Readers, Solana is here again to kick this 33rd issue of the White Pill off with an IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:

As free subscribers may have noticed, 100% of content over at Pirate Wires is now paywalled, which we’ve done in advance of next week’s site launch. In just a handful of days, we’re adjusting paid subscription pricing to $12/month for total access to every Pirate Wires vertical (PW main, the White Pill, the Industry, Dolores Park, and a few more coming). Which means this week is your last chance to grandfather yourself into a year-long subscription for $8/month. Subscribe now, for you or ten of your closest friends, and join the revolution. It’s stocking stuffer season, baby. Subscribe, or die.

Now, onto the Pill.

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

Space

• The sublime Korolev Crater on Mars (images above), near its north pole, is about 50 miles (81 km) in diameter and is filled with water ice that’s over a mile deep​. The ice is permanently stable in the crater due to a natural cold trap effect, where the cooler, heavier air above the ice forms a protective layer, preventing melting and evaporation. (@BrianRommele)

• SpaceX commemorated Starship’s second launch with a video that I’m pretty sure has never-before-seen footage of the launch, from various interesting perspectives. Beautiful.

• In last week’s White Pill, we briefly covered the solar storm that scored a direct hit on our planet two Fridays ago, “with the NOAA observing strong (but not dangerous to people or infrastructure) geomagnetic storm conditions, and very high probability of aurora over places like Alaska.” @ExploreCosmos_ rounded up some of the amazing auroras people across the planet captured during the event, including Mongolia’s “blood red” aurora (above).

Computing, Engineering, Energy, AI

Our knowledge of new materials just expanded in a big way. The future just got more interesting, with the recent publication of two new studies. One is on using the Google’s AI Deep Mind to simulate millions of theoretically possible new materials. The other is about an autonomous laboratory that will be able to make these materials in the real world and work to understand their properties. As Andrew Côté correctly noted, this is “just the beginning.” Of the millions of possibilities, around 400,000 were predicted to be stable, which the autonomous lab will then set about creating. As humans have currently developed only about 20,000 new materials, this bonanza expands our materials menu by more than an order of magnitude. (Twitter/X) (Interesting Engineering) (Singularity Hub)

Advance in quantum computing. A DARPA-funded team at Harvard developed a new type of qubit, the basic unit of quantum computers, that’s being referred as a breakthrough for its potential to unlock much more practical and powerful quantum computing. These new qubits are better because they make fewer mistakes, which is a big problem with current quantum computers. This breakthrough could lead to building larger and more reliable quantum computers that can handle much more complex tasks than what has been the quantum computing state-of-the-art up to now.

Gene editing and agriculture. All-In podcast co-host David Friedberg, aka the Sultan of Science, announced that he’ll be joining agriculture gene editing company Ohalo as CEO. The company “uses gene editing to completely reimagine agriculture, creating new plant varieties in major crops that were not previously feasible, significantly increasing yields and productivity, ultimately helping farmers make more food using far less land, resources, and capital,” Friedberg said on X. Gene editing in agriculture not only has the potential to solve food scarcity on earth, but could potentially solve the problem of agriculture on Mars, as Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin and I went in-depth on in a previous issue of the White Pill (read it!)

More:

• Good news for the future commercialization of fusion energy: the United States now has a set of rules determining fusion will “be regulated separately from nuclear fission.” Fusion will be regulated similarly to particle accelerators, which also produce low-level radioactive waste. Hopefully fusion can avoid the regulatory problems that have stymied fission for decades. (Fusion Industry Association)

• There’s a lot of AI doomerism out there, especially the idea that a superintelligent AI, or even an AGI might escape our control. AI Optimism suggests a simple solution to this problem: get each current generation of controllable AI to help control the next. “it looks like this process can continue indefinitely, even to very high levels of capability.” Worth a read. (AI Optimism)

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.

• AI patent writer copilot — Solve Intelligence, a startup builing an AI-powered patent document editor (they claim they can make the process 60-90% more efficient), raises $3 million of venture funding from SAV, TransLink Capital and NVO Capital and other investors

• Autonomous drones for defense — Darkhive, a company developing a palm-sized drone to be used in public safety and military reconnaissance, raises a $4 million seed led by Crosslink Capital

• Autonomous cleaning for high rises — Verobotics, a Tel Aviv company developing a robot that continuously cleans and scans building exteriors, raises $5 million of venture funding from Tidhar Group and other undisclosed investors

• Contraceptive bait for rats — Senestech, a company developing pest bait that sterilizes any pest that eats it, raises $5 million of development capital from undisclosed investors

• Assembly line Q&A robot — Retrocausal, a startup developing a platform for factories that uses a “camera that watches assembly line operators perform routine tasks, and offers audible and visual alerts when it notices a mistake,” raises $5.3 million of venture funding in a deal led by Glasswing Ventures, One Way Ventures, and Indicator Ventures

• VR for pilot training — VRgineers, a company developing enterprise-grade VR headsets that can be used to train pilots and astronauts (NASA is a client), raises a $6 million Series A led by Taiwania Capital

• Real-time space-based railway monitoring — LiveEO, a company that uses satellite imagery to alert railway and pipeline operators of changes in vegetation, land deformation, or encroachments, raises $10 million of venture funding from GreenCode Ventures

• Lithium extraction from saltwater — Adionics, a company that uses a patented process called “liquid-liquid extraction technologies” to extract lithium from naturally occurring brine, raises a $27 million Series B from Ovive, Sociedad Quimica y Minera and Supernova Invest

• AI text-to-video — Pika Labs, a company developing an AI product that can create stunning videos from a single text prompt, raises a $35 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partner

• Next-gen rocket engines — Ursa Major, a company developing rocket engines with the goal to double launch capacity and save engine customers 5 years vs. developing their propulsion in-house, raises a $138 million of Series D led by RTX Ventures, Explorer 1 Fund and Eclipse Venture

Medicine

Embryo screening breakthrough. In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is a fertility technique where mature eggs are collected from the ovaries and fertilized with sperm in a lab. The fertilized eggs, called embryos, are monitored by embryologists for a few days after the procedure to assess their health and viability; this is based on growth rate, appearance, and genetic makeup when genetic testing is used. The most promising embryo is chosen for transfer to mom (sometimes multiple embryos are transferred, depending on circumstances), with the aim of increasing the likelihood of a successful pregnancy.

Briefly, genetic testing involves performing a biopsy on the embryo and removing five to seven individual cells from what will form into the embryo’s placenta layer. Couples who opt for embryonic genetic testing have the advantage of seeing which embryos, if carried to term, are unlikely to experience conditions such as Patau Syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra 13th chromosome that results in heart defects, brain or spinal cord abnormalities, very small or poorly developed eyes, extra fingers or toes, cleft lip or cleft palate, and weak muscle tone, and which causes the majority of babies who have it to die within days or weeks of being born. If the parents have a family history of certain genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease, characterized by physical symptoms like involuntary jerking or writhing movements, difficulties in thinking and psychiatric issues, and which can affect you as early as 30, they can order a test that will determine if their embryo has the specific genetic mutation that causes it.

The fact that we can do any of this is awesome. But probing for specific diseases is categorically limited. If you don’t know about a disease in your family history, how can you test for it? Furthermore, you cannot design a genetic probe for de novo mutations — ‘new’ genetic mutations that occur randomly during the formation of egg and sperm cells and early stages of embryonic development, which can manifest as genetic disorders — because again, you don’t know what you’re looking for. All this adds up to an embryonic screening state-of-the-art that can prevent a pretty narrow range of terrible conditions, many of which are only preventable if you know to look for them.

But this week, Noor Siddiqui and Orchid Health appear to have radically improved the state of the art with “whole genome reports [that] sequence over 99% of an embryo’s genome, compared to existing options that sequence less than 1%.” Orchid screens for 1200+ monogenic (caused by a single gene) conditions, and “because Orchid screens embryos directly, it is able to detect randomly occurring mutations (de novo variants) within an embryo. Because these are randomly occurring, parents would not have a family history of the condition and would not know to screen for it.”

“These papers showing an ability to read over 99% of an embryo’s DNA is groundbreaking,” said George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. “For the first time, comprehensive screening is made possible for genetic forms of neurodevelopmental disorders, congenital anomalies, and cancers prior to pregnancy. Helping empower families with this critical health information is a game-changer. This is the future of preventive medicine and family planning.”

Orchid’s whole embryo screens are now currently available at fertility clinics across the country (sign up here if you’re thinking about it). Below, a sample report Siddiqui shared with us on Thursday. Huge.

Curing paralysis. Five years ago, a team of researchers made quite a bit of progress in paralysis treatment when it was able to regenerate nerve fibers across total (catastrophic) spinal cord injuries in mice. But this wasn’t enough to restore function, because the regenerated nerves didn’t connect to the correct “targets” on the other side of the spinal cord lesion. But in late November, the team announced progress on this new front after they developed a multipronged gene therapy that “activated growth programs in the identified neurons in mice to regenerate their nerve fibers, upregulated specific proteins to support the neurons’ growth through the lesion core, and administered guidance molecules to attract the regenerating nerve fibers to their natural targets below the injury.” Mice with total spinal cord injuries who received this therapy “regained the ability to walk, exhibiting gait patterns that resembled those… in mice that resumed walking naturally after partial injuries.” The fixed the targeting problem! There’s still a way to go before we can get this therapy to humans, but it’s certainly progress. (EPFL)

Lasers could replace bone saws. Lasers are used in medicine, most prominently in eye surgery, but they have yet to expand into their full potential. That could be changing, with a new technique being developed to replace bone saws with lasers. It uses three separate lasers all focused on the same location. The first acts as a tissue scanner around the site where the bone will be cut, vaporizing tiny patches of tissue at regular intervals and using a spectrometer to identify tissue type — each has its own signal. This creates a map showing exactly where the bone meets soft tissue. Once this precision map is generated, the bone cutting laser turns on, while a third laser measures the cut depths ensuring the cutting laser isn’t going deeper than it should. Not until all of this has been completed does the second laser, which cuts bone, activate, and then only in places where bones rather than soft tissue are shown on the map that has just been generated. At the same time, the third laser—an optical system—measures the depth of the cut and checks that the cutting laser is not penetrating more deeply than planned. During the cutting phase, the tissue sensor also constantly monitors whether the correct tissue is being cut.

Work is continuing to make the system more compact, the ideal goal being small enough to fit “into the tip of an endoscope to carry out minimally invasive operations.” Using lasers more in the medical field is a worthwhile goal as they can reduce the risk of infection, and allow “smaller and more precise incisions,” allowing the body to heal faster and reducing scaring. (Phys.org)

More:

• Bryan Longevity released a sci-novel called We The People. Check it out on Amazon.

• A treatment for stroke that actually restores brain function, instead of just limiting damage, could be on the horizon. Mice and rats that suffered strokes were given a class of molecules that inhibit a receptor regulating communication in the brain. Inhibiting it actually restores activity, and therefore helps restore brain function. Sensory and motor functions improved, even though damage was not reduced. It improved even further when combined with somatosensory training, i.e., rehab. (Science Daily)

• A new enzyme lets CRISPR “accurately target almost all human genes,” greatly expanding what we can edit and the range of treatable diseases. This is huge considering the original CRISPR system only allowed about 12.5% of our genome to be targeted. (Phys.org)

Finally, the fun stuff

• Presumably this is a video of a cow in a wind tunnel (pic above).

• Here’s someone making incredible pillow sculptures (just click it trust me).

• Also, the exoskeletons of insects become stronger when raised under higher gravity conditions. It’s known that when put under greater mechanical load, tree bark grows thicker and stronger, as do vertebrate bones. Looks promising if we ever decide to colonize a planet with a bit higher gravity. (Phys.org)

Touch grass this weekend.

-Brandon Gorrell