The Highlights
Nigeria’s Chaotic Rise as the Tech Heart of Africa. There’s so much to think about in this piece. I have been interested in Lagos for a while given the sheer size, youthfulness, and potential for growth. What I find remarkable is that many of the stated problems with the electrical grid, gasoline scarcity, and water can be addressed with clean technologies like solar, batteries, and desalination. In rich countries, we use these technologies to show we care, but in developing countries they may become a necessity.
Poor countries are at the forefront of technology adoption in many ways. Cryptocurrency and mobile payments are common in much of the developing world. Apparently, Zipline has been running a drone network across all of Rwanda for years.
I’m excited to see how places like Nigeria and Rwanda grow with these new technologies.
Idea Feedback Request: Pneumatic Canopies For Large-Scale Climate Regulation. These are pretty neat. The idea is that if you can maintain a slight pressure differential, you can support a large inflatable structure for mars bases or arcologies. The author suggests that these might be a viable way to provide city-wide climate control to combat some of the damages of climate change. I’m thinking about these in the context of equatorial megacities like Lagos and Mubai that will experience more heatwaves in the coming decades.
Other Stuff
Swift Cities is building gondola systems for cities.
Extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distillation with thermohaline convection. Seems to be a significant improvement on desalination technology, though we will have to wait to see how it scales.
“GELLO is an intuitive and low cost teleoperation device for robot arms that costs less than $300” Thread. Open-source teleoperation systems like these with easy-to-source parts will make it easy to gather a huge amount of robotic data (though note that Eric Jang thinks that we already have enough real world data). See also: “… Eureka, an open-ended agent that designs reward functions for robot dexterity at super-human level”
High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation
Riding Sunbeams with Solar Sails
This podcast with Kevin Esvelt had a lot of interesting stuff in it.
Ultrasound Neuromodulation. Looking forward to new posts in this series.
A feasibility study for a Single-electron nano-chip free-electron laser. I’m not sure how valuable this is in general, but electron beams and free-electron lasers seem pretty useful, so enchippening them seems like a good idea.
Related: Coherent nanophotonic electron accelerator
Nvidia's Computational Lithography Breakthrough. Notice that we are using computers to make better computers.
Microsoft’s Project Silica has developed a way to store data for centuries.
DNA Microscopy: Optics-free Spatio-genetic Imaging by a Stand-Alone Chemical Reaction
From Andy McKenzie:
The expression of clustered protocadherins allows for millions of possible combinations of isoforms on the neuron surface, effectively forming a distinct barcode. A new study using single-cell RNA expression corroborates that the variable isoforms of gamma clustered protocadherins have a very low similarity level between neocortical neurons in mice.
This is pretty useful for mapping the brain!
Grant proposal for Sustainable biomanufacturing of engineered protein nanobubbles for buoyant isolation of protein targets. Neat idea!
A piece on companies trying to automate IVF