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Before 2020, many of us had never heard of mRNA. With the development of Covid-19 vaccines dependent on this molecule, though, it was all over the news. Covid was the first disease mRNA therapeutics tackled, and given the success of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines at preventing severe cases of the virus, it won’t be the last.

New candidates are lining up, with scientists saying mRNA could make it possible to develop vaccines against diseases that, until now, haven’t had solutions in sight. One of these is HIV; Moderna (whose name, by the way, comes from “modified RNA”) launched trials of its experimental mRNA-based HIV vaccine, called mRNA-1644, this week.

Phase 1

The Phase 1 trial will consist of giving the vaccine to 56 adults who don’t have HIV, with the primary goals being to evaluate its safety and monitor the development of an immune response in participants. In addition to the initial version of the vaccine, Moderna also developed a variant called mRNA-1644-v2-Core (catchy, isn’t it?).

As detailed in Moderna’s August 11 submission to the to the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Trials registry, participants in the trial will be split into four different groups, with one group getting mRNA-1644, a second group getting mRNA-1644-v2, and the remaining two groups getting a mix of both versions. Rather than a blind trial, where people don’t know which injection they’re receiving, participants will be informed of what they’re getting.

The Phase 1 trial is scheduled to take around 10 months. Later-stage trials will likely take much longer than Covid-19 trials did; as Covid spread like wildfire in 2019 and 2020, getting hundreds of thousands sick, it was much easier to give people a vaccine and quickly see who became infected and who didn’t. HIV is, thankfully, far less prevalent, and you can go a lifetime without ever coming into contact with the virus.

mRNA 101

As you’ve probably heard by now through reading up on the Covid vaccines, mRNA-based versions work a little differently than traditional vaccines, which used a weakened piece of virus to expose our bodies to it.

As detailed in an excellent, very-worth-listening-to ‘Gamechangers’ podcast from The Economist, mRNA vaccines are intended to train our cells to create proteins to fight viruses. mRNA is the intermediary between DNA and proteins, and proteins control pretty much everything that happens in our cells. DNA makes mRNA, which in turn acts as a “messenger” and instructs our cells to make proteins.

The “workshop” where the proteins get made is the cell’s ribosome. “This is fundamentally the idea behind RNA therapeutics,” said Natasha Loder, health policy editor at The Economist. “It’s about taking control of that workshop.by essentially manipulating these messengers.”

One of the biggest obstacles scientists had to solve was getting modified RNA into cells without it triggering an immune response. “Part of the mRNA molecule was alerting the immune system, and just by tweaking the structure of one of those molecules, it.was easier for the molecule to sneak in without being recognized,” said Loder.

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania were able to create mRNA that could get past cells’ defenses, but still be recognized by the ribosome. For the Covid vaccine, this entailed getting the ribosome to start cranking out that spike protein.

24 to 48 hours after getting a shot of the vaccine, the recipient’s cells start to manufacture the spike protein. The body tags it as an invader and launches an immune response. Then, when the person comes in contact with the real virus, their cells are already prepared to fight the infection before it takes over.

The HIV virus is a bit more complicated. It creates new strains at a rapid rate, meaning that a vaccine targeting a single surface protein wouldn’t work. Instead, this vaccine’s aim will be to generate broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) that are effective against many variants.

A New Frontier

Much of the vacc...

Vaccine and drug development, artificial intelligence, transport and logistics, climate science—these are all areas that stand to be transformed by the development of a full-scale quantum computer. And there has been explosive growth in quantum computing investment over the past decade.

Yet current quantum processors are relatively small in scale, with fewer than 100 qubits— the basic building blocks of a quantum computer. Bits are the smallest unit of information in computing, and the term qubits stems from “quantum bits.”

While early quantum processors have been crucial for demonstrating the potential of quantum computing, realizing globally significant applications will likely require processors with upwards of a million qubits.

Our new research tackles a core problem at the heart of scaling up quantum computers: how do we go from controlling just a few qubits, to controlling millions? In research published today in Science Advances, we reveal a new technology that may offer a solution.

What Exactly Is a Quantum Computer?

Quantum computers use qubits to hold and process quantum information. Unlike the bits of information in classical computers, qubits make use of the quantum properties of nature, known as “superposition” and “entanglement,” to perform some calculations much faster than their classical counterparts.

Unlike a classical bit, which is represented by either 0 or 1, a qubit can exist in two states (that is, 0 and 1) at the same time. This is what we refer to as a superposition state.

Demonstrations by Google and others have shown even current, early-stage quantum computers can outperform the most powerful supercomputers on the planet for a highly specialized (albeit not particularly useful) task—reaching a milestone we call quantum supremacy.

Google’s quantum computer, built from superconducting electrical circuits, had just 53 qubits and was cooled to a temperature close to -273℃ in a high-tech refrigerator. This extreme temperature is needed to remove heat, which can introduce errors to the fragile qubits. While such demonstrations are important, the challenge now is to build quantum processors with many more qubits.

Major efforts are underway at UNSW Sydney to make quantum computers from the same material used in everyday computer chips: silicon. A conventional silicon chip is thumbnail-sized and packs in several billion bits, so the prospect of using this technology to build a quantum computer is compelling.

The Control Problem

In silicon quantum processors, information is stored in individual electrons, which are trapped beneath small electrodes at the chip’s surface. Specifically, the qubit is coded into the electron’s spin. It can be pictured as a small compass inside the electron. The needle of the compass can point north or south, which represents the 0 and 1 states.

To set a qubit in a superposition state (both 0 and 1), an operation that occurs in all quantum computations, a control signal must be directed to the desired qubit. For qubits in silicon, this control signal is in the form of a microwave field, much like the ones used to carry phone calls over a 5G network. The microwaves interact with the electron and cause its spin (compass needle) to rotate.

Currently, each qubit requires its own microwave control field. It is delivered to the quantum chip through a cable running from room temperature down to the bottom of the refrigerator at close to -273℃. Each cable brings heat with it, which must be removed before it reaches the quantum processor.

At around 50 qubits, which is state-of-the-art today, this is difficult but manageable. Current refrigerator technology can cope with the cable heat load. However, it represents a huge hurdle if we’re to use systems with a million qubits or more.

The Solution Is ‘Global’ Control

An elegant solution to the challenge of how to deliver control signals to millions of spin qubits was proposed in the late 1990s. The idea of “global control” was simple: broadca...

At the end of 2020, Boston Dynamics released a spirits-lifting, can’t-watch-without-smiling video of its robots doing a coordinated dance routine. Atlas, Spot, and Handle had some pretty sweet moves, though if we’re being honest, Atlas was the one (or, in this case, two) that really stole the show.

A new video released yesterday has the bipedal humanoid robot stealing the show again, albeit in a way that probably won’t make you giggle as much. Two Atlases navigate a parkour course, complete with leaping onto and between boxes of different heights, shimmying down a balance beam, and throwing synchronized back flips.

The big question that may be on many viewers’ minds is whether the robots are truly navigating the course on their own—making real-time decisions about how high to jump or how far to extend a foot—or if they’re pre-programmed to execute each motion according to a detailed map of the course.

As engineers explain in a second new video and accompanying blog post, it’s a combination of both.

Atlas is equipped with RGB cameras and depth sensors to give it “vision,” providing input to its control system, which is run on three computers. In the dance video linked above and previous videos of Atlas doing parkour, the robot wasn’t sensing its environment and adapting its movements accordingly (though it did make in-the-moment adjustments to keep its balance).

But in the new routine, the Boston Dynamics team says, they created template behaviors for Atlas. The robot can match these templates to its environment, adapting its motions based on what’s in front of it. The engineers had to find a balance between “long-term” goals for the robot—i.e., making it through the whole course—and “short-term” goals, like adjusting its footsteps and posture to keep from keeling over. The motions were refined through both computer simulations and robot testing.

“Our control team has to create algorithms that can reason about the physical complexity of these machines to create a broad set of high energy and coordinated behavior,” said Atlas team lead Scott Kuindersma. “It’s really about creating behaviors at the limits of the robot’s capabilities and getting them all to work together in a flexible control system.”

The limits of the robot’s capabilities were frequently reached while practicing the new parkour course, and getting a flawless recording took many tries. The explainer video includes bloopers of Atlas falling flat on its face—not to mention on its head, stomach, and back, as it under-rotates for flips, crosses its feet while running, and miscalculates the distance it needs to cover on jumps.

I know it’s a robot, but you can’t help feeling sort of bad for it, especially when its feet miss the platform (by a lot) on a jump and its whole upper body comes crashing onto said platform, while its legs dangle toward the ground, in a move that would severely injure a human (and makes you wonder if Atlas survived with its hardware intact).

Ultimately, Atlas is a research and development tool, not a product the company plans to sell commercially (which is probably good, because despite how cool it looks doing parkour, I for one would be more than a little wary if I came across this human-shaped hunk of electronics wandering around in public).

“I find it hard to imagine a world 20 years from now where there aren’t capable mobile robots that move with grace, reliability, and work alongside humans to enrich our lives,” Kuindersma said. “But we’re still in the early days of creating that future.”

Image Credit: Boston Dynamics

It’s the dog days of summer. You bite down on a plump, chilled orange. Citrus juice explodes in your mouth in a refreshing, tingling burst. Ahh.

And congratulations—you’ve just been vaccinated for the latest virus.

That’s one of the goals of molecular farming, a vision to have plants synthesize medications and vaccines. Using genetic engineering and synthetic biology, scientists can introduce brand new biochemical pathways into plant cells—or even whole plants—essentially turning them into single-use bioreactors.

The whole idea has a retro-futuristic science fiction vibe. First conceived of in 1986, molecular farming got its boost three decades later, when the FDA approved the first—and only—plant-derived therapeutic protein for humans to treat Gaucher disease, a genetic disorder that prevents people from breaking down fats.

But to Drs. Hugues Fausther-Bovendo and Gary Kobinger at Université Laval, Quebec and Galveston National Laboratory, Texas, respectively, we’re just getting started. In a new perspective article published last week in Science, the duo argues that plants have long been an overlooked resource for biomanufacturing.

Plants are cheap to grow and resist common forms of contamination that haunt other drug manufacturing processes, while being sustainable and environmentally friendly. The resulting therapeutic proteins or vaccines are often stored inside their seeds or other plant cell components, which can be easily dehydrated for storage—no ultra-cold freezers or sterile carriers required.

They also work fast. In just three weeks, the Canadian company Medicago produced a candidate Covid-19 vaccine that mimics the outer layer of the virus to stimulate an immune response. The vaccine is now in late-stage clinical trials.

Even wilder, plants themselves can be turned into edible medicines. Rather than insulin shots, people with diabetes could just eat a tomato. Instead of getting a flu jab, you could munch on an ear of fresh, sweet corn. The draw of molecular farming encouraged DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to finance three massive facilities to optimize plant-made vaccines.

And if we ever make it to Mars, plants are far easier to cultivate than setting up a whole pharmaceutical operation.

“Molecular farming could have a considerable impact on both human and animal health,” the authors said.

What’s the Current Alternative?

Hijacking other lifeforms to make drugs isn’t new.

Take the common yeast, a scientist’s favorite medium for genetic engineering and a brewer’s best friend. Using little circular “spaceships” that carry new genes, called vectors, scientist can create brand-new biochemical pathways into these critters. In one recent study, a Stanford team made 34 modifications to the yeast’s DNA to chemically assemble a molecule with widespread effects on human muscles, glands, and tissue.

Other mediums for synthesizing drugs, antibodies, and vaccines have relied on a rainbow of hosts, from the exotic—insect cells—to the slightly more mundane, such as eggs. The flu vaccine, for example, is cultured in chicken eggs, which supports the growth of an attenuated version of the virus to help stimulate the immune system. An upcoming Covid-19 vaccine is doing the same.

But if you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of home brewing gone bad—beer, wine, kombucha, or otherwise—you’ll have a visceral feel of the dangers involved. Although using yeast or mammalian cells for biomanufacturing is the norm today, it’s a costly operation. Cells fill massive, rotating jugs inside strictly-controlled facilities. Operations are under constant threat of zoonotic pathogens—dangerous, disease-causing bugs that could waste a whole tank.

A Plant-Based Alternative

Using plants as replacement biofactories started with a simple calculation: they’re cheap and easy to grow. Plants only require three things: light, water, and soil. Add in fertilizer if you’re feeling fancy. Greenhouses, if needed, are still far more econom...

Batteries and renewable energy are helping to decarbonize large swathes of the modern world, but they look less likely to help in areas like industrial heating, long-haul heavy transportation, and long-duration energy storage. Some are touting hydrogen as a potentially emissions-free alternative fuel that could fill the gap.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which passed the Senate last week, features $8 billion earmarked to create four regional hydrogen hubs, as well as support for further research and development to accelerate clean hydrogen technology.

However, building out a national hydrogen economy that is both competitive and clean will not be easy, say the authors of a commentary article in Joule. They outline the main challenges the effort faces and the key ingredients that will be required to support the production, transport, storage, and use of clean hydrogen.

The world already produces 70 million metric tons of hydrogen every year, most of which is used to make petrochemicals and synthesize ammonia for fertilizer. It’s primarily derived from fossil fuels by subjecting methane to steam, high heat, and pressure to break it into hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and costs about $1 per kilogram.

Today, that CO2 is simply released into the atmosphere, so this so-called “gray hydrogen” is not especially good for the environment. But there are proposals to capture the CO2 using carbon capture technology and store it deep underground. This so-called “blue carbon” costs 50 percent more, but is touted as a clean source of hydrogen.

In reality, the authors note that only 70 to 80 percent of CO2 can be reliably captured. A cleaner alternative is to use renewable electricity to power electrolyzers that split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but today that “green hydrogen” costs three to four times as much as gray hydrogen.

One less-developed but potentially promising approach is to heat methane in the absence of oxygen. This produces “turquoise hydrogen” and solid carbon as a byproduct. This black carbon can be sold for about $1 a kilogram, though the market for it is fairly small and would quickly be saturated if this became the primary method of hydrogen production.

To compete with gray hydrogen and fossil fuels, all of these approaches would need to hit a cost of $1 per kilogram, say the authors. At that price, clean hydrogen would become viable to replace gray hydrogen in chemical production and gasoline for transportation applications. To break into industrial heating it would probably have to drop below $0.40 per kilogram, though.

On top of that, we also need to find ways to transport and store huge amounts of hydrogen. This presents a major challenge, because the amount of energy in a given volume of hydrogen is a third of that in natural gas. That means either the pressure it’s stored at or the speed at which it’s pumped will need to be boosted three-fold, the authors say.

Building a whole new network of high-pressure hydrogen pipelines and storage tanks would be a massive investment. Instead, we could rely on the existing natural gas and electricity infrastructure to transport the feedstock for making clean hydrogen—electricity and methane—to smaller local hydrogen generation facilities.

According to the article’s authors, the US Geological Survey should be charged with scanning the country for underground caverns where large amounts of hydrogen could be stored. Also, more research and development should go into proposals to convert hydrogen into chemicals that are easier to store, such as ammonia, light alcohols, and metal hydrides.

Some of the steps required to make this happen have already been taken. Earlier this year, the US Energy Secretary launched an initiative to bring the cost of clean hydrogen down to $1 per kilogram by the end of the decade.

Beyond that, the government also needs to support technology demonstrators to help companies test out key parts of a future hydrogen infrastructure. Federal or ...

In the beginning, computer programmers translated their desires into the language of machines. Now, those machines are becoming conversant in the language of their programmers. OpenAI’s newly released Codex, a machine learning algorithm that can parse everyday language and computer code, sits between these worlds.

This week, in a blog post and demo, OpenAI showed off Codex’s skills.

The algorithm can turn written prompts into computer code with, at times, impressive results. OpenAI believes Codex will prove a worthy sidekick for coders, accelerating their work.

What Is Codex?

Codex is a descendent of OpenAI’s GPT-3, a sprawling natural-language machine learning algorithm released last year. After digesting and analyzing billions of words, GPT-3 could write (sometimes eerily) passable text with nary but a simple prompt.

But when OpenAI released GPT-3 to developers, they quickly learned it could do more. One fascinating discovery was that GPT-3 could write simple code from prompts. But it wasn’t very good at it, so the team decided to fine-tune the algorithm with coding in mind from the start. They took a version of GPT-3 and trained it on billions of lines of publicly available code, and Codex was born.

According OpenAI, Codex is proficient in over a dozen computer languages, but it’s particularly good at Python and, of course, everyday language. These skills in hand, Codex can digest a prompt like, “Add this image of a rocket ship,” and spit out the code necessary to embed an image (provided by the programmer) on the screen.

In a demo, the OpenAI team showed how to code a simple video game—from blank screen to playable—using naught but a series of chatty prompts.

The demos are impressive, but Codex is not about to replace programmers.

OpenAI researchers say Codex currently completes around 37 percent of requests. That’s an improvement on an earlier iteration called Copilot, a kind of autocomplete for coders released as a product on Github, which had a success rate of 27 percent. But it took some manual labor in the form of supervised learning with labeled data sets to get it there. (GPT-3, by contrast, was trained on unlabeled data.) So, there’s room for improvement.

And like any demo, it’s difficult to predict how useful Codex will be in the real world. OpenAI acknowledges this is just a start, calling it a “taste of the future.” They expect it will get better over time, but part of their motivation for this week’s release was to get Codex into the hands of developers, a strategy that paid off richly for GPT-3.

Even with improvements, OpenAI doesn’t see tools like this as a replacement for coders. Rather, they hope to speed up programming and remove some of the drudgery. In the live demo, for example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman casually noted Codex completed a step in seconds that would have taken him a half hour back when he was programming.

Further, writing good software isn’t only about the actual coding bit, they suggest. “Programming is really about having a dream,” OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman told Wired, “It’s about having this picture of what you want to build, understanding your user, asking yourself, ‘How ambitious should we make this thing, or should we get it done by the deadline?’i” Codex doesn’t come up with what to design or how to design it. It will need significant direction, oversight, and quality control for the foreseeable future. (Which is true of its sibling GPT-3 as well.)

For now, these kinds of programs will be more like sidekicks as opposed to the story’s hero. They may also be a next step in the long-running evolution of computer languages.

In a companion op-ed in TechCrunch, Brockman and Hadi Partovi, founder and CEO of Code.org, emphasize how far we’ve come from the days when a select few scientists laboriously programmed computers with punch cards and machine code. In a long progression, computer language has evolved from what suited machines to what suits us.

“With Al-generated code, one can imagine a...

Five years ago, a plane called the Solar Impulse 2 flew around the world without using any liquid fuel. As you might guess from the name, the plane was solar-powered. It wasn’t the fastest—it took about almost a year and a half to circumnavigate the globe, traveling 26,718 miles and stopping in 17 different cities. But it was a meaningful proof of concept, and a technological feat.

Now Solar Impulse 2 has a successor, with equally ambitious plans on the horizon. Skydweller, as the new plane has been appropriately dubbed, relies on the same basic technology as Solar Impulse 2, but will be autonomous and able to fly continuously for up to 90 days. And by autonomous, I mean there won’t even be an option to have a pilot sit in the cockpit and direct the plane, because there is no cockpit.

That frees up extra space that can be used for other purposes, though. Skydweller will be able to carry payloads of up to 800 pounds—and they’ll most likely consist of radar and camera equipment, as the US Navy is funding a demo of the aircraft as a surveillance tool for monitoring the whereabouts of ships.

Talk about an (unrelenting) eye in the sky. But the fact that it will stay aloft for months on end is, of course, Skydweller’s main advantage.

The solar aircraft is made by a Spanish-American aerospace startup called Skydweller Aero. Based in Oklahoma City, the company raised $32 million in its Series A funding round, led by Italian aerospace firm Leonardo.

“For us, if you’re flying 90 days with one aircraft, that’s two takeoffs and landings versus . hundreds,” Skydweller Aero co-founder John Parkes told Aviation Today. “Being able to fly thousands of miles, persist over an area for 30-60 days and fly back is a differentiator. It’s a huge cost savings to the US government when you look at the whole cost of doing a lot of the national security missions that we have.”

The plane will stay airborne thanks to 2,900 square feet of photovoltaic cells that will blanket its surface, generating up to 2 kilowatts of electricity. As a backup in case it’s cloudy for a few days in a row, the plane will also be equipped with hydrogen fuel cells (maybe they’re not as “extremely silly” as Elon Musk thinks).

With a wingspan of 236 feet (that’s just a bit larger than Boeing’s 747, whose wingspan measures 224 feet), Skydweller will fly the friendly skies at altitudes of 30,000-45,000 feet.

“There are certainly differentiated missions that Skydweller can do that no other aircraft can do, but the core of it really is doing things that we do today better, smarter, cheaper, more effectively,” Parkes said. “And that is communications—being a node in the sky, whether for the military and first responder market or for the telecom world.”

The company plans to start testing its aircraft in autonomous takeoff, landing, and flight this year. Once those tests are complete, they’ll be followed by long-endurance testing, with the goal of hitting at least 90 continuous days of flight.

Image Credit: Skydweller Aero

Consciousness is arguably the most important scientific topic there is. Without consciousness, there would after all be no science. But while we all know what it is like to be conscious—meaning that we have personal awareness and respond to the world around us—it has turned out to be near impossible to explain exactly how it arises from the hardware of the brain. This is dubbed the “hard” problem of consciousness.

Solving the hard problem is a matter of great scientific curiosity. But so far, we haven’t even solved the “easy” problems of explaining which brain systems give rise to conscious experiences in general—in humans or other animals. This is of huge clinical importance. Disorders of consciousness are a common consequence of severe brain injury and include comas and vegetative states. And we all experience temporary loss of awareness when under anesthesia during an operation.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, we have now shown that conscious brain activity seems to be linked to the brain’s “pleasure chemical,” dopamine.

The fact that the neural mechanisms that underpin consciousness disorders are difficult to characterize makes these conditions hard to diagnose and treat. Brain imaging has established that a network of interconnected brain regions, known as the default mode network, is involved in self-awareness. This network has also been shown to be impaired in anesthesia and after brain damage that causes disorders of consciousness. Importantly, it seems to be crucial to conscious experience.

Some patients, however, may seem to be unconscious when they in fact are not. In a landmark study in 2006, a team of researchers showed that a 23-year-old woman, who suffered severe brain trauma and was thought to be in a vegetative state following a traffic accident, had signs of awareness. The patient was asked to imagine playing tennis during a brain scan (fMRI) and the scientists saw that regions of the brain involved in motor processes activated in response.

Similarly, when she was asked to imagine walking through the rooms of her home, regions of the brain involved in spatial navigation, such as the posterior parietal cortex, became active. The pattern of activation that she showed was similar to that of healthy people, and she was deemed to have awareness even though that wasn’t noticeable in classical clinical assessment (not involving brain scans).

Other research has found similar effects in other vegetative state patients. This year, a group of scientists, writing in the journal Brain, warned that one in five patients in vegetative states may in fact be conscious enough to follow commands during brain scans—though there is no consensus on this.

The Brain Chemical Involved in Consciousness

So how do we help these people? The brain is more than just a congregation of different areas. Brain cells also rely on a number of chemicals to communicate with other cells, enabling a number of brain functions. Before our study, there was already some evidence that dopamine, well known for its role in reward, also plays a role in disorders of consciousness.

For example, one study showed that dopamine release in the brain is impaired in minimally conscious patients. Moreover, a number of small-scale studies have shown that patients’ consciousness can improve by giving them drugs that act through dopamine.

The dopamine source in the brain is called the ventral tegmental area (VTA). It is from this region that dopamine is released to most areas in the cortex. In our recent study, we showed that the function of this source of the brain’s dopamine is impaired in patients with disorders of consciousness and also in healthy people after the administration of an anesthetic.

In healthy people, we found that VTA function was restored after withdrawal of sedation. And people with reduced consciousness who improved over time also regained some of their VTA function. In addition, the dysfunction in d...

Last week, NASA released a timelapse video showing construction of a supersonic jet called the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST or “son of Concorde” for short). The experimental aircraft is designed to fly faster than the speed of sound without producing the telltale sonic booms that were part of what led to the Concorde being retired back in 2003.

Now there’s an even faster plane under development. Atlanta-based aerospace startup Hermeus just announced a $60 million contract with the US Air Force to flight test the company’s Quarterhorse, a hypersonic aircraft that can fly at Mach 5 speeds. That’s over 3,000 miles per hour, a speed that could deliver passengers from the eastern US to western Europe in 90 minutes.

Development of the aircraft isn’t focused solely around military use; Hermeus is intent on bringing innovation to commercial flight, too. “While this partnership with the US Air Force underscores US Department of Defense interest in hypersonic aircraft, when paired with Hermeus’ partnership with NASA announced in February 2021, it is clear that there are both commercial and defense applications for what we’re building,” said Hermeus CEO and co-founder AJ Piplica.

Quarterhorse uses the company’s turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) engine, which is modeled after GE’s small single-shaft J85 turbojet engine. The TBCC uses a conventional turbojet to get the plane up to a high speed, but then a simpler air-breathing engine takes over. As shown in the depiction of the Quarterhorse’s engine layout, the engine uses the plane’s forward motion to draw in air.

Hermeus did ground testing of its TBCC engine in 2020 after raising $16 million. The company plans to cut costs of testing via autonomous technology and reusable systems, vertical integration, and being “hardware-rich.”

When the flight test campaign is complete, Quarterhorse will be the fastest reusable aircraft in the world—and it’s just the first in a series of autonomous high-speed aircraft the company plans to develop.

Hermeus was founded in 2018 and is venture-backed. Piplica previously worked on hypersonic flight testing at Generation Orbit, and other members of the team came from Blue Origin and SpaceX.

Given the dire outlook issued this week in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the future of air travel seems tenuous. We’re certainly not going to go back to riding boats across oceans, and fully-electric aircraft are still decades away—but with its high emissions, air travel will come under increasing scrutiny in the next few years, and there will be pressure to minimize flight as a mode of transportation.

If anti-flight sentiment picks up speed (pun intended), it will be hard to justify going from New York to London in 90 minutes on a commercial flight. However, the military applications of hypersonic flight mean testing and development of the technology isn’t going away anytime soon.

Image Credit: Hermeus

The group of Japanese centenarians had seemingly magical health powers.

Sure, with an average age of 107, they’re among the longest-living humans on Earth. But they were also shockingly healthy, protected from chronic diseases that inevitably haunt us as we age: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cancer.

This month, a Japanese study uncovered one piece of their secret. The key to their healthy longevity lies in their guts, or more specifically, in trillions of microbes thriving synergistically as their hosts gracefully age.

What stood out wasn’t the amount of gut bugs. Rather, it was their composition. The gut microbiome is an entire ecosystem, composed of a dazzling number of microbial “species,” each digesting food and pumping out biomolecules. By comparing the gut microbiomes of 160 centenarians with those of the elderly and young, the team found that centenarians had a particular signature to the strains of bacteria in their microbiome.

One strain particularly stood out. Basically living antibiotic factories, the gut bugs readily synthesized a chemical that, when tested in the lab, could knock out one of the toughest infections that causes severe diarrhea and even death. The nature of the superpower chemical raised eyebrows: a type of bile acid, an unglamorous, rather boring bodily fluid commonly known for digesting fat.

“Bile acids are emerging as a new class of ‘enterohormones’ beyond their classic role in fat digestion and absorption,” said Dr. Kim Barrett at UC San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Rather than “a mere consequence of aging,” these changes in the gut microbiome could potentially protect centenarians against infections and other environmental stressors, helping them maintain their health with age, the authors said. And if bile acids are key, we could conceivably test these chemicals for both battling infection and for longevity.

“This work seems timely, interesting, and important, and to have been carefully conducted. It is certainly conceivable that manipulating concentrations of specific bile acids, whether microbially or by giving them directly, could exert health benefits,” said Barrett.

Gut and Longevity

It’s weird to think that microbes in our gastrointestinal (GI) tract can contribute to longevity. But their impact on our well-being is one of the most mind-boggling health discoveries of the past decade.

The gut is basically an Amazonian forest, densely populated by microbes of all sorts—bacteria, fungi, and viruses. In a healthy human, these are not just benign and along for the ride; they live with us in harmony. The gut bugs capture food as it moves through our alimentary canal, taking in nutrients and secreting their own metabolites—basically, microbial poop.

Similar to animal species, each strain of microbe has its own quirks. Some strains chomp on steak remnants and dose out chemicals that have been linked to inflammatory conditions like heart disease. Others can cause obesity or contribute to Type 2 diabetes. Still others have a direct link to the brain, tapping into a sophisticated neural network that alters anxiety, mood, and even brain development.

The power of the gut microbiota lies in its composition. The ecosystem is a fluid, ever-changing beast. Diet is one trigger. In mice, switching their meals from plant-based vegetarian to cheeseburgers and chocolate changed their microbiome structure within a day. Aging is another: as we age, the microbiome’s composition can shift to correlate with healthy or unhealthy trajectories.

Previous studies with centenarians in Italy and China, for example, found that centenarians carried an abundance of two strains, suggesting those who successfully age also have microbiota that flexibly change and adapt.

The question is: why?

A Behemoth Study

The new study stands out due to its sheer numbers: 160 centenarians, 10 times more than previous efforts at uncovering the link between gut bugs and healthy longevity.

The authors compared these long-l...