This week’s Crypto Biz explores Singapore Gulf Bank’s plans to acquire a stablecoin firm, Binance delisting tokens, Cantor Fitzgerald’s stake in Tether and the first DOGE ETP.
A notable surge in activity puts analysts’ eyes back on Ethereum. Can the Ethereum network catch up to and surpass Solana?
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The risk of a bird flu pandemic is rising
How worried should we be about bird flu? The past few months have seen some potentially worrisome developments in the US, including the continued spread of the virus among dairy cattle, the detection of the virus in a pig as well as cow’s milk, and—most concerning of all—the growing number of human infections.
We don’t yet have any evidence that the virus is spreading between people, but the risk of a potential pandemic has increased since MIT Technology Review last covered this topic a couple of months ago.
The good news is we are in a much better position to tackle any potential future flu outbreaks than we were to face covid-19 back in 2020, given that we already have vaccines. But, on the whole, it’s not looking great. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things health and biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
The moon is just the beginning for this waterless concrete
If NASA establishes a permanent presence on the moon, its astronauts’ homes could be made of a new 3D-printable, waterless concrete. Someday, so might yours. By accelerating the curing process for more rapid construction, this sulfur-based compound could become just as applicable on our home terrain as it is on lunar soil.
Traditional concrete requires large amounts of water, a commodity that will be in short supply on the moon, and sending just 1 kilogram of it to the moon costs roughly $1.2 million.
Instead, NASA hopes to create new materials from lunar soil and eventually adapt the same techniques for building on Mars. But creating the perfect waterless “lunarcrete” is easier said than done. Read the full story.
—Jenna Ahart
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Australia has banned under-16s from using social media
But the law is easily circumvented, and could create more problems than it solves. (WP $)
+ Unsurprisingly, the tech giants aren’t fans of the ruling. (Fortune)
+ Australians’ reactions to the news appear to be fairly mixed. (BBC)
2 US retailers are urging shoppers to buy before new tariffs kick in
It’s yet another marketing tactic to drive sales during the busiest time for shopping. (WSJ $)
+ Are you among the horde of this year’s Black Friday refuseniks? (FT $)
+ How Trump’s tariffs could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Canada is suing Google for ‘creating a monopoly’
The suit is following in the footsteps of the US government. (NYT $)
+ It’s joining calls for the colossal company to sell two pieces of marketing software. (WSJ $)
+ Google’s antitrust gut punch and the Trump wild card. (MIT Technology Review)
4 How China came to dominate the car export market
And spook the EU and US in the process. (NYT $)
+ Generous government subsidies also played a not insignificant part. (MIT Technology Review)
5 A UK politician says businesses should use robots over migrants
Automating tasks like fruit picking would reduce the UK’s net migration figures, he claims. (The Guardian)
+ Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating elder care. (MIT Technology Review)
6 North Korean hackers have stolen billions in crypto
The illicit currency is funneled into funding its nuclear weapons program. (TechCrunch)
7 America refuses to give up its dream of soldiers in exoskeletons
It’s been testing the suits for decades. Why haven’t they caught on? (Wired $)
+ This robotic exoskeleton can help runners sprint faster. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Is it really possible to get paid to do virtually nothing?
This Stanford thinks one in 10 engineers is doing exactly that. (404 Media)
+ Big Tech has become preoccupied with identifying and firing freeloaders. (Insider $)
9 GitHub can teach you to bake bread 
Featuring flowcharts, tables, and timelines galore. (Ars Technica)
10 Here’s how a diamond is grown in a lab 
Can you tell the difference between them and the real deal? (WP $)
Quote of the day
“It is impossible to be a teen in most parts of the world without social media.”
—Stephen Scheeler, the former head of Facebook in Australia and New Zealand, tells Bloomberg about his doubts whether Australia’s new ban on social media for teenagers can truly be enforced.
The big story
Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation
August 2023
PowerPoint is everywhere. It’s used in religious sermons; by schoolchildren preparing book reports; at funerals and weddings. In 2010, Microsoft announced that PowerPoint was installed on more than a billion computers worldwide.
But before PowerPoint, 35-millimeter film slides were king. They were the only medium for the kinds of high-impact presentations given by CEOs and top brass at annual meetings for stockholders, employees, and salespeople.
Known in the business as “multi-image” shows, these presentations required a small army of producers, photographers, and live production staff to pull off. Read this story to delve into the fascinating, flashy history of corporate presentations.
—Claire L. Evans
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ We’re witnessing a sandwich boom in the UK, and fillings are getting increasingly outlandish.
+ Now Thanksgiving is behind us, it’s time to look forward to Christmas: specifically Mariah Carey’s smash hit All I Want for Christmas is You 
+ The world’s oldest lizard has been recently uncovered in an unassuming quarry.
+ Is it really 25 years since Slipknot first freaked out the world with their masked antics?
If NASA establishes a permanent presence on the moon, its astronauts’ homes could be made of a new 3D-printable, waterless concrete. Someday, so might yours. By accelerating the curing process for more rapid construction, this sulfur-based compound could become just as applicable on our home terrain as it is on lunar soil.
Artemis III—set to launch no earlier than September 2026—will not only mark humanity’s return to the moon after more than 50 years, but also be the first mission to explore the lunar South Pole, the proposed site of NASA’s base camp.
Building a home base on the moon will demand a steep supply of moon-based infrastructure: launch pads, shelter, and radiation blockers. But shipping Earth-based concrete to the lunar surface bears a hefty price tag. Sending just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of material to the moon costs roughly $1.2 million, says Ali Kazemian, a robotic construction researcher at Louisiana State University (LSU). Instead, NASA hopes to create new materials from lunar soil and eventually adapt the same techniques for building on Mars.
Traditional concrete requires large amounts of water, a commodity that will be in short supply on the moon and critically important for life support or scientific research, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. While prior NASA projects have tested compounds that could be used to make “lunarcrete,” they’re still working to craft the right waterless material.
So LSU researchers are refining the formula, developing a new cement based on sulfur, which they heat until it’s molten to bind material without the need for water. In recent work, the team mixed their waterless cement with simulated lunar and Martian soil to create a 3D-printable concrete, which they used to assemble walls and beams. “We need automated construction, and NASA thinks 3D printing is one of the few viable technologies for building lunar infrastructure,” says Kazemian.
COURTESY OF ALI KAZEMIAN
Beyond circumventing the need for water, the cement can handle wider temperature extremes and cures faster than traditional methods. The group used a pre-made powder for their experiments, but on the moon and Mars, astronauts might extract sulfur from surface soil.
To test whether the concrete can stand up to the moon’s harsh environment, the team placed its structures in a vacuum chamber for weeks, analyzing the material’s stability at different temperatures. Originally, researchers worried that cold conditions on the dark side of the moon might cause the compound to turn into a gas through a process called sublimation, like when dry ice skips its liquid phase and evaporates directly. Ultimately, they found that the concrete can handle the lunar South Pole’s frigid forecast without losing its form.
Some conditions, like reduced gravity, could even work toward the concrete’s advantage. The experiment tested structures like walls and small circular towers, each made by stacking many layers of concrete. “One of the main challenges in larger-scale 3D printing is a distortion of these thick, heavy layers,” says Kazemian “But when you have lower gravity, that can actually help keep the layers from deforming.”
Kazemian and his colleagues recently transferred the technology to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to implement their design on a larger-scale robotic system and test construction in larger vacuum chambers. If adopted, the concrete will most likely be used for taller lunar structures like habitats and radiation shields. Flatter designs, like a landing pad, will probably use laser-based technologies to melt down lunar soil into a ceramic structure.
There may only be so much testing we can do on Earth, however. According to Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist at University of Central Florida who recently retired from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the concrete’s efficacy may falter with the shift from simulant to real soil. “There’s chemistry in the samples of these planets that the simulants cannot perfectly replicate,” he says. “When we send missions to these planetary bodies to test the technology using the real soil, we may find that we need to further improve the technology to get it to work in that environment.”
But Metzger still sees the sulfur-based concrete as a vital foundation for the tall orders of upcoming planetary projects. Future missions to Mars could demand roads to drive back and forth from ice-mining sites and pavement around habitats to create dust-free work zones. This new concrete brings these distant goals a touch closer to reality.
It could benefit construction on Earth, too. Kazemian sees the new material as a potential alternative for traditional concrete, especially in areas with water scarcity or a surplus of sulfur. Parts of the Middle East, for example, have abundant sulfur as a result of oil and gas production.
The technology could become especially useful in disaster areas with broken supply chains, according to Metzger. It could also have military applications for rapid construction of structures like storage buildings. “This is great for people out there working on another planet who don’t have a lot of support,” Metzger says. “But there are already plenty of analogs to that here on Earth.”
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.
How worried should we be about bird flu? It’s a question that I’ve been asked by friends and colleagues several times over the last couple of weeks. Their concerns have been spurred by some potentially worrisome developments in the US, including the continued spread of the virus among dairy cattle, the detection of the virus in a pig as well as cow’s milk, and—most concerning of all—the growing number of human infections.
I’ll admit that I’m worried. We don’t yet have any evidence that the virus is spreading between people, but the risk of a potential pandemic has increased since I last covered this topic a couple of months ago.
And once you combine that increased risk with an upcoming change in presidential administration that might leave US health agencies in the hands of a vaccine denier who promotes the consumption of raw milk, well … it’s not exactly a comforting thought.
The good news is we are in a much better position to tackle any potential future flu outbreaks than we were to face covid-19 back in 2020, given that we already have vaccines. But, on the whole, it’s not looking great.
The bird flu that is currently spreading in US dairy cattle is caused by the H5N1 virus. The virus is especially lethal to some bird populations and has been wiping out poultry and seabirds for the last couple of years. It has also caused fatal infections in many mammals who came into contact with those birds.
H5N1 was first detected in a dairy cow in Texas in March of this year. As of this week, the virus has been reported in 675 herds across 15 states, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (also known as APHIS).
Those are just the cases we know about. There may be more. The USDA requires testing of cattle before they are moved between states. And it offers a voluntary testing program for farmers who want to know if the virus is present in their bulk milk tanks. But participation in that program is optional.
States have their own rules. Colorado has required testing of bulk milk tanks in licensed dairy farms since July. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture announced plans for a program just last week. But some states have no such requirements.
At the end of October, the USDA reported that the virus had been detected in a pig for the first time. The pig was one of five in a farm in Oregon that had “a mix of poultry and livestock.” All the pigs were slaughtered.
Virologists have been especially worried about the virus making its way into pigs, because these animals are notorious viral incubators. “They can become infected with swine strains, bird strains and human strains,” says Brinkley Bellotti, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. These strains can swap genes and give rise to new, potentially more infectious or harmful strains.
Thankfully, we haven’t seen any other cases in pig farms, and there’s no evidence that the virus can spread between pigs. And while it has been spreading pretty rapidly between cattle, the virus doesn’t seem to have evolved much, says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. That suggests that the virus made the leap into cattle, probably from birds, only once. And it has been spreading through herds since.
Unfortunately, we still don’t really know how it is spreading. There is some evidence to suggest the virus can be spread from cow to cow through shared milking equipment. But it is unclear how the virus is spreading between farms. “It’s hard to form an effective control strategy when you don’t know exactly how it’s spreading,” says Bellotti.
But it is in cows. And it’s in their milk. When scientists analyzed 297 samples of Grade A pasteurized retail milk products, including milk, cream and cheese, they found viral RNA from H5N1 in 20% of them. Those samples were collected from 17 states across the US. And the study was conducted in April, just weeks after the virus was first detected in cattle. “It’s surprising to me that we are totally fine with … our pasteurized milk products containing viral DNA,” says Lakdawala.
Research suggests that, as long as the milk is pasteurized, the virus is not infectious. But Lakdawala is concerned that pasteurization may not inactivate all of the virus, all the time. “We don’t know how much virus we need to ingest [to become infected], and whether any is going to slip through pasteurization,” she says.
And no reassurances can be made for unpasteurized raw milk. When cows are infected with H5N1, their milk can turn thick, yellow and “chunky.” But research has shown that, even when the milk starts to look normal again, it can still contain potentially infectious virus.
The most concerning development, though, is the rise in human cases. So far, 55 such cases of H5N1 bird flu have been reported in the US, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Twenty-nine of those cases have been detected in California. In almost all those cases, the infected person is thought to have caught the virus from cattle or poultry on farms. But in two of those cases, the source of the infection is unknown.
Health professionals don’t know how a teenager in British Columbia, Canada, got so sick with bird flu, either. The anonymous teenager, who sought medical care for an eye infection on November 2, is still seriously ill in hospital, and continues to rely on a ventilator to breathe. Local health officials have closed their investigation into the teen’s infection.
There may be more, unreported cases out there, too. When researchers tested 115 dairy farm workers in Michigan and Colorado, they found markers of recent infection with the virus in 7% of them.
So far, there is no evidence that the virus can spread between people. But every human infection offers the virus another opportunity to evolve into a form that can do just that. People can act as viral incubators, too. And during flu season, there are more chances for the H5N1 virus to mix with circulating seasonal flu viruses.
“Just because we [haven’t seen human-to-human spread] now doesn’t mean that it’s not capable of happening, that it won’t happen, or that it hasn’t already happened,” says Lakdawala.
So where do we go from here? Lakdawala thinks we should already have started vaccinating dairy farm workers. After all, the US has already stockpiled vaccines for H5N1, which were designed to protect against previous variants of the virus. “We’re not taking [the human cases] seriously enough,” she says.
We need to get a better handle on exactly how the virus is spreading, too, and implement more effective measures to stop it from doing so. That means more testing of both cows and dairy farm workers at the very least. And we need to be clear that, despite what Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current lead contender for the role of head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, says, raw milk can be dangerous, and vaccines are a vital tool in the prevention of pandemics.
We still have an opportunity to prevent the outbreak from turning into a global catastrophe. But the situation has worsened since the summer. “This is sort of how the 2009 pandemic started,” says Lakdawala, referring to the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. “We started to have a couple of cases sporadically, and then the next thing you knew, you were seeing it everywhere.”
Now read the rest of The Checkup
Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive
The US is planning to stockpile millions of doses of H5N1 vaccines. But our current approach to making flu vaccines is slow and cumbersome. New vaccines that don’t rely on the use of eggs, or make use of mRNA, might offer a better alternative.
Flu season is already underway in the US, where bird flu is spreading among cattle. That has virologists worried that a person infected with both viruses could unwittingly incubate an all-new strain of the virus.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already spread harmful misinformation, pseudoscience and fringe theories about AIDS and covid-19.
Some researchers are exploring new ways to prevent the spread of H5N1 in poultry. The gene editing tool CRISPR could be used to help make chickens more resistant to the virus, according to preliminary research published last year.
From around the web
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Jay Bhattacharya for his pick to lead the US National Institutes of Health, an agency with a $48 billion budget that oversees the majority of medical research in the country. Bhattacharya was one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto published in 2020 arguing against lockdowns during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, and supporting a “let it rip” approach instead. (STAT)
An IVF mix up left two families raising each other’s biological babies. They didn’t realize until the children were a couple of months old. What should they do? (Have the tissues ready for this one, which is heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure) (New York Times)
Why do we feel the need to surveil our sleeping babies? This beautiful comic explores the various emotional pulls experienced by new parents. (The Verge)
Australia’s parliament has passed a law that bans children under the age of 16 from using social media. Critics are concerned that the law is a “blunt instrument” that might drive young teens to the dark web, or leave them feeling isolated. (The Guardian)
Lab-grown foie gras, anyone? Cultivated meat is going high-end, apparently. (Wired)
If successful with its fundraising, Metaplanet could purchase roughly 652 extra Bitcoin for $62 million.
Bitcoin is going to go to $250,000 to $500,000 within the next 12 to 24 months, predicted Charles Hoskinson.
It took 482 attempts from 195 participants before Freysa was convinced from a persuasive message to transfer the $47,000 of prize pool funds.
Dragon Ball and One Piece producer’s new blockchain game, Justin Sun is the largest investor in Donald Trump’s WLFI: Asia Express
The private market platform says $15 million in Pump.fun equity is for sale.