Free our feeds🔒➡️🦋 tick…tock for tiktok⏰ exa websets🔍 moondream 2🌝 grok app📱 token property💰🏢 BONG delayed🚀 roboturtle🐢 biophotovoltaics 🌱⚡ #2025.02

Remember those rules we set down at Westphalia back in 1648?

Welcome to this week's Memia scan across AI, emerging tech and the exponentially accelerating future. As always, thanks for being here!

*Sorry that I’m late pressing “send” again this week… I had to drive nearly half the length of Te Wai Pounamu today returning from holiday… normal service resumes from now on for 2025 (whatever “normal” is!)*

ℹ️ Memia sends *very long emails*, best viewed online or in the Substack app.

🗞️Weekly roundup

The most clicked link in last week’s newsletter was the Wikipedia entry for Dead Internet Theory.

🦻Maintaining signal in ever-increasing noise

My newsletter production process continues to evolve after 5 years as I try to keep up with the accelerating pace of change. In particular, absorbing the sheer quantity of tech and AI news across traditional news outlets, digital media, academic media, social media, my own ad hoc scanning and reading feels like a bigger job each week. (This is to be expected as more and more voices are enabled to self-publish, assisted by AI).

Simultaneously, to maintain a high(-enough) ratio of signal over noise, I have been intentionally widening my raw “ingestion” to include a broader range of information sources. Above all, because the Twitter/X feed consistency has deteriorated markedly in recent months (AND I’m hyper-wary of unwittingly amplifying whatever the X algo feeds me) I have been making efforts to ingest and cross-reference information from a more diverse set of feeds.

As a result, you may notice an increased breadth of sources, content and topics in 2025 - hopefully this increases value for you¹.

The challenge: getting the balance right between breadth and depth - I only have a limited amount of time each week to produce these weighty info-dumps - and you certainly have a limited amount of time to read them! Therefore, I’m going to experiment a bit in the first few months of 2025 with the amount of information per story… (obviously if you need to read more, click the link).

If I get it right, the *information density* of the weekly newsletter will be just right for you to spend around 30 minutes per week absorbing your Memia “feed” - and this should bring you up to speed with a sizeable chunk of what has happened internationally at the frontier of information technology and science in the last 7 days.

So, if you have time, 2 feedback questions requested below once you’ve finished with today’s missive:

• (1) How long did you spend reading this week’s newsletter?

• (2) And how much of the newsletter do you estimate you got through?

Thank you!

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🔒➡️🦋Free our feeds

🙉Meta fact check fallout

There’s been much online discussion of Meta’s transparently self-interested move to shut down content moderation and “fact checking” functions in the US (and presumably in other jurisdictions if they can get their way…). Some developments:

• Meta has apparently started its own implementation of “Community Notes” - this screenshot appearing on Threads last week, but no timeline to when it will be live:

  

  (Since when does anything happen first on Threads…? More importantly, will Meta open-source the algorithm which promotes certain notes over others? This still feels like algorithmic capture…)

• As Meta gets ready to phase “civil content” back onto Facebook, Instagram and Threads the company previewed an option for users to dial up or down the amount of politics they see in their Threads feed. (An option for people who want to continue living in a blissfully ignorant bubble of Love Island and cosmetics influencers...)

• This week’s LA fires (see Zeitgeist below) have certainly highlighted high-decibel climate misinformation on social media platforms which undermines public understanding and response to climate-related disasters. The immediate X-sphere cacophony focusing on the sexual orientation of the fire service chief (“DEI”) and deliberate arson (“crime”) drowned out messages about changing climate patterns. Expect far more of this on unfiltered information feeds owned by oligarchs.

• The FT frames Meta and X’s moves as a coming battle between social media and the state: aligning with Trump's return to power and promoting memetic outrage (Elon Musk suddenly hyping UK rape gangs this week is another) are coldly rational moves to push back on international regulation of their businesses, particularly from the EU, rather than any kind of genuine “free speech” intentions.

• This timeless quote from Hannah Arendt struck me as being most contemporary:

  

  @haversham_miss

• Nonetheless, Meta’s move is not without risk: if advertisers respond in the same way as they did with X, Meta’s ad business could face an exodus…

• Tim Warren is also on-point, with his post on LinkedIn getting blocked until it had the word “Parody” pasted over it:

Tim Warren

🔒➡️🦋Free our feeds

In response to this, BlueSky fronted a new campaign titled Free Our Feeds with support from many well-known open technology advocates, notably:

“With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square.

Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control. But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app.

We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.”

US$30M is chump change in this game… but worth considering donating to see what they can come up with.

⏰Tick…tock for TikTok

The US Supreme Court appears poised to uphold last year’s legislation requiring TikTok to either divest from Chinese owner ByteDance or face a complete US ban by January 19th, 1 day before Trump’s inauguration:

• The ban would affect 100+ million US users and thousands of businesses dependent on platform

• Competitors, in particular Meta, could win big, gaining millions of users’ engagement and advertising revenue

• Alternatively, there are plenty of oligarch buyers in the wings - and surely Trump’s new buddy Zuck would be happy to jump in and purchase TikTok at the last second… can you imagine?

• Opportunity abounds…. Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu (RedNote) has surged to the #1 position on the US as the TikTok ban looms…

• ByteDance has repeatedly stated that TikTok’s US operation is not up for sale - and has recently promoted Lemon8 — another video sharing app it owns — which it could push as a viral replacement for TikTok if the ban goes ahead. That would certainly be one way of staying ahead of regulators…

• Not to forget that Jeffrey Yass, one of Bytedance’s largest shareholders, is a mega-donor to Trump’s political campaign, allegedly behind his policy about-face on TikTok less than a year ago after which Trump committed to “saving” the app, but with no specifics… Chaos everywhere, already.

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🎮CES highlights

CES 2025 came and went… here are the highlights I spotted in my feed.

🖥️Nvidia at CES

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used his CES keynote to make the usual raft of gamechanging announcements… consolidating Nvidia’s position at the fulcrum of 3D simulation and robotics (“physical AI”).

• GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs The new GeForce RTX 50 Series lineup, powered by the new Blackwell architecture ranging from the RTX 5070 (priced at US$549) up to the flagship RTX 5090 (US$1,999)

• NVIDIA Cosmos Platform As covered briefly last week, COSMOS is an open-source “generative world foundation model” platform designed to accelerate the development of "physical AI", autonomous vehicles, factories, and robots. Cosmos generates lifelike synthetic training data to make training robotics far more efficient and cost-effective (on Nvidia hardware, naturally…)

• Digital Humans AI foundation models for RTX PCs feature AI Blueprints for crafting digital humans, podcasts, images and videos.

• Project DIGITS The biggest surprise of CES was Project DIGITS:

  “The world’s smallest supercomputer“

  A high-end personal computer powered by NVIDIA's GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, aimed at AI researchers, data scientists, and enthusiasts. Starting at US$3,000 and available in May, it allows users to run LLMs with up to 200 billion parameters locally, facilitating more decentralised AI deployment without needing cloud infrastructure.

  

• Automotive partnerships with Toyota and Aurora for autonomous cars and shipping trucks running Nvidia DriveOS.

💡Also at CES:

Just a taster of what else was on show this year… everything pretty incremental:

• World's smallest ebike motor Urtopia unveiled the Titanium Zero e-bike, weighing only 10.8kg, could transform ebike industry with unprecedented power-to-weight ratio

  

  Urtopia

• XPeng modular car with “detachable” aircraft: XPeng Aeroht showcased its split-type flying car 'Land Aircraft Carrier':

• Two-second battery swap Instead of waiting hours for your phone’s battery to recharge, Swippitt's Instant Power System (IPS) just swaps a battery shaped as a phone protection case. Only available for iPhones currently but I can see this catching on…

  

  Swippit

• And… Realbotix. Ew. (But imagine 1 year from now…)

Lots of other CES 2025 coverage online… notable threads of highlights:

• The OG Robert Scoble:

  

  @scobleizer

• Gina Acosta:

  

  @Ginacostag_:

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📈The week in AI

The week's AI news and releases

📜AI policy news

• AI diffusion controls One week before the end of the presidential term, the outgoing Biden administration unveiled a controversial new 3-tier framework for controlling AI chip exports. The resulting map is as clear a depiction of the US’ geopolitical view of the world as any — 20 key allied states would face no restrictions on accessing chips, while other countries would face caps of “50,000 advanced GPUs per country”. “Countries of concern” … no GPUs for you:

  

  Bloomberg (what did Portugal, Switzerland and Iceland do wrong!?! And… Greenland but not Denmark…)

  The proposed rules already raised a strong backlash among both governments and the tech sector:

  • European Commission Joint Statement by Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen and Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič:

    “We are concerned about the US measures adopted today restricting access to advanced AI chip exports for selected EU Member States and their companies. We believe it is also in the US economic and security interest that the EU buys advanced AI chips from the US without limitations: we cooperate closely, in particular in the field of security, and represent an economic opportunity for the US, not a security risk.”

  • Meanwhile Ned Finkle, vice president of external affairs at Nvidia (whose business will be most affected), put out a strongly-worded statement that the proposed framework would hurt innovation without achieving the stated national security goals:

    "While cloaked in the guise of an “anti-China” measure, these rules would do nothing to enhance U.S. security. The new rules would control technology worldwide, including technology that is already widely available in mainstream gaming PCs and consumer hardware. Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead."

  There is 120 day period before the restrictions come into force… expect the incoming Trump administration to repeal much of this and the rest of the Biden administration’s AI policies.

  
  Further coverage: TechXPlore | FT | TechCrunch

• AI is already reshaping the US An FT article about how the rapid advancement of AI is reshaping the US economy and workforce in unprecedented ways, driving economic growth but threatening widespread job disruption:

  • AI's impact on productivity could widen economic gaps between US and other nations

  • However, 85% of the US labour market faces AI disruption, potentially triggering social and political instability

  • Economic anxiety from AI job displacement may lead to major societal shifts

• UK AI strategy revamp

  • After pulling up the reins on the previous Tory government’s AI initiatives, the new UK’s new Labour administration unveiled its own ambitious national AI strategy featuring a number of key initiatives:

    • A multibillion-pound investment in computing infrastructure, pledging to increase “sovereign computing power” 20-fold by 2030 (that’s quite a flat line relative to the US…)

      • A recent report by UK venture capitalist Matt Clifford advocated for reaching the equivalent of 100,000 GPUs in government-owned capacity by 2030

      • This sovereign compute investment complements the >£25 billion of private sector investment in new UK data centres announced since July.

    • Creation of special zones with fast-tracked planning approvals for data centres

    • An “AI Energy Council” to help accelerate renewable energy solutions

    • Development of a “National Data Library” using public sector data for AI model training, to support academic research and improve public services delivery

    • (Plus the usual headings: skills, talent, regulation….etc etc etc)

• South Korea

  • At the end of December, lost in the haze of domestic political turmoil, the South Korean government passed the "Basic Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence and the Establishment of Trust" becoming the second jurisdiction after the EU to implement comprehensive AI legislation.

🏢AI industry news

A few notable industry moves and shimmies…

• Blaize, an AI chip startup founded by former Intel engineers in 2011, is set to become the first AI chip company to go public in 2025 through a SPAC deal on NASDAQ, with US$400 million pipeline and defense contracts showing emerging market demand for AI chips in physical devices.

• Gassy AI as previously anticipated, the AI boom is driving a massive expansion of US gas power plants, driving construction of 80 new gas plants by 2030. Tech companies choosing gas over renewables due to reliability needs for AI operations. How will the tech giants reconcile their “carbon negative” commitments against all those extra GHG emissions…??

• Microsoft is making a historic US$3 billion investment in India to expand its cloud computing and AI operations, the company's largest financial commitment to the country to date.

• Meta faces more legal scrutiny after newly unredacted court documents revealed its use of Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious “pirated” book dataset, to train AI language models.

🤯The [AI] world according to OpenAI

OpenAI continues to be the world’s most prominent frontier AI firm, actively shaping the narrative around where the technology is heading with every dramatic up, down, twist and turn of the company’s rollercoaster ride. Some of the latest messaging:

• CEO Sam Altman posted to a new personal blog (taking a leaf out of Dario Amodei’s book) with a piece titled “Reflections”. In it he looks back over the last couple of years at OpenAI since ChatGPT’s wild introduction in November 2022, including his firing - and instant reinstatement - as CEO. It’s worth reading just for his first-person perspective storytelling … but what the media latched on to most were these two paragraphs (my bold):

  “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

  We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.“

  (Reminder: I don’t doubt Sam and the team deeply believe this - but also OpenAI needs the imminent promise of “AGI” (whatever that is) to sustain their hyped up valuation in time for the next investment round… and now “Superintelligence” is the next infinite horizon point beyond that… it seems to be working so far, but conventional investors would be confused by the P&L…)

• Define AGI? Interesting nugget arose around Xmas when it emerged that Microsoft and OpenAI settled on a mutual definition of AGI in a signed agreement last year: stating that OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least US$100 billion in profits. LOL, I wasn’t expecting that.😂

• Economic Blueprint OpenAI unveiled a set of ambitious policy proposals aimed at securing US leadership in the global AI race, particularly against China (clunky DALL-E art on the cover, natch)

  

  This is obviously OpenAI’s attempt to push their agenda in front of the incoming Trump administration… key points (courtesy of Claude):

  • Establish national-level AI security and oversight while preempting state-by-state regulations, similar to how federal highway standards enabled the auto industry's growth. This includes creating standardised safety protocols and export controls for frontier AI models.

  • Create "AI Economic Zones" with streamlined permitting for critical infrastructure (energy, compute, data centers), backed by federal funding and purchase commitments to accelerate development of AI capabilities.

  • Form a "Compact for AI" among US allies to build secure supply chains, shared infrastructure, and common security standards to compete with China's AI infrastructure alliances.

  • Launch regional AI research hubs aligned with local industries (e.g., agriculture in Kansas, energy in Texas) by requiring AI companies to provide compute resources to public universities for workforce development.

  • Implement a national AI education strategy focused on workforce development, with particular emphasis on communities that haven't benefited from previous tech booms.

  • Develop next-generation energy infrastructure through increased federal investment in sustainable power sources, transmission lines, and a "National AI Infrastructure Highway" connecting regional power and communication grids.

🆕 AI releases

• BREAKING: ChatGPT scheduled and repeating tasks:

  

• 🔍Exa the most impressive glimpse so far of what’s arriving soon this year is from AI search startup Exa.ai (first covered in Memia 2023.36 when they were called Metaphor Systems). Founder Will Bryk introduces the concept behind their product Websets - delivering “perfect” search across the Web, returning a list of whatever you’re looking for in a table. If it takes a while to deliver the result, so be it, this is a step-up play from Google or even Perplexity-type search summaries. Imagine what you could do with this:

  Here’s Will in conversation with the team at the Latent Space podcast:

  Beating Google at Search with Neural PageRank and $5M of H200s — with Will Bryk of Exa.ai

• 📱xAI launched a standalone Grok app on the iPhone, going head-to-head with OpenAI’s ChatGPT app by the looks of it. (video via @adcock_brett)

• HeyGen X Sora HeyGen has integrated OpenAI's Sora video model with its avatar technology, creating fully AI-driven virtual characters that can interact naturally with Sora-generated environments

  

  @joshua_xu

  Impressive indeed:

• 🌝Moondream Moondream 2 is an open-source small vision language model designed to run efficiently on edge devices. It includes object detection… and pretty accurate gaze detection too (fun demo video via Reddit/LocalLlama):

• Microsoft Phi-4 Fully open (MIT licence) LLM, only 14B parameters, trained upon:

  “…a blend of synthetic datasets, data from filtered public domain websites, and acquired academic books and Q&A datasets…to ensure that small capable models were trained with data focused on high quality and advanced reasoning.”

  

• AI-designed 3D-printed shoes Syntilay is the world's first fully AI-designed and 3D-printed personalised shoe concept - based upon a design created first using MidJourney and then in 3D using Viscom AI. Before purchase, the company gets you to scan both of your feet using your phone, enabling a personalised custom fit (for each foot). Priced at “only” US$150 (each!)…maybe they need to try a few more AI design prompts… but the overall concept could catch on pretty quickly I think.

  

🔬New AI research

• The EduSent-Dig a new AI model published by Ruiting Bai of Puyang Medical College in China, which measures emotional responses in online learning, enabling better, data-driven course design decisions.

  “The study reveals that emotional experiences are not just peripheral to learning; they are central to it. How students feel about their coursework directly affects their motivation, engagement, and whether they complete a course.”

• DIMON Johns Hopkins researchers have developed DIMON (Diffeomorphic Mapping Operator Learning), a novel AI framework that solves complex maths problems on desktop computers in seconds instead of requiring supercomputers.

• AI for spreadsheets A new AI model delivers a universal solution that can analyse any spreadsheet without task-specific training. Unlike traditional approaches that require custom models for each data analysis task, this research describes a one-size-fits-all solution can instantly interpret various types of tabular data.

• Foundation model of cell transcription GET (general expression transformer) is a groundbreaking foundation model designed to predict and understand gene transcription across 213 human cell types. GET achieves experimental-level accuracy in predicting gene expression in unseen cell types. Notable discoveries made using the model:

  • Identified previously unknown distal regulatory regions in fetal erythroblasts

  • Uncovered a lymphocyte-specific transcription factor interaction involving PAX5

  • Revealed a potential disease mechanism for leukemia-associated mutations

  
  Likely to be a valuable tool for predicting gene expression patterns and regulatory interactions across diverse human cell types in future.

  

  Fu et al

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🔮[Weak] signals

Non-AI tech signals from near and far futures...

🛰️Starlink ascendant

At the start of 2025, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service is supported by the largest satellite constellation by far. As of 9 January, there were 6,912 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 6,874 are working, promising download speeds between 100 Mb/s and 200 Mb/s, and latency as low as 20ms in most locations according to the firm’s website.

• Starlink’s current competitors Oneweb (Eutelsat), Hughes and Viasat offer significantly slower speeds and less geographical coverage.

• ICYMI just before Xmas, telcos in the US and Aotearoa New Zealand announced direct-to-mobile Starlink satellite service - effectively mobile coverage *everywhere*.

• Starlink is now beating local internet prices across African markets with monthly subscriptions being cheaper than leading fixed internet providers in at least 5 of the 16 African countries where it operates.

• Expect to see Starlink remain dominant throughout 2025, despite competition arriving in the form of Amazon Kuiper as it deploys its initial constellation through to 2026, plus the EU’s Iris satellite network, aims to rival Starlink for Europeans by 2030.

🎯ALSO: The SCMP reports how Chinese researchers have simulated tracking and potentially targeting Starlink’s satellite constellation: just 99 Chinese satellites could effectively approach approximately 1,400 Starlink satellites within a 12-hour period, and the tracking satellites could be equipped with lasers and microwaves.

• A clear signal of growing technological competition in space between major powers — and of the risks of relying on satellite networks for critical infrastructure.

💰🏢Token property

Dubai-based DAMAC Group is partnering with blockchain firm MANTRA to tokenize US$1 billion of its real estate portfolio, enabling investors to trade digital tokens representing ownership in physical assets starting in early 2025.

• That’s the same DAMAC that earlier this week US President-elect Donald Trump said had laid out plans for a US$20 billion investment in US data centres.

🦾Robotics and drones

• Shanghai-based NeuroXess has achieved significant BCI(brain-computer interface) breakthroughs with successful clinical trials on two epileptic patients:

  • A 256-channel flexible BCI device enabled a 21-year-old woman to control robot arms, smartphones, smart home systems, and play computer games using only her thoughts, with system delays under 60 milliseconds.

  • Also in a world-first achievement, their BCI system successfully decoded Chinese speech in real-time, reaching 71% accuracy with 142 typical Chinese syllables and delays under 100 milliseconds - a particularly complex feat given Chinese language's unique characteristics requiring multiple brain zone processing.

• Composer Fredrik Gran is experimenting with two KUKA robot arms playing a cello (via @mashable):

• 🐢RoboTurtle Chinese robotics company Beatbot has unveiled the Amphibious RoboTurtle, a bio-inspired autonomous underwater robot that mimics sea turtle movement for marine applications

  

  Beatbot

• Cab-less trucks caught in the wild (video via @BrianRoemmele)

• EngineAI’s latest humanoid robot goes for a walk in Shenzhen (Video via @adcock_brett) who vouches for its authenticity… looks pretty CGI…!

• Home-made VTOL Engineer Tsung Xu made his own VTOL drone which flew 2 laps of his local airfield hitting a max speed of 71 kph. AND he meticulously documents the entire process. Marvellous.

💝Touchy feelies

• Feel Technology makes the HEY bracelet which lets you say, er, “Hey” to your special loved one at a distance. Pretty basic but you can imagine the *features* getting more advanced pretty quickly…. (also what about the polyamorous edition, could get quite complex, eh… imagining someone with 5 bracelets strapped to each arm😂)

⛏️Boring

China's largest dual-shield tunnel boring machine (TBM), the Jianghan Ping'an, has begun operations on the ambitious Yangtze-to-Hanjiang Water Diversion Project, the world's largest water transfer project to address critical water scarcity in China's major northern cities. Completion of the planned 195 kilometers of underground tunnel is expected to be completed in 2031, at a cost of approximately 55.16 billion yuan (about US$7.67 billion). China certainly does BIG infrastructure (but at what environmental cost?)

Kattel et al

⚡Energy generation

• 💨Empire Wind 1 is a massive US$3 billion offshore wind farm spanning 80,000 acres which will be NYC's first direct grid-connected offshore wind farm, set to power 500,000 homes by 2027:

  

  Empire Wind

  

  Empire Wind

• 🌱⚡Biophotovoltaics Researchers have made significant progress in understanding biophotovoltaic (BPV) systems, which combine photosynthetic microbes with electrochemical systems to generate electricity from sunlight and capture CO2.

🔋Energy storage

• Korean scientists have achieved a major breakthrough in lithium-sulphur battery technology, developing a system that can fully charge in just 12 minutes while maintaining exceptional stability - offering 82% capacity retention after 1,000 cycles.

🇯🇵🌙Japan on the moon?

• Japanese startup Ispace is preparing for its second Moon landing attempt with the launch of its Hakuto-R Resilience lander this week, participating in NASA's commercial lunar services programme. A successful mission would achieve Asia's first private Moon landing.

  

  

  iSpace

⚛️ Quantum technology

• Theory Rice University physicists have challenged the fundamental binary classification of particles into bosons and fermions with a mathematical framework suggesting the potential existence of quantum paraparticles.

• Practice The British military is implementing quantum clock technology across its forces over the next five years, a significant advancement beyond traditional atomic clocks:

  

  • Quantum clocks enable GPS-independent navigation when signals are jammed or spoofed.

  • Military systems gain nanosecond precision for enhanced weapon accuracy and cyber defense.

  • Secure communications improve through quantum clock-based high-level encryption capabilities.

💎Mining tech

• Electrokinetic mining for rare earth elements Chinese researchers have developed electrokinetic mining (EKM) technology that reduces environmental impact while achieving over 95% recovery of rare earth elements:

  • Achieves 95% rare earth element recovery while reducing environmental damage by 95%

  • Cuts mining costs through 80% less leaching agent, 70% faster extraction, 60% lower energy use

  • Addresses critical supply of heavy rare earth elements needed for modern technology

🛰️Satellite-based infrastructure maintenance

• Korean researchers have developed a satellite-based infrastructure maintenance system that leverages Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to monitor urban facilities more efficiently, reducing infrastructure maintenance costs by 30% while eliminating monitoring blind spots - in all weathers.

♻️🏭Carbon capture tech

• Use building materials! The construction sector generates 37% of global CO2 emissions. New research in Science has found that using new building materials could cut global CO2 emissions by 16 billion tonnes annually. Switching out concrete and other construction materials for carbon-absorbing alternatives could store the equivalent of half of all human-made carbon emissions in 2021. Key technologies to invest in:

  • Mixing carbon-absorbing substances with concrete and aggregate

  • Modified cement using magnesium oxide and biochar

  • Carbon-storing bricks incorporating biomass fibers and mineral carbonation

  
  The outcomes would be cumulatively huge:

  

  Cumulative CO₂ removals by 2100 as a function of the year of implementation of carbon storing technologies Van Roijen et al

• New carbon capture system pulls CO2 from open air University of Cincinnati researchers have developed a new direct air capture system for removing atmospheric carbon dioxide, capturing atmospheric CO2 using 50% less energy than current methods. The system maintains efficiency for thousands of cycles, making it economically viable.

  

  University of Cincinnati doctoral student James Akinjide holds up a honeycombed block covered in an adsorbent that captures carbon from air. Credit: Andrew Higley (via TechXPlore)

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⏳Zeitgeist

Once around the world trying to walk on the other side of the street to the oligarch mainstream news agenda…

🔥Weather report

Another Yellow dot weather report, 5 major weather events around the world in the last month including wildfires in Los Angeles, southern California.

Kia kaha to everyone affected all around the world.

As for LA: while I’m no fan of either political philosophy taken to its extreme, this meme sums up the choices being felt there right now:

@strike_dr

While mainstream media fixates on the LA Fires…there’s another South American heatwave going on:

@PGDynes

💧Water, water, everywhere

• Global water cycle chaos intensifies The 2024 Global Water Monitor Report reveals alarming trends in global water patterns, with Earth experiencing its fourth consecutive hottest year on record:

  • Record-breaking rainfall extremes are becoming 27-38% more frequent, increasing disaster risks worldwide.

  • Water disasters in 2023 caused 8,700 deaths and US$550 billion in losses.

  • Half of the global population experienced their warmest year ever, accelerating water cycle disruptions.

  

  Global Water Monitor

• Massive underground lake found in Oregon dwarfs Lake Mead A massive underground aquifer newly discovered in Oregon's Cascade Range holds 81 cubic kilometres of water - three times the capacity of Lake Mead! (The US is the luckiest country… water security for a bit longer… although climate change risk as the snowpack melts…)

〽️Deadly Tibet earthquake kills 126

A devastating 7.1 magnitude earthquake has claimed at least 126 lives in the Tibetan city of Shigatse, sending shockwaves that reached Nepal and India. Freezing temperatures are creating an urgent public health crisis. Hardly on the mainstream news at all.

⚔️Rogue state?

A crazy week in mainstream media with the US President-elect continuing to openly push the idea of annexing Greenland, Canada and Panama (not ruling out force if necessary). The FT’s phrasing, not mine: Trump's territorial threats risk turning the US into a rogue state.

• Key insight from that piece: historical patterns show that territorial aggression against smaller nations often leads to major international conflicts.

• Grant Duncan also examines the emerging new geopolitics of force and the hypocrisy of Great Power Politics:

Donald Trump's Pax Americana

“Could something similar [to Greenland] happen to defenceless New Zealand when Great Powers start taking a greater interest in Antarctica?…Meanwhile, the UK is a shadow of its former self, and the EU jumps up and down and says, “They’re breaking the rules! (Remember those rules we set down at Westphalia back in 1648?)”

New rules afoot, it seems…

🚀BONG delayed

Blue Origin's inaugural launch of its 97-metre-tall New Glenn orbital rocket was postponed due to a subsystem issue, reportedly involving ice-clogged gas venting lines, further delaying Blue Origin's entry into the heavy-lift market and start competing with SpaceX's dominance.

From now on we will just use the abbreviation BONG:

@DJSnM

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🎭And then there were memes...

Bit of a random catch this week…

🚶‍♂️😆#internationalsillywalksday

January 7th was International Silly Walk Day, celebrating the timeless Monty Python sketch. Here’s an example from Jan 2013 - the annual Silly Walk March across Brno city centre in the Czech Republic. (Shared by none other than @JohnCleese)

🎬🎭Deepfake biopics are here

A groundbreaking Polish biopic of Vladimir Putin debuted this week, setting a new precedent for using AI face replacement in major film releases.

XYZEI

🎨🌡️Heat-activated art

Two MIT engineers have developed Thermochromorph, a new printing technology that creates dynamic, temperature-responsive artwork capable of switching between two distinct full-colour images at 35°C… which could potentially be scaled up to a billboard which changes colour throughout the day:

(More details here.)

📉Ever decreasing [social] circles

This tweet *burns* 🔥… nothing to see here, honest…🫣

@AISafetyMemes

🙏🙏🙏 Thanks as always to everyone who takes the time to get in touch with links and feedback. Back again, hopefully on time next week!

Namaste

Ben

1. For some time now I have been developing software and AI tools (working title “Memia Sensorium”) which are helping to automate much of the scanning and filtering of links and generating the first draft of content for me to edit. Coming down the road: subscriber access to Sensorium with AI-generated analysis links…