Hey readers, it’s great to be back in your inbox yet again with the 36th issue of the world’s best weekly newsletter on the latest developments space, hard tech, energy, engineering, and medicine. This week has something for everyone: items on the “magic islands” theory of things we’re seeing on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, “droid” delivery expanding across the US, harnessing the power of Icelandic magma, GPT’s ever-increasing relevance in healthcare, the White Pill Investment Index, and tons more.

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

OK — let’s get to it.

Space

Alternative type of rocket engine. Rotating detonation rocket engines (RDREs) create thrust by detonating relatively small amounts of fuel mixture sequentially, in a circle. Detonated fuel mixture is replaced by ‘fresh’ fuel before the sequence completes — or the “detonation wave” reaches its original position — so that the engine effectively ‘rinses and repeats’, firing and creating thrust continuously. RDREs are a significant departure from conventional rocket engines, where, very roughly speaking, combustion happens in a chamber where fuel and oxidizer mix and burn at subsonic speed, and the resultant pressure escapes ‘downward’ into a nozzle, creating thrust. Instead, in RDREs, continuous, circular detonations within a donut-shaped chamber generate pressure that’s expelled through a nozzle to create thrust, and can maybe do that as much as 25% more efficiently than conventional engines, which would be a big deal. (Wait hey, have you always wondered exactly how rocket engines work? I spent a fair amount of time researching them over Christmas break, and found this video super helpful.)

In the late 2010s, NASA began to conduct experimental demonstrations of RDRE designs at small scale. And recently, NASA pulled off a perfect test of the engine scaled up to full size, for 251 seconds — a typical length of time a rocket would need to fire. Progress! (ExtremeTech) (NASA)

Magic islands. One of the otherworldly aspects of the liquid methane lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan is that they’re glass-like — extremely still, peaceful, touched by waves no larger than a few millimeters. More, the methane there is presumed to be completely clear, but reflects the yellow-orange hues of the moon’s sky. Thinking about being alone on a little boat on the surface of one of these lakes gets weird after a certain amount of time, for me at least. The fact that radar imagery that penetrates Titan’s thick smog shows lakes and rivers that are basically indistinguishable from satellite imagery of earth turns the weirdness up a bit more, but again that’s just me. Check this out for example —

Stranger still, this week Owen learned that, according to new research out of the University of Texas San Antonio's Department of Physics and Astronomy, the lakes could have so-called “magic islands”: large groupings of porous, organic solids that float on the lakes’ surface, “presumably… [accumulating] after snowing from the sky of Titan.” From space.com:

If the snow clumps were large enough and porous like Swiss cheese, the hollow holes and tubes would allow them to float until methane or ethane seeps within, filling the voids and causing them to sink.

The model developed by [the researchers] suggested that individual snow clumps would be too small to let this happen, but if enough of this snow massed together on the lakeside shores of Titan, large pieces could break off and drop away and float on methane/ethene [sic] lakes.

This is similar to how sheets of ice break away from glaciers on Earth and float into seas, a process called “calving.”

The islands are temporary, eventually sinking, somewhat similar to how rafts of pumice can float around for a while after nearby volcanic eruptions. It’s another interesting example of how Earth and Titan have parallel environmental conditions in some cases. (ExploreCosmos_) (Space.com)

More:

• An innovative satellite duo will allow astronomers to study our Sun’s corona (its outer atmosphere) at will. Normally only visible during an eclipse, the two satellites will create artificial solar eclipses — with one very precisely blocking the Sun, and the other observing its atmosphere. 👍 (Interesting Engineering)

• SpaceX plans to launch 12 flights per month in 2024, or 144 flights total — a significant increase over the 96 they launched in 2023. That works out to a launch cadence of every 2.8 days, which was unimaginable not that long ago. About two-thirds of 2024 SpaceX launches will be to expand the Starlink satellite constellation, hopefully we see several Starship flights, five missions will carry humans, and the rest will be contracts for outside parties like NASA or private satellite companies. (Space.com)

Energy, Engineering, AI

Droid delivery. The company Zipline has been operating a drone delivery service pilot program in Pea Ridge, Arkansas that delivers stuff from Wal-Mart to customers in the area since 2021, and per the company, it seems to have been going pretty well: “We've been blown away by how quickly customers have taken a sci-fi technology and fully integrated it into their lives in ways that are both convenient and mundane. At this point, drone delivery is totally normal in Northwest Arkansas. Our average customer rating there is 9.2/10 and our average flight time is about 3 minutes per order.” Zipline’s drones in Pea Ridge simply drop packages, which are fitted with parachutes, onto customer doorsteps. Cool!

But this week, Wal-Mart annouced it would expand its partnership with Zipline to Dallas, where the company will use its next-gen fleet of drones that, instead of dropping packages, make use of a “droid” that allows delivery to be whisper quiet. The drone, hovering at an altitude that is quiet on the ground, lowers the “droid” which gently sets down the delivery on a customer’s patio or doorstep. “It will feel like teleportation,” says Zipline CEO Keller Rinaud Cliffton. Watch the video above. (@KellerRinaudo)

Big magma energy. An Icelandic company is planning to drill 2 km boreholes into a magma chamber beneath the Krapla volcano in northern Iceland, in “what you could call the ‘gateway’ to ‘magma energy’,” the director of the project Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson told the New Civil Engineer. “We are talking about 10 times more power from a magma well than a normal geothermal well.”

Drilling the first borehole will hopefully get underway in 2026 or 2027, and “will allow direct sampling of magma as well as measuring its pressure and temperature. This will be followed by a second borehole that will be used to investigate the potential of supercharging geothermal power to generate energy.” Based. (New Civil Engineer)

The first working graphene semiconductor is go. Long touted as a wonder material due to its “strong electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and flexibility,” graphene has been notoriously difficult to integrate into technologies. Now that barrier may be coming down with the first functional graphene semiconductor. This is important because semiconductors form part of the backbone for every electronic device on (and off) the planet. Graphene might be able to replace silicon, the most commonly used semiconductor, allowing for the creation of smaller, tougher, and faster electronics. (Interesting Engineering)

More:

• Materials scientists from Duke University have used a new computational method called DEED (Disordered Enthalpy-Entropy Descriptor) to discover hundreds of new high performance ceramics, some of which are so tough they could “enable devices to function at lava-like temperatures above several thousands of degrees Fahrenheit.” Maybe those guys in Iceland should give them a call. (Duke University)

• An AI lab assistant dubbed Coscientist was able to successfully learn about, design, and carry out a complex chemical reaction that won its discoverers the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Potential applications are numerous, including expanding the scientific workforce available in laboratories (often in short supply). While it hasn’t happened yet, the logical next step is that Coscientist or an AI like it start doing original science on their own, instead of just acting as support for human scientists. (Science Daily)

• NASA did a big reveal for their “quiet,” very pointy supersonic aircraft technology, the experimental X-59, yesterday. The aircraft could lead to the development of quieter passenger supersonic flights, and potentially reverse the ban of commercial supersonic flights over land, as the bans are due to noise concerns. Watch the reveal video here. (@NASA)

The White Pill Investment Index

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

• WiFi-connected smart toilet seat — Toi Labs, creator of the TrueLoo toilet seat that uses sensors to monitor the user’s digestive health, raises an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Portfolia

• Self-balancing 2-wheel wheelchair — Centaur Robotics, a company developing a Segway-like wheelchair that allows the user to navigate a home or workplace more naturally, raises £791,144 in equity crowdfunding via Seedrs

• Origami-inspired composites — Armory Technologies, a company building geometrically-complex composites for applications where weight and strength are critical factors, raises $2.05 million of seed funding from undisclosed investors

• Motion sensation tech for VR —Vmocion, a startup developing tech that uses “tiny impulses across the skin’s surface to the inner ear” to stimulate the inner ear and directly match the motion shown on the screen, raises an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Mayo Clinic Ventures

• Robotic burger chef — Aniai, maker of the Alpha Grill burger-maker (bonus: it grills the burger on both sides at the same time, reducing cook time by 4x), raises an $11.9 million seed from from Ignite, Capstone Partners Korea and SV Investment

Medicine

GPT EMT. According to a new study, AI can save lives in ambulances by helping quickly asses someone’s condition, allowing the right care to be given more rapidly, with severely injured patients being sent to centers better able to help them. (MedicalXpress)

The new study tracks with a broader trend we’ve been documenting on the White Pill: people with rare conditions treating GPT as an always-available member of their care team, albeit one that never gets tired of their questions and isn’t spread thin over a long line of patients, appointments, and procedures. Last September, for example, a mom at her wits end turned to GPT after practically giving up on her son Alex’s doctors and specialists, who could not figure out what was causing his pain and emerging growth defects. From our Twitter write-up:

GPT eventually suggested tethered cord syndrome, and Alex's mom joined a Facebook group for families of children with it. Their stories sounded like Alex's.

She scheduled an appointment with a new neurosurgeon and told her she suspected Alex had tethered cord syndrome. The doctor looked at his MRI images and immediately confirmed the diagnosis. Alex received corrective surgery, and is expected to make a full recovery.

And yesterday, in a post worth reading in full, Patrick Blumenthal detailed how he’s been using GPT to assist his care team in helping him manage two rare conditions he has. An excerpt:

GPT has made it a thousand times easier for me to advocate for myself and avoid the mistake of wasting away while I wait for answers from a healthcare system ill-equipped for treating complex, interdisciplinary health issues.

Anyone who has gone through the healthcare system with similar struggles will know that mistake viscerally well. You wait months to see a specialist who turns out to be too specialized to help you. Their time is spread too thin across their patients to thoughtfully answer all of your questions and consider every data point, and before you know it, you are rushed out, feeling ignored.

GPT on the other hand is infinitely patient. There is no time limit. It won’t dismiss your questions. GPT allows you to abandon any shame you have about wasting a doctor’s time, or appearing dumb or crazy.

Secondly, by virtue of knowing (almost) everything that there is to know about current medical knowledge, GPT is extraordinarily good at connecting the dots between disparate medical specialties. Because GPT has the patience to digest the full context of your health data, and the knowledge to interpret that data, it can provide actionable insights that many specialists would miss, and educate patients about their ailments with a level of granularity that specialists don’t have time or breadth for.

After using GPT for the past year, I better understand my ailments, I ask my doctors better questions, and I proactively direct my care. GPT continues to suggest experiments and additional treatments to fill in gaps, helps me understand the latest research, and interprets new test results and symptoms. AI, both GPT and the tools I developed for myself, have become a critical member of my care team.

Knowing all this, why would you not teach kids GPT?

Tumor therapy breakthrough in view. CAR-T cell therapy, short for Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy, has been in development for several decades, but it's only in recent years that it’s become a clinically approved treatment for certain blood cancers and leukemia. The basic process by which CAR-T does its job is as follows: immune cells called T-cells are taken from the patient’s blood, then genetically engineered to produce structures on their surface called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), which are designed to identify and attach to a specific protein on the patient’s cancer cells. These modified T-cells are multiplied in the lab and infused back into the patient, where they latch onto the patient’s cancer cells and destroy them.

Contrast CAR-T with traditional approaches to cancer like chemotherapy, which is far less specific as it targets rapidly dividing cells (a hallmark of cancer), but can also affect healthy cells. That’s bad, but chemo is still far cheaper and more widely available than CAR-T, which is obviously an advantage.

Recently, a new and more robust version of CAR-T cell therapy is showing remarkable results, with all human patients hitting complete remission (100% success rate) of tumors (as opposed to liquid cancers), and consistent tumor elimination in mice. As an added bonus, the treatment is both cheaper and faster than traditional CAR-T cell therapy, hopefully expanding its use to more patients. To be clear, this new approach is successfully targeting solid tumors, previously considered beyond the reach of CAR-T cell therapy, which has shown good success with blood cancers. (MedicalXpress) (Nature)

More:

• Sometimes greater understanding is the way forward for particularly stubborn diseases. A team out of Amsterdam may have identified five separate subtypes of Alzheimer’s, possibly explaining the difficulty of designing treatments which may help for one subtype, but be ineffective for others. With this new information, there’s a clearer path forward to more targeted treatments. (IFL Science)

Finally, the fun stuff

• Someone combined a laser engraver with Midjourney, allowing AI generated art to assume a permanence it’s mostly lacked until now. Their Kickstarter, which has completely blown its donation goal out of the water (holy shit), shows what the laser is capable of. (Kickstarter)

• Read the story of how science found the grave of famous astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, previously lost for centuries.

• The Civil Rights Lawyer’s thread on his thrift store find of a chair that sat the likes of Mark Twain, Ulysses Grant, Jefferson Davis, even Abraham Lincoln — and how he figured out this was the chair — is just awesome. Note that it’s not the specific chair, but is the model of chair, of which only two or three survive today. Hard to explain, just read the thread, you wont regret it.

Touch grass this weekend.

-Brandon Gorrell