Conic Finance was hacked in July draining roughly $3.6 million worth of ether from the protocol.
Read more The three aspiring presidents touched on many of the same pro-crypto points at a Coinbase-linked crypto advocacy event.
Read more The FCC has made a final denial of Starlink’s application for $885 million in public funds to expand its orbital communications infrastructure to cover parts of rural America, saying the company “failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.” As previously reported, the money in question was part of the Rural Digital Opportunity […]
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The in-car tech used by the likes of Ford and GM to make sure drivers pay attention to the road has come a long way. But it’s just not ready to help prevent or mitigate the damage done by drunk driving, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That assessment is threaded throughout a […]
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True Anomaly has closed $100 million in new funding, a strong signal that the appetite for startups operating at the intersection of space and defense is far from abating. The new round was led by Riot Ventures, with participation from Eclipse, ACME Capital, Menlo Ventures, Narya, 645 Ventures, Rocketship.vc, Champion Hill Ventures and FiveNine Ventures. […]
© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software isn’t just for managing customer relationships anymore. Here’s a detailed guide to setting up your own system for pitching investors.
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Blue Origin is aiming to finally conclude a more than 15-month pause in operations of its New Shepard suborbital rocket, with the company announcing today that it will fly an uncrewed mission as early as December 18. The company confirmed the launch on its social media account following a Bloomberg report of an internal email […]
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The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it’s already headed in the wrong direction. Two former staffers of the US agency responsible for advancing the technology argue that the profit-driven industry’s focus on cleaning up corporate emissions will come at the expense of helping to pull the planet back from dangerous levels of warming.
Numerous studies have found that the world may have to remove tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year by around midcentury to keep global warming in check. These findings have spawned significant investments into startups developing carbon-sucking direct-air-capture factories, and companies striving to harness the greenhouse-gas-trapping potential of plants, minerals, and the oceans.
But a fundamental challenge is that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) isn’t a product that any person or company “needs,” in the traditional market sense. Rather, carrying it out provides a collective societal good, in the way that waste management does, only with larger global stakes. To date, it’s largely been funded by companies that are voluntarily paying for it as a form of corporate climate action, in the face of rising investor, customer, employee, or regulatory pressures. That includes purchases of future removal through the $1 billion Frontier effort, started by Stripe and other companies.
There’s also some growing government support in countries including the US, which is funding carbon removal projects, offering a comparatively small amount of money to companies that provide the service and subsidizing those that store away carbon dioxide.
But in a lengthy and pointed essay published in the journal Carbon Management on Tuesday, researchers Emily Grubert and Shuchi Talati argue there are rising dangers for the field. Both previously worked for the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which drove several of the recent US efforts to develop the industry.
They write that the emergence of a for-profit, growth-focused sector selling a carbon removal product, instead of a publicly funded and coordinated effort more akin to waste management, “presents grave risks for the ability of CDR to enable net zero and net negative targets in general,” including keeping or pulling the planet back to 1.5 ºC of warming.
“If we missallocate our limited CDR resources and end up not having access to the capacity that can help meet the needs we really have, climatically, that’s a problem,” says Grubert, now an associate professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame. “It means we’re never going to get there.”
One of their main concerns is that corporations have come to see carbon removal as a relatively simple and reliable way of canceling out ongoing climate pollution that they have other ways of cleaning up, which the authors refer to as “luxury” removal.
That could significantly increase the total carbon removal the world would need to pull off, and effectively dedicate a large share of a limited resource to things that can be addressed directly. Moreover, it grants a significant slice of the world’s carbon removal capacity to profitable companies in rich nations rather than reserving it for higher-priority public goods, including allowing developing nations more time to reduce emissions; balancing out emissions from sectors we still don’t have ways of cleaning up, like agriculture; and drawing down historic emissions enough to bring global temperatures to safer levels.
“You really need to save it for the stuff you can’t eliminate, not just the stuff that’s expensive to eliminate,” Grubert says.
That means using carbon removal to address things like the emissions from the fertilizer used to feed populations in poor parts of the world, not for avoiding the hassle and expense of retrofitting a cement plant, she adds.
“CDR cannot succeed at restorative and reparative goals if it is controlled by the same forces that created the problems it is trying to solve,” write Grubert and Talati, executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering.
There is evidence that some companies have come to perceive carbon removal in the way that the authors describe.
Earlier this year, Vicki Hollub, the chief executive of the oil and gas company Occidental, which recently acquired a direct-air-capture company, told the audience at an energy conference: “We believe that our direct-capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
Part of the problem, the authors note, is that carbon removal is seen as “unconstrained,” easily scaled to meet industry goals and climate needs. But in fact, it’s hard and expensive to do reliably. Direct-air-capture machines, for instance, require a lot of land and resources to build and a lot of energy to run, Talati says. That limits how big the sector can become and complicates the question of how much good the facilities do.
Last week, the Global Carbon Project reported that the world’s technology-based carbon removal only sucked down about 10,000 tons this year, “significantly less than one-millionth of our fossil-fuel emissions,” as MIT Technology Review reported.
Other means of carbon removal may be cheaper and more scalable, particularly methods that harness nature to do the job. But some of these approaches, including adding minerals to the oceans or sinking biomass in them, also raise concerns about environmental side effects or create added difficulties in certifying the climate benefits.
Grubert and Talatai fear that growing market pressures, including the demand for low-cost carbon removal at high volume, could undermine how well such efforts are measured, reported, and verified over time. They add that the carbon removal market may simply replicate many of the problems in the traditional carbon offsets space, where researchers have found that efforts to plant trees or prevent deforestation often substantially exaggerate the amount of additional carbon trapped.
Ultimately, the authors argue that the global task of drawing down billions of tons of carbon dioxide should largely be publicly funded, owned, and managed if we hope to achieve the global common good of stabilizing and repairing the climate.
“There’s a role for the private sector, but our argument is that a purely profit-driven industry that’s currently operating with very little governance is going to go badly,” Talati says. “If we want to see this succeed, we can’t count on the self-governance of corporations, which we’ve seen fail over and over again, across every industry. The role of the public sector needs to be broadened and deepened.”
Stripe didn’t respond to an inquiry before press time. But executives there have argued that Frontier is marshaling corporate funds and expertise to help build up an essential industry that will be needed to combat the dangers of climate change, enabling startups to move ahead with early demonstration projects and to test a variety of approaches to carbon removal. Major investors have also said that rising demand among corporations is helping to drive innovation and growth in the field.
A spokesman for Heirloom, which is part of a team that recently secured Department of Energy funds to move ahead with a major direct-air-capture project in Louisiana, said it recognizes some of the risks that the authors raise and has taken steps to address them by committing to follow a clear set of corporate principles: “We believe decarbonization should be the #1 goal of climate mitigation, and CDR should be used for residual and legacy emissions. We feel strongly that CDR is not used as a fig leaf for emitting industries.”
37 trillion. That is the number or cells that form a human being. How they all work together to sustain life is possibly the biggest unsolved puzzle in biology. A group of up-and-coming technologies for spatially resolved multi omics, here collectively called “spatial omics,” may provide researchers with the solution.
Over the last 20 years, the omics revolution has enabled us to understand cell and tissue biology at ever increasing resolutions. Bulk sequencing techniques that emerged in the mid 2000s allowed the study of mixed populations of cells. A decade later, single-cell omics methods became commercially available, revolutionizing our understanding of cell physiology and pathology. These methods, however, required dissociating cells from their tissue of origin, making it impossible to study their spatial organization in tissue.
Spatial omics refers to the ability to measure the activity of biomolecules (RNA, DNA, proteins, and other omics) in situ—directly from tissue samples. This is important because many biological processes are controlled by highly localized interactions between cells that take place in spatially heterogeneous tissue environments. Spatial omics allows previously unobservable cellular organization and biological events to be viewed in unprecedented detail.
A few years ago, these technologies were just prototypes in a handful of labs around the world. They worked only on frozen tissue and they required impractically large amounts of precious tissue biopsies. But as these challenges have been overcome and the technologies commercialized by life science technology providers, these tools have become available to the wider scientific community. Spatial omics technologies are now improving at a rapid pace, increasing the number of biomolecules that can be profiled from hundreds to tens of thousands, while increasing resolution to single-cell and even subcellular scales.
Complementary advances in data and AI will expand the impact of spatial omics on life sciences and health care—while also raising new questions. How are we going to generate the large datasets that are necessary to make clinically relevant discoveries? What will data scientists see in spatial omics data through the lens of AI?
Discovery requires large-scale spatial omics datasets
Several areas of life science are already benefiting from discoveries made possible by spatial omics, with the biggest impacts in cancer and neurodegenerative disease research. However, spatial omics technologies are very new, and experiments are challenging and costly to execute. Most present studies are performed by single institutions and include only a few dozen patients. Complex cell interactions are highly patient-specific, and they cannot be fully understood from these small cohorts. Researchers need the data to enable hypothesis generation and discovery.
This requires a shift in mentality toward collaborative projects, which can generate large-scale reference datasets both on healthy organs and human diseases. Initiatives such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) have transformed our understanding of cancer. Similar large-scale spatial omics efforts are needed to systematically interrogate the role of spatial organization in healthy and diseased tissues; they will generate large datasets to fuel many discovery programs. In addition, collaborative initiatives steer further improvement of spatial omics technologies, generate data standards and infrastructures for data repositories, and drive the development and adoption of computational tools and algorithms.
At Owkin we are pioneering the generation of such datasets. In June 2023, we launched an initiative to create the world largest spatial omics dataset in cancer, with a vision to include data from 7,000 patients with seven difficult-to-treat cancers. The project, known as MOSAIC (Multi-Omics Spatial Atlas in Cancer), won’t stop at the data generation, but will mine the data to learn disease biology and identify new molecular targets against which to design new drugs.
Owkin is well placed to drive this kind of initiative. We can tap a vast network of collaborating hospitals across the globe: to create the MOSAIC dataset, we are working with five world-class cancer research hospitals. And we have deep experience in AI: In the last five years, we have published 54 research papers generating AI methodological innovation and building predictive models in several disease areas, including many types of cancer.
AI’s transformative role in discovering new biology
Spatial omics was recognized as method of the year 2020 by Nature Methods, and it was named one of the top 10 emerging technologies by the World Economic Forum in 2023—alongside generative AI.
With these two technologies developing in tandem, the opportunities for AI-driven biological discoveries from spatial omics are numerous. Looking at the fast-evolving landscape of spatial omics AI methods, we see two broad categories of new methods breaking through.
In the first category are AI methods that aim to improve the usability of spatial omics and enable richer downstream analyses for researchers. Such methods are specially designed to deal with the high dimensionality and the signal-to-noise ratio that are specific to spatial omics. Some are used to remove technical artifacts and batch effects from the data. Other methods, collectively known as “super-resolution methods,” use AI to increase the resolution of spatial omics assays to near single-cell levels. Another group of approaches looks to integrate dissociated single-cell omics with spatial omics. Collectively, these AI methods are bridging the gap with future spatial omics technologies.
In the second category, AI methods aim at discovering new biology from spatial omics. By exploiting the localization information of spatial omics, they shed light on how groups of cells organize and communicate with unprecedented resolution. Such methods are sharpening our understanding of how cells interact to form complex tissues.
At Owkin, we are developing methods to identify new therapeutic targets and patient subpopulations using spatial omics. We have pioneered methods allowing researchers to understand how cancer patient outcomes are linked to tumor heterogeneity, directly from tumor biopsy images. Building on this expertise and the MOSAIC consortium, we are developing the next generation of AI methods, which will link patient-level outcomes with an understanding of disease heterogeneity at the molecular level.
Looking ahead
Spatial biology has the potential to radically change our understanding of biology. It will change how we see a biomarker, going from the mere presence of a particular molecule in a sample to patterns of cells expressing a certain molecule in a tissue. Promising research on spatial biomarkers has been published for several diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and ovarian cancer. Spatial omics has already been used in research associated with clinical trials to monitor tumor progression in patients.
Five years from now, spatial technologies will be capable of mapping every human protein, RNA, and metabolite at subcellular resolution. The computing infrastructure to store and analyze spatial omics data will be in place, as will the necessary standards for data and metadata and the analytical algorithms. The tumor microenvironment and cellular composition of difficult-to-treat cancers will be mapped through collaborative efforts such as MOSAIC.
Spatial omics datasets from patient biopsies will quickly become an essential part of pharmaceutical R&D, and through the lens of AI methods, they will be used to inform the design of new, more efficacious drugs and to drive faster and better-designed clinical trials to bring those drugs to patients. In the clinic, spatial omics data will routinely be collected from patients, and doctors will use purpose-built AI models to extract clinically relevant information about a patient’s tumor and what drugs it will best respond to.
Today we are witnessing the convergence of three forces: spatial omics technologies becoming increasingly high-throughput and high-resolution, large-scale datasets from patient biopsies being generated, and AI models becoming ever more sophisticated. Together, they will allow researchers to dissect the complex biology of health and diseases, enabling ever more sophisticated therapeutic interventions.
Davide Mantiero, PhD, Joseph Lehár, PhD, and Darius Meadon also contributed to this piece.
This content was produced by Owkin. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
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.
Inside the decades-long fight over Yahoo’s misdeeds in China
When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for Chinese dissident Xu Wanping, the company still looms large—and has for nearly two decades.
In 2005, Xu was arrested for signing online petitions relating to anti-Japanese protests. He didn’t use his real name, but he did use his Yahoo email address. Yahoo China violated its users’ trust—providing information on certain email accounts to Chinese law enforcement, which in turn allowed the government to identify and arrest some users.
Xu was one of them; he would serve nine years in prison. Now, he and five other Chinese former political prisoners are suing Yahoo and a slate of co-defendants—not because of the company’s information-sharing (which was the focus of an earlier lawsuit filed by other plaintiffs), but rather because of what came after. Read the full story.
—Eileen Guo
Five things you need to know about the EU’s new AI Act
Two and a half years after it was first introduced—after months of lobbying and political arm-wrestling, plus grueling final negotiations—EU lawmakers have reached a deal over the AI Act. It will be the world’s first sweeping AI law.
The AI Act was conceived as a landmark bill that would mitigate harm in areas where using AI poses the biggest risk to our rights, as well as banning uses that pose an “unacceptable risk.”
The new legislation should introduce important rules and enforcement mechanisms to a sector that is currently a Wild West. Melissa Heikkilä, our senior AI reporter, has five key takeaways—check them out.
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
Human brain cells hooked up to a chip can do speech recognition
The news: Brain organoids, clumps of human brain cells grown in a dish, can be hooked up to an electronic chip and carry out simple computational tasks, a new study shows. The hybrid system is capable of processing, learning, and remembering information. It was even able to carry out some rudimentary speech recognition.
Why it matters: Scientists have been trying to build computers based on advanced biological systems for decades. Such computers could overcome some challenges of silicon-based computers, such as bottlenecks in data processing, and usher in a new age of biocomputing. Read the full story.
—Abdullahi Tsanni
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Google’s Play app store is a monopoly
That’s the unanimous decision of the jury in its antitrust trial against Epic Games. (The Verge)
+ Now it’s down to the judge to decide the appropriate remedies Google should face. (FT $)
+ It’s major news for the app industry. (Bloomberg $)
2 Democrats are splashing out on thousands of X ads
Just as other advertisers abandon the troubled platform in droves. (WP $)
+ Other X ads these days include those for DIY artificial insemination kits. (404 Media)
+ The rich can afford to banish adverts altogether. What about the rest of us? (Economist $)
3 The COP28 climate summit’s draft deal was met with fury
The 198 participant countries can’t agree on how we ditch fossil fuels. (BBC)
4 New York wants to sink $1 billion into chip research
The state wants to become a major semiconductor player. (NYT $)
+ The biggest investor in AI companies? The firm that makes their chips. (FT $)
+ Inside the software that will become the next battle front in US-China chip war. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Taylor Swift is the focus of another wild conspiracy theory
QAnon believers are convinced she’s been weaponized to alter next year’s US Presidential election. (Wired $)
6 What’s next for the US’s nuclear ambitions
Money is dwindling, and regulators are circling. (FT $)
+ We were promised smaller nuclear reactors. Where are they? (MIT Technology Review)
7 SBF was the worst witness his lawyer has ever seen
So bad, in fact, he’s reconsidering his future in criminal law altogether. (Bloomberg $)
+ There are few crypto leaders left right now. (NYT $)
+ Slowly but surely, bitcoin is bouncing back. (Reuters)
8 TikTok hosted its first live concert this weekend
In what looked like a weird collision of virtual and analogue worlds. (Insider $)
9 Meet the highly competitive spreadsheeters
Excel is more than office software to these dedicated fans—much more. (WSJ $)
10 Where’s our flatworm emoji?
Researchers are calling for greater representation for microorganisms and fungi. (The Guardian)
Quote of the day
“We will not sign our death certificate.”
—Cedric Schuster of Samoa, the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States at the COP28 summit, explains that they refuse to sign an agreement without strong commitments to phase out fossil fuels, The Guardian reports.
The big story
How Silicon Valley hatched a plan to turn blood into human eggs
October 2021
A few years ago, a young man from California’s technology scene began popping up in the world’s leading developmental biology labs that research embryos. Matt Krisiloff had an interest in the artificial-egg technology, and said he wanted to help them.
The company Krisiloff started, called Conception, is the largest commercial venture pursuing what’s called in vitro gametogenesis, which refers to turning adult cells into gametes—sperm or egg cells.
Their goal is ambitious, to say the least. If scientists can generate supplies of eggs, it would cancel the age limits on female fertility—and break the rules of reproduction as we know them. Read the full story.
—Antonio Regalado
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ This uilleann pipe version of Fairytale of New York is something special.
+ Get your kicks on your state’s quietest route doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
+ The UK is home to countless wonderful small galleries—make sure you check these out.
+ Why Mariah Carey is the undisputed queen of Christmas. 
+ Love to read but short on time? Never fear: these classic novels are all under 200 pages.