DTN 002: Space is Hard

Plus: Microsoft's voice deepfakes, GPT fools scientists, crypto on the space station, the end of animal testing for drug trials, and more.

Jan 13, 2023

Welcome to The Deep Tech Newsletter, a weekly exploration of the business, science, and engineering behind the world’s most important frontier technologies.

The Big Picture

Issue with Virgin Orbit’s second stage led to launch failure

“Virgin Orbit, which tried to launch satellites into space from Britain for the first time earlier this week, said that a problem with the rocket’s second-stage engine about 110 miles above the earth caused the failure of the mission. Some of the satellites on board belonged to Britain, the United States and other governments, which are unlikely to feel much financial pain from the loss. But for one of the satellite makers, Horizon Technologies, a start-up based in Reading, England, the loss of its device could threaten the company’s existence.” (New York Times)

First ABL Space Systems launch fails

The first flight of ABL Space Systems’ RS1 rocket failed to reach orbit on Jan. 10 after launching from the Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island. The company said that the nine engines in its first stage shut down simultaneously after liftoff, causing the vehicle to fall back to the pad and explode. The explosion damaged the launch facility but no personnel were injured. (SpaceNews)

VALL-E’s quickie voice deepfakes should worry you, if you weren’t worried already

“VALL-E, posted on GitHub by its creators at Microsoft last week, is a “neural codec language model” that uses a different approach to rendering voices than many before it. Its larger training corpus and some new methods allow it to create “high-quality personalized speech” using just three seconds of audio from a target speaker. But VALL-E is more iterative than breakthrough, and the capabilities aren’t so new as you might think.” (TechCrunch)

FDA no longer needs to require animal tests before human drug trials

“New medicines need not be tested in animals to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, according to legislation signed by President Joe Biden in late December 2022. In place of the 1938 stipulation that potential drugs be tested for safety and efficacy in animals, the law allows FDA to promote a drug or biologic—a larger molecule such as an antibody—to human trials after either animal or nonanimal tests.” (Science)

Scientists See Quantum Interference between Different Kinds of Particles for First Time

“For the first time, scientists have observed quantum interference—a wavelike interaction between particles related to the weird quantum phenomenon of entanglement—occurring between two different kinds of particles. Dissimilar particles can sometimes become entangled, but until now, these mismatched entangled particles weren’t known to interfere with one another. The discovery could help physicists understand what goes on inside an atomic nucleus.” (Scientific American)

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Deep Tech News

Crypto News

Is crypto just a ‘hot ball’ of momentum-chasing money? (Starkiller Capital)
Chainalysis finds $20B in 2022 crypto transactions linked to stolen funds, terrorism financing, darknet markets, and digital ransoms (Bloomberg)
Cryptosat and DoraHacks complete ZK proof experiment on space station (The Block)
One of America’s largest hemp processors makes entry into sustainable bitcoin mining (Bitcoin Magazine)
Ethereum developers eye February public testnet for Shanghai upgrade (The Block)
ConsenSys launches private beta testnet for zkEVM scaling technology (The Block)

Peer Review

Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists (Nature)
Argonne National Laboratory finds a way to make stable lithium-sulfur batteries that last 700 cycles (Nature Communications)
A solar-powered artificial leaf that produces hydrogen from air (Advanced Materials)
Perovskite-silicon tandem PV cell hits 28.1% efficiency (Advanced Energy Materials)
A gravity energy storage system based on linear electric machines (Journal of Energy Storage)
Human consumption of insects (Science)
Laser cooling of solids: Towards absolutely cold quantum nano object (Journal of Lasers, Optics & Photonics)
Smart Material Systems: Future Trends and Applications (Nano Research & Applications)
A Comprehensive Survey on Cooperative Intersection Management for Heterogeneous Connected Vehicles (IEEE Access)

Funding x M&A

Not Boring Capital raises $30M third fund to focus on hard startups (Not Boring)
No Meat Factory raises $42M Series B to build an alternative protein production plant in the US (TechCrunch)
Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquires Pachyderm for undisclosed sum to boost AI dev (Venturebeat)
Oxbotica raises $140M more for its B2B autonomous vehicle platform (TechCrunch)
Seek lands $7.5M investment for AI that answers domain-specific questions (TechCrunch)
UAE investor groups launch billion-dollar web3 fund (The Block)
DeepL targets AI translation for enterprises with $100M Raise (VentureBeat)

Miscellanea.

Teaching ChatGPT a language / The ‘recalibration phase’ of AI in drug discovery / Is the business of AI more like Steel or VBA?/ Liu Cixin's technologies of the future / How airports catch illicit radioactive cargo / The Factobattery / How we turned our deep tech company into a SaaS company / Thousands of scientists publish a paper every 5 days / Fiber optics take the pulse of the planet / The Army Corps of Engineers made a cat calendar

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