t name the distributor he bought from, but he says the company continued to sell its exosome products to clinics in the UK for at least two years after that point.

Patel stresses that as soon as he found out about the regulations surrounding exosomes derived from human cells, he stopped using the product. “I had probably had £5,000 [around $6,500] worth of product sitting in my clinic, and it was just thrown away,” he says. Instead, he switched to exosomes from plant cells and, more recently, others derived from salmon testes.

For hair regrowth, Perfect Skin Solutions offers a course of five exosome treatments, each delivered during a half-hour appointment, at a total cost of £2,000. When it comes to skin treatments, Patel recommends two or three sessions—more for those who are looking to counter the signs of aging. “By harnessing the power of exosomes, you can achieve a more youthful and radiant complexion, while also addressing specific skin concerns and promoting overall skin health,” according to the company’s website.  

Patel says he uses the exosomes to treat clients for baldness around four times a week. He and his team members will first perform microneedling on the scalp. This technique uses tiny needles to make miniature holes in the skin—“80,000 holes a minute,” he says. Microneedling is often used to trigger a wound healing process that can improve the look of the skin. But after Patel performs the procedure on a person’s head, he uses a “jet propulsion device” that uses carbon dioxide to spray cooled salmon exosomes into the tiny indentations. “You basically create these … micro-icicles containing the product,” he says. “They pierce the skin, but you don’t feel it. It feels quite nice, actually.” After six to 10 weeks, customers can expect healthier skin and thicker, stronger hair, he says.

“The results are amazing,” says Patel. “I’ve had it done on my hair, which is probably why it’s looking out of control now,” he adds, pointing to his thick but neatly styled do, combed back and shaved at the sides. 

Not everyone is as enthusiastic. Sarah, who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her professional image, tried exosomes last year, though not at Patel’s clinic. Now in her 30s, she had acne as a teenager, and her dermatologist suggested that rubbing exosomes from human umbilical-cord cells into her face after a microneedling treatment might reduce the scarring. But he didn’t fully explain exactly what exosomes are or what they were expected to do, she says. 

“I feel like it’s a little bit of health marketing bullshit,” she says. “I don’t really understand how they work.”

Sarah received three treatments, three months apart, as part of a trial her dermatologist was participating in. As a participant, Sarah didn’t have to pay for her treatment. In each of the sessions, the doctor numbed Sarah’s face with lidocaine cream before microneedling it. “Then they kind of dribbled the exosomes on with a syringe,” she recalls. She was advised to sleep on a clean pillow and avoid washing her face that evening. “There was some redness … but my skin was mostly back to normal the following day,” she says.

Her last treatment was a year ago. And she hasn’t seen a reduction in her scarring. “I don’t think I’d recommend it,” she says. “The results were very underwhelming.”

Safety in salmon?

In theory, exosomes should be safer than stem-cell therapies. Cells can be thought of as “living drugs,” while exosomes are non-living collections of biological molecules, says Ke Cheng at Columbia University in New York, who is doing more conventional research into potential applications of exosomes. Cheng is exploring the use of engineered exosomes for heart diseases. Exosomes are less likely than cells to trigger an immune response, and because they can’t replicate, the risk of tumor formation is also lower. 

But that, of course, does not make them risk-free. There are no established standards or regulations for the manufacture of exosomes to be used in people. This leaves plenty of room for companies to manufacture exosomes in different ways—and for disagreements over which method is the best and safest. 

The product Sarah tried that was derived from human umbilical-cord cells is called Age Zero. Erin Crowley and her father, Michael Crowley, who manufacture and sell the product, have a team that grows the cells and then harvests the exosome-containing liquid surrounding them at a clean lab in Rochester, New York. 

“We have in stock right now about $3.5 billion worth of exosomes,” says Michael Crowley. That’s enough for millions of treatments, he says, although the figure will depend on what they are used for: The pair have different companies that sell exosomes for experimental medical use (25 billion to 100 billion exosomes per treatment) and cosmetic use (5 to 10 billion). Cosmetic clinics can buy vials that the company says contain 5, 10, 50, or 100 billion exosomes. Those with 10 billion exosomes are sold in packs of nine for $1,999, according to the company’s website.

“Right now, we’re in about a little less than a thousand medspas, aesthetician offices, dermatologists, plastic surgeons with our cosmetic product,” Erin Crowley says. “We can sell direct to consumer, but the product really works great after microneedling or after laser or dermaplaning.” They have been selling in the US for the last year and half; she says the product is also available in the UAE, Pakistan, Lebanon, Canada, and Turkey. 

The Crowleys argue that because their exosomes come from human umbilical-cord cells, they are more effective than those from other sources, although again, rigorous side-by-side comparison studies have not been done. Exosomes from plant or fish cells “just don’t have the right language to speak to human cells,” says Erin Crowley, who has a background in mechanical engineering and quality control. She says that she analyzed the exosome market a couple of years ago and was “appalled” at what was on offer. 

“The industry now … is very, very confused, and the marketing is very confused,” she says. Across the board, production quality standards are low, she says, adding that she and her dad hold their product to higher standards by testing for potential sources of infections (which can arise from contamination) and using devices to count exosomes.

On the other hand, Primacure, the company that sells the product derived from salmon testicles, argues that fish exosomes are safer than those taken from human cells or from other animals. These exosomes are collected from cells grown in a medium that contains a mix of growth factors and peptides, and the team uses ultrasound to release the exosomes from the cells, according to a video presentation by Mike Lee, CEO of Primacure. “We want to refrain from using products that are human-derived, or maybe even animal-derived, that can transmit diseases to humans,” Lee says in the video. 

There are no known cases of exosomes causing such diseases in people. But some practitioners buy that argument: “Fish present a very low-risk option in terms of disease transmission,” says Patel. Turner, though, isn’t convinced: “I don’t see any reason why they would be [safer],” he says, adding that usually, biological materials from other animals are seen as posing a greater risk to patients. The use of animal cells or tissues in humans carries risks of infection, for example.

We can’t be sure either way, because rigorous research comparing these exosomes and their safety simply has not been done. “If they are from different sources, their outcomes and effects will be different,” says Cheng. “You need to have science; you need to know why they work.”

Exosomes derived from human cells will still have molecules that are foreign to a person’s body and could trigger an immune response, says Edgar. He is also concerned that because exosomes may hold the original cell’s waste, they could be introducing things that a recipient’s cells would rather be rid of. They might, for example, shuttle excess receptors for growth factors out of a cell. If another cell takes these up, it might end up with too many growth factor receptors, which could help drive cancer, he says. “We do need to understand the basics of what’s going on here before we jump into the clinic,” he adds.

At any rate, there are no rigorous human studies to support the safety or effectiveness of using exosomes for skin health, hair growth, or anything else. Look at any clinic website, and it will probably have some impressive-looking before-and-after photos of a customer or two. But these individuals are often having several treatments at the same time. Microneedling alone has been used for decades as an aesthetic treatment. And Patel says he delivers each vial of exosomes alongside a second vial containing a concoction of many other ingredients that are thought to be beneficial to skin health.

So how can a clinician be sure that the apparent effects are due to the exosomes? I put this question to Patel. “I can’t answer that,” he told me. “I’ve never just used the mix on its own to see [what it does]. You’d have to do countless patients with either [vial] to know.”

Beyond beauty

While many of the clinics offering exosome treatments are focused on their purported cosmetic benefits, a significant number claim that they can treat diseases. In the three months between November 2021 and January 2022, Turner and his colleagues identified 16 businesses that were marketing exosome-based therapies to treat or prevent covid-19 or long covid, for example. Others claim exosomes can treat sports injuries and even disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. Again, there is no rigorous research to support these claims.

There have been some promising early studies in animals, and a handful of small, weak phase I trials exploring the use of exosomes in medical treatments. But these fall way below the approval standards of the FDA. 

“There are currently no FDA-approved exosome products for any use,” Paul Richards, an FDA representative, wrote in an email to MIT Technology Review. Because of this, no exosome product should be marketed for any medical use.

“There is an abundance of misleading information in the public domain regarding regenerative medicine products, including exosome products,” wrote Richards. “The FDA continues to remind consumers to be cautious of any clinics, including regenerative medicine clinics, health-care providers, physicians, chiropractors, or nurses, that advertise or offer anything purported to be an exosome product. These products are not without risk and are often marketed by clinics as being safe and effective for the treatment of a wide range of diseases or conditions, even though they haven’t been adequately studied in clinical trials.” 

No exosome-based products have been approved by the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) or by the European Medicine Agency (EMA), either.

“They’re unproven technologies, at least from the perspective of the FDA,” says Dave Carter, head of research at the biotech company Evox, which is exploring the use of exosomes for drug delivery. “We don’t really understand [how they work] … I personally would be somewhat wary of these types of things outside of the context of proper clinical trials.”

The FDA has issued letters to some of the clinics providing these treatments. In 2020, for example, the organization wrote to Douglas Spiel, president of Regenerative Solutions of New Jersey, about its claims—being published on Facebook at the time—that exosomes could “mitigate, prevent, treat, or cure” covid. The company was also marketing exosome products for a range of other disorders, including spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, lupus, and multiple sclerosis.The FDA letter listed the problematic posts and requested a response within 30 days. Spiel’s current clinic doesn’t make any claims about exosomes. 

Turner is concerned that letters like these have little impact. “It’s not terribly consequential,” he says. “No one has to surrender their medical license, and there are no automatic financial penalties.”

Beyond potential harm to individual patients, both scientists and regulatory agencies are concerned that unapproved, untested, and unregulated exosome “treatments” could set back an exciting field of research. Potential uses of exosomes to diagnose and treat diseases are being explored through lab-based research and early-stage clinical trials. Companies making unsubstantiated claims to sell products could undermine that progress.

These marketing claims are often “a mishmash of marketing froth, marketing hype, and some credible claims cut and paste[d] from [scientific] papers and websites,” says Turner. “It makes it more challenging for us to have any kind of meaningful public understanding or discussion.”

In the meantime, Turner is one of many scientists cautioning people against the use of exosomes. “I would say that it’s a bit of a Wild West out there with respect to how these are being used,” says Kalluri of MD Anderson Cancer Center. “Ultimately, some science needs to be done to show that this actually works.”

“From a very basic point of view, we don’t really know what they’re doing, good or bad,” says Edgar, from the University of Cambridge. “I wouldn’t take them, let’s put it that way.”

Even Sarah, who received three exosome treatments last year, agrees. “I think there needs to be more research around it … I would just hold on and see,” she says. “Maybe [I would feel] different if I looked a million years younger after using it. But that wasn’t the case.”

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Oct 30 2024
Palmer Luckey’s vision for the future of mixed reality

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

War is a catalyst for change, an expert in AI and warfare told me in 2022. At the time, the war in Ukraine had just started, and the military AI business was booming. Two years later, things have only ramped up as geopolitical tensions continue to rise.

Silicon Valley players are poised to benefit. One of them is Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual-reality headset company Oculus, which he sold to Facebook for $2 billion. After Luckey’s highly public ousting from Meta, he founded Anduril, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense. The company is now valued at $14 billion. My colleague James O’Donnell interviewed Luckey about his new pet project: headsets for the military. 

Luckey is increasingly convinced that the military, not consumers, will see the value of mixed-reality hardware first: “You’re going to see an AR headset on every soldier, long before you see it on every civilian,” he says. In the consumer world, any headset company is competing with the ubiquity and ease of the smartphone, but he sees entirely different trade-offs in defense. Read the interview here. 

The use of AI for military purposes is controversial. Back in 2018, Google pulled out of the Pentagon’s Project Maven, an attempt to build image recognition systems to improve drone strikes, following staff walkouts over the ethics of the technology. (Google has since returned to offering services for the defense sector.) There has been a long-standing campaign to ban autonomous weapons, also known as “killer robots,” which powerful militaries such as the US have refused to agree to.  

But the voices that boom even louder belong to an influential faction in Silicon Valley, such as Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, who has called for the military to adopt and invest more in AI to get an edge over adversaries. Militaries all over the world have been very receptive to this message.

That’s good news for the tech sector. Military contracts are long and lucrative, for a start. Most recently, the Pentagon purchased services from Microsoft and OpenAI to do search, natural-language processing, machine learning, and data processing, reports The Intercept. In the interview with James, Palmer Luckey says the military is a perfect testing ground for new technologies. Soldiers do as they are told and aren’t as picky as consumers, he explains. They’re also less price-sensitive: Militaries don’t mind spending a premium to get the latest version of a technology.

But there are serious dangers in adopting powerful technologies prematurely in such high-risk areas. Foundation models pose serious national security and privacy threats by, for example, leaking sensitive information, argue researchers at the AI Now Institute and Meredith Whittaker, president of the communication privacy organization Signal, in a new paper. Whittaker, who was a core organizer of the Project Maven protests, has said that the push to militarize AI is really more about enriching tech companies than improving military operations. 

Despite calls for stricter rules around transparency, we are unlikely to see governments restrict their defense sectors in any meaningful way beyond voluntary ethical commitments. We are in the age of AI experimentation, and militaries are playing with the highest stakes of all. And because of the military’s secretive nature, tech companies can experiment with the technology without the need for transparency or even much accountability. That suits Silicon Valley just fine. 

Now read the rest of The Algorithm

Deeper Learning

How Wayve’s driverless cars will meet one of their biggest challenges yet

The UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firm’s cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well. And that brings a new challenge: Its AI will need to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right.

Full speed ahead: As visitors to or from the UK will know, making that switch is harder than it sounds. Your view of the road, how the vehicle turns—it’s all different. The move to the US will be a test of Wayve’s technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering. Across the Atlantic, the company will now go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla. Join Will Douglas Heaven on a ride in one of its cars to find out more. 

Bits and Bytes

Kids are learning how to make their own little language models
Little Language Models is a new application from two PhD researchers at MIT’s Media Lab that helps children understand how AI models work—by getting to build small-scale versions themselves. (MIT Technology Review) 

Google DeepMind is making its AI text watermark open source
Google DeepMind has developed a tool for identifying AI-generated text called SynthID, which is part of a larger family of watermarking tools for generative AI outputs. The company is applying the watermark to text generated by its Gemini models and making it available for others to use too. (MIT Technology Review) 

Anthropic debuts an AI model that can “use” a computer
The tool enables the company’s Claude AI model to interact with computer interfaces and take actions such as moving a cursor, clicking on things, and typing text. It’s a very cumbersome and error-prone version of what some have said AI agents will be able to do one day. (Anthropic) 

Can an AI chatbot be blamed for a teen’s suicide?
A 14-year-old boy committed suicide, and his mother says it was because he was obsessed with an AI chatbot created by Character.AI. She is suing the company. Chatbots have been touted as cures for loneliness, but critics say they actually worse isolation.  (The New York Times) 

Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in search results
The internet’s biggest AI-powered search engines are featuring the widely debunked idea that white people are genetically superior to other races. (Wired) 

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Oct 29 2024
This AI system makes human tutors better at teaching children math

The US has a major problem with education inequality. Children from low-income families are less likely to receive high-quality education, partly because poorer districts struggle to retain experienced teachers. 

Artificial intelligence could help, by improving the one-on-one tutoring sometimes used to supplement class instruction in these schools. With help from an AI tool, tutors could tap into more experienced teachers’ expertise during virtual tutoring sessions. 

Researchers from Stanford University developed an AI system calledTutor CoPilot on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and integrated it into a platform called FEV Tutor, which connects students with tutors virtually. Tutors and students type messages to one another through a chat interface, and a tutor who needs help explaining how and why a student went wrong can press a button to generate suggestions from Tutor CoPilot. 

The researchers created the model by training GPT-4 on a database of 700 real tutoring sessions in which experienced teachers worked on on one with first- to fifth-grade students on math lessons, identifying the students’ errors and then working with them to correct the errors in such a way that they learned to understand the broader concepts being taught. From this, the model generates responses that tutors can customize to help their online students.

“I’m really excited about the future of human-AI collaboration systems,” says Rose Wang, a PhD student at Stanford University who worked on the project, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed “I think this technology is a huge enabler, but only if it’s designed well.”

The tool isn’t designed to actually teach the students math—instead, it offers tutors helpful advice on how to nudge students toward correct answers while encouraging deeper learning. 

For example, it can suggest that the tutor ask how the student came up with an answer, or propose questions that could point to a different way to solve a problem. 

To test its efficacy, the team examined the interactions of 900 tutors virtually teaching math to 1,787 students between five and 13 years old from historically underserved communities in the US South. Half the tutors had the option to activate Tutor CoPilot, while the other half did not. 

The students whose tutors had access to Tutor CoPilot were 4 percentage points more likely to pass their exit ticket—an assessment of whether a student has mastered a subject—than those whose tutors did not have access to it. (Pass rates were 66% and 62%, respectively.)

The tool works as well as it does because it’s being used to teach relatively basic mathematics, says Simon Frieder, a machine-learning researcher at the University of Oxford, who did not work on the project. “You couldn’t really do a study with much more advanced mathematics at this current point in time,” he says.

The team estimates that the tool could improve student learning at a cost of around $20 per tutor annually to the tutoring provider, which is significantly cheaper than the thousands of dollars it usually takes to train educators in person. 

It has the potential to improve the relationship between novice tutors and their students by training them to approach problems the way experienced teachers do, says Mina Lee, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the project.

“This work demonstrates that the tool actually does work in real settings,” she says. “We want to facilitate human connection, and this really highlights how AI can augment human-to-human interaction.”

As a next step, Wang and her colleagues are interested in exploring how well novice tutors remember the teaching methods imparted by Tutor CoPilot. This could help them gain a sense of how long the effects of these kinds of AI interventions might last. They also plan to try to work out which other school subjects or age groups could benefit from such an approach.

“There’s a lot of substantial ways in which the underlying technology can get better,” Wang says. “But we’re not deploying an AI technology willy-nilly without pre-validating it—we want to be sure we’re able to rigorously evaluate it before we actually send it out into the wild. For me, the worst fear is that we’re wasting the students’ time.”

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Oct 29 2024
Palmer Luckey on the Pentagon’s future of mixed reality

Palmer Luckey has, in some ways, come full circle. 

His first experience with virtual-reality headsets was as a teenage lab technician at a defense research center in Southern California, studying their potential to curb PTSD symptoms in veterans. He then built Oculus, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion, left Facebook after a highly public ousting, and founded Anduril, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense. The company is now valued at $14 billion.

Now Luckey is redirecting his energy again, to headsets for the military. In September, Anduril announced it would partner with Microsoft on the US Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), arguably the military’s largest effort to develop a headset for use on the battlefield. Luckey says the IVAS project is his top priority at Anduril.

“There is going to be a heads-up display on every soldier within a pretty short period of time,” he told MIT Technology Review in an interview last week on his work with the IVAS goggles. “The stuff that we’re building—it’s going to be a big part of that.”

Though few would bet against Luckey’s expertise in the realm of mixed reality, few observers share his optimism for the IVAS program. They view it, thus far, as an avalanche of failures. 

IVAS was first approved in 2018 as an effort to build state-of-the-art mixed-reality headsets for soldiers. In March 2021, Microsoft was awarded nearly $22 billion over 10 years to lead the project, but it quickly became mired in delays. Just a year later, a Pentagon audit criticized the program for not properly testing the goggles, saying its choices “could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended.” The first two variants of the goggles—of which the army purchased 10,000 units—gave soldiers nausea, neck pain, and eye strain, according to internal documents obtained by Bloomberg. 

Such reports have left IVAS on a short leash with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which helps determine how much money should be spent on the program. In a subcommittee meeting in May, Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and ranking member, expressed frustration at IVAS’s slow pace and high costs, and in July the committee suggested a $200 million cut to the program. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft has for years been cutting investments into its HoloLens headset—the hardware on which the IVAS program is based—for lack of adoption. In June, Microsoft announced layoffs to its HoloLens teams, suggesting the project is now focused solely on serving the Department of Defense. The company received a serious blow in August, when reports revealed that the Army is considering reopening bidding for the contract to oust Microsoft entirely. 

This is the catastrophe that Luckey’s stepped into. Anduril’s contribution to the project will be Lattice, an AI-powered system that connects everything from drones to radar jammers to surveil, detect objects, and aid in decision-making. Lattice is increasingly becoming Anduril’s flagship offering. It’s a tool that allows soldiers to receive instantaneous information not only from Anduril’s hardware, but also from radars, vehicles, sensors, and other equipment not made by Anduril. Now it will be built into the IVAS goggles. “It’s not quite a hive mind, but it’s certainly a hive eye” is how Luckey described it to me. 

Palmer Luckey holding an autonomous drone interceptor
Anvil, seen here held by Luckey in Anduril’s Costa Mesa Headquarters, integrates with the Lattice OS and can navigate autonomously to intercept hostile drones.
PHILIP CHEUNG

Boosted by Lattice, the IVAS program aims to produce a headset that can help soldiers “rapidly identify potential threats and take decisive action” on the battlefield, according to the Army. If designed well, the device will automatically sort through countless pieces of information—drone locations, vehicles, intelligence—and flag the most important ones to the wearer in real time. 

Luckey defends the IVAS program’s bumps in the road as exactly what one should expect when developing mixed reality for defense. “None of these problems are anything that you would consider insurmountable,” he says. “It’s just a matter of if it’s going to be this year or a few years from now.” He adds that delaying a product is far better than releasing an inferior product, quoting Shigeru Miyamoto, the game director of Nintendo: “A delayed game is delayed only once, but a bad game is bad forever.”

He’s increasingly convinced that the military, not consumers, will be the most important testing ground for mixed-reality hardware: “You’re going to see an AR headset on every soldier, long before you see it on every civilian,” he says. In the consumer world, any headset company is competing with the ubiquity and ease of the smartphone, but he sees entirely different trade-offs in defense.

“The gains are so different when we talk about life-or-death scenarios. You don’t have to worry about things like ‘Oh, this is kind of dorky looking,’ or ‘Oh, you know, this is slightly heavier than I would prefer,’” he says. “Because the alternatives of, you know, getting killed or failing your mission are a lot less desirable.”

Those in charge of the IVAS program remain steadfast in the expectation that it will pay off with huge gains for those on the battlefield. “If it works,” James Rainey, commanding general of the Army Futures Command, told the Armed Services Committee in May, “it is a legitimate 10x upgrade to our most important formations.” That’s a big “if,” and one that currently depends on Microsoft’s ability to deliver. Luckey didn’t get specific when I asked if Anduril was positioning itself to bid to become IVAS’s primary contractor should the opportunity arise. 

If that happens, US troops may, willingly or not, become the most important test subjects for augmented- and virtual-reality technology as it is developed in the coming decades. The commercial sector doesn’t have thousands of individuals within a single institution who can test hardware in physically and mentally demanding situations and provide their feedback on how to improve it. 

That’s one of the ways selling to the defense sector is very different from selling to consumers, Luckey says: “You don’t actually have to convince every single soldier that they personally want to use it. You need to convince the people in charge of him, his commanding officer, and the people in charge of him that this is a thing that is worth wearing.” The iterations that eventually come from IVAS—if it keeps its funding—could signal what’s coming next for the commercial market. 

When I asked Luckey if there were lessons from Oculus he had to unlearn when working with the Department of Defense, he said there’s one: worrying about budgets. “I prided myself for years, you know—I’m the guy who’s figured out how to make VR accessible to the masses by being absolutely brutal at every part of the design process, trying to get costs down. That isn’t what the DOD wants,” he says. “They don’t want the cheapest headset in a vacuum. They want to save money, and generally, spending a bit more money on a headset that is more durable or that has better vision—and therefore allows you to complete a mission faster—is definitely worth the extra few hundred dollars.”

I asked if he’s impressed by the progress that’s been made during his eight-year hiatus from mixed reality. Since he left Facebook in 2017, Apple, Magic Leap, Meta, Snap, and a cascade of startups have been racing to move the technology from the fringe to the mainstream. Everything in mixed reality is about trade-offs, he says. Would you like more computing power, or a lighter and more comfortable headset? 

With more time at Meta, “I would have made different trade-offs in a way that I think would have led to greater adoption,” he says. “But of course, everyone thinks that.” While he’s impressed with the gains, “having been on the inside, I also feel like things could be moving faster.”

Years after leaving, Luckey remains noticeably annoyed by one specific decision he thinks Meta got wrong: not offloading the battery. Dwelling on technical details is unsurprising from someone who spent his formative years living in a trailer in his parents’ driveway posting in obscure forums and obsessing over goggle prototypes. He pontificated on the benefits of packing the heavy batteries and chips in removable pucks that the user could put in a pocket, rather than in the headset itself. Doing so makes the headset lighter and more comfortable. He says he was pushing Facebook to go that route before he was ousted, but when he left, it abandoned the idea. Apple chose to have an external battery for its Vision Pro, which Luckey praised. 

“Anyway,” he told me. “I’m still sore about it eight years later.”

Speaking of soreness, Luckey’s most public professional wound, his ouster from Facebook in 2017, was partially healed last month. The story—involving countless Twitter threads, doxxing, retractions and corrections to news articles, suppressed statements, and a significant segment in Blake Harris’s 2020 book The History of the Future—is difficult to boil down. But here’s the short version: A donation by Luckey to a pro-Trump group called Nimble America in late 2016 led to turmoil within Facebook after it was reported by the Daily Beast. That turmoil grew, especially after Ars Technica wrote that his donation was funding racist memes (the founders of Nimble America were involved in the subreddit r/TheDonald, but the organization itself was focused on creating pro-Trump billboards). Luckey left in March 2017, but Meta has never disclosed why. 

This April, Oculus’s former CTO John Carmack posted on X that he regretted not supporting Luckey more. Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, argued with Carmack, largely siding with Meta. In response, Luckey said, “You publicly told everyone my departure had nothing to do with politics, which is absolutely insane and obviously contradicted by reams of internal communications.” The two argued. In the X argument, Bosworth cautioned that there are “limits on what can be said here,” to which Luckey responded, “I am down to throw it all out there. We can make everything public and let people judge for themselves. Just say the word.” 

Six months later, Bosworth apologized to Luckey for the comments. Luckey responded, writing that although he is “infamously good at holding grudges,” neither Bosworth nor current leadership at Meta was involved in the incident. 

By now Luckey has spent years mulling over how much of his remaining anger is irrational or misplaced, but one thing is clear. He has a grudge left, but it’s against people behind the scenes—PR agents, lawyers, reporters—who, from his perspective, created a situation that forced him to accept and react to an account he found totally flawed. He’s angry about the steps Facebook took to keep him from communicating his side (Luckey has said he wrote versions of a statement at the time but that Facebook threatened further escalation if he posted it).

“What am I actually angry at? Am I angry that my life went in that direction? Absolutely,” he says.

“I have a lot more anger for the people who lied in a way that ruined my entire life and that saw my own company ripped out from under me that I’d spent my entire adult life building,” he says. “I’ve got plenty of anger left, but it’s not at Meta, the corporate entity. It’s not at Zuck. It’s not at Boz. Those are not the people who wronged me.”

While various subcommittees within the Senate and House deliberate how many millions to spend on IVAS each year, what is not in question is the Pentagon is investing to prepare for a potential conflict in the Pacific between China and Taiwan. The Pentagon requested nearly $10 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative in its latest budget. The prospect of such a conflict is something Luckey considers often. 

He told the authors of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War that Anduril’s “entire internal road map” has been organized around the question “How do you deter China? Not just in Taiwan, but Taiwan and beyond?”

At this point, nothing about IVAS is geared specifically toward use in the South Pacific as opposed to Ukraine or anywhere else. The design is in early stages. According to transcripts of a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee meeting in May, the military was scheduled to receive the third iteration of IVAS goggles earlier this summer. If they were on schedule, they’re currently in testing. That version is likely to change dramatically before it approaches Luckey’s vision for the future of mixed-reality warfare, in which “you have a little bit of an AI guardian angel on your shoulder, helping you out and doing all the stuff that is easy to miss in the midst of battle.”

Palmer Luckey sitting on yellow metal staircase
Designs for IVAS will have to adapt amid a shifting landscape of global conflict.
PHILIP CHEUNG

But will soldiers ever trust such a “guardian angel”? If the goggles of the future rely on AI-powered software like Lattice to identify threats—say, an enemy drone ahead or an autonomous vehicle racing toward you—Anduril is making the promise that it can sort through the false positives, recognize threats with impeccable accuracy, and surface critical information when it counts most. 

Luckey says the real test is how the technology compares with the current abilities of humans. “In a lot of cases, it’s already better,” he says, referring to Lattice, as measured by Anduril’s internal tests (it has not released these, and they have not been assessed by any independent external experts). “People are fallible in ways that machines aren’t necessarily,” he adds.

Still, Luckey admits he does worry about the threats Lattice will miss.

“One of the things that really worries me is there’s going to be people who die because Lattice misunderstood something, or missed a threat to a soldier that it should have seen,” he says. “At the same time, I can recognize that it’s still doing far better than people are doing today.”

When Lattice makes a significant mistake, it’s unlikely the public will know. Asked about the balance between transparency and national security in disclosing these errors, Luckey said that Anduril’s customer, the Pentagon, will receive complete information about what went wrong. That’s in line with the Pentagon’s policies on responsible AI adoption, which require that AI-driven systems be “developed with methodologies, data sources, design procedures, and documentation that are transparent to and auditable by their relevant defense personnel.” 

However, the policies promise nothing about disclosure to the public, a fact that’s led some progressive think tanks, like the Brennan Center for Justice, to call on federal agencies to modernize public transparency efforts for the age of AI. 

“It’s easy to say, Well, shouldn’t you be honest about this failure of your system to detect something?” Luckey says, regarding Anduril’s obligations. “Well, what if the failure was because the Chinese figured out a hole in the system and leveraged that to speed past our defenses of some military base? I’d say there’s not very much public good served in saying, ‘Attention, everyone—there is a way to get past all of the security on every US military base around the world.’ I would say that transparency would be the worst thing you could do.”

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Oct 29 2024
AI will add to the e-waste problem. Here’s what we can do about it.

Generative AI could account for up to 5 million metric tons of e-waste by 2030, according to a new study.

That’s a relatively small fraction of the current global total of over 60 million metric tons of e-waste each year. However, it’s still a significant part of a growing problem, experts warn. 

E-waste is the term to describe things like air conditioners, televisions, and personal electronic devices such as cell phones and laptops when they are thrown away. These devices often contain hazardous or toxic materials that can harm human health or the environment if they’re not disposed of properly. Besides those potential harms, when appliances like washing machines and high-performance computers wind up in the trash, the valuable metals inside the devices are also wasted—taken out of the supply chain instead of being recycled.

Depending on the adoption rate of generative AI, the technology could add 1.2 million to 5 million metric tons of e-waste in total by 2030, according to the study, published today in Nature Computational Science. 

“This increase would exacerbate the existing e-waste problem,” says Asaf Tzachor, a researcher at Reichman University in Israel and a co-author of the study, via email.

The study is novel in its attempts to quantify the effects of AI on e-waste, says Kees Baldé, a senior scientific specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and an author of the latest Global E-Waste Monitor, an annual report.

The primary contributor to e-waste from generative AI is high-performance computing hardware that’s used in data centers and server farms, including servers, GPUs, CPUs, memory modules, and storage devices. That equipment, like other e-waste, contains valuable metals like copper, gold, silver, aluminum, and rare earth elements, as well as hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, and chromium, Tzachor says.

One reason that AI companies generate so much waste is how quickly hardware technology is advancing. Computing devices typically have lifespans of two to five years, and they’re replaced frequently with the most up-to-date versions. 

While the e-waste problem goes far beyond AI, the rapidly growing technology represents an opportunity to take stock of how we deal with e-waste and lay the groundwork to address it. The good news is that there are strategies that can help reduce expected waste.

Expanding the lifespan of technologies by using equipment for longer is one of the most significant ways to cut down on e-waste, Tzachor says. Refurbishing and reusing components can also play a significant role, as can designing hardware in ways that makes it easier to recycle and upgrade. Implementing these strategies could reduce e-waste generation by up to 86% in a best-case scenario, the study projected. 

Only about 22% of e-waste is being formally collected and recycled today, according to the 2024 Global E-Waste Monitor. Much more is collected and recovered through informal systems, including in low- and lower-middle-income countries that don’t have established e-waste management infrastructure in place. Those informal systems can recover valuable metals but often don’t include safe disposal of hazardous materials, Baldé says.

Another major barrier to reducing AI-related e-waste is concerns about data security. Destroying equipment ensures information doesn’t leak out, while reusing or recycling equipment will require using other means to secure data. Ensuring that sensitive information is erased from hardware before recycling is critical, especially for companies handling confidential data, Tzachor says.

More policies will likely be needed to ensure that e-waste, including from AI, is recycled or disposed of properly. Recovering valuable metals (including iron, gold, and silver) can help make the economic case. However, e-waste recycling will likely still come with a price, since it’s costly to safely handle the hazardous materials often found inside the devices, Baldé says. 

“For companies and manufacturers, taking responsibility for the environmental and social impacts of their products is crucial,” Tzachor says. “This way, we can make sure that the technology we rely on doesn’t come at the expense of human and planetary health.”

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Oct 27 2024
Kids are learning how to make their own little language models

“This new AI technology—it’s very interesting to learn how it works and understand it more,” says 10-year-old Luca, a young AI model maker.

Luca is one of the first kids to try Little Language Models, a new application from Manuj and Shruti Dhariwal, two PhD researchers at MIT’s Media Lab, that helps children understand how AI models work—by getting to build small-scale versions themselves. 

The program is a way to introduce the complex concepts that make modern AI models work without droning on about them in a theoretical lecture. Instead, kids can see and build a visualization of the concepts in practice, which helps them get to grips with them.

“What does it mean to have children see themselves as being builders of AI technologies and not just users?” says Shruti.

The program starts out by using a pair of dice to demonstrate probabilistic thinking, a system of decision-making that accounts for uncertainty. Probabilistic thinking underlies the LLMs of today, which predict the most likely next word in a sentence. By teaching a concept like it, the program can help to demystify the workings of LLMs for kids and assist them in understanding that sometimes the model’s choices are not perfect but the result of a series of probabilities. 

Students can modify each side of the dice to whatever variable they want. And then they can change how likely each side is to come up when you roll them. Luca thinks it would be “really cool” to incorporate this feature into the design of a Pokémon-like game he is working on. But it can also demonstrate some crucial realities about AI.

Let’s say a teacher wanted to educate students about how bias comes up in AI models. The kids could be told to create a pair of dice and then set each side to a hand of a different skin color. At first, they could set the probability of a white hand at 100%, reflecting a hypothetical situation where there are only images of white people in the data set. When the AI is asked to generate a visual, it produces only white hands.

Then the teacher can have the kids increase the percentage of other skin colors, simulating a more diverse data set. The AI model now produces hands of varying skin colors.

“It was interesting using Little Language Models, because it makes AI into something small [where the students] can grasp what’s going on,” says Helen Mastico, a middle school librarian in Quincy, Massachusetts, who taught a group of eighth graders to use the program.

“You start to see, ‘Oh, this is how bias creeps in,’” says Shruti. “It provides a rich context for educators to start talking about and for kids to imagine, basically, how these things scale to really big levels.”

They plan for the tool to be used around the world. Students will be able to upload their own data, monitored by their teacher. “[Students] can also add their own sounds, images, and backdrops that represent their culture,” says Manuj. 

The Dhariwals have also implemented a tool where kids can play around with more advanced concepts like Markov chains, where a preceding variable influences what comes after it. For example, a child could build an AI that creates random houses made from Lego bricks. The child can dictate that if the AI uses a red brick first, the percentage of yellow brick coming next is set much higher.

“The best way to support young people as creative learners is through helping them work on projects based on their passions,” says the Dhariwals’ PhD advisor Mitch Resnick, co-creator of Scratch, the most famous program in the world for teaching kids to code. “And that’s what Little Language Models does. It lets children take these new ideas and put them to use in creative ways.”

Little Language Models may fill a hole in the current educational landscape. “There is a real lack of playful resources and tools that teach children about data literacy and about AI concepts creatively,” says Emma Callow, a learning experience designer who works with educators and schools on implementing new ways to teach kids about technology. “Schools are more worried about safety, rather than the potential to use AI. But it is progressing in schools, and people are starting to kind of use it,” she says. “There is a space for education to change.”

Little Language Models is rolling out on the Dhariwals’ online education platform, coco.build, in mid-November, and they’re trialing the program at various schools over the next month. 

Luca’s mom, Diana, hopes the chance to experiment with it will serve him well. “It’s experiences like this that will teach him about AI from a very young age and help him use it in a wiser way,” she says.

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Oct 25 2024
GMOs could reboot chestnut trees

Under a slice-of-heaven sky, 150 acres of rolling green hills stretch off into the distance. About a dozen people—tree enthusiasts, conservationists, research biologists, biotech entrepreneurs, and a venture capitalist in long socks and a floppy hat—have driven to this rural spot in New York state on a perfect late-July day. 

We are here to see more than 2,500 transgenic chestnut seedlings at a seed farm belonging to American Castanea, a new biotech startup. The sprouts, no higher than our knees, are samples of likely the first genetically modified trees to be considered for federal regulatory approval as a tool for ecological restoration. American Castanea’s founders, and all the others here today, hope that the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) will be the first tree species ever brought back from functional extinction—but, ideally, not the last.

Living as long as a thousand years, the American chestnut tree once dominated parts of the Eastern forest canopy, with many Native American nations relying on them for food. But by 1950, the tree had largely succumbed to a fungal blight probably introduced by Japanese chestnuts. “Now after hard work, great ideas, and decades of innovation, we have a tree and a science platform designed to make restoration possible,” American Castanea cofounder Michael Bloom told the people squinting in the sun.

As recently as last year, it seemed the 35-year effort to revive the American chestnut might grind to a halt. Now, federal regulatory approval is expected soon. And there’s millions of dollars in new funding coming in from private investors and the federal government. One conservation nonprofit is in discussions with American Castanea to plant up to a million of its chestnuts per year as soon as they’re ready and approved. 

Nothing like this has ever been tried before. But the self-­proclaimed “nutheads” believe the reintroduction of a GMO, blight-resistant American chestnut at scale could also become a model for how environmentalists can redeploy trees in general: restoring forests and shifting food production, all to combat climate change and biodiversity loss. 

“It’s a hard time to be a tree,” says Leigh Greenwood, director of the forest pest and pathogen program at the Nature Conservancy, which has been supportive of the GMO chestnut’s regulatory application. “But there’s some really interesting promise and hope.”  

Four billion trees dead 

“Charismatic megafauna” is the scientific term for species, like pandas and blue whales, that draw a disproportionate amount of love and, thus, resources. The nearly vanished American chestnut may be the most charismatic tree east of the Rockies. Because of its historical importance, fast growth, and abundant productivity of both nuts and timber, it’s drawn an exceptional amount of interest among biologists, conservationists, and a new crop of farmers. 

Trees that die back from blight occasionally resprout. Volunteer groups like the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation have been working for decades to gather and crossbreed wild trees in the hopes of nudging along natural resistance to the blight. Meanwhile, the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), with the support of a different group, the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), has been pursuing genetic engineering in its labs and on its 44 wooded acres outside Syracuse. 

When ESF biologist Bill Powell and his colleagues began working with chestnut embryonic cells in 1989, it took them a decade just to optimize the growing process to make research practical. After that, researchers in the small lab inserted a wheat gene in embryos that inactivated oxalic acid, the toxin produced by the blight fungus. Gathering results on these transgenic trees takes time, because each generation has to grow for a few years before it produces the most useful data. But they eventually created a promising line, named Darling-58 after Herb Darling, a New York construction magnate who funded this research through TACF. Darling-58 was not perfect, and results varied from tree to tree and site to site. But eventually, the data showed slower infections and smaller cankers, the bulbous growths produced by the blight. 

In 2020, Darling-58 became, in all likelihood, the first genetically modified forest tree to be submitted for federal regulatory approval to the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the EPA, and the FDA to determine the safety of introducing it in the wild. 

“It’s a hard time to be a tree. But there’s some really interesting promise and hope.”

It is this genetically engineered strain of chestnut that American Castanea, too, is now planting and propagating in New York state, under a nonexclusive commercial license from ESF. They want to sell these trees, pending approval. And then they want to keep going, engineering ever-better chestnuts, and selling them first to enthusiasts, then to farmers, and finally to conservationists for timber, reforestation, maybe even carbon capture. 

To aid the effort, the company is looking for extraordinary wild specimens. In early 2024, it purchased an orchard that had been lovingly cultivated for three decades by a conservationist. The windy hilltop spot houses hundreds of trees, collected like stray kittens from a dozen states throughout the chestnut’s natural range. 

Most of the trees are homely and sickly with blight. They have bulging cankers, “flagging” branches sporting yellow and brown leaves, or green shoots that burst each season from their large root systems only to flop over and die back. “They make me a little sad,” admits Andrew Serazin, cofounder of American Castanea. But a few have shot up as tall as 40 feet, with only a few cankers. All these specimens have been sampled and are being analyzed. They will become the basis of a chestnut gene database that’s as complete as American Castanea can make it. 

From there, the plan is: Apply bioinformatics and AI techniques to correlate genetic signatures with specific traits. Borrow techniques developed in the cannabis industry for seedling production, cloning, and growth acceleration in high-intensity light chambers—none of which have yet been yet applied at this scale to forest trees. Develop several diverse, improved new strains of chestnut that are blight-resistant and optimized for different uses like forest restoration, nut production, and timber. Then produce seedlings at a scale previously unknown. The hope is to accelerate restoration, cutting down the time it would take resistant strains of the tree to propagate in the wild. “Tree growth takes a long time. We need to bend the curve of something that’s like a 30-year problem,” says Serazin.

The breadtree revival

The chestnut has not disappeared from the US: In fact, Americans eat some 33 million pounds of the nuts a year. These are European and Asian varieties, mostly imported. But some companies are looking to expand the cultivation of the nuts domestically. 

Among those leading the quest is a company called Breadtree Farms in upstate New York, named for a traditional nickname for the chestnut. In March, it won a $2 million grant from the USDA to build the largest organic chestnut processing facility in the US. It will be up to eight times larger than needed for its own 250 acres of trees. The company is dedicated to scaling the regional industry. “We have a list of over 100 growers that are, and will be, planting chestnut trees,” says Russell Wallack, Breadtree’s young cofounder.

Chestnuts have a nutritional profile similar to brown rice; they’re high in carbohydrates and lower in fat than other nuts. And unlike other nut trees, the chestnut “masts”—produces a large crop—every year, making it far more prolific.

That makes it a good candidate for an alternative form of agriculture dubbed agroforestry, which incorporates more trees into food cultivation. Food, agriculture, and land use together account for about one-quarter of greenhouse-gas emissions. Adding trees, whether as windbreaks between fields or as crops, could lower the sector’s carbon footprint.

Many different trees can be used this way. But Joe Fargione, science director for the Nature Conservancy’s North America region, says the chestnut is a standout candidate. “It’s great from a climate perspective, and there’s a lot of farmers that are excited about it,” he says. “Chestnuts end up being big trees that store a lot of CO2 and have a product that can be very prolific. They have the potential to pay for themselves. We want not just environmental sustainability but economic sustainability.”

The passion for chestnut revival connects the foresters and the farmers. Farmers aren’t waiting for the GMO trees to get federal approval. They are planting existing Chinese varieties, and hybrids between American and Chinese chestnuts, which thrive in the East. Still, Fargione says that if nut cultivation is going to scale up, farmers will need reliable seed stock of genetically improved trees. 

A Tennessee family poses at the base of a chestnut tree, circa 1920. A deadly fungus nearly drove the once mighty species extinct by 1940.
NEGATIVES OF GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK

On the other hand, those foreign orchard varieties would be considered invasives if planted in the wild. And they wouldn’t feed wildlife in the same way, says Sara Fern Fitzsimmons, chief conservation officer of the American Chestnut Foundation. “Wild turkeys prefer American chestnuts,” she says. “And the blue jay—since the American chestnut is smaller, he can fit more in his crop,” a food storage area inside a bird’s throat. For forest restoration you need American chestnuts or something as close to them as possible. That’s where the genetic engineering and crossbreeding projects will be crucial. But that path has been full of pitfalls.

Switched at birth

In late 2023, a biologist at the University of New England discovered evidence that Darling-58 was not what people thought it was. For nearly 10 years, all the data that ESF had painstakingly gathered on the strain actually pertained to a different line, Darling-54, which has its wheat gene in a different place on the genome. The promising results were all still there. The trees had simply been mislabeled that entire time. 

 A few weeks later, in December 2023, the American Chestnut Foundation suddenly announced it was withdrawing its support of ESF’s Darling tree research, citing the 54-58 mix-up, as well as what it called “disappointing performance results” for 54. 

But Andy Newhouse, director of the American Chestnut Project at SUNY ESF, says the mislabeling is not a deal-breaker. The research doesn’t “need to start from scratch,” he says. “This is correcting the record, making sure we have the appropriate label on it, and moving forward.” Newhouse says the regulatory application is ongoing (the USDA and FDA declined to comment on a pending regulatory application; the EPA did not respond to requests for comment). 

Newhouse defends the documented blight response of the trees that, we now know, are actually Darling-54.

And besides, he says, they’ve got a potentially better strain coming: the DarWin. The “Win” stands for “wound-inducible.” In these trees, the anti-blight action turns on—is induced—only when the tree’s bark is wounded, working something like an animal’s immune response. This could be more efficient than continuously expressing the anti-blight gene, the way Darling-54 does. So DarWin trees might reserve more of their energy to grow and produce nuts. 

The DarWin trees are about three years old, meaning data is still being collected. And if the Darling trees are approved for safety, it should smooth the path for a much faster approval of the DarWin trees, Newhouse says.

There was another reason, though, that TACF dropped its support of the Darling regulatory petition. In a FAQ on its website, the foundation said it was “surprised and concerned” that ESF had made a licensing deal for the Darling and DarWin trees—potentially worth millions—with a for-profit company: American Castanea.

TACF said it had been supporting the project under the assumption that the results would be available, for free, to anyone, in the “public commons.” Commercialization, it says, could make the trees more expensive for anyone who might want to plant them. Fitzsimmons wouldn’t comment further. 

The biotech boys

American Castanea’s Andrew Serazin is a Rhodes scholar whose scientific background is in tropical disease research. He rose in the ranks in global philanthropy, running million-­dollar grant competitions for the Gates Foundation, funding projects like vitamin-­enhanced “golden rice” and HIV vaccines. 

He was president of the Templeton World Charity Foundation in 2020 when it gave a “transformational” $3.2 million grant to SUNY ESF’s chestnut project. Serazin became convinced that the chestnut could be the seed of something much, much bigger. It didn’t hurt that he had a sentimental chestnut connection through his wife’s family farm in West Virginia, which dates back to the time of George Washington. 

With pests and pathogens threatening so many different species, “there’s a huge potential for there to be precision management of forests using all of the same capabilities we’ve used in human medicine,” he says. 

For that, Serazin was convinced, they needed money. Real money. Venture capital money. “I mean, really, there’s only one system that we know about that works the best for this kind of innovation, and that’s using incentives for companies to bring together these resources,” he says. 

Serazin teamed up with his friend Michael Bloom, an entrepreneur who’s sold two previous companies. They incorporated American Castanea for certification as a public benefit corporation in Delaware, pledging to balance profit with purpose and adhere to a high degree of transparency on social and environmental impact. They went to “impact investors” to sell the vision. That was part of what was going on at the seed farm on that July day; the company has $4 million in seed financing and wants to raise $7 million to $10 million more next year. 

What he’s offering investors, Serazin says, isn’t quick returns but a chance to “participate in the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring back a tree species from functional extinction, and participate in this great American story.” 

What they’re proposing, over the next several decades or more, is no less than replanting the entire Eastern forest with a variety of genetically superior breeds, on the scale of millions of trees. 

It sounds, at first blush, like a sci-fi terraforming scenario. On the other hand, Leigh Greenwood, at the Nature Conservancy, says every species group of tree in the woods is threatened by climate change. Pathogens are emerging in new territories, trees are stressed by extreme weather, and the coldest winter temperatures, which used to reliably kill off all manner of forest insects and diseases at the edges of their habitats, are getting milder.

Besides chestnut blight, there’s Dutch elm disease, the emerald ash borer, butternut canker, oak wilt, and white pine blister rust. The southern pine beetle now ranges as far north as Massachusetts because of milder winters. The spongy (formerly gypsy) moth is a champion defoliator, munching enough leaves “to make an entire forest look naked in June,” says Greenwood. A new nematode that attacks leaves and buds, previously unknown to science, has emerged near the Great Lakes in the last decade. Sick and dying trees stop sequestering carbon and storing water, are prone to wildfire, and can take entire ecosystems down with them. 

“Invasive species are moving faster than biological time,” Greenwood says. “What we have to do is speed up the host trees, their natural selection. And that is an enormous task that only in very recent times have we really developed the tools in order to figure out how the heck we’re going to do that.” 

By “recent tools,” Greenwood means, more or less, what American Castanea is trying: genetic analysis and advanced horticultural techniques that allow resistant trees to be propagated and introduced into the wild more quickly. 

Greenwood is quick to say that the Nature Conservancy also supports the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation, which crossbreeds wild American chestnuts for blight resistance. They are a small, all-volunteer organization with no university affiliation. They mail their crossbred chestnuts out to hobbyist landowners all over the country, and president Ed Greenwell tells me they don’t really know exactly how many are growing out there—maybe 5,000, maybe more. He has seen some that are big and healthy, he says. “We have many trees of 40-plus years of age.” 

What they don’t have is a sense of urgency. “We’re self-funded, so we could do our breeding as we choose,” says Greenwell. “Our method is tried and true, and we have no pressure to take shortcuts, like genetic modification, which theoretically could have shortened the time to get trees back in the woods.” 

The whole idea of a GMO forest tests our concept of what “nature” is. And that may just be a marker of where we are at this point in the Anthropocene.

Greenwell is not the only one to object to GMO chestnuts. In 2023, Joey Owle, then the secretary of agriculture and natural resources for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, told Grist magazine that while the group was open to introducing transgenic trees on its land if necessary, it was the “last option that we would like to pursue.”

Greenwood led the writing of an expert letter, something like an amicus brief, in support of SUNY ESF’s regulatory petition for the Darling tree. She takes such objections seriously. “If we do not address the human dimensions of change, no matter how good the biological, chemical designs are,” she says, “those changes will fail.” 

That July day out at the seed farm, sitting under a tent with plates of pork barbecue, the scientists, conservationists, and businesspeople started debating how deep these GMO objections really run. Serazin said he believes that what people really hate is corporate monopoly, not the technology per se. “It’s really about the exertion of power and capital,” he said. He’s hoping that by incorporating as a public benefit corporation and making the trees widely available to conservation groups and responsible forest product and nut producers, he can convince people that American Castanea’s heart is in the right place. 

Still, others pointed out, the whole idea of a GMO forest tests our concept of what “nature” is. And that may just be a marker of where we are at this point in the Anthropocene—it’s hard to envision a future where any living creature in the ecological web can remain untouched by humans. 

That responsibility may connect us more to the past than we realize. For centuries, Native people like the Haudenosaunee Nation practiced intentional land management to improve habitat for the chestnut. When the Europeans began clearing land for farming and timber, the fast-growing tree was able to claim proportionately even more space for itself. It turns out the forest those colonists embraced—the forest dominated by chestnut trees—was no true accident of nature. It was a product of a relationship between people and chestnuts. One that continues to evolve today. 

Anya Kamenetz is a freelance reporter who writes the Substack newsletter The Golden Hour.

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Oct 25 2024
Introducing: The AI Hype Index

There’s no denying that the AI industry moves fast. Each week brings a bold new announcement, product release, or lofty claim that pushes the bounds of what we previously thought was possible. Separating AI fact from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

Our first index is a white-knuckle ride that ranges from the outright depressing—rising numbers of sexually explicit deepfakes; the complete lack of rules governing Elon Musk’s Grok AI model—to the bizarre, including AI-powered dating wingmen and startup Friend’s dorky intelligent-jewelry line. 

But it’s not all a horror show—at least not entirely. AI is being used for more wholesome endeavors, too, like simulating the classic video game Doom without a traditional gaming engine. Elsewhere, AI models have gotten so good at table tennis they can now beat beginner-level human opponents. They’re also giving us essential insight into the secret names monkeys use to communicate with one another. Because while AI may be a lot of things, it’s never boring. 

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Oct 25 2024
Why agriculture is a tough climate problem to solve

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

As a climate reporter, I’m all too aware of the greenhouse-gas emissions that come from food production. And yet, I’m not a vegan, and I do enjoy a good cheeseburger (at least on occasion). 

It’s a real problem, from a climate perspective at least, that burgers taste good, and so do chicken sandwiches and cheese and just about anything that has butter in it. It can be hard to persuade people to change their eating habits, especially since food is tied up in our social lives and our cultures. 

We could all stand to make some choices that could reduce the emissions associated with the food on our plates. But the longer I write about agriculture and climate, the more I think we’re also going to need to innovate around people’s love for burgers—and fix our food system not just in the kitchen, but on the farm. 

If we lump in everything it takes to get food grown, processed, and transported to us, agriculture accounts for between 20% and 35% of annual global greenhouse-gas emissions. (The range is huge because estimates can vary in what they include and how they account for things like land use, the impact of which is tricky to measure.) 

So when it came time to put together our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, which we released earlier this month, we knew we wanted to represent the massive challenge that is our food system. 

We ended up choosing two companies in agriculture for this year’s list, Pivot Bio and Rumin8. My colleague James Temple and I spoke with leaders from both these businesses at our recent Roundtables online event, and it was fascinating to hear from them about the problems they’re trying to solve and how they’re doing it. 

Pivot Bio is using microbes to help disrupt the fertilizer industry. Today, applying nitrogen-based fertilizers to fields is basically like putting gas into a leaky gas tank, as Pivot cofounder Karsten Temme put it at the event. 

Plants rely on nitrogen to grow, but they fail to take up a lot of the nitrogen in fertilizers applied in the field. Since fertilizer requires a ton of energy to produce and can wind up emitting powerful greenhouse gases if plants don’t use it, that’s a real problem.

Pivot Bio uses microbes to help get nitrogen from the air into plants, and the company’s current generation of products can help farmers cut fertilizer use by 25%. 

Rumin8 has its sights set on cattle, making supplements that help them emit less methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Cows have a complicated digestive system that involves multiple stomachs and a whole lot of microbes that help them digest food. Those microbes produce methane that the cows then burp up. “It’s really rude of them,” quipped Matt Callahan, Rumin8’s cofounder and counsel, at the event. 

In part because of the powerful warming effects of methane, beef is among the worst foods for the climate. Beef can account for up to 10 times more greenhouse-gas emissions than poultry, for example. 

Rumin8 makes an additive that can go into the food or water supply of dairy and beef cattle that can help reduce the methane they burp up. The chemical basically helps the cows use that gas as energy instead, so it can boost their growth—a big benefit to farmers. The company has seen methane reductions as high as 90%, depending on how the cow is getting the supplement (effects aren’t as strong for beef cattle, which often don’t have as close contact with farmers and may not get as strong a dose of the supplement over time as dairy cattle do). 

My big takeaway from our discussion, and from researching and picking the companies on our list this year, is that there’s a huge range of work being done to cut emissions from agriculture on the product side. That’s crucial, because I’m personally skeptical that a significant chunk of the world is going to quickly and voluntarily give up all the tasty but emissions-intensive foods that they’re used to. 

That’s not to say individual choices can’t make a difference. I love beans and lentils as much as the next girl, and we could all stand to make choices that cut down our individual climate impact. And it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Anyone can choose to eat a little bit less beef specifically, and fewer meat and animal products in general (which tend to be more emissions-intensive than plant-based options). Another great strategy is to focus on cutting down your food waste, which not only reduces emissions but also saves you money. 

But with appetites and budgets for beef and other emissions-intensive foods continuing to grow worldwide, I think we’re also going to need to see a whole lot of innovation that helps lower the emissions of existing food products that we all know and love, including beef. 

There’s no one magic solution that’s going to solve our climate problem in agriculture. The key is going to be both shifting diets through individual and community action and adopting new, lower-emissions options that companies bring to the table. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

If you missed our Rountables event “Producing Climate-Friendly Food,” you can check out the recording here. And for more details on the businesses we mentioned, read our profiles on Pivot Bio and Rumin8 from our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. 

There are also some fascinating climate stories from the new, food-focused issue of our print magazine: 

grid of batteries, part of an electric car driving down the road, a flame and an inset of PyroThin aerogels

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | ASPEN AEROGEL (PYROTHIN,) AUDI (EV)

Another thing

As more EVs hit the roads, there’s a growing concern about battery fires, which are a relatively rare but dangerous occurrence. 

Aspen Aerogels is making super-light materials that can help suppress battery fires, and the company just got a huge boost from the US Department of Energy. Read more about the $670.6 million loan and the details of the technology in my latest story. 

Keeping up with climate  

Hurricane Milton disrupted the supply of fresh drinking water, so a Florida hospital deployed a machine to harvest it out of the air. (Wired) 

There may be a huge supply of lithium in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. Using this source of the crucial battery metal will require companies to scale up new ways of extracting it. (New York Times)

There’s been a flurry of new deals between Big Tech and the nuclear industry, but Amazon is going one step further with its latest announcement. The company is supporting development of a new project rather than just agreeing to step in once electricity is ready. (Heatmap)
→ Here’s why Microsoft is getting involved in a plan to revive a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. (MIT Technology Review)

Japan’s most popular rice is in danger because of rising temperatures. Koshihikari rice has a low tolerance for heat, and scientists are racing to breed new varieties that can handle a changing climate. (New York Times)

There are some pretty straightforward solutions that could slash methane emissions from landfills, including requiring more sites to install gas-capture systems. Landfills are the third-largest source of the powerful greenhouse gas. (Canary Media)

Heat pump sales have slowed in the US and stalled in Europe. The technology is struggling in part because of high interest rates, increasing costs, and misinformation about the appliances. (Washington Post)
→ Here’s everything you need to know about how heat pumps work. (MIT Technology Review)

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