App MIT Technology Review Explains Policy

Aug 19 2024

What Japan’s “megaquake” warning really tells us

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

On August 8, at 16:42 local time, a magnitude-7.1 earthquake shook southern Japan. The temblor, originating off the shores of mainland island of Kyūshū, was felt by nearly a million people across the region, and initially, the threat of a tsunami emerged. But only a diminutive wave swept ashore, buildings remained upright, and nobody died. The crisis was over as quickly as it began.

But then, something new happened. The Japan Meteorological Agency, a government organization, issued a ‘megaquake advisory’ for the first time. This pair of words may appear disquieting—and to some extent, they are. There is a ticking bomb below Japanese waters, a giant crevasse where one tectonic plate dives below another. Stress has been accumulating across this boundary for quite some time, and inevitably, it will do what it has repeatedly done in the past: part of it will violently rupture, generating a devastating earthquake and a potentially huge tsunami.

The advisory was in part issued because it is possible that the magnitude-7.1 quake is a foreshock – a precursory quake – to a far larger one, a tsunami-making monster that could kill a quarter of a million people.

The good news, for now, is that scientists think it is very unlikely that that magnitude-7.1 quake is a prelude to a cataclysm. Nothing is certain, but “the chances that this actually is a foreshock are really quite low,” says Harold Tobin, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

The advisory, ultimately, isn’t prophetic. Its primary purpose is to let the public know that scientists are aware of what’s going on, that they are cognizant of the worst-case scenario—and that everyone else should be mindful of that grim possibility too. Evacuation routes should be memorized, and emergency supplies should be obtained, just in case.

“Even if the probability is low, the consequences are so high,” says Judith Hubbard, an earthquake scientist at Cornell University. “It makes sense to worry about some of these low probabilities.”

Japan, which sits atop a tectonic jigsaw, is no stranger to large earthquakes. Just this past New Year’s Day, a magnitude-7.6 temblor convulsed the Noto Peninsula, killing 230 people. But special attention is paid to certain quakes even when they cause no direct harm.

The August 8 event took place on the Nankai subduction zone: here, the Philippine Sea plate creeps below Japan, which is attached to the Eurasian plate. This type of plate boundary is the sort capable of producing ‘megaquakes’, those of a magnitude-8.0 and higher. (The numerical difference may seem small, but the scale is logarithmic: a magnitude-8.0 quake unleashes 32 times more energy than a magnitude-7.0 quake.)

Consequently, the Nankai subduction zone (or Nankai Trough) has created several historical tragedies. A magnitude-7.9 quake in 1944 was followed by a magnitude-8.0 quake in 1946; both events were caused by part of the submarine trench jolting. The magnitude-8.6 quake of 1707, however, involved the rupture of the entire Nankai Trough. Thousands died on each occasion.

Predicting disaster

Predicting when and where the next major quake will happen anywhere on Earth is currently impossible. Nankai is no different: as recently noted by Hubbard on her blog Earthquake Insights – co-authored with geoscientist Kyle Bradley – there isn’t a set time between Nankai’s major quakes, which range from days to several centuries.

But as stress is continually accumulating on that plate boundary, it’s certain that, one day, the Nankai Trough will let loose another great quake, one which could push a vast volume of seawater toward a large swath of western and central Japan, making a tsunami 100 feet tall. The darkest scenario suggests that 230,000 could perish, two million buildings would be damaged or destroyed, and the country would be left with a $1.4 trillion bill.

Naturally, a magnitude-7.1 quake on that Trough worries scientists. Aftershocks (a series of smaller magnitude quakes) are a guaranteed feature of potent quakes. But there is a small chance that a large quake will be followed by an even larger quake, retrospectively making the first a foreshock.

“The earthquake changes the stress in the surrounding crust a little bit,” says Hubbard. Using the energy released during the August 8 rupture, and decoding the seismic waves created during the quake, scientists can estimate how much stress gets shifted to surrounding faults.

The worry is that some of the stress released by one quake gets transferred to a big fault that hasn’t ruptured in a very long time but is ready to fold like an explosive house of cards. “You never know which increment of stress is gonna be the one that pushes it over the edge.”

Scientists cannot tell whether a large quake is a foreshock until a larger quake occurs. But the possibility remains that the August 8 temblor is a foreshock to something considerably worse. Statistically, it’s unlikely. But there is additional context to why that megaquake advisory was issued: the specter of 2011’s magnitude-9.1 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which killed 18,000 people, still haunts the Japanese government and the nation’s geoscientists.

Hubbard explains that, two days before that quake struck off Japan’s eastern seaboard, there was a magnitude-7.2 event in the same area—now known to be a foreshock to the catastrophe. Reportedly, authorities in Japan regretted not highlighting that possibility in advance, which may have meant people on the eastern seaboard would have been more prepared, and more capable, of escaping their fate.

A sign to get prepared

In response, Japan’s government created new protocols for signaling that foreshock possibility. Most magnitude-7.0-or-so quakes would not be followed by a ‘megaquake advisory’. Only those happening in tectonic settings able to trigger truly gigantic quakes will—and that includes the Nankai Trough.

Crucially, this advisory is not a warning that a megaquake is imminent. It means: “be ready for when the big earthquake comes,” says Hubbard. Nobody is mandated to evacuate, but they are asked to know their escape routes. Meanwhile, local news reports that nursing homes and hospitals in the region are tallying emergency supplies while moving immobile patients to higher floors or other locations. The high-speed Shinkansen railway trains are running at a reduced maximum speed, and certain flights are carrying more fuel than usual in case they need to divert.

Earthquake advisories aren’t new. “California has something similar, and has issued advisories before,” says Wendy Bohon, an independent earthquake geologist. In September 2016, for example, a swarm of hundreds of modest quakes caused the U.S. Geological Survey to publicly advise that, for a week, there was a 0.03 to 1% chance of a magnitude-7.0-or-greater quake rocking the Southern San Andreas Fault—an outcome that fortunately didn’t come to pass.

But this megaquake advisory is Japan’s first, and it will have both pros and cons. “There are economic and social consequences to this,” says Bohon. Some confusion about how to respond has been reported, and widespread cancellations of travel to the region will come with a price tag.

But calm reactions to the advisory seem to be the norm, and (ideally) this advisory will result in an increased understanding of the threat of the Nankai Trough. “It really is about raising awareness,” says Adam Pascale, chief scientist at the Seismology Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia. “It’s got everyone talking. And that’s the point.”

Geoscientists are also increasingly optimistic that the August 8 quake isn’t a harbinger of a seismic pandemonium. “This thing is way off to the extreme margin of the actual Nankai rupture zone,” says Tobin—meaning it may not even count as being in the zone of tectonic concern.

A blog post co-authored by Shinji Toda, a seismologist at Tōhoku University in Sendai, Japan, also estimates that any stress transferal to the dangerous parts of the Trough is negligible. There is no clear evidence that the plate boundary is acting weirdly. And with each day that goes by, the odds of the August 8 quake being a foreshock drop even further.

Tech defenses

But if a megaquake did suddenly emerge, Japan has a technological shield that may mitigate a decent portion of the disaster.

Buildings are commonly fitted with dampeners that allow them to withstand dramatic quake-triggered shaking. And like America’s West Coast, the entire archipelago has a sophisticated earthquake early-warning system: seismometers close to the quake’s origins listen to its seismic screams, and software makes a quick estimate of the magnitude and shaking intensity of the rupture, before beaming it to people’s various devices, giving them invaluable seconds to get to cover. Automatic countermeasures also slow trains down, control machinery in factories, hospitals, and office buildings, to minimize damage from the incoming shaking.

A tsunami early-warning system also kicks into gear if activated, beaming evacuation notices to phones, televisions, radios, sirens, and myriad specialized receivers in buildings in the afflicted region—giving people several minutes to flee. A megaquake advisory may be new, but for a population highly knowledgeable about earthquake and tsunami defense, it’s just another layer of protection.

The advisory has had other effects too: it’s caused those in another imperiled part of the world to take notice. The Cascadia Subduction Zone offshore from the US Pacific Northwest is also capable of producing both titanic quakes and prodigious tsunamis. Its last grand performance, in 1700, created a tsunami that not only inundated large sections of the North American coast, but it also swamped parts of Japan, all the way across the ocean.

Japan’s megaquake advisory has got Tobin thinking: “What would we do if our subduction zone starts acting weird?” he says—which includes a magnitude-7.0 quake in the Cascadian depths. “There is not a protocol in place the way there is in Japan.” Tobin speculates that a panel of experts would quickly assemble, and a statement – perhaps one not too dissimilar to Japan’s own advisory – would emerge from the U.S. Geological Survey. Like Japan, “we would have to be very forthright about the uncertainty,” he says.

Whether it’s Japan or the US or anywhere else, such advisories aren’t meant to engender panic. “You don’t want people to live their lives in fear,” says Hubbard. But it’s no bad thing to draw attention to the fact that Earth can sometimes be an unforgiving place to live.

Robin George Andrews is an award-winning science journalist and doctor of volcanoes based in London. He regularly writes about the Earth, space, and planetary sciences, and is the author of two critically acclaimed books: Super Volcanoes (2021) and How To Kill An Asteroid (October 2024).

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App biotech Biotechnology and health life extension

Aug 19 2024

This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little

A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death.

His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain.

Jean Hébert, a new hire with the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is expected to lead a major new initiative around “functional brain tissue replacement,” the idea of adding youthful tissue to people’s brains.

President Joe Biden created ARPA-H in 2022, as an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, to pursue what he called “bold, urgent innovation” with transformative potential.

The brain renewal concept could have applications such as treating stroke victims, who lose areas of brain function. But Hébert, a biologist at the Albert Einstein school of medicine, has most often proposed total brain replacement, along with replacing other parts of our anatomy, as the only plausible means of avoiding death from old age.

As he described in his 2020 book, Replacing Aging, Hébert thinks that to live indefinitely people must find a way to substitute all their body parts with young ones, much like a high-mileage car is kept going with new struts and spark plugs.

The idea has a halo of plausibility since there are already liver transplants and titanium hips, artificial corneas and substitute heart valves. The trickiest part is your brain. That ages, too, shrinking dramatically in old age. But you don’t want to swap it out for another—because it is you.

And that’s where Hébert’s research comes in. He’s been exploring ways to “progressively” replace a brain by adding bits of youthful tissue made in a lab. The process would have to be done slowly enough, in steps, that your brain could adapt, relocating memories and your self-identity.

During a visit this spring to his lab at Albert Einstein, Hébert showed MIT Technology Review how he has been carrying out initial experiments with mice, removing small sections of their brains and injecting slurries of embryonic cells. It’s a step toward proving whether such youthful tissue can survive and take over important functions.

To be sure, the strategy is not widely accepted, even among researchers in the aging field. “On the surface it sounds completely insane, but I was surprised how good a case he could make for it,” says Matthew Scholz, CEO of aging research company Oisín Biotechnologies, who met with Hébert this year.

Scholz is still skeptical though. “A new brain is not going to be a popular item,” he says. “The surgical element of it is going to be very severe, no matter how you slice it.”

Now, though, Hébert’s ideas appear to have gotten a huge endorsement from the US government. Hébert told MIT Technology Review that he had proposed a $110 million project to ARPA-H to prove his ideas in monkeys and other animals, and that the government “didn’t blink” at the figure.

ARPA-H confirmed this week that it had hired Hébert as a program manager.

The agency, modeled on DARPA, the Department of Defense organization that developed stealth fighters, gives managers unprecedented leeway in awarding contracts to develop novel technologies. Among its first programs are efforts to develop at-home cancer tests and cure blindness with eye transplants.

President Biden created ARPA-H in 2022 to pursue “bold, urgent innovation” with transformative potential.

It may be several months before details of the new project are announced, and it’s possible that ARPA-H will establish more conventional goals like treating stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients, whose brains are damaged, rather than the more radical idea of extreme life extension.

“If it can work, forget aging; it would be useful for all kinds of neurodegenerative disease,” says Justin Rebo, a longevity scientist and entrepreneur.

But defeating death is Hébert’s stated aim. “I was a weird kid and when I found out that we all fall apart and die, I was like, ‘Why is everybody okay with this?’ And that has pretty much guided everything I do,” he says. “I just prefer life over this slow degradation into nonexistence that biology has planned for all of us.”

Hébert, now 58, also recalls when he began thinking that the human form might not be set in stone. It was upon seeing the 1973 movie Westworld, in which the gun-slinging villain, played by Yul Brynner, turns out to be an android. “That really stuck with me,” Hébert said.

Lately, Hébert has become something of a star figure among immortalists, a fringe community devoted to never dying. That’s because he’s an established scientist who is willing to propose extreme steps to avoid death. “A lot of people want radical life extension without a radical approach. People want to take a pill, and that’s not going to happen,” says Kai Micah Mills, who runs a company, Cryopets, developing ways to deep-freeze cats and dogs for future reanimation.

The reason pharmaceuticals won’t ever stop aging, Hébert says, is that time affects all of our organs and cells and even degrades substances such as elastin, one of the molecular glues that holds our bodies together. So even if, say, gene therapy could rejuvenate the DNA inside cells, a concept some companies are exploring, Hébert believes we’re still doomed as the scaffolding around them comes undone.

One organization promoting Hébert’s ideas is the Longevity Biotech Fellowship (LBF), a self-described group of “hardcore” life extension enthusiasts, which this year published a technical roadmap for defeating aging altogether. In it, they used data from Hébert’s ARPA-H proposal to argue in favor of extending life with gradual brain replacement for elderly subjects, as well as transplant of their heads onto the bodies of “non-sentient” human clones, raised to lack a functioning brain of their own, a procedure they referred to as “body transplant.”

Such a startling feat would involve several technologies that don’t yet exist, including a means to attach a transplanted head to a spinal cord. Even so, the group rates “replacement” as the most likely way to conquer death, claiming it would take only 10 years and $3.6 billion to demonstrate.

“It doesn’t require you to understand aging,” says Mark Hamalainen, co-founder of the research and education group. “That is why Jean’s work is interesting.”

Hébert’s connections to such far-out concepts (he serves as a mentor in LBF’s training sessions) could make him an edgy choice for ARPA-H, a young agency whose budget is $1.5 billion a year.

For instance, Hebert recently said on a podcast with Hamalainen that human fetuses might be used as a potential source of life-extending parts for elderly people. That would be ethical to do, Hébert said during the program, if the fetus is young enough that there “are no neurons, no sentience, and no person.” And according to a meeting agenda viewed by MIT Technology Review, Hébert was also a featured speaker at an online pitch session held last year on full “body replacement,” which included biohackers and an expert in primate cloning.

Hébert declined to describe the session, which he said was not recorded “out of respect for those who preferred discretion.” But he’s in favor of growing non-sentient human bodies. “I am in conversation with all these groups because, you know, not only is my brain slowly deteriorating, but so is the rest of my body,” says Hébert. “I’m going to need other body parts as well.”

The focus of Hébert’s own scientific work is the neocortex, the outer part of the brain that looks like a pile of extra-thick noodles and which houses most of our senses, reasoning, and memory. The neocortex is “arguably the most important part of who we are as individuals,” says Hébert, as well as “maybe the most complex structure in the world.”

There are two reasons he believes the neocortex could be replaced, albeit only slowly. The first is evidence from rare cases of benign brain tumors, like a man described in the medical literature who developed a growth the size of an orange. Yet because it grew very slowly, the man’s brain was able to adjust, shifting memories elsewhere, and his behavior and speech never seemed to change—even when the tumor was removed.

That’s proof, Hébert thinks, that replacing the neocortex little by little could be achieved “without losing the information encoded in it” such as a person’s self-identity.

The second source of hope, he says, is experiments showing that fetal-stage cells can survive, and even function, when transplanted into the brains of adults. For instance, medical tests underway are showing that young neurons can integrate into the brains of people who have epilepsy and stop their seizures.

“It was these two things together—the plastic nature of brains and the ability to add new tissue—that, to me, were like, ‘Ah, now there has got to be a way,’” says Hébert.

“I just prefer life over this slow degradation into nonexistence that biology has planned for all of us.”

One challenge ahead is how to manufacture the replacement brain bits, or what Hebert has called “facsimiles” of neocortical tissue. During a visit to his lab at Albert Einstein, Hébert described plans to manually assemble chunks of youthful brain tissue using stem cells. These parts, he says, would not be fully developed, but instead be similar to what’s found in a still-developing fetal brain. That way, upon transplant, they’d be able to finish maturing, integrate into your brain, and be “ready to absorb and learn your information.”

To design the youthful bits of neocortex, Hébert has been studying brains of aborted human fetuses 5 to 8 weeks of age. He’s been measuring what cells are present, and in what numbers and locations, to try to guide the manufacture of similar structures in the lab.

“What we’re engineering is a fetal-like neocortical tissue that has all the cell types and structure needed to develop into normal tissue on its own,” says Hébert.

Part of the work has been carried out by a startup company, BE Therapeutics (it stands for Brain Engineering), located in a suite on Einstein’s campus and which is funded by Apollo Health Ventures, VitaDAO, and with contributions from a New York State development fund. The company had only two employees when MIT Technology Review visited this spring, and the its future is uncertain, says Hébert, now that he’s joining ARPA-H and closing his lab at Einstein.

Because it’s often challenging to manufacture even a single cell type from stem cells, making a facsimile of the neocortex involving a dozen cell types isn’t an easy project. In fact, it’s just one of several scientific problems standing between you and a younger brain, some of which might never have practical solutions. “There is a saying in engineering. You are allowed one miracle, but if you need more than one, find another plan,” says Scholz.

Maybe the crucial unknown is whether young bits of neocortex will ever correctly function inside an elderly person’s brain, for example by establishing connections or storing and sending electro-chemical information. Despite evidence the brain can incorporate individual transplanted cells, that’s never been robustly proven for larger bits of tissue, says Rusty Gage, a biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and who is considered a pioneer of neural transplants. He says researchers for years have tried to transplant larger parts of fetal animal brains into adult animals, but with inconclusive results. “If it worked, we’d all be doing more of it,” he says.

The problem, says Gage, isn’t whether the tissue can survive, but whether it can participate in the workings of an existing brain. “I am not dissing his hypothesis. But that’s all it is,” says Gage. “Yes, fetal or embryonic tissue can mature in the adult brain. But whether it replaces the function of the dysfunctional area is an experiment he needs to do, if he wants to convince the world he has actually replaced an aged section with a new section.”

In his new role at ARPA-H, it’s expected that Hébert will have a large budget to fund scientists to try and prove his ideas can work. He agrees it won’t be easy. “We’re, you know, a couple steps away from reversing brain aging,” says Hébert. “A couple of big steps away, I should say.”

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App Artificial intelligence What's Next in Tech

Aug 19 2024

What’s next for drones

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

Drones have been a mainstay technology among militaries, hobbyists, and first responders alike for more than a decade, and in that time the range available has skyrocketed. No longer limited to small quadcopters with insufficient battery life, drones are aiding search and rescue efforts, reshaping wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and delivering time-sensitive packages of medical supplies. And billions of dollars are being plowed into building the next generation of fully autonomous systems.

These developments raise a number of questions: Are drones safe enough to be flown in dense neighborhoods and cities? Is it a violation of people’s privacy for police to fly drones overhead at an event or protest? Who decides what level of drone autonomy is acceptable in a war zone?

Those questions are no longer hypothetical. Advancements in drone technology and sensors, falling prices, and easing regulations are making drones cheaper, faster, and more capable than ever. Here’s a look at four of the biggest changes coming to drone technology in the near future.

Police drone fleets

Today more than 1,500 US police departments have drone programs, according to tracking conducted by the Atlas of Surveillance. Trained police pilots use drones for search and rescue operations, monitoring events and crowds, and other purposes. The Scottsdale Police Department in Arizona, for example, successfully used a drone to locate a lost elderly man with dementia, says Rich Slavin, Scottsdale’s assistant chief of police. He says the department has had useful but limited experiences with drones to date, but its pilots have often been hamstrung by the “line of sight” rule from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The rule stipulates that pilots must be able to see their drones at all times, which severely limits the drone’s range.

Soon, that will change. On a rooftop somewhere in the city, Scottsdale police will in the coming months install a new police drone capable of autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing. Slavin says the department is seeking a waiver from the FAA to be able to fly its drone past the line of sight. (Hundreds of police agencies have received a waiver from the FAA since the first was granted in 2019.) The drone, which can fly up to 57 miles per hour, will go on missions as far as three miles from its docking station, and the department says it will be used for things like tracking suspects or providing a visual feed of an officer at a traffic stop who is waiting for backup.

“The FAA has been much more progressive in how we’re moving into this space,” Slavin says. That could mean that around the country, the sight (and sound) of a police drone soaring overhead will become much more common.

The Scottsdale department says the drone, which it is purchasing from Aerodome, will kick off its drone-as-first-responder program and will play a role in the department’s new “real-time crime center.” These sorts of centers are becoming increasingly common in US policing, and allow cities to connect cameras, license plate readers, drones, and other monitoring methods to track situations on the fly. The rise of the centers, and their associated reliance on drones, has drawn criticism from privacy advocates who say they conduct a great deal of surveillance with little transparency about how footage from drones and other sources will be used or shared.

In 2019, the police department in Chula Vista, California, was the first to receive a waiver from the FAA to fly beyond line of sight. The program sparked criticism from members of the community who alleged the department was not transparent about the footage it collected or how it would be used.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says the waivers exacerbate existing privacy issues related to drones. If the FAA continues to grant them, police departments will be able to cover far more of a city with drones than ever, all while the legal landscape is murky about whether this would constitute an invasion of privacy.

“If there’s an accumulation of different uses of this technology, we’re going to end up in a world where from the moment you step out of your front door, you’re going to feel as though you’re under the constant eye of law enforcement from the sky,” he says. “It may have some real benefits, but it is also in dire need of strong checks and balances.”

Scottsdale police say the drone could be used in a variety of scenarios, such as responding to a burglary in progress or tracking a driver with suspected connection to a kidnapping. But the real benefit, Slavin says, will come from pairing it with other existing technologies, like automatic license plate readers and hundreds of cameras placed around the city. “It can get to places very, very quickly,” he says. “It gives us real-time intelligence and helps us respond faster and smarter.”

While police departments might indeed benefit from drones in those situations, Stanley says the ACLU has found that many deploy them for far more ordinary cases, like reports of a kid throwing a ball against a garage or of “suspicious persons” in an area.

“It raises the question about whether these programs will just end up being another way in which vulnerable communities are over-policed and nickeled and dimed by law enforcement agencies coming down on people for all kinds of minor transgressions,” he says.

Drone deliveries, again

Perhaps no drone technology is more overhyped than home deliveries. For years, tech companies have teased futuristic renderings of a drone dropping off a package on your doorstep just hours after you ordered it. But they’ve never managed to expand them much beyond small-scale pilot projects, at least in the US, again largely due to the FAA’s line of sight rules.

But this year, regulatory changes are coming. Like police departments, Amazon’s Prime Air program was previously limited to flying its drones within the pilot’s line of sight. That’s because drone pilots don’t have radar, air traffic controllers, or any of the other systems commercial flight relies on to monitor airways and keep them safe. To compensate, Amazon spent years developing an onboard system that would allow its drones to detect nearby objects and avoid collisions. The company says it showed the FAA in demonstrations that its drones could fly safely in the same airspace as helicopters, planes, and hot air balloons.

In May, Amazon announced the FAA had granted the company a waiver and permission to expand operations in Texas, more than a decade after the Prime Air project started. And in July, the FAA cleared one more roadblock by allowing two companies—Zipline as well as Google’s Wing Aviation—to fly in the same airspace simultaneously without the need for visual observers.

While all this means your chances of receiving a package via drone have ticked up ever so slightly, the more compelling use case might be medical deliveries. Shakiba Enayati, an assistant professor of supply chains at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has spent years researching how drones could conduct last-mile deliveries of vaccines, antivenom, organs, and blood in remote places. She says her studies have found drones to be game changers for getting medical supplies to underserved populations, and if the FAA extends these regulatory changes, it could have a real impact.

That’s especially true in the steps leading up to an organ transplant, she says. Before an organ can be transmitted to a recipient, a number of blood tests must be sent back-and-forth to make sure the recipient can accept it, which takes a time if the blood is being transferred by car or even helicopter. “In these cases, the clock is ticking,” Enayati says. If drones were allowed to be used in this step at scale, it would be a significant improvement.

“If the technology is supporting the needs of organ delivery, it’s going to make a big change in such an important arena,” she says.

That development could come sooner than using drones for delivery of the actual organs, which have to be transported under very tightly controlled conditions to preserve them.

Domesticating the drone supply chain

Signed into law last December, the American Security Drone Act bars federal agencies from buying drones from countries thought to pose a threat to US national security, such as Russia and China. That’s significant. China is the undisputed leader when it comes to manufacturing drones and drone parts, with over 90% of law enforcement drones in the US made by Shenzhen-based DJI, and many drones used by both sides of the war in Ukraine are made by Chinese companies.

The American Security Drone Act is part of an effort to curb that reliance on China. (Meanwhile, China is stepping up export restrictions on drones with military uses.) As part of the act, the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit has created the Blue UAS Cleared List, a list of drones and parts the agency has investigated and approved for purchase. The list applies to federal agencies as well as programs that receive federal funding, which often means state police departments or other non-federal agencies.

Since the US is set to spend such significant sums on drones—with $1 billion earmarked for the Department of Defense’s Replicator initiative alone—getting on the Blue List is a big deal. It means those federal agencies can make large purchases with little red tape.

Allan Evans, CEO of US-based drone part maker Unusual Machine, says the list has sparked a significant rush of drone companies attempting to conform to the US standards. His company manufactures a first-person view flight controller that he hopes will become the first of its kind to be approved for the Blue List.

The American Security Drone Act is unlikely to affect private purchases in the US of drones used by videographers, drone racers, or hobbyists, which will overwhelmingly still be made by China-based companies like DJI. That means any US-based drone companies, at least in the short term, will only survive by catering to the US defense market.

“Basically any US company that isn’t willing to have ancillary involvement in defense work will lose,” Evans says.

The coming months will show the law’s true impact: Because the US fiscal year ends in September, Evans says he expects to see a host of agencies spending their use-it-or-lose-it funding on US-made drones and drone components in the next month. “That will indicate whether the marketplace is real or not, and how much money is actually being put toward it,” he says.

Autonomous weapons in Ukraine

The drone war in Ukraine has largely been one of attrition. Drones have been used extensively for surveying damage, finding and tracking targets, or dropping weapons since the war began, but on average these quadcopter drones last just three flights before being shot down or rendered unnavigable by GPS jamming. As a result, both Ukraine and Russia prioritized accumulating high volumes of drones with the expectation that they wouldn’t last long in battle.

Now they’re having to rethink that approach, according to Andriy Dovbenko, founder of the UK-Ukraine Tech Exchange, a nonprofit that helps startups involved in Ukraine’s war effort and eventual reconstruction raise capital. While working with drone makers in Ukraine, he says, he has seen the demand for technology shift from big shipments of simple commercial drones to a pressing need for drones that can navigate autonomously in an environment where GPS has been jammed. With 70% of the front lines suffering from jamming, according to Dovbenko, both Russian and Ukrainian drone investment is now focused on autonomous systems.

That’s no small feat. Drone pilots usually rely on video feeds from the drone as well as GPS technology, neither of which is available in a jammed environment. Instead, autonomous drones operate with various types of sensors like LiDAR to navigate, though this can be tricky in fog or other inclement weather. Autonomous drones are a new and rapidly changing technology, still being tested by US-based companies like Shield AI. The evolving war in Ukraine is raising the stakes and the pressure to deploy affordable and reliable autonomous drones.

The transition toward autonomous weapons also raises serious yet largely unanswered questions about how much humans should be taken out of the loop in decision-making. As the war rages on and the need for more capable weaponry rises, Ukraine will likely be the testing ground for if and how the moral line is drawn. But Dovbenko says stopping to find that line during an ongoing war is impossible.

“There is a moral question about how much autonomy you can give to the killing machine,” Dovbenko says. “This question is not being asked right now in Ukraine because it’s more of a matter of survival.”

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App Biotechnology and health The Checkup

Aug 16 2024

Aging hits us in our 40s and 60s. But well-being doesn’t have to fall off a cliff.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

This week I came across research that suggests aging hits us in waves. You might feel like you’re on a slow, gradual decline, but, at the molecular level, you’re likely to be hit by two waves of changes, according to the scientists behind the work. The first one comes in your 40s. Eek.

For the study, Michael Snyder at Stanford University and his colleagues collected a vast amount of biological data from 108 volunteers aged 25 to 75, all of whom were living in California. Their approach was to gather as much information as they could and look for age-related patterns afterward.

This approach can lead to some startling revelations, including the one about the impacts of age on 40-year-olds (who, I was horrified to learn this week, are generally considered “middle-aged”). It can help us answer some big questions about aging, and even potentially help us find drugs to counter some of the most unpleasant aspects of the process.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds. And midlife needn’t involve falling off a cliff in terms of your well-being. Let’s explore why.

First, the study, which was published in the journal Nature Aging on August 14. Snyder and his colleagues collected a real trove of data on their volunteers, including on gene expression, proteins, metabolites, and various other chemical markers. The team also swabbed volunteers’ skin, stool, mouths, and noses to get an idea of the microbial communities that might be living there.

Each volunteer gave up these samples every few months for a median period of 1.7 years, and the team ended up with a total of 5,405 samples, which included over 135,000 biological features. “The idea is to get a very complete picture of people’s health,” says Snyder.

When he and his colleagues analyzed the data, they found that around 7% of the molecules and microbes measured changes gradually over time, in a linear way. On the other hand, 81% of them changed at specific life stages. There seem to be two that are particularly important: one at around the age of 44, and another around the age of 60.

Some of the dramatic changes at age 60 seem to be linked to kidney and heart function, and diseases like atherosclerosis, which narrows the arteries. That makes sense, given that our risks of developing cardiovascular diseases increase dramatically as we age—around 40% of 40- to 59-year-olds have such disorders, and this figure rises to 75% for 60- to 79-year-olds.

But the changes that occur around the age of 40 came as a surprise to Snyder. He says that, on reflection, they make intuitive sense. Many of us start to feel a bit creakier once we hit 40, and it can take longer to recover from injuries, for example.

Other changes suggest that our ability to metabolize lipids and alcohol shifts when we reach our 40s, though it’s hard to say why, for a few reasons.

First, it’s not clear if a change in alcohol metabolism, for example, means that we are less able to break down alcohol, or if people are just consuming less of it when they’re older.

This gets us to a central question about aging: Is it an inbuilt program that sets us on a course of deterioration, or is it merely a consequence of living?

We don’t have an answer to that one, yet. It’s probably a combination of both. Our bodies are exposed to various environmental stressors over time. But also, as our cells age, they are less able to divide, and clear out the molecular garbage they accumulate over time.

It’s also hard to tell what’s happening in this study, because the research team didn’t measure more physiological markers of aging, such as muscle strength or frailty, says Colin Selman, a biogerontologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

There’s another, perhaps less scientific, question that comes to mind. How worried should we be about these kinds of molecular changes? I’m approaching 40—should I panic? I asked Sara Hägg, who studies the molecular epidemiology of aging at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “No,” was her immediate answer.

While Snyder’s team collected a vast amount of data, it was from a relatively small number of people over a relatively short period of time. None of them were tracked for the two or three decades you’d need to see the two waves of molecular changes occur in a person.

“This is an observational study, and they compare different people,” Hägg told me. “There is absolutely no evidence that this is going to happen to you.” After all, there’s a lot that can happen in a person’s life over 20 or 30 years. They might take up a sport. They might quit smoking or stop eating meat.

However, the findings do support the idea that aging is not a linear process.

“People have always suggested that you’re on this decline in your life from [around the age of] 40, depressingly,” says Selman. “But it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Snyder hopes that studies like his will help reveal potential new targets for therapies that help counteract some of the harmful molecular shifts associated with aging. “People’s healthspan is 11 to 15 years shorter than their lifespan,” he says. “Ideally you’d want to live for as long as possible [in good health], and then die.”

We don’t have any such drugs yet. For now, it all comes down to the age-old advice about eating well, sleeping well, getting enough exercise, and avoiding the big no-nos like smoking and alcohol.

I happened to speak to Selman at the end of what had been a particularly difficult day, and I confessed that I was looking forward to enjoying an evening glass of wine. That’s despite the fact that research suggests that there is “no safe level” of alcohol consumption.

“A little bit of alcohol is actually quite nice,” Selman agreed. He told me about an experience he’d had once at a conference on aging. Some of the attendees were members of a society that practiced caloric restriction—the idea being that cutting your calories can boost your lifespan (we don’t yet know if this works for people). “There was a big banquet… and these people all had little scales, and were weighing their salads on the scales,” he told me. “To me, that seems like a rather miserable way to live your life.”

I’m all for finding balance between healthy lifestyle choices and those that bring me joy. And it’s worth remembering that no amount of deprivation is going to radically extend our lifespans. As Selman puts it: “We can do certain things, but ultimately, when your time’s up, your time’s up.”

Now read the rest of the Checkup

From around the web

Mpox, the disease that has been surging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and nearby countries, now constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, according to the World Health Organization.

“The detection and rapid spread of a new clade [subgroup] of mpox in Eastern DRC, its detection in neighboring countries that had not previously reported mpox, and the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing shared on X. “It’s clear that a coordinated international response is essential to stop these outbreaks and save lives.” (WHO)

Prosthetic limbs are often branded with company logos. For users of the technology, it can feel like a tattoo you didn’t ask for. (The Atlantic)

A testing facility in India submitted fraudulent data for more than 400 drugs to the FDA. But these drugs have not been withdrawn from the US market. That needs to be remedied, says the founder and president of a nonprofit focused on researching drug side effects. (STAT)

Antibiotics can impact our gut microbiomes. But the antibiotics given to people who undergo c-sections don’t have much of an impact on the baby’s microbiome. The way the baby is fed seems to be much more influential. (Cell Host & Microbe)

When unexpected infectious diseases show up in people, it’s not just physicians that are crucial. Veterinarian “disease detectives” can play a vital role in tracking how infections pass from animals to people, and the other way around. (New Yorker)

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App Climate change and energy

Aug 14 2024

How the auto industry could steer the world toward green steel

Steel scaffolds our world, undergirding buildings and machines. It also presents a major challenge for climate change, since steel production largely relies on polluting fossil fuels. The automotive industry could be a key player in turning things around.

Steel production is currently responsible for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a growing array of technologies that can produce steel with dramatically lower emissions—though some are still in development, and they often come with a higher price tag. The auto industry could be a fertile early market for these technologies, both because it’s a major player in the industry and because switching to more expensive materials would only bump costs up for new vehicles by less than 1%, according to a new report.

Finding economical ways to produce the materials we rely on while also cutting emissions is a major challenge for the industrial sector. Vehicle manufacturers embracing greener steel could provide a blueprint for how to bring more climate-friendly materials to the market without driving customers away.

Since automakers use a lot of steel, they have an opportunity to lead the charge to decarbonize the industry, says Peter Slowik, an analyst leading research on passenger vehicles in the US for the International Council on Clean Transportation.

About 12% of global steel production goes to the auto industry, and in some regions, the percentage is significantly higher—about 60% of all primary (non-recycled) steel produced in the US goes to vehicle manufacturing. That non-recycled steel comes with higher emissions than the recycled version, so making a swap to greener steel in the automotive industry, which mostly uses non-recycled material, would have an outsized impact.

Making steel today generally requires steelmakers to heat raw materials to high temperatures, using fossil fuels like coal to drive the chemical reactions that transform iron ore into steel. But there’s a growing array of ways to make steel with lower emissions, including efforts to add carbon capture technology to new and existing plants and implement new technologies that rely on electricity instead of fossil fuels.

One leading contender for producing low-emissions steel is a process called direct reduction, where chemical reactions can be powered by hydrogen fuel instead of coal. If that hydrogen is produced with renewable or other low-carbon energy sources, it could allow steel production with up to 95% lower emissions.

Steel is responsible for a major chunk of the climate impacts of manufacturing a vehicle—so swapping in green steel could cut the emissions associated with building a car by 27%, according to the ICCT report.

And the materials wouldn’t dramatically inflate costs, either. “Generally, we’re finding that it wouldn’t add too much to the cost of the vehicle,” Slowik says.

H2 Green Steel is currently building what could become the world’s largest low-emissions steel factory, with a capacity of 2.5 million metric tons of steel by 2026. The company has said its product will cost 20% to 30% more than conventional steel. That would add roughly $100 to $200 more to a vehicle’s cost of materials, totaling less than 1% of the average vehicle.

In another recent report examining steel in vehicle manufacturing in Europe, experts put the additional cost at just €105, or about $115, for a vehicle made entirely with steel produced using a hydrogen-powered process in 2030. And even that slight cost bump could disappear in the future as production volumes increase and costs come down.

“The relatively high value of cars, especially of premium brands, also means they can absorb the short-term green premium of greener steel,” Alex Keynes, cars policy manager at the European Federation for Transport and Environment, said in an email.

The same principle might hold for some other common products made with steel. One estimate from Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and deputy editor at Our World In Data, put the added cost for using green steel in a house at less than 1% of its purchase price.

There’s a complicated web of actors in construction though, from architects to builders to contractors, which could make purchasing more expensive materials that come with a climate benefit a more complex proposition. And bigger projects that require more steel could face much larger price increases that make green steel unaffordable in those contexts, at least for now.

Automakers committing to purchasing green steel from steelmakers could help ensure they’re able to grow quickly, and some companies have already secured such commitments. As of January 2024, H2 Green Steel had binding agreements in place for more than 40% of its steel production in the initial years of its new plant.

However, there are still challenges facing the industry, including questions about the future cost and availability of green hydrogen, Keynes says. Policy measures, from subsidies to encourage the fuel’s production to regulations, could be crucial to getting greener steel into our vehicles and beyond.

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App Artificial intelligence The Algorithm

Aug 13 2024

Here’s how people are actually using AI

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here.

When the generative AI boom started with ChatGPT in late 2022, we were sold a vision of superintelligent AI tools that know everything, can replace the boring bits of work, and supercharge productivity and economic gains.

Two years on, most of those productivity gains haven’t materialized. And we’ve seen something peculiar and slightly unexpected happen: People have started forming relationships with AI systems. We talk to them, say please and thank you, and have started to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers.

We’re seeing a giant, real-world experiment unfold, and it’s still uncertain what impact these AI companions will have either on us individually or on society as a whole, argue Robert Mahari, a joint JD-PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School, and Pat Pataranutaporn, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. They say we need to prepare for “addictive intelligence”, or AI companions that have dark patterns built into them to get us hooked. You can read their piece here. They look at how smart regulation can help us prevent some of the risks associated with AI chatbots that get deep inside our heads.

The idea that we’ll form bonds with AI companions is no longer just hypothetical. Chatbots with even more emotive voices, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, are likely to reel us in even deeper. During safety testing, OpenAI observed that users would use language that indicated they had formed connections with AI models, such as “This is our last day together.” The company itself admits that emotional reliance is one risk that might be heightened by its new voice-enabled chatbot.

There’s already evidence that we’re connecting on a deeper level with AI even when it’s just confined to text exchanges. Mahari was part of a group of researchers that analyzed a million ChatGPT interaction logs and found that the second most popular use of AI was sexual role-playing. Aside from that, the overwhelmingly most popular use case for the chatbot was creative composition. People also liked to use it for brainstorming and planning, asking for explanations and general information about stuff.

These sorts of creative and fun tasks are excellent ways to use AI chatbots. AI language models work by predicting the next likely word in a sentence. They are confident liars and often present falsehoods as facts, make stuff up, or hallucinate. This matters less when making stuff up is kind of the entire point. In June, my colleague Rhiannon Williams wrote about how comedians found AI language models to be useful for generating a first “vomit draft” of their material; they then add their own human ingenuity to make it funny.

But these use cases aren’t necessarily productive in the financial sense. I’m pretty sure smutbots weren’t what investors had in mind when they poured billions of dollars into AI companies, and, combined with the fact we still don’t have a killer app for AI,it’s no wonder that Wall Street is feeling a lot less bullish about it recently.

The use cases that would be “productive,” and have thus been the most hyped, have seen less success in AI adoption. Hallucination starts to become a problem in some of these use cases, such as code generation, news and online searches, where it matters a lot to get things right. Some of the most embarrassing failures of chatbots have happened when people have started trusting AI chatbots too much, or considered them sources of factual information. Earlier this year, for example, Google’s AI overview feature, which summarizes online search results, suggested that people eat rocks and add glue on pizza.

And that’s the problem with AI hype. It sets our expectations way too high, and leaves us disappointed and disillusioned when the quite literally incredible promises don’t happen. It also tricks us into thinking AI is a technology that is even mature enough to bring about instant changes. In reality, it might be years until we see its true benefit.

Now read the rest of The Algorithm

Deeper Learning

AI “godfather” Yoshua Bengio has joined a UK project to prevent AI catastrophes

Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the godfathers of modern AI, is throwing his weight behind a project funded by the UK government to embed safety mechanisms into AI systems. The project, called Safeguarded AI, aims to build an AI system that can check whether other AI systems deployed in critical areas are safe. Bengio is joining the program as scientific director and will provide critical input and advice.

What are they trying to do: Safeguarded AI’s goal is to build AI systems that can offer quantitative guarantees, such as risk scores, about their effect on the real world. The project aims to build AI safety mechanisms by combining scientific world models, which are essentially simulations of the world, with mathematical proofs. These proofs would include explanations of the AI’s work, and humans would be tasked with verifying whether the AI model’s safety checks are correct. Read more from me here.

Bits and Bytes

Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis

Researchers managed to get a robot wielding a 3D-printed paddle to win 13 of 29 games against human opponents of varying abilities in full games of competitive table tennis. The research represents a small step toward creating robots that can perform useful tasks skillfully and safely in real environments like homes and warehouses, which is a long-standing goal of the robotics community. (MIT Technology Review)

Are we in an AI bubble? Here’s why it’s complex.

There’s been a lot of debate recently, and even some alarm, about whether AI is ever going to live up to its potential, especially thanks to tech stocks’ recent nosedive. This nuanced piece explains why although the sector faces significant challenges, it’s far too soon to write off AI’s transformative potential. (Platformer)

How Microsoft spread its bets beyond OpenAI

Microsoft and OpenAI have one of the most successful partnerships in AI. But following OpenAI’s boardroom drama last year, the tech giant and its CEO, Satya Nadella, have been working on a strategy that will make Microsoft more independent of Sam Altman’s startup. Microsoft has diversified its investments and partnerships in generative AI, built its own smaller, cheaper models, and hired aggressively to develop its consumer AI efforts. (Financial Times)

Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales

Oof. The extremely hyped AI pin, which was billed as a wearable AI assistant, seems to have flopped. Between May and August, more Humane AI Pins were returned than purchased. Infuriatingly, the company has no way to reuse the returned pins, so they become e-waste. (The Verge)

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App Climate change and energy The Spark

Aug 11 2024

Your AC habits aren’t unique. Here’s why that’s a problem.

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

When I get home in the evening on a sweltering summer day, the first thing I do is beeline to my window air-conditioning units and crank them up.

People across the city, county, and even the state are probably doing the same thing. And like me, they might also be firing up the TV and an air fryer to start on dinner. This simple routine may not register in your mind as anything special, but it sure does register on the electrical grid.

These early evening hours in the summer are usually the time with the highest electricity demand. And a huge chunk of that power is going into cooling systems that keep us safe and comfortable. This is such a significant challenge for utilities and grid operators that some companies are trying to bring new cooling technologies to the market that can store up energy during other times to use during peak hours, as I covered in my latest story.

Let’s dig into why that daily maximum is a crucial data point to consider as we plan to keep the lights (and AC) on while cleaning up our energy system.

In some places where air-conditioning is common, like parts of the US, space cooling can represent more than 70% of peak residential electrical demand on hot days, according to data from the International Energy Agency. It’s no wonder that utilities sometimes send out notices begging customers to turn down their AC during heat waves.

All that demand can add up—just look at data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which oversees operation of electricity generation and transmission in the state. Take, for example, Monday, August 5. The minimum amount of power demand, at around four in the morning, was roughly 25,000 megawatts. The peak, at about six in the evening, was 42,000 megawatts. There’s a lot behind that huge difference between early morning and the evening peak, but a huge chunk of it comes down to air conditioners.

These summer evenings often represent the highest loads the grid sees all year long, since cooling systems like my window air conditioners are such energy hogs. Winter days usually see less variation, and typically there are small peaks in both the morning and evening that can be attributed to heating systems. (See more about how this varies around the US in this piece from the Energy Information Agency.)

From a climate perspective, this early evening peak in the summer is inconveniently timed, since it hits right around when solar power is ramping down for the day. It’s an example of one of the perennial challenges of some renewable electricity sources: they might be available, but they’re not always available at the right times.

Grid operators often don’t have the luxury of choosing how they meet demand—they take what they can get, even if that means turning on fossil-fuel power plants to keep the lights on. So-called peaker plants are usually the ones tapped to meet the highest demand, and they’re typically more expensive and also less efficient than other power plants.

Batteries are starting to come to the rescue, as I covered in this newsletter a few months ago. On April 16, CAISO data showed that energy storage systems were the single biggest power source on the grid starting just after 7 p.m. local time. But batteries are far from being able to solve peak demand—with higher summer grid loads, natural-gas plants are cranked up much higher in August than they were in April, so fossil fuels are powering summer evening routines in California.

We still need a whole lot more energy storage on the grid, and other sources of low-emissions electricity like geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear to help in these high-demand hours. But there’s also a growing interest in cooling systems that can act as their own batteries.

A growing number of technologies do just this—the goal is to charge up the systems using electricity during times when demand is low, or when renewables are readily available. Then they can provide cooling during these peak-demand hours without adding stress to the grid. Check out my full story for more on how they work, and how far along they are.

As the planet warms and more people install AC, we might be pushing the limits of what the grid can handle. Even if generation capacity isn’t stretched thin, extreme heat and high loads can threaten transmission equipment.

While asking people to bump up their thermostat can be a short-term fix on the hottest days, having technologies that allow us to be more flexible in how and when we use energy could be key to staying safe and comfortable even as the summer nights keep getting hotter.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Another thing

A growing number of companies in China want to power fleets of bikes not with batteries, but with hydrogen. But reception has been mixed, with riders reporting trouble with range. Read more in the latest story from my colleague Zeyi Yang.

Part of the reason for the growing interest in hydrogen is concern over the safety of lithium-ion batteries. New York is trying to make e-bikes safer by deploying battery-swapping stations in the city. For all you need to know about the program, check out my May story on the topic.

Keeping up with climate

A major renewable-energy company unveiled a first-of-its-kind robot to help install solar panels. The company claims Maximo can install panels twice as fast as humans, at half the cost. (New York Times)

The European Union got more electricity from solar and wind than fossil fuels in the first half of 2024. Reforms in permitting and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are two factors pushing the rise of renewables. (Canary Media)

Stepping into the shade can make the temperature feel dozens of degrees cooler. Cities need to look beyond trees for shade. (The Atlantic)

Check out these interactive charts detailing how each US state gets its electricity, and how it’s changed in the last two decades. Some surprises for me included South Carolina and Iowa. (New York Times)

Electric-vehicle sales in Germany are continuing their slide, dropping by 37%. The ongoing slump comes after the country ended incentives last year that supported EVs. (Bloomberg)

Wildfire smoke can have negative health effects. Protect yourself by staying indoors on days when air quality is poor, wearing a mask, and—especially—avoiding outdoor exercise. (Wired)

→ I spoke about a new study that will follow survivors of last year’s Maui fire to track their health outcomes, along with other science news of the week, on the latest episode of Science Friday. (Science Friday)

A new bill snaking its way through the US Congress could make it easier to build renewable-energy projects—and some fossil-fuel projects too. Here’s why a growing cadre of energy experts is on board with these permitting reforms despite concessions for oil and gas. (Heatmap)

Kamala Harris tapped Tim Walz as her pick for vice president. The Minnesota governor brings some climate experience to the ticket, including a law that requires utilities to reach 100% renewable energy by 2040. (Grist)

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Aug 11 2024

Watch a video showing what happens in our brains when we think

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

What does a thought look like? We can think about thoughts resulting from shared signals between some of the billions of neurons in our brains. Various chemicals are involved, but it really comes down to electrical activity. We can measure that activity and watch it back.

Earlier this week, I caught up with Ben Rapoport, the cofounder and chief science officer of Precision Neuroscience, a company doing just that. It is developing brain-computer interfaces that Rapoport hopes will one day help paralyzed people control computers and, as he puts it, “have a desk job.”

Rapoport and his colleagues have developed thin, flexible electrode arrays that can be slipped under the skull through a tiny incision. Once inside, they can sit on a person’s brain, collecting signals from neurons buzzing away beneath. So far, 17 people have had these electrodes placed onto their brains. And Rapoport has been able to capture how their brains form thoughts. He even has videos. (Keep reading to see one for yourself, below.)

Brain electrodes have been around for a while and are often used to treat disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and some severe cases of epilepsy. Those devices tend to involve sticking electrodes deep inside the brain to access regions involved in those disorders.

Brain-machine interfaces are newer. In the last couple of decades, neuroscientists and engineers have made significant progress in developing technologies that allow them to listen in on brain activity and use brain data to allow people to control computers and prosthetic limbs by thought alone.

The technology isn’t commonplace yet, and early versions could only be used in a lab setting. Scientists like Rapoport are working on new devices that are more effective, less invasive, and more practical. He and his colleagues have developed a miniature device that fits 1,024 tiny electrodes onto a sliver of ribbon-like film that’s just 20 microns thick—around a third of the width of a human eyelash.

The vast majority of these electrodes are designed to pick up brain activity. The device itself is designed to be powered by a rechargeable battery implanted under the skin in the chest, like a pacemaker. And from there, data could be transmitted wirelessly to a computer outside the body.

Unlike other needle-like electrodes that penetrate brain tissue, Rapoport says his electrode array “doesn’t damage the brain at all.” Instead of being inserted into brain tissue, the electrode arrays are arranged on a thin, flexible film, fed through a slit in the skull, and placed on the surface of the brain.

From there, they can record what the brain is doing when the person thinks. In one case, Rapoport’s team inserted their electrode array into the skull of a man who was undergoing brain surgery to treat a disease. He was kept awake during his operation so that surgeons could make sure they weren’t damaging any vital regions of his brain. And all the while, the electrodes were picking up the electrical signals from his neurons.

This is what the activity looked like:

“This is basically the brain thinking,” says Rapoport. “You’re seeing the physical manifestation of thought.”

In this video, which I’ve converted to a GIF, you can see the pattern of electrical activity in the man’s brain as he recites numbers. Each dot represents the voltage sensed by an electrode on the array on the man’s brain, over a region involved in speech. The reds and oranges represent higher voltages, while the blues and purples represent lower ones. The video has been slowed down 20-fold, because “thoughts happen faster than the eye can see,” says Rapoport.

This approach allows neuroscientists to visualize what happens in the brain when we speak—and when we plan to speak. “We can decode his intention to say a word even before he says it,” says Rapoport. That’s important—scientists hope technologies will interpret these kinds of planning signals to help some individuals communicate.

For the time being, Rapoport and his colleagues are only testing their electrodes in volunteers who are already scheduled to have brain surgery. The electrodes are implanted, tested, and removed during a planned operation. The company announced in May that the team had broken a record for the greatest number of electrodes placed on a human brain at any one time—a whopping 4,096.

Rapoport hopes the US Food and Drug Administration will approve his device in the coming months. “That will unlock … what we hope will be a new standard of care,” he says.

Now read the rest of The Checkup

From around the web

Do you share DNA with Ludwig van Beethoven, or perhaps a Viking? Tests can reveal genetic links, but they are not always clear, and the connections are not always meaningful or informative. (Nature)

This week marks 79 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Survivors share their stories of what it’s like to live with the trauma, stigma, and survivor’s guilt caused by the bombs—and why weapons like these must never be used again. (New York Times)

At least 19 Olympic athletes have tested positive for covid-19 in the past two weeks. The rules allow them to compete regardless. (Scientific American)

Honey contains a treasure trove of biological information, including details about the plants that supplied the pollen and the animals and insects in the environment. It can even tell you something about the bees’ “micro-bee-ota.” (New Scientist)

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App Artificial intelligence

Aug 11 2024

Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis

Do you fancy your chances of beating a robot at a game of table tennis? Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play the game at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has announced. It claims it’s the first time a robot has been taught to play a sport with humans at a human level.

Researchers managed to get a robotic arm wielding a 3D-printed paddle to win 13 of 29 games against human opponents of varying abilities in full games of competitive table tennis. The research was published in an Arxiv paper.

The system is far from perfect. Although the table tennis bot was able to beat all beginner-level human opponents it faced and 55% of those playing at amateur level, it lost all the games against advanced players. Still, it’s an impressive advance.

“Even a few months back, we projected that realistically the robot may not be able to win against people it had not played before. The system certainly exceeded our expectations,” says Pannag Sanketi, a senior staff software engineer at Google DeepMind who led the project. “The way the robot outmaneuvered even strong opponents was mind blowing.”

And the research is not just all fun and games. In fact, it represents a step towards creating robots that can perform useful tasks skillfully and safely in real environments like homes and warehouses, which is a long-standing goal of the robotics community. Google DeepMind’s approach to training machines is applicable to many other areas of the field, says Lerrel Pinto, a computer science researcher at New York University who did not work on the project.

“I’m a big fan of seeing robot systems actually working with and around real humans, and this is a fantastic example of this,” he says. “It may not be a strong player, but the raw ingredients are there to keep improving and eventually get there.”

To become a proficient table tennis player, humans require excellent hand-eye coordination, the ability to move rapidly and make quick decisions reacting to their opponent—all of which are significant challenges for robots. Google DeepMind’s researchers used a two-part approach to train the system to mimic these abilities: they used computer simulations to train the system to master its hitting skills; then fine tuned it using real-world data, which allows it to improve over time.

The researchers compiled a dataset of table tennis ball states, including data on position, spin, and speed. The system drew from this library in a simulated environment designed to accurately reflect the physics of table tennis matches to learn skills such as returning a serve, hitting a forehand topspin, or backhand shot. As the robot’s limitations meant it could not serve the ball, the real-world games were modified to accommodate this.

During its matches against humans, the robot collects data on its performance to help refine its skills. It tracks the ball’s position using data captured by a pair of cameras, and follows its human opponent’s playing style through a motion capture system that uses LEDs on its opponent’s paddle. The ball data is fed back into the simulation for training, creating a continuous feedback loop.

This feedback allows the robot to test out new skills to try and beat its opponent—meaning it can adjust its tactics and behavior just like a human would. This means it becomes progressively better both throughout a given match, and over time the more games it plays.

The system struggled to hit the ball when it was hit either very fast, beyond its field of vision (more than six feet above the table), or very low, because of a protocol that instructs it to avoid collisions that could damage its paddle. Spinning balls proved a challenge because it lacked the capacity to directly measure spin—a limitation that advanced players were quick to take advantage of.

Training a robot for all eventualities in a simulated environment is a real challenge, says Chris Walti, founder of robotics company Mytra and previously head of Tesla’s robotics team, who was not involved in the project.

“It’s very, very difficult to actually simulate the real world because there’s so many variables, like a gust of wind, or even dust [on the table]” he says. “Unless you have very realistic simulations, a robot’s performance is going to be capped.”

Google DeepMind believes these limitations could be addressed in a number of ways, including by developing predictive AI models designed to anticipate the ball’s trajectory, and introducing better collision-detection algorithms.

Crucially, the human players enjoyed their matches against the robotic arm. Even the advanced competitors who were able to beat it said they’d found the experience fun and engaging, and said they felt it had potential as a dynamic practice partner to help them hone their skills.

“I would definitely love to have it as a training partner, someone to play some matches from time to time,” one of the study participants said.

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Aug 8 2024

AI “godfather” Yoshua Bengio has joined a UK project to prevent AI catastrophes

Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the “godfathers” of modern AI, is throwing his weight behind a project funded by the UK government to embed safety mechanisms into AI systems.

The project, called Safeguarded AI, aims to build an AI system that can check whether other AI systems deployed in critical areas are safe. Bengio is joining the program as scientific director and will provide critical input and scientific advice. The project, which will receive £59 million over the next four years, is being funded by the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), which was launched in January last year to invest in potentially transformational scientific research.

Safeguarded AI’s goal is to build AI systems that can offer quantitative guarantees, such as a risk score, about their effect on the real world, says David “davidad” Dalrymple, the program director for Safeguarded AI at ARIA. The idea is to supplement human testing with mathematical analysis of new systems’ potential for harm.

The project aims to build AI safety mechanisms by combining scientific world models, which are essentially simulations of the world, with mathematical proofs. These proofs would include explanations of the AI’s work, and humans would be tasked with verifying whether the AI model’s safety checks are correct.

Bengio says he wants to help ensure that future AI systems cannot cause serious harm.

“We’re currently racing toward a fog behind which might be a precipice,” he says. “We don’t know how far the precipice is, or if there even is one, so it might be years, decades, and we don’t know how serious it could be … We need to build up the tools to clear that fog and make sure we don’t cross into a precipice if there is one.”

Science and technology companies don’t have a way to give mathematical guarantees that AI systems are going to behave as programmed, he adds. This unreliability, he says, could lead to catastrophic outcomes.

Dalrymple and Bengio argue that current techniques to mitigate the risk of advanced AI systems—such as red-teaming, where people probe AI systems for flaws—have serious limitations and can’t be relied on to ensure that critical systems don’t go off-piste.

Instead, they hope the program will provide new ways to secure AI systems that rely less on human efforts and more on mathematical certainty. The vision is to build a “gatekeeper” AI, which is tasked with understanding and reducing the safety risks of other AI agents. This gatekeeper would ensure that AI agents functioning in high-stakes sectors, such as transport or energy systems, operate as we want them to. The idea is to collaborate with companies early on to understand how AI safety mechanisms could be useful for different sectors, says Dalrymple.

The complexity of advanced systems means we have no choice but to use AI to safeguard AI, argues Bengio. “That’s the only way, because at some point these AIs are just too complicated. Even the ones that we have now, we can’t really break down their answers into human, understandable sequences of reasoning steps,” he says.

The next step—actually building models that can check other AI systems—is also where Safeguarded AI and ARIA hope to change the status quo of the AI industry.

ARIA is also offering funding to people or organizations in high-risk sectors such as transport, telecommunications, supply chains, and medical research to help them build applications that might benefit from AI safety mechanisms. ARIA is offering applicants a total of £5.4 million in the first year, and another £8.2 million in another year. The deadline for applications is October 2.

The agency is also casting a wide net for people who might be interested in building Safeguarded AI’s safety mechanism through a nonprofit organization. ARIA is eyeing up to £18 million to set this organization up and will be accepting funding applications early next year.

The program is looking for proposals to start a nonprofit with a diverse board that encompasses lots of different sectors in order to do this work in a reliable, trustworthy way, Dalrymple says. This is similar to what OpenAI was initially set up to do before changing its strategy to be more product- and profit-oriented.

The organization’s board will not just be responsible for holding the CEO accountable; it will even weigh in on decisions about whether to undertake certain research projects, and whether to release particular papers and APIs, he adds.

The Safeguarded AI project is part of the UK’s mission to position itself as a pioneer in AI safety. In November 2023, the country hosted the very first AI Safety Summit, which gathered world leaders and technologists to discuss how to build the technology in a safe way.

While the funding program has a preference for UK-based applicants, ARIA is looking for global talent that might be interested in coming to the UK, says Dalrymple. ARIA also has an intellectual-property mechanism for funding for-profit companies abroad, which allows royalties to return back to the country.

Bengio says he was drawn to the project to promote international collaboration on AI safety. He chairs the International Scientific Report on the safety of advanced AI, which involves 30 countries as well as the EU and UN. A vocal advocate for AI safety, he has been part of an influential lobby warning that superintelligent AI poses an existential risk.

“We need to bring the discussion of how we are going to address the risks of AI to a global, larger set of actors,” says Bengio. “This program is bringing us closer to this.”

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