Month: October 2019

Seeing The End Of Oil

The end of petroleum is in sight. The reason is simple: the black goo that powered and built the 20th century is now losing economically to other technologies. Petroleum is facing competition at both ends of the barrel, from low value, high volume commodities such as fuel, up through high value, low volume chemicals. Electric vehicles and renewable energy will be the most visible threats to commodity transportation fuel demand in the short term, gradually outcompeting petroleum via both energy efficiency and capital efficiency. Biotechnology will then deliver the coup de grace, first by displacing high value petrochemicals with products that have lower energy and CO2 costs, and then by delivering new CO2 negative biochemicals and biomaterials that cannot be manufactured easily or economically, if at all, from petrochemical feedstocks.

2021-11-22: Here’s one approach:

Biologists have devised a way to engineer yeast to produce itaconic acid—a valuable commodity chemical—using data integration and supercomputing power as a guide. Yeasts and other microbes are commonly used to produce useful chemicals. While it is easy to get them to produce some chemicals in high yields, like ethanol, other chemicals may provide more of a challenge. Kumar hopes that this system of combining machine learning with metabolic modeling and multiomics datasets will help overcome these production challenges. “Though we still need more testing on this model, there is an amazing potential to expand this computationally guided bioengineering to other systems. This strategy could open up a new era in biosystem design for the production of eco-friendly chemicals.”

Future Of Work stories

The future of work is likely to be complicated

The Nole Edge Economy: I’ve been talking a lot about protocols over platforms lately, and wanted to explore such a world in a fictional context — and combined 2 other elements: the incredible wealth of DIY info found totally free online such as on YouTube (I was inspired to write this after learning how to rebuild a carburetor via YouTube videos) and also the odd dependencies created by shareable, reusable code. Also, there’s a little nod towards SLAPP suits as well. In short, this is a story that hits on a lot of regular Techdirt points.

eMotion: by our very own Timothy Geigner. He kept telling me he was too busy to write something, and then at the last minute delivered this wonderful story exploring what the world might look like when artificial intelligence is granted its own rights — and starts to require what probably can’t be called “human” resources any more when dealing with job changes and transitions. But, in such a world, certainly the line begins to blur between who gets to make decisions for whom. And, I mean, how do you let a military artificial intelligence know that its services are no longer needed.

Genetic Changelings: by Keyan Bowes was one of the few stories we received that didn’t focus on artificial intelligence, but rather started exploring a world where genetic engineering has taken off to fairly spectacular levels. It’s a world that will seem quite familiar to today’s… but with a few potentially startling differences. I mean, when a story starts out in its first line discussing a child’s tail, you know it’s going to be a bit different.

Kitty Hawk Plane

Kitty Hawk showed off its latest concept—an 8-motor prototype that uses an unconventional forward-swept wing, and is purportedly 100x quieter than a conventional helicopter. The company calls it Heaviside, after noted physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, who advanced a variety of theories and innovations in mathematics, electronics, and communications in the early 20th century.

Automated Discovery

To what extent can scientific discovery be automated? Where are the areas where automation can make the biggest contribution to human efforts? These questions and a number of others are addressed in a very interesting 2-part review article on “Automated Discovery in the Chemical Sciences”. As the authors say, “The prospect of a robotic scientist has long been an object of curiosity, optimism, skepticism, and job-loss fear, depending on who is asked” I know that when I’ve written about such topics here, the comments and emails I receive cover all those viewpoints and more. Most of us are fine with having automated help for the “grunt work” of research – the autosamplers, image-processing and data-analysis software, the plate handlers and assay readers, etc. But the 2 things that really seem to set off uneasiness are (1) the idea that the output such machinery might be usefully fed into software that can then reach its own conclusions about the experimental outcomes, and (2) the enablement of discovery through “rapid random” mechanized experimental setups, which (to judge from the comments I’ve gotten) is regarded by a number of people as a lazy or even dishonorable way to do science.

Harbinger customers

there exist “harbinger customers” who systematically purchase new products that fail (and are discontinued by retailers). This article extends this result in 2 ways. First, the findings document the existence of “harbinger zip codes.” If households in these zip codes adopt a new product, this is a signal that the new product will fail. Second, a series of comparisons reveal that households in harbinger zip codes make other decisions that differ from other households. The first comparison identifies harbinger zip codes using purchases from one retailer and then evaluates purchases at a different retailer. Households in harbinger zip codes purchase products from the second retailer that other households are less likely to purchase. The analysis next compares donations to congressional election candidates; households in harbinger zip codes donate to different candidates than households in neighboring zip codes, and they donate to candidates who are less likely to win. House prices in harbinger zip codes also increase at slower rates than in neighboring zip codes. Investigation of households that change zip codes indicates that the harbinger zip code effect is more due to where customers choose to live, rather than households influencing their neighbors’ tendencies.

Mesh networks

Over the last 10 years, communities seeking more resilient and responsive infrastructures that are more closely aligned with their commitment to common resources and mutual aid have chosen to build their own networks. Greta Byrum tells the story of their efforts — from Brooklyn to Detroit, Tennessee, and the Hudson Valley — and the lessons learned on the way to a People’s Internet. The process has not been seamless: Their builders must navigate bureaucracy and neighborly tensions, and the connectivity these networks ultimately provide isn’t of the lightning-speed frictionless sort promised by the major commercial providers. Yet local networks — owned, operated, and governed by those who use them — don’t simply link devices together into a mesh; they also link people together into a community of stewardship and self-governance.

Evil Twin taproom

“The taproom experience is getting more and more important in this competitive market. While you could 5 years ago open whatever taproom and people would show up just because it was a brewery, it’s not the case anymore. You have to make it attractive for people to come out not just for the beer, but something else also.” Thus, the taproom is housed in a glass-enclosed greenhouse designed by architecture firm Kushner Studios, filled with wooden picnic tables and stools around the bar that seat 76. There will be programming like live music, and a basement room will be used for film screenings and other events. A coffee shop with Sey Coffee will soon open at 7:00 so people can make use of the space all day, and a speakeasy-like cocktail bar is also on the horizon. More picnic tables sit outside for 185 people, as will rotating food trucks.

Calcifying Plankton

Then the calcifying plankton took over. Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find ocean waters less than 100 meters deep that don’t contain calcifying plankton. Despite their teeny size, they may account for 12% of the total biomass in the oceans. And they’ve completely altered the way carbon moves around the planet. 80% of the carbon-containing rocks on Earth are derived from the remains of these plankton and other marine calcifiers — even though by mass, these plankton may account for less than 0.2% of Earth’s carbon-containing life. Making the oceans more stable didn’t just benefit the calcifying critters. With so many species less likely to become extinct at the planet’s whim, all marine species were able to relax and take the time to evolve complex relationships with others. That’s why life became bigger, faster and more aggressive: What had been a struggle against the planet became a struggle between organisms.

Beachheads and Obstacles

Amazon, on the other hand, seems to have learned the right lessons from its mobile failures; what is notable about the company’s approach to Alexa is that it leverages and learns from the mobile era. Alexa benefits from Amazon’s investments in data centers and networking, interacts with both iOS and Android to the greatest extent possible, and is in line with Amazon’s overall business — making buying things that much more convenient. Alexa is an operating system for the home, and perhaps beyond.