The risk of a bird flu pandemic is rising

How worried should we be about bird flu? The past few months have seen some potentially worrisome developments in the US, including the continued spread of the virus among dairy cattle, the detection of the virus in a pig as well as cow’s milk, and—most concerning of all—the growing number of human infections.

We don’t yet have any evidence that the virus is spreading between people, but the risk of a potential pandemic has increased since MIT Technology Review last covered this topic a couple of months ago.

The good news is we are in a much better position to tackle any potential future flu outbreaks than we were to face covid-19 back in 2020, given that we already have vaccines. But, on the whole, it’s not looking great. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things health and biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The moon is just the beginning for this waterless concrete

If NASA establishes a permanent presence on the moon, its astronauts’ homes could be made of a new 3D-printable, waterless concrete. Someday, so might yours. By accelerating the curing process for more rapid construction, this sulfur-based compound could become just as applicable on our home terrain as it is on lunar soil.

Traditional concrete requires large amounts of water, a commodity that will be in short supply on the moon, and sending just 1 kilogram of it to the moon costs roughly $1.2 million.

Instead, NASA hopes to create new materials from lunar soil and eventually adapt the same techniques for building on Mars. But creating the perfect waterless “lunarcrete” is easier said than done. Read the full story.

—Jenna Ahart

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Australia has banned under-16s from using social media
But the law is easily circumvented, and could create more problems than it solves. (WP $)
+ Unsurprisingly, the tech giants aren’t fans of the ruling. (Fortune)
+ Australians’ reactions to the news appear to be fairly mixed. (BBC)

2 US retailers are urging shoppers to buy before new tariffs kick in
It’s yet another marketing tactic to drive sales during the busiest time for shopping. (WSJ $)
+ Are you among the horde of this year’s Black Friday refuseniks? (FT $)
+ How Trump’s tariffs could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Canada is suing Google for ‘creating a monopoly’
The suit is following in the footsteps of the US government. (NYT $)
+ It’s joining calls for the colossal company to sell two pieces of marketing software. (WSJ $)
+ Google’s antitrust gut punch and the Trump wild card. (MIT Technology Review)

4 How China came to dominate the car export market
And spook the EU and US in the process. (NYT $)
+ Generous government subsidies also played a not insignificant part. (MIT Technology Review)

5 A UK politician says businesses should use robots over migrants
Automating tasks like fruit picking would reduce the UK’s net migration figures, he claims. (The Guardian)
+ Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating elder care. (MIT Technology Review)

6 North Korean hackers have stolen billions in crypto
The illicit currency is funneled into funding its nuclear weapons program. (TechCrunch)

7 America refuses to give up its dream of soldiers in exoskeletons
It’s been testing the suits for decades. Why haven’t they caught on? (Wired $)
+ This robotic exoskeleton can help runners sprint faster. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Is it really possible to get paid to do virtually nothing?
This Stanford thinks one in 10 engineers is doing exactly that. (404 Media)
+ Big Tech has become preoccupied with identifying and firing freeloaders. (Insider $)

9 GitHub can teach you to bake bread
Featuring flowcharts, tables, and timelines galore. (Ars Technica)

10 Here’s how a diamond is grown in a lab
Can you tell the difference between them and the real deal? (WP $)

Quote of the day

“It is impossible to be a teen in most parts of the world without social media.”

—Stephen Scheeler, the former head of Facebook in Australia and New Zealand, tells Bloomberg about his doubts whether Australia’s new ban on social media for teenagers can truly be enforced.

The big story

Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation

August 2023

PowerPoint is everywhere. It’s used in religious sermons; by schoolchildren preparing book reports; at funerals and weddings. In 2010, Microsoft announced that PowerPoint was installed on more than a billion computers worldwide.

But before PowerPoint, 35-millimeter film slides were king. They were the only medium for the kinds of high-impact presentations given by CEOs and top brass at annual meetings for stockholders, employees, and salespeople.

Known in the business as “multi-image” shows, these presentations required a small army of producers, photographers, and live production staff to pull off. Read this story to delve into the fascinating, flashy history of corporate presentations. 

—Claire L. Evans

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ We’re witnessing a sandwich boom in the UK, and fillings are getting increasingly outlandish.
+ Now Thanksgiving is behind us, it’s time to look forward to Christmas: specifically Mariah Carey’s smash hit All I Want for Christmas is You
+ The world’s oldest lizard has been recently uncovered in an unassuming quarry.
+ Is it really 25 years since Slipknot first freaked out the world with their masked antics?

Artemis III—set to launch no earlier than September 2026—will not only mark humanity’s return to the moon after more than 50 years, but also be the first mission to explore the lunar South Pole, the proposed site of NASA’s base camp. 

Building a home base on the moon will demand a steep supply of moon-based infrastructure: launch pads, shelter, and radiation blockers. But shipping Earth-based concrete to the lunar surface bears a hefty price tag. Sending just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of material to the moon costs roughly $1.2 million, says Ali Kazemian, a robotic construction researcher at Louisiana State University (LSU). Instead, NASA hopes to create new materials from lunar soil and eventually adapt the same techniques for building on Mars. 

Traditional concrete requires large amounts of water, a commodity that will be in short supply on the moon and critically important for life support or scientific research, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. While prior NASA projects have tested compounds that could be used to make “lunarcrete,” they’re still working to craft the right waterless material.

So LSU researchers are refining the formula, developing a new cement based on sulfur, which they heat until it’s molten to bind material without the need for water. In recent work, the team mixed their waterless cement with simulated lunar and Martian soil to create a 3D-printable concrete, which they used to assemble walls and beams. “We need automated construction, and NASA thinks 3D printing is one of the few viable technologies for building lunar infrastructure,” says Kazemian. 

COURTESY OF ALI KAZEMIAN

Beyond circumventing the need for water, the cement can handle wider temperature extremes and cures faster than traditional methods. The group used a pre-made powder for their experiments, but on the moon and Mars, astronauts might extract sulfur from surface soil. 

To test whether the concrete can stand up to the moon’s harsh environment, the team placed its structures in a vacuum chamber for weeks, analyzing the material’s stability at different temperatures. Originally, researchers worried that cold conditions on the dark side of the moon might cause the compound to turn into a gas through a process called sublimation, like when dry ice skips its liquid phase and evaporates directly. Ultimately, they found that the concrete can handle the lunar South Pole’s frigid forecast without losing its form. 

Some conditions, like reduced gravity, could even work toward the concrete’s advantage. The experiment tested structures like walls and small circular towers, each made by stacking many layers of concrete. “One of the main challenges in larger-scale 3D printing is a distortion of these thick, heavy layers,” says Kazemian “But when you have lower gravity, that can actually help keep the layers from deforming.” 

Kazemian and his colleagues recently transferred the technology to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to implement their design on a larger-scale robotic system and test construction in larger vacuum chambers. If adopted, the concrete will most likely be used for taller lunar structures like habitats and radiation shields. Flatter designs, like a landing pad, will probably use laser-based technologies to melt down lunar soil into a ceramic structure. 

There may only be so much testing we can do on Earth, however. According to Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist at University of Central Florida who recently retired from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the concrete’s efficacy may falter with the shift from simulant to real soil. “There’s chemistry in the samples of these planets that the simulants cannot perfectly replicate,” he says. “When we send missions to these planetary bodies to test the technology using the real soil, we may find that we need to further improve the technology to get it to work in that environment.”

But Metzger still sees the sulfur-based concrete as a vital foundation for the tall orders of upcoming planetary projects. Future missions to Mars could demand roads to drive back and forth from ice-mining sites and pavement around habitats to create dust-free work zones. This new concrete brings these distant goals a touch closer to reality. 

It could benefit construction on Earth, too. Kazemian sees the new material as a potential alternative for traditional concrete, especially in areas with water scarcity or a surplus of sulfur. Parts of the Middle East, for example, have abundant sulfur as a result of oil and gas production. 

The technology could become especially useful in disaster areas with broken supply chains, according to Metzger. It could also have military applications for rapid construction of structures like storage buildings. “This is great for people out there working on another planet who don’t have a lot of support,” Metzger says. “But there are already plenty of analogs to that here on Earth.”

How worried should we be about bird flu? It’s a question that I’ve been asked by friends and colleagues several times over the last couple of weeks. Their concerns have been spurred by some potentially worrisome developments in the US, including the continued spread of the virus among dairy cattle, the detection of the virus in a pig as well as cow’s milk, and—most concerning of all—the growing number of human infections.

I’ll admit that I’m worried. We don’t yet have any evidence that the virus is spreading between people, but the risk of a potential pandemic has increased since I last covered this topic a couple of months ago.

And once you combine that increased risk with an upcoming change in presidential administration that might leave US health agencies in the hands of a vaccine denier who promotes the consumption of raw milk, well … it’s not exactly a comforting thought.

The good news is we are in a much better position to tackle any potential future flu outbreaks than we were to face covid-19 back in 2020, given that we already have vaccines. But, on the whole, it’s not looking great.

The bird flu that is currently spreading in US dairy cattle is caused by the H5N1 virus. The virus is especially lethal to some bird populations and has been wiping out poultry and seabirds for the last couple of years. It has also caused fatal infections in many mammals who came into contact with those birds.

H5N1 was first detected in a dairy cow in Texas in March of this year. As of this week, the virus has been reported in 675 herds across 15 states, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (also known as APHIS).

Those are just the cases we know about. There may be more. The USDA requires testing of cattle before they are moved between states. And it offers a voluntary testing program for farmers who want to know if the virus is present in their bulk milk tanks. But participation in that program is optional.

States have their own rules. Colorado has required testing of bulk milk tanks in licensed dairy farms since July. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture announced plans for a program just last week. But some states have no such requirements.

At the end of October, the USDA reported that the virus had been detected in a pig for the first time. The pig was one of five in a farm in Oregon that had “a mix of poultry and livestock.” All the pigs were slaughtered.

Virologists have been especially worried about the virus making its way into pigs, because these animals are notorious viral incubators. “They can become infected with swine strains, bird strains and human strains,” says Brinkley Bellotti, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. These strains can swap genes and give rise to new, potentially more infectious or harmful strains.

Thankfully, we haven’t seen any other cases in pig farms, and there’s no evidence that the virus can spread between pigs. And while it has been spreading pretty rapidly between cattle, the virus doesn’t seem to have evolved much, says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. That suggests that the virus made the leap into cattle, probably from birds, only once. And it has been spreading through herds since.

Unfortunately, we still don’t really know how it is spreading. There is some evidence to suggest the virus can be spread from cow to cow through shared milking equipment. But it is unclear how the virus is spreading between farms. “It’s hard to form an effective control strategy when you don’t know exactly how it’s spreading,” says Bellotti.

But it is in cows. And it’s in their milk. When scientists analyzed 297 samples of Grade A pasteurized retail milk products, including milk, cream and cheese, they found viral RNA from H5N1 in 20% of them. Those samples were collected from 17 states across the US. And the study was conducted in April, just weeks after the virus was first detected in cattle. “It’s surprising to me that we are totally fine with … our pasteurized milk products containing viral DNA,” says Lakdawala.

Research suggests that, as long as the milk is pasteurized, the virus is not infectious. But Lakdawala is concerned that pasteurization may not inactivate all of the virus, all the time. “We don’t know how much virus we need to ingest [to become infected], and whether any is going to slip through pasteurization,” she says.

And no reassurances can be made for unpasteurized raw milk. When cows are infected with H5N1, their milk can turn thick, yellow and “chunky.” But research has shown that, even when the milk starts to look normal again, it can still contain potentially infectious virus.

The most concerning development, though, is the rise in human cases. So far, 55 such cases of H5N1 bird flu have been reported in the US, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Twenty-nine of those cases have been detected in California. In almost all those cases, the infected person is thought to have caught the virus from cattle or poultry on farms. But in two of those cases, the source of the infection is unknown.

Health professionals don’t know how a teenager in British Columbia, Canada, got so sick with bird flu, either. The anonymous teenager, who sought medical care for an eye infection on November 2, is still seriously ill in hospital, and continues to rely on a ventilator to breathe. Local health officials have closed their investigation into the teen’s infection.

There may be more, unreported cases out there, too. When researchers tested 115 dairy farm workers in Michigan and Colorado, they found markers of recent infection with the virus in 7% of them.

So far, there is no evidence that the virus can spread between people. But every human infection offers the virus another opportunity to evolve into a form that can do just that. People can act as viral incubators, too. And during flu season, there are more chances for the H5N1 virus to mix with circulating seasonal flu viruses. 

“Just because we [haven’t seen human-to-human spread] now doesn’t mean that it’s not capable of happening, that it won’t happen, or that it hasn’t already happened,” says Lakdawala.

So where do we go from here? Lakdawala thinks we should already have started vaccinating dairy farm workers. After all, the US has already stockpiled vaccines for H5N1, which were designed to protect against previous variants of the virus. “We’re not taking [the human cases] seriously enough,” she says.

We need to get a better handle on exactly how the virus is spreading, too, and implement more effective measures to stop it from doing so. That means more testing of both cows and dairy farm workers at the very least. And we need to be clear that, despite what Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current lead contender for the role of head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, says, raw milk can be dangerous, and vaccines are a vital tool in the prevention of pandemics.

We still have an opportunity to prevent the outbreak from turning into a global catastrophe. But the situation has worsened since the summer. “This is sort of how the 2009 pandemic started,” says Lakdawala, referring to the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. “We started to have a couple of cases sporadically, and then the next thing you knew, you were seeing it everywhere.”

Now read the rest of The Checkup

Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive

The US is planning to stockpile millions of doses of H5N1 vaccines. But our current approach to making flu vaccines is slow and cumbersome. New vaccines that don’t rely on the use of eggs, or make use of mRNA, might offer a better alternative.

Flu season is already underway in the US, where bird flu is spreading among cattle. That has virologists worried that a person infected with both viruses could unwittingly incubate an all-new strain of the virus.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already spread harmful misinformation, pseudoscience and fringe theories about AIDS and covid-19.

Some researchers are exploring new ways to prevent the spread of H5N1 in poultry. The gene editing tool CRISPR could be used to help make chickens more resistant to the virus, according to preliminary research published last year.

From around the web

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Jay Bhattacharya for his pick to lead the US National Institutes of Health, an agency with a $48 billion budget that oversees the majority of medical research in the country. Bhattacharya was one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto published in 2020 arguing against lockdowns during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, and supporting a “let it rip” approach instead. (STAT)

An IVF mix up left two families raising each other’s biological babies. They didn’t realize until the children were a couple of months old. What should they do? (Have the tissues ready for this one, which is heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure) (New York Times)

Why do we feel the need to surveil our sleeping babies? This beautiful comic explores the various emotional pulls experienced by new parents. (The Verge)

Australia’s parliament has passed a law that bans children under the age of 16 from using social media. Critics are concerned that the law is a “blunt instrument” that might drive young teens to the dark web, or leave them feeling isolated. (The Guardian)

Lab-grown foie gras, anyone? Cultivated meat is going high-end, apparently. (Wired)

What’s next for NASA’s giant moon rocket?

NASA’s huge lunar rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), might be in trouble. As rival launchers like SpaceX’s Starship gather pace, some are questioning the need for the US national space agency to have its own mega rocket at all—something that could become a focus of the incoming Trump administration, in which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is set to play a key role.

SLS has been in development for more than a decade. The rocket is huge, and about 15% more powerful than the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 70s. It is also expensive, costing an estimated $4.1 billion per launch.

It was designed with a clear purpose—returning astronauts to the moon’s surface. And while it seems likely the rocket will at least launch Artemis II next September, beyond that its future is less certain. Read the full story.

—Jonathan O’Callaghan

This piece is part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, looking across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

This startup is getting closer to bringing next-generation nuclear to the grid

This is a busy time of year for all of us, and that’s certainly true in the advanced nuclear industry.

MIT Technology Review released our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch less than two months ago. Since then, awardee Kairos Power has had three big announcements about its progress toward building next-generation nuclear reactors. 

Each of these bits of news represents an interesting aspect of the process. So let’s dig into the announcements and what they mean for where nuclear technology is going. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things climate and energy. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 A Chinese ship may have sabotaged critical data cables
By dragging its huge anchor along the Baltic seabed for over 100 miles. (WSJ $)+ Swedish authorities are investigating the bulk carrier. (FT $)

2 The FTC is probing Microsoft
It’s a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into its cloud computing, AI and security arms. (NYT $)+ The FTC has been preparing for this for a full year. (WP $)
+ It’s notable it’s been signed off in the Biden administration’s dying days. (The Information $)
+ Meanwhile, Google is hoping to have its recent antitrust ruling thrown out. (Bloomberg $)

3 RFK’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement is in trouble
Just days into the project, cracks are already beginning to show. (FT $)
+ The MAGA policy agenda is extremely skeptical of actual scientific evidence. (NYT $)+ America’s opioid crisis probably played a role in Trump’s reelection. (New Yorker $)

4 TikTok is blocking beauty filters for teenagers
But the restrictions aren’t exactly difficult to circumvent. (The Guardian)
+ Filters will be required to specify the nature of the tweaks they make, too. (The Verge)
+ The fight for “Instagram face.” (MIT Technology Review)

5 Who is applying to join Elon Musk’s DOGE?
Everyone from students to tech CEOs, apparently. (Forbes $)
+ The division is highly likely to clash with the US government’s budget office. (WSJ $)

6 Interpol has arrested 1,000 potential cyber criminals across Africa
They’re suspected of extorting victims using ransomware, phishing schemes and scams. (WP $)

7 Here’s all the tariffs China’s tech industry is facing
It’s not just the US that’s increasing its restrictions. (Rest of World)+ Buckle up: China is likely to face even greater chip restrictions from next week. (Wired $)
+ How Trump’s tariffs could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Mark Zuckerberg has been hobnobbing with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago
Which is interesting considering that Trump has threatened him with life imprisonment. (The Information $)
+ Zuckerberg has been on a charm offensive to repair their relationship for almost two years. (NYT $)
+ But the President-elect has a history of holding grudges. (NY Mag $)

9 Distributed computing is the next big thing
We can achieve more when we work together, after all. (Quanta Magazine)

10 How those massive Macy’s Thanksgiving parade balloons stay afloat
The greater the mass, the greater the weight. (Wired $)

Quote of the day

“The main advice I have to give is stay true to yourself and hit post.”

—TikToker Leah Halton dispenses some sage advice after winning an award for video of the year at Australia’s TikTok awards, the Guardian reports.

The big story

A day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driver

July 2022

When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: “I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself,” says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021 as a robotaxi driver.

Liu is one of the hundreds of safety operators employed by Baidu, “driving” five days a week in Shougang Park. But despite having only worked for the company for 19 months, he already has to think about his next career move, as his job will likely be eliminated within a few years. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ If you’ve ever admired the incredible Co Rentmeester picture of Michael Jordan leaping through the air, here’s the story behind the iconic image.
+ If you look to the skies in Alaska, you might just see a Thanksgiving turkey being thrown out of a plane.
+ Talking of Thanksgiving, if you want to cook the ultimate turkey, look no further.
+ Move over, the hot artists are coming.

This is a busy time of year for all of us, and that’s certainly true in the advanced nuclear industry.

MIT Technology Review released our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch less than two months ago. Since then, awardee Kairos Power has had three big announcements about its progress toward building next-generation nuclear reactors. 

Each of these bits of news represents an interesting aspect of the process. So let’s dig into the announcements and what they mean for where nuclear technology is going.

First, a quick refresher on Kairos Power: While nuclear plants today overwhelmingly use pressurized water to keep reactors cool, Kairos is using molten salt. The idea is that these reactors (which are also smaller than those typically built today) will help generate electricity in a way that’s safer and more efficient than conventional nuclear power.

When it comes to strategy, Kairos is taking small steps toward the ultimate goal of full-size power plants. Construction began earlier this year on Hermes, the company’s first nuclear test reactor. That facility will generate a small amount of heat—about 35 megawatts’ worth—to demonstrate the technology.

Last week, the company announced it received a construction permit for the next iteration of its system, Hermes 2. This plant will share a location with Hermes, and it will include the infrastructure to transform heat to electricity. That makes it the first electricity-producing next-generation nuclear plant to get this approval in the US.

While this news wasn’t a huge surprise (the company has been working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years), “any day that you’re getting a permit or a license from the NRC is an unusual and special day,” Kairos CEO Mike Laufer told me in an interview.  

The company is developing a plan to work on construction for both Hermes and Hermes 2 at the same time, he added. When I asked if Hermes is still on track to start up in 2027 (as we reported in our profile of the company in October), Laufer said that’s an “aggressive timeline.”

While construction on test reactors is rolling, Kairos is forging ahead with commercial deals—in October, it announced an agreement with Google to build up to 500 megawatts’ worth of power plants by 2035. Under this agreement, Kairos will develop, construct, and operate plants and sell electricity to the tech giant.

Kairos will need to build multiple reactors to deliver 500 MW. The first deployment should happen by 2030, with additional units to follow. One of the benefits of building smaller reactors is learning as you go along and making improvements that can lower costs and make construction more efficient, Laufer says. 

While the construction permit and Google deal are arguably the biggest recent announcements from Kairos, I’m also fascinated by a more niche milestone: In early October, the company broke ground on a salt production facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that will make the molten salt used to cool its reactors.

“Salt is one of the key areas where we do have some unique and specialized needs,” Laufer says. And having control over the areas of the supply chain that are specialized will be key to helping the company deliver electricity reliably and at lower cost, he adds. 

The company’s molten salt is called Flibe, and it’s a specific mix of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride. One fun detail I learned from Laufer is that the mixture needs to be enriched in lithium-7 because that isotope absorbs fewer neutrons than lithium-6, allowing the reactor to run more efficiently. The new facility in Albuquerque will produce large quantities of high-purity Flibe enriched in lithium-7.

Progress in the nuclear industry can sometimes feel slow, with milestones few and far between, so it’s really interesting to see Kairos taking so many small steps in quick succession toward delivering on its promise of safe, cheap nuclear power. 

“We’ve had a lot of huge accomplishments. We have a long way to go,” Laufer says. “This is not an easy thing to pull off. We believe we have the right approach and we’re doing it the right way, but it requires a lot of hard work and diligence.”

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more details on Kairos and its technology, check out our profile of the company in the 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch package from October. 

If you’re dying for more details on molten salt, check out this story I wrote in January about a test system Kairos built to demonstrate the technology. 

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY, ADOBE STOCK

Another thing

Donald Trump pledged to enact tariffs on a wide range of products imported into the US. The plans could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more, threatening to slow progress on climate and potentially stall the economy. Read more about the potential impacts for technology in the latest story from my colleague James Temple. 

Keeping up with climate  

The UN climate talks wrapped up over the weekend. In the resulting agreement, rich nations will provide at least $300 billion in climate finance per year by 2035 to developing nations to help them deal with climate change. (Carbon Brief)
→ This falls well short of the $1 trillion mark that many had hoped to reach. (MIT Technology Review)

Utilities might be spending a lot of money on the wrong transmission equipment on the grid. Dollars are flowing to smaller, local projects, not the interstate projects that are crucial for getting more clean energy online. (Inside Climate News)

Sustainable aviation fuel is one of the only viable options to help clean up the aviation industry in the near term. But what are these fuels, exactly? And how do they help with climate change? It’s surprisingly complicated, and the details matter. (Canary Media)

Automakers want Trump to keep rules in place that will push the US toward adoption of electric vehicles. Companies have already invested billions of dollars into an EV transition. (New York Times)

There’s a growing chasm in American meat consumption: The number of households that avoid meat has increased slightly, but all other households have increased their meat purchases. (Vox)

Trump has vowed to halt offshore wind energy, but for some projects, things take so long that a four-year term may not even touch them. (Grist)

NASA’s huge lunar rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), might be in trouble. As rival launchers like SpaceX’s Starship gather pace, some are questioning the need for the US national space agency to have its own mega rocket at all—something that could become a focus of the incoming Trump administration, in which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is set to play a key role.

“It’s absolutely in Elon Musk’s interest to convince the government to cancel SLS,” says Laura Forczyk from the US space consulting firm Astralytical. “However, it’s not up to him.”

SLS has been in development for more than a decade. The rocket is huge, 322 feet (98 meters) tall, and about 15% more powerful than the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 70s. It is also expensive, costing an estimated $4.1 billion per launch.

It was designed with a clear purpose—returning astronauts to the moon’s surface. Built to launch NASA’s human-carrying Orion spacecraft, the rocket is a key part of the agency’s Artemis program to go back to the Moon, started by the previous Trump administration in 2019. “It has an important role to play,” says Daniel Dumbacher, formerly a deputy associate administrator at NASA and part of the team that selected SLS for development in 2010. “The logic for SLS still holds up.”

The rocket has launched once already on the Artemis I mission in 2022, a test flight that saw an uncrewed Orion spacecraft sent around the moon. Its next flight, Artemis II, earmarked for September 2025, will be the same flight but with a four-person crew, before the first lunar landing, Artemis III, currently set for September 2026.

SLS could launch missions to other destinations too. At one stage NASA intended to launch its Europa Clipper spacecraft to Jupiter’s moon Europa using SLS, but cost and delays saw the mission launch instead on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in October this year. It has also been touted to launch parts of NASA’s new lunar space station, Gateway, beginning in 2028. The station is currently in development.

NASA’s plan to return to the moon involves using SLS to launch astronauts to lunar orbit on Orion, where they will rendezvous with a separate lander to descend to the surface. At the moment that lander will be SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, a huge reusable shuttle intended to launch and land multiple times. Musk wants this rocket to one day take humans to Mars.

Starship is currently undergoing testing. Last month, it completed a stunning flight in which the lower half of the rocket, the Super Heavy booster, was caught by SpaceX’s “chopstick” launch tower in Boca Chica, Texas. The rocket is ultimately more powerful than SLS and designed to be entirely reusable, whereas NASA’s rocket is discarded into the ocean after each launch.

The success of Starship and the development of other large commercial rockets, such as the Jeff Bezos-owned firm Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, has raised questions about the need for SLS. In October, billionaire Michael Bloomberg called the rocket a “colossal waste of taxpayer money”. In November, journalist Eric Berger said there was at least a 50-50 chance the rocket would be canceled.

“I think it would be the right call,” says Abhishek Tripathi, a former mission director at SpaceX now at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s hard to point to SLS as being necessary.”

The calculations are not straightforward, however. Dumbacher notes that while SpaceX is making “great progress” on Starship, there is much yet to do. The rocket will need to launch possibly up to 18 times to transfer fuel to a single lunar Starship in Earth orbit that can then make the journey to the moon. The first test of this fuel transfer is expected next year.

SLS, conversely, can send Orion to the moon in a single launch. That means the case for SLS is only diminished “if the price of 18 Starship launches is less than an SLS launch”, says Dumbacher. SpaceX was awarded $2.9 billion by NASA in 2021 for the first Starship mission to the moon on Artemis III, but the exact cost per launch is unknown.

MICHAEL DEMOCKER/NASA

NASA is also already developing hardware for future SLS launches. “All elements for the second SLS for Artemis II have been delivered,” a NASA spokesperson said in response to emailed questions, adding that SLS also has “hardware in production” for Artemis III, IV, and V.

“SLS can deliver more payload to the moon, in a single launch, than any other rocket,” NASA said. “The rocket is needed and designed to meet the agency’s lunar transportation requirements.”

Dumbacher points out that if the US wants to return to the moon before China sends humans there, which the nation has said it would do by 2030, canceling SLS could be a setback. “Now is not the time to have a major relook at what’s the best rocket,” he says. “Every minute we delay, we are setting ourselves up for a situation where China will be putting people on the moon first.”

President-elect Donald Trump has given Musk a role in his incoming administration to slash public spending as part of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency. While the exact remit of this initiative is not yet clear, projects like SLS could be up for scrutiny.

Canceling SLS would require support from Congress, however, where Republicans will have only a slim majority. “SLS has been bipartisan and very popular,” says Forczyk, meaning it might be difficult to take any immediate action. “Money given to SLS is a benefit to taxpayers and voters in key congressional districts [where development of the rocket takes place],” says Forczyk. “We do not know how much influence Elon Musk will have.”

It seems likely the rocket will at least launch Artemis II next September, but beyond that there is more uncertainty. “The most logical course of action in my mind is to cancel SLS after Artemis III,” says Forczyk.

Such a scenario could have a broad impact on NASA that reaches beyond just SLS. Scrapping the rocket could bring up wider discussions about NASA’s overall budget, currently set at $25.4 billion, the highest-funded space agency in the world. That money is used for a variety of science including astrophysics, astronomy, climate studies, and the exploration of the solar system.

“If you cancel SLS, you’re also canceling the broad support for NASA’s budget at its current level,” says Tripathi. “Once that budget gets slashed, it’s hard to imagine it’ll ever grow back to present levels. Be careful what you wish for.”

These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own

Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion.

The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models to interact with one another. Given just a nudge through text prompting, they developed a remarkable range of personality traits, preferences and specialist roles, with no further inputs from their human creators.

The work, from AI startup Altera, is part of a broader field that wants to use simulated agents to model how human groups would react to new economic policies or other interventions. And its creators see it as an early step towards large-scale “AI civilizations” that can coexist and work alongside us in digital spaces. Read the full story.

—Niall Firth

To learn more about the intersection of AI and gaming, why not check out:

+ How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play. AI-powered NPCs that don’t need a script could make games—and other worlds—deeply immersive. Read the full story.

+ What impact will AI have on video game development? It could make working conditions more bearable—or it could just put people out of work. Read the full story.

+ What happened when MIT Technology Review’s staff turned our colleague Niall into an AI-powered nonplayer character—and why he hated his digital incarnation so much.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: The great commercial takeover of low Earth orbit

Did you know that NASA intends to destroy the International Space Station by around 2030? Once it’s gone, private companies will likely swoop in with their own replacements. Get ready for the great commercial takeover of low Earth orbit.

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI has suspended access to its Sora video tool
After a group of artists leaked access to it in protest. (TechCrunch)
+ OpenAI responded to say they were under no obligation to use its tool. (WP $)
+ Four ways to protect your art from AI. (MIT Technology Review)

2 A researcher created a database of one million public Bluesky posts
Even though Bluesky itself doesn’t use AI trained on its user content. (404 Media)
+ A new public database lists all the ways AI could go wrong. (MIT Technology Review)

3 China is on a Silicon Valley hiring offensive
Chinese firms are prepared to triple engineers’ salaries to lure them in. (WSJ $)

4 What happens when autonomous weapons make life-or-death decisions
The notion of algorithms making decisions over who lives or dies is chilling. (Undark Magazine)
+ Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review)

5 How Elon Musk is trying to make xAI a bona fide OpenAI competitor 
It’s up against some pretty stiff competition. (WSJ $)
+ The firm is likely to double its current valuation to the tune of $50 billion. (FT $)
+ How OpenAI stress-tests its large language models. (MIT Technology Review)

6 These treatments can bring patients back from the brink of death
So when should they be deployed—and who should get them? (New Scientist $)
+ Inside the billion-dollar meeting for the mega-rich who want to live forever. (MIT Technology Review)

7 How this gigantic laser achieved a nuclear fusion milestone
The team behind it already has a new goal in its sights, too. (Nature)
+ When the race for fusion ground to a halt. (MIT Technology Review)

8 These two influencers are locked in a legal battle
But can you really legally protect an aesthetic that’s everywhere? (The Verge)

9 LinkedIn’s viral posts are mostly written by AI
That explains a lot. (Wired $)

10 This lollipop device allows you to ‘taste’ nine virtual flavors
Willy Wonka eat your heart out. (Ars Technica)

Quote of the day

“We are not your free bug testers, PR puppets, training data, validation tokens.”

—A group of artists decry OpenAI’s treatment of creators in an open letter accompanying a leaked version of the company Sora generative AI video tool, Variety reports.

The big story

Why we can no longer afford to ignore the case for climate adaptation

August 2022

Back in the 1990s, anyone suggesting that we’d need to adapt to climate change while also cutting emissions was met with suspicion. Most climate change researchers felt adaptation studies would distract from the vital work of keeping pollution out of the atmosphere to begin with.

Despite this hostile environment, a handful of experts were already sowing the seeds for a new field of research called “climate change adaptation”: study and policy on how the world could prepare for and adapt to the new disasters and dangers brought forth on a warming planet. Today, their research is more important than ever. Read the full story. 

—Madeline Ostrander

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Japanese leaf art is truly an impressive feat (thanks Stephen!)
+ Can our Los Angeles readers let me know if this Cyberpunk exhibition at the Academy Museum is as amazing as it looks?
+ The year’s best music books serve as great Christmas present inspiration.
+ If you hate how Sam Altman takes notes, here’s how to do it the right way.

The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs) to interact with one another. Given just a nudge through text prompting, they developed a remarkable range of personality traits, preferences and specialist roles, with no further inputs from their human creators. 

The work, from AI startup Altera, is part of a broader field that wants to use simulated agents to model how human groups would react to new economic policies or other interventions.

But for Altera’s founder, Robert Yang, who quit his position as an assistant professor in computational neuroscience at MIT to start the company, this demo is just the beginning. He sees it as an early  step towards large-scale “AI civilizations” that can coexist and work alongside us in digital spaces. “The true power of AI will be unlocked when we have actually truly autonomous agents that can collaborate at scale,” says Yang.

Yang was inspired by Stanford University researcher Joon Sung Park who, in 2023, found that surprisingly humanlike behaviors arose when a group of 25 autonomous AI agents was let loose to interact in a basic digital world. 

“Once his paper was out, we started to work on it the next week,” says Yang. “I quit MIT six months after that.”

Yang wanted to take the idea to its extreme. “We wanted to push the limit of what agents can do in groups autonomously.”

Altera quickly raised more than $11m in funding from investors including A16Z and the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s emerging tech VC firm. Earlier this year Altera released its first demo: an AI-controlled character in Minecraft that plays alongside you.

Altera’s new experiment, Project Sid, uses simulated AI agents equipped with “brains” made up of multiple modules. Some modules are powered by LLMs and designed to specialize in certain tasks, such as reacting to other agents, speaking, or planning the agent’s next move.

ALTERA

The team started small, testing groups of around 50 agents in Minecraft to observe their interactions. Over 12 in-game days (4 real-world hours) the agents began to exhibit some interesting emergent behavior. For example, some became very sociable and made many connections with other characters, while others appeared more introverted. The “likability” rating of each agent (measured by the agents themselves) changed over time as the interactions continued. The agents were able to track these social cues and react to them: in one case an AI chef tasked with distributing food to the hungry gave more to those who he felt valued him most.

More humanlike behaviors emerged in a series of 30-agent simulations. Despite all the agents starting with the same personality and same overall goal—to create an efficient village and protect the community against attacks from other in-game creatures—they spontaneously developed specialized roles within the community, without any prompting.  They diversified into roles such as builder, defender, trader, and explorer. Once an agent had started to specialize, its in-game actions began to reflect its new role. For example, an artist spent more time picking flowers, farmers gathered seeds and guards built more fences. 

“We were surprised to see that if you put [in] the right kind of brain, they can have really emergent behavior,” says Yang. “That’s what we expect humans to have, but don’t expect machines to have.”

Yang’s team also tested whether agents could follow community-wide rules. They introduced a world with basic tax laws and allowed agents to vote for changes to the in-game taxation system. Agents prompted to be pro or anti tax were able to influence the behavior of other agents around them, enough that they would then vote to reduce or raise tax depending on who they had interacted with.

The team scaled up, pushing the number of agents in each simulation to the maximum the Minecraft server could handle without glitching, up to 1000 at once in some cases. In one of Altera’s 500-agent simulations, they watched how the agents spontaneously came up with and then spread cultural memes (such as a fondness for pranking, or an interest in eco-related issues) among their fellow agents. The team also seeded a small group of agents to try to spread the (parody) religion, Pastafarianism, around different towns and rural areas that made up the in-game world, and watched as these Pastafarian priests converted many of the agents they interacted with. The converts went on to spread Pastafarianism (the word of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) to nearby towns in the game world.

The way the agents acted might seem eerily lifelike, but their behavior combines patterns learned by the LLMs from human-created data with Altera’s system, which translates those patterns into context-aware actions, like picking up a tool, or interacting with another agent. “The takeaway is that LLMs have a sophisticated enough model of human social dynamics [to] mirror these human behaviors,” says Altera co-founder Andrew Ahn.

ALTERA

In other words, the data makes them excellent mimics of human behavior, but they are in no way “alive”.

But Yang has grander plans. Altera plans to expand into Roblox next, but Yang hopes to eventually move beyond game worlds altogether. Ultimately, his goal is a world in which humans don’t just play alongside AI characters, but also interact with them in their day-to-day lives. His dream is to create a vast number of “digital humans” who actually care for us and will work with us to help us solve problems, as well as keep us entertained. “We want to build agents that can really love humans (like dogs love humans, for example),” he says.

This viewpoint—that AI could love us—is pretty controversial in the field, with many experts arguing it’s not possible to recreate emotions in machines using current techniques. AI veteran Julian Togelius, for example, who runs games testing company Modl.ai, says he likes Altera’s work, particularly because it lets us study human behavior in simulation.

But could these simulated agents ever learn to care for us, love us, or become self-aware? Togelius doesn’t think so. “There is no reason to believe a neural network running on a GPU somewhere experiences anything at all,” he says.

But maybe AI doesn’t have to love us for real to be useful.

“If the question is whether one of these simulated beings could appear to care, and do it so expertly that it would have the same value to someone as being cared for by a human, that is perhaps not impossible,” Togelius adds. “You could create a good-enough simulation of care to be useful. The question is whether the person being cared for would care that the carer has no experiences.”

In other words, so long as our AI characters appear to care for us in a convincing way, that might be all we really care about.

Update: We gave more detail on how Altera’s system combines LLMs with other modules.

Our discussion focuses on overcoming key challenges such as deployment complexity, security, and cost management. We also discuss how microservices can help executives realize business value with generative AI while maintaining control over data and intellectual property.