Author: chemistadmin

Blue Apron Review: Not as Good as It Once Was

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For many years, Blue Apron has been one of my favorite meal kits out of the dozens I’ve tested. It was No. 1 in our buying guide, and my colleague Adrienne So even gave the service its own love letter. I recently retested the service to ensure that our coverage was up to date, and I’m dismayed to announce that, while it’s still a good meal kit subscription service, Blue Apron is no longer my top pick.

I still think it has its merits, and in no way would I call it “bad.” It’s undeniably convenient to have ingredients shipped to your door, because who actually likes going grocery shopping? And the dishes I’ve tried have been mostly good. But I had some issues with this round of testing that have led me to believe that other services might be a better use of your time—and money.

A Fly in My Soup

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

After speaking with the lovely PR folks at Blue Apron to start a round of retesting, they confirmed my recipes: Sour Cherry-Dijon Chicken, Chimichurri Shrimp, Fall Harvest Grain Bowls, Southwestern-Style Egg Bites, and Double Chocolate Cake. Only three of the five were actually cookable upon arrival.

It started with the eggs that were packed inside my shipping box, which had broken and coated everything inside. I rinsed everything off and packed it into my fridge. No use in crying over broken eggs, or whatever that old adage is. That night, I cooked the chicken dish, which was mostly tasty, except my chicken had a defect known as “spaghetti meat“—a muscle abnormality that causes chicken breast to appear soft and stringy, like spaghetti. It’s usually not obvious on the outside of the meat (it wasn’t in my case), but these internal strings turn tough upon being cooked and alter the texture of the finished dish, making it more fibrous. I only discovered the abnormality after I cut into the cooked chicken breast. I would have realized it earlier if the instructions called for cutting into the protein earlier—for example, if the breasts were to be butterflied—but since I was cooking it whole, I didn’t catch the issue until dinner was served.

I know it’s silly to expect that a meal kit service delivers the highest-quality butcher-grade cuts of meat, and despite it being unappetizing, I still ate it. My chicken was tougher and stringier than it would have been without the defect, but “spaghetti meat” is still safe to eat. It’s just less delicious. And despite that issue, the rest of the meal was pretty good. I reached out to the PR folks and mentioned it, since I would have done the same with customer service if I’d been a paying customer. They said they’d send two replacement meals—Pork Schnitzel & Pancetta-Potato Salad, as well as Beef Over Curry-Spiced Rice. (For customers, if an issue is encountered, Blue Apron typically offers a credit toward your next box or order.)

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December 10, 2024
Extracting treasure from trash | Opinion

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Like every other practising scientist, my relationship with the literature is rather fraught. I go to the vast collection of chemistry and biology papers for information, for instruction, and for answers, because where else is there? But the whole time I’m searching through it, I find myself wondering first what important things I might be missing, and second, how much of what I’m reading is incorrect (or at best incomplete).

We’ve all come across papers that are wrong. And of those wrong ones, a few go beyond the ‘honest mistake’ category into outright fraud. That mass of false or unreliable data makes the task of extracting useful guidance even more complicated. Scientists have been telling themselves for a long time that the literature is self-correcting. And while that statement is not completely wrong, it isn’t completely right, either. Not by a long way.

To begin with, there are naturally a huge number of older outmoded papers that most of us don’t even seriously consider. If the only report of some molecule is from 1928, I am unlikely to track it down to see how the authors tried to characterise it by melting point, appearance, and probably by taste. I would assume that the machine learning algorithms are given a cutoff to make the really old literature vanish. But there are more recent difficulties. For example, a great deal of the kinase selectivity literature from the 1990s and early 2000s is quite unreliable, because there weren’t enough selective inhibitors to really trust those numbers. I would not want my Grand Kinase AnswerBot to either be trained on them, or try to extract any sense from them.

But there are larger and more subtle problems than wrong or outmoded papers. I wrote here last year about the problems with negative data (not enough of it, because we pretend that we don’t have much) and biases in selection of reactions and reagents. The molecular and cell biology literature has the same issues, and on top of that those fields honestly have many more variables than organic chemistry. Two papers can look as if they’re talking about the same thing, but differences in cell lines, culture conditions, protein purification and refolding, assay buffers, orders of addition and many more can make their results non-comparable.

So what’s to be done? Perhaps some idle billionaire could throw some money at the idea of a Revised Scientific Corpus, a literature collection stripped of faked Western blots, non-reproducible reaction conditions, outdated assays, and control compounds that we now know don’t control for much of anything. As appealing as that idea is (from some angles, anyway) it would become unworkable rather quickly: after what time period or number of citations, for example, do we consider a paper reliable? Curation would, by definition, be a continuous task. This would be as far from a one-and-done cleanup as one could imagine. I mean, the dumper trucks are rumbling in and depositing piles of new results every day of the week.

A more lasting solution would be to address some of the underlying reasons that the literature has so many problematic regions. I would argue that there are too many papers being published overall, and they are being written too quickly to fill the pages of too many repetitious journal titles. And the reason for all this is that too many institutions make publishing – widely and often – a major criterion for hiring and advancement. This is particularly a problem in academia, although it’s not limited to that area, and it’s particularly a problem in some countries that have made explicit paper-counting a part of their system. I cannot blame people for trying to get a job, keep a job, or get promoted at said job, but I can blame the near-mindless use of publications as a proxy for evaluation. You want papers? You insist on papers? Papers, then, are what you will get, and plenty of them. They may be ground out by AI-assisted ‘paper-mill’ operations, with authorship sold to the highest bidders and favorable referee reports organised in advance for an additional fee, but by gosh, they are papers.

That’s how we have put ourselves in the situation we’re in. It would be better for science, better for human knowledge, and also better for all the people devoting their time to such efforts, if we found another way to do it all.

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December 10, 2024
Poker Cheaters Allegedly Use Tiny Hidden Cameras to Spot Dealt Cards

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Some Vegas casinos, per multiple sources, have begun banning phones from being set down at felt level on tables. Many casinos have long had policies prohibiting phone use during hands, and some have even banned phones entirely in prior years, and now these efforts are growing more widespread. However, with the knowledge that today’s miniature cameras can be built into lighters, pens, and other non-phone devices, is that enough of a safety measure? A true “no items on the table whatsoever” rule feels more prudent, but will casinos view that as too invasive toward their clientele? Then there’s a whole separate conversation about placing devices on the rail, which is where players rest their elbows and which sits slightly higher than the felt itself.

“There will be guys who want to watch the game at the table and have their phone propped up,” Berkey says. “That should just be fine. It’s a fine line; it’s a gray line.”

Berkey even suggested some sort of hybrid arrangement where phones or other devices are allowed so long as they sit behind chips or some other item that blocks their view of the felt. These solutions, though, also fail to account for rings or other jewelry that may contain a concealed camera.

The device removal tactic would have run into another big snag when the arrests in France took place: One of the suspects had nothing on the table at all. He allegedly concealed a camera in his clothing. If that scheme worked to capture card faces out of a dealer’s shoe, it would definitely work for the traditional dealer-pitch style used in Vegas.

The better long-term solution, one Berkey and others in the poker world support, involves retraining the dealers—a process that’s already begun.

The European Poker Tour has introduced a new form of dealer pitch known as slide dealing, where the deck remains on the table and the dealer slides each top card off individually to greatly minimize or eliminate any exposure. EPT tournament director Toby Stone directly cited issues of camera cheating as the impetus behind this change, which took effect within the past couple of months.

Casinos could take it even further; some have been cracking down for years. The Star casinos in Australia, for instance, have long used a modified version of a blackjack shoe meant for a single poker deck, which sits at the center of the table and allows cards to slide out from within it. This ostensibly makes it much harder to capture cards than from the traditional blackjack shoe placed at the very side of the table, closer to potential cameras. Anecdotally, these contraptions also seem to limit or eliminate other common risks like bottom-dealing or cards flipping over while being dealt.

While it might take time to retrain the world’s legion of poker dealers to mitigate these schemes, that could be the eventual outcome here.

“I’ve spoken to a few of the [casino] higher-ups, and it seems they’re all open to the idea of retraining dealers,” Berkey says.

Maybe even that eventual move wouldn’t completely eliminate mini camera cheating. As the suspects in France allegedly showed us, today’s video technology is truly amazing. Would you ever have guessed a mini camera could accurately capture which cards are being dealt during the split second they’re exposed as they’re pulled from a blackjack shoe?

Anyone putting their money down at a casino, particularly higher up the stakes spectrum, should at least be aware of the risk of bad actors—particularly in a game like poker, where your opponents are other patrons rather than the casino itself. Whether to combat this or any other potential scheme, a dose of diligence goes a long way.

“As long as there’s a fair game to be offered, there will be people who will try to corrupt it,” Berkey says. “The best we can do is continually work hard to keep the game as fair as possible.”

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December 10, 2024
New materials to manufacture advanced computer chips

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Engineers need new materials to make computer chips—and the devices they power—even smaller and more efficient.

Faculty members from the University of Dallas, collaborators, and industry partners have teamed up to design and test indium-based materials to manufacture the next generation of computer chips.

The researchers have received a $1.9m, three-year grant through the National Science Foundation’s Future of Semiconductors (FuSe2) programme to support their work.

The UTD funding is part of $42.4m in FuSe2 grants announced in September to support the goals of the federal CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) and Science Act of 2022.

This aims to make computer chips more energy-efficient and facilitate the domestic production of integrated circuits.

Improving the performance of computer chips

By introducing indium-based materials, the researchers aim to facilitate patterning in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) range. Patterning, or lithography, is a key step in the semiconductor fabrication process in which patterns are created on the surface of a wafer to serve as pathways for transistors and other components.

Moving from deep UV to EUV range makes it possible to produce smaller, more precise features on computer chips for better performance and energy efficiency.

During the traditional patterning process in the manufacturing of computer chips, silicon wafers are coated with a removable layer of material called a photoresist before being exposed to UV photons.

The next generation of lithography uses very high-energy photons — 92 electronvolts — in the EUV region. Due to the high energy of these photons, conventional photoresist materials will not work.

The researchers’ new materials also could enable the production of 3D circuits, which are designed by stacking layers of chips like high-rises in a crowded city.

New materials are needed to build added layers on a 3D chip without disturbing the existing circuits.

Better semiconducting properties without overheating

“If you are making a layer of devices on top of another layer of devices, you cannot heat it to a high temperature. Otherwise, you will destroy the existing layers,” explained Dr Julia Hsu, professor of materials science and engineering and leader of the study.

Using indium-containing materials for the EUV photoresist and the transistors should lead to more efficiency in computer chips by eliminating a step in integrated circuit manufacturing that involves solvents.

The researchers are testing a technique called photonic curing to convert EUV-patterned structures to nanoscale devices.

Photonic curing uses pulses of light at high intensity but low energy to complete the chemical reactions that allow the indium oxide to achieve better semiconducting properties without overheating the underlying devices.

Incorporating machine learning into the process

Hsu’s preliminary work on indium-containing materials as an EUV photoresist has been supported by a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) grant to investigate new materials for computer chips.

Hsu also plans to incorporate machine learning — a method she learned with support from a 2023 Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship — into the project’s design and testing methodologies.

“The FuSe2 project will enable us to take our preliminary results from the SRC project to a much higher level and bigger impact,” Hsu said.

“We will bring computation and synthetic chemistry to expand beyond currently commercially available materials.”

Key collaborations in the project

Hsu’s co-principal investigators include Dr Cormac Toher, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering and computational materials scientist, and Dr Kevin Brenner, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering.

Toher will design the indium-containing molecules, and Brenner will fabricate and test the devices.

The project also includes semiconductor industry workforce training for community college students through UTD’s North Texas Semiconductor Institute and a class that Hsu will teach as an immersive experience in the semiconductor industry.

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December 10, 2024
An Augmented Reality Program Can Help Patients Overcome Parkinson’s Symptoms

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In 2018, Tom Finn took his father, Nigel, to a physiotherapy appointment. Nigel was living with vascular dementia, which can present with symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder characterized by motor symptoms such as tremors, stiffness, and trouble balancing. He was losing the ability to walk.

The physiotherapist told Finn about cue markers—colored lines laid on the floor that can help Parkinson’s patients overcome difficulty walking. Finn was unconvinced. He couldn’t see how some lines on the floor would help his father. But when they got home, he laid some colored exercise bands down in the kitchen and watched in amazement as his dad easily marched back and forth across them.

The technique, called external cueing, works by using visual, auditory, or tactile prompts—colored tape on the ground, playing a metronome, or physical vibrations—to engage neural pathways not affected by the disease. “It can help people focus their attention and help them take that first step and overcome the freeze,” says Claire Bale, associate director of research at Parkinson’s UK, a research and support charity in the UK.

While Finn—who worked in marketing and video production in London—was struck by the effectiveness of this simple intervention, he thought it too basic to actually be helpful. But augmented reality glasses from the likes of Magic Leap had just started coming to market, and he wondered whether they might be able to project virtual lines onto the ground to act as cues. He founded a startup, Strolll, to try to make that vision a reality.

Two years later, Strolll had no staff and about £50 in the bank, according to Jorgen Ellis. Ellis, a New Zealander with a background in furniture startups, had come to the UK looking for his next venture and wanted to get involved with something he felt passionate about. His grandfather had lived with Parkinson’s for over a decade, and when he met Finn through a mutual contact, he immediately saw the promise of the technology. He came onboard as CEO and started by trying to demonstrate that AR-based cueing was scientifically valid.

Ellis and Finn soon found a group of academics at VU University in Amsterdam, led by Melvyn Roerdink, who were working on something similar. Strolll acquired their intellectual property, and with Roerdink on board as chief innovation officer they began to develop and test the technology, now called Reality DTx.

Instead of physical bands like Finn used, Strolll’s AR software simulates colored lines on the floor in front of the wearer, with each line disappearing as they clear it. A clinical trial (supported by Strolll) confirmed the cueing technology was feasible and found promising outcomes.

It could also help with rehabilitation exercises amid a shortage of physiotherapists: The software includes AR games like whack-a-mole and basketball, but designed around functional movements that help people with Parkinson’s. Mark Ross—who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s eight years ago at the age of 36 and is now Strolll’s head of brand and creative strategy—says these games can help overcome the apathy and depression that’s also a symptom of the disease. “You might know that you’ve got to exercise … but that’s not going to help you get off your chair,” he says. So the fact that it’s gamified makes doing the exercises much more alluring.

The Magic Leap headset the software runs on costs around £3,000 ($3,800), and Strolll charges upwards of £300 a month for its services—but Ellis argues this is more cost-effective than 30 half-hour sessions of in-person physical therapy. Ultimately, the company’s goal is to be the “most used rehabilitation software in the world,” says Ellis. They even have a specific timeline in mind: 7 million minutes of rehab with the Strolll device in a week by New Year’s Eve 2029. By then, Ellis hopes Strolll could be in use for all kinds of neurological conditions, from stroke to multiple sclerosis. There is, he says, an “almost unlimited opportunity.”

This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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December 10, 2024
New funding secures UK’s protection from animal diseases

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A £200m investment in the UK’s main research and laboratory testing facility will bolster the country’s fight against dangerous animal diseases.

The Animal Plant Health Agency’s laboratories at Weybridge, which protect the country against the increasing threats of animal diseases, will now be safeguarded and enhanced – ensuring we maintain our world-leading scientific and veterinary capability.

The move will help deliver on the government’s Plan for Change mission to deliver growth by helping to protect profits for farmers and other food producers.

Upgrading critical facilities to respond to disease outbreaks

Weybridge is the UK’s primary capability for managing the threats posed by the spread of animal diseases, many of which pose a significant threat to public health, the food and farming sector, the wider economy, and the environment.

However, the government inherited the laboratories in poor condition with their long-term future in doubt – posing a significant risk to Britain’s farmers and human health.

It is a critical national infrastructure and a global centre of expertise in a wide range of animal diseases, providing ‘end to end’ capability from research to outbreak response.

The threat from zoonotic diseases is increasing globally, with nearly two-thirds of infectious diseases in humans originating in animals, such as Avian Influenza and bovine tuberculosis.

The funding will enable the APHA to replace and upgrade the biosecurity facilities, providing increased capability to prevent, detect and respond to disease outbreaks.

This new science hub will provide additional capacity to meet both current and future requirements, including enhancing its ability to handle concurrent major disease outbreaks.

Protecting farming from outbreaks of animal diseases

Development is essential in safeguarding the livelihoods of farmers and rural communities, who face significant impacts from outbreaks of animal diseases, such as movement restrictions and livestock loss.

The export of livestock, meat and meat products, dairy, and animal by-products is worth £16bn per year to the UK economy. APHA’s services safeguard these exports.

The funding pledge underlines the government’s commitment to shielding our farmers from the devastating impacts of animal diseases.

Environment Secretary Steve Reed explained: “Animal diseases represent a significant risk to Britain’s farmers, global trade and human health.

“Recognising the importance of protecting our farming and food sector to deliver growth across the UK, we are bolstering our national biosecurity and safeguarding the county from these diseases with a £200m investment into our scientific capabilities.”

APHA is at the forefront of managing the UK’s biosecurity

APHA’s vital work includes leading the current operational response to the impacts of Avian Influenza and Bluetongue virus (BTV-3), which has been affecting farmers across the country.

This includes testing thousands of samples, which requires significant laboratory capacity.

“APHA is at the forefront of tackling animal and plant disease outbreaks, with our experts working around the clock to manage threats to the UK’s biosecurity,” said Jenny Stewart, Animal Plant Health Agency Chief Executive.

“This funding is hugely welcomed to support crucial upgrades that will allow us to continue delivering disease surveillance, detection, and research work that protects against new and existing threats of animal diseases.”

She concluded: “Our work is world-leading, and this funding affirms the government’s commitment to protecting animal and plant health and will help us protect the economy from disease risk.”

The risk to our biosecurity will continue to rise in the years ahead due to a changing climate, as it will ensure new pathways for pests, pathogens and invasive species.

This investment will help ensure we are better prepared for the future.

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December 10, 2024
Inside a Fusion Startup’s Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony

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So the race is on to engineer an efficient surrounding for fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to get a bunch of big capacitors to discharge at once, thus kick-starting a reaction. That’s why, at our show, there were all those big caps behind the audience. (You also see constructions of big caps at other fusion startups, like Helion.) The goal of Fuse, as JC describes it, is to become the SpaceX of fusion, to enable “big tech” achievements with all kinds of partners.

Back to our story. JC contacts Serene and says we’re opening a second facility (the first was in Canada) and it would be nice to have a spectacular opening ceremony. Serene, being a startup founder who’s also, naturally, working on music robots, applies obsessive logistic efforts. Charlotte, being a director, does the same. Those of you with any life experience might be asking yourselves, “This sounds like an alien planet with two queens. Was it, um, a process?” I will not answer you directly except to compliment you on your finely hewn wisdom.

Now you know the basics. I am a scientist and do not enjoy superstitious takes on reality, but so many coincidences had to happen at just the right time for this show to come together in just a few weeks. At the last minute, we needed high-performance robots; a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg, found them for us. Why does reality synchronize like this sometimes?

I used to put on high-effort, high-tech music shows, often in VR, in the 1980s and ’90s. I burned out. It was bruisingly expensive, stressful, and exhausting. I used to long for the future when VR would get cheap and lots of people would know how to work with it. But when that time arrived, instead of relief, I had the feeling that VR had become too easy. There used to be a higher-stakes feeling. You had to make every triangle in the scene count, since there could not be too many, even though the computer doing the real-time graphics cost a million dollars. There’s a tangible sense of care in those earliest works.

If I longed for hassle and expense as guarantors of stakes, then I found them again in this show. The week leading up to the performance reminded me of those early days of VR. Late, late nights, which don’t come as easily to me as before, in rehearsal; Serene would be up there trapped in the cables and the mathematical dress, designed by Threeasfour, but there’s a timing problem with the robot motion. With assistance she frees herself, gets to a screen, and does 10 minutes of high-speed programming. The robots glide again.

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December 10, 2024
Incorrect pKa values have slipped into chemical databases and could distort drug design | Research

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Inconsistencies have been uncovered in how acid dissociation constants for zwitterionic compounds are recorded in chemical databases, as well as how they are used in modelling.¹ This could have a significant impact on areas like drug design or environmental chemistry where pK_a values play a crucial role. ‘We found that the ChEMBL database, one of the largest data repositories for biochemicals – and frequently used as a data corpus for training pK_a models – includes many incorrect pK_a values due to this nomenclature issue,’ says Jonathan Zheng from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who participated in the study.

The pK_a of a molecule describes how that molecule behaves at different pH values, influencing important properties such as its solubility in water and other media or its ability to penetrate cell membranes. In pharmaceutical chemistry, this property can indicate whether a compound is suitable for medical applications or not. ‘Drug molecules often form zwitterions – molecules that have distinct charged centres while being neutral overall,’ explains Zheng. ‘Our results could therefore help to avoid confusion during drug development efforts, as well as in the broader literature.’

Kai Leonhard from RWTH Aachen University in Germany, who wasn’t involved in the research, agrees that the errors discovered by the US team might affect areas such as drug discovery. ‘Candidates for new medicines, even if active in vitro, are screened with respect to several properties like their solubility in blood. So, it could happen that an effective drug candidate isn’t brought into clinical studies just because the misinterpreted pK_a data suggests it’s not soluble in blood, although it actually is.’

The scientists realised that something was wrong when they weren’t able to reconcile the values obtained from pK_a prediction models with experimental data that had been previously compiled by the International Union of Pure and Applied and Chemistry (Iupac). After discovering the mismatch between experimental data and that on ChEMBL, Zheng and colleagues noticed that a popular machine-learning model called QupKake,² which was trained on ChEMBL data, was less accurate for zwitterionic compounds too.

These discrepancies result from confusion about what the terms acidic and basic mean when describing pK_a values, points out Zheng. He explains that for compounds that can form zwitterions, these designations are ambiguous because of the presence of different isomers (uncharged and dipolar) in solution.

‘While it may seem simple to tell what a dissociation constant is, matters can become complex for molecules with multiple acidic and basic functional groups,’ comments Leonhard. ‘In this case, the pK_a value of one group may depend on the protonation states of the others.’

That’s why, decades ago, chemists thought it would be reasonable to label the lower pK_a for zwitterion-forming compounds as acidic and the higher pK_a values as basic, while the opposite convention is used for compounds that don’t really form zwitterions, notes Zheng. But he adds that this difference in nomenclature isn’t widely known, or if known, it isn’t handled consistently. ‘Modellers and data curators typically use one of these conventions, applying it broadly to all species, which leads to incorrect applications of the data.’

Zheng says that to fix this, data curators may have to re-examine many compounds for which errors have been identified and use more precise labels and metadata in future. He suggests avoiding the use of acidic or basic as pK_a labels and either use pK_a to only refer to acidic phenomena or use proton gain and proton loss instead. He also recommends introducing the tags ‘macroscopic’ and ‘microscopic’ whenever possible to indicate whether the reported pK_a values refer to the ensemble of multiple isomeric forms of an acid or a specific isomer.

‘In general, we believe that researchers should spend more time in carefully examining and curating data for any chemical property,’ concludes Zheng. ‘Based on our experience, it is very likely that systematic issues are pervasive in other physicochemical property data as well.’

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December 10, 2024
We saw a demo of the new AI system powering Anduril’s vision for war

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Right now, humans also have to be the translator between systems made by different manufacturers. One soldier might have to manually rotate a camera to look around a base and see if there’s a drone threat, and if they find one, they have to manually send information about it to another soldier operating the weapon to take that drone down. To do so, they might use a low-tech messenger app—one on par with AOL instant messenger—to share instructions. That takes time. It’s something the Pentagon is attempting to solve through its Joint All-Domain Command and Control plan, among other initiatives.

“For a long time, we’ve known that our military systems don’t interoperate,” says Chris Brose, former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and principal adviser to Senator John McCain, who now works as Anduril’s chief strategy officer. Much of his work has been convincing Congress and the Pentagon that a software problem is just as worthy of a slice of the defense budget as jets and aircraft carriers. (Anduril spent nearly $1.6 million on lobbying last year, according to data from Open Secrets, and has numerous ties with the incoming Trump administration: Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has been a longtime donor and supporter of Trump, and JD Vance spearheaded an investment in Anduril in 2017 when he worked at venture capital firm Revolution.)

Defense hardware also suffers from a connectivity problem. Tom Keane, a senior vice president in Anduril’s connected warfare division, walked me through a simple example from the civilian world. If you receive a text message when your phone is off, when you turn the phone back on, you’ll see the message. It’s preserved. “But this functionality, which we don’t even think about,” Keane says, “it doesn’t really exist” in how many defense hardware systems are designed. Data and communications can be easily lost in challenging military networks. Anduril says its system instead stores data locally.

An AI data treasure trove

The push to build more AI-connected hardware systems in the military could spark one of the largest data collection projects that the Pentagon has ever undertaken, and one that companies like Anduril and Palantir have big plans for.

“Exabytes of defense data, indispensable for AI training and inferencing, are currently evaporating,” Anduril said on December 6, when it announced it would be working with Palantir to compile data collected in Lattice, including highly sensitive classified information, to train AI models. Training on a broader collection of data collected by all these sensors will also hugely boost the model-building efforts that Anduril is now doing in a partnership with OpenAI, announced on December 4. Earlier this year, Palantir also offered its AI tools to help the Pentagon reimagine how it categorizes and manages classified data. When Anduril founder Palmer Luckey told me in an interview in October that “it’s not like there’s some wealth of information on classified topics and understanding of weapons systems” to train AI models on, he may have been foreshadowing what Anduril is now building.

Even if some of this data from the military is already being collected, AI will suddenly make it useful. “What is new is that the Defense department now has the capability to use the data in new ways,” Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, wrote in an email. “More data and ability to process it could support great accuracy and precision as well as faster information processing.”

The sum total of these developments might be that AI models are brought more directly into military decision-making, rather than just surfacing information. That idea has brought scrutiny, like when Israel was found last year to have been using advanced AI models to process intelligence data and generate lists of targets. Human Rights Watch wrote that the tools “rely on faulty data and inexact approximations” in a report.

“I think we are already on a path to integrating AI, including generative AI, into the realm of decision making,” says Probasco, who authored a recent analysis of one such case. She examined a system built within the military in 2023 called Maven Smart System, which allows users to “access sensor data from diverse sources [and] apply computer vision algorithms to help soldiers identify and choose military targets.”

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December 10, 2024
Climate Change Is Destroying Monarch Butterflies’ Winter Habitat

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every year, at the beginning of November, one of the most impressive natural spectacles in the world takes place in Michoacán, Mexico. Hundreds of millions of migrating monarch butterflies settle in the forested massifs of the country’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, roughly 100 kilometers west of Mexico City. Having flown south for eight months, beginning their journey in the northern United States or southern Canada, they hibernate here for the winter before mating in the spring.

After flying for more than 4,000 kilometers, the butterflies land in the oyamel fir trees of the Ejido el Rosario region, where for weeks they congregate, protecting themselves from the wind and the cold nights. Without these trees, the butterflies would not be able to survive their exhausting journey.

The oyamel fir grows in a very small climatic space, one that is humid yet cold. “Its distribution is very limited to the highest mountains in central Mexico,” says Cuauhtémoc Sáenz Romero, a professor at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Sáenz Romero is the lead author of a recent study that anticipates that this forest will gradually deteriorate to the point of disappearance as a result of climate change, endangering the butterflies.

For the roosting monarchs, the oyamel canopy acts as a buffer to the local temperature and humidity, Sáenz Romero explains. “During the day, under the shade of the oyamel, the environment stays 5 degrees Celsius cooler than outside. It is a protection against high temperatures. At night it is the other way around, resulting in a 5 degree Celsius warmer environment.” The density of the canopy also protects against winter rain. “If the temperature drops below zero and the butterflies get their wings wet, they can freeze. That’s why these trees represent such a particular habitat,” says Sáenz Romero.

After awaking from hibernation and mating in central Mexico, the insects fly north to Texas in the United States, where they lay their eggs. “For all this, they need energy reserves to return, which they don’t have to spend on fighting the cold in the wintering sites,” he explains.

This fine balance for their survival is provided only by the oyamel firs. However, some models indicate that a climate conducive to them will have disappeared in this area by 2090. “Due to rising temperatures, we are observing a process of forest decline,” says Sáenz Romero, who is leading an initiative to establish new overwintering sites for the monarchs, which are on the red list of threatened species.

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December 10, 2024