In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at a new optical chip for data centers, turning fossil fuels into EV batteries, Google’s quantum breakthrough and more. You can sign up to get The Prototype in your inbox here.
This week, IBM announced that it has developed a new way to build co-packaged optics that could enable fiberoptic connectivity within data centers, which currently still rely on electric cables. The company published its first prototype design in a technical paper as well.
The company said that this could potentially expand the connectivity bandwidth in a data center, which could in turn significantly decrease the amount of energy consumed by generative AI applications. The company’s calculations suggest the energy saved in training a large language model would be equal to the annual power consumed by 5,000 homes–and it would happen up to five times faster than conventional training.
“If we can reduce this communication bottleneck, then GPUs can talk to each other much faster, and that can really save us power,” Mukesh Khare, general manager of IBM semiconductors, said in a media briefing.
Stay tuned.
Yesterday’s Coal Can Turn Into Tomorrow’s Battery
The world is increasingly reliant on electronics and batteries for everyday life. And that means turning to a material that you can find in your old school box: graphite. The same material that makes your pencil possible is also a crucial component of lithium-ion batteries and other electronic devices.
But supplies of graphite are beginning to show their limits, with shortages expected by the beginning of the next decade. And the world is mostly dependent on China for the material: it produces nearly 80% of the world’s supply, both from mines and manufacturing of artificial graphite.
In the meantime, while moving towards renewable energy is an overall positive, it’s had an economic cost in coal-producing regions of the United States as demand has declined. But researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory may have a solution: they’ve developed two new processes that can transform coal in many of its forms into graphite to power the next generation of technology.
There are two separate processes for this, project lead Edgar Lara-Curzio explained to me. The first is the heat up coal to about 800 degrees Celsius, at which point the volatile chemicals turn to gasses, leaving char behind, which is ground into small particles and milled. They are then loaded into an electrochemical reactor that heats it up to about 1500 degrees Celsius, resulting in the production of graphite. The process is similar to what happened when car bumpers used to be electroplated, Lara-Curzio added.
The second method is applied to coal slurries, where coal is mixed with water or other liquid. These are filtered and treated to create pitch, which is then added to a solvent to dissolve. The resulting mixture is sprayed through a nozzle, which evaporates the solvent leaving spherical particles behind that are then electrochemically treated the same way as the ground char.
Both processes, when scaled, are likely to be less expensive than current graphite production methods, Lara-Curzio said. “When you compare the cost per kilogram of our process to the conventional processes, you utilize less energy, that’s probably the biggest factor,” he said. “In terms of capital equipment, they may also be less expensive.”
So far in the lab, scientists can produce graphite from coal using a batch process. The next step, Lara-Curzio said, is to work with industry to develop a scalable, continuous process of manufacturing. This is not only important for meeting the growing demand for the material, he said, but also for the coal-producing communities America’s economy was built on.
“This country became a superpower because of inexpensive coal,” said Lara-Curzio, who added. “It would be an incredible story if we could bring back some of those jobs related to coal, but to support new industries and new technologies.”
DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: GOOGLE’S NEW QUANTUM CHIP
Google unveiled Willow, its new quantum computing chip, which boasts the ability to quickly correct errors in computation, a key barrier to scaling quantum computing. Google’s chip architecture creates a lattice of qubits that, interestingly enough, are better at correcting errors the bigger they get. The company published its experimental results in Nature.
FINAL FRONTIER: BLUE ORIGIN TO LAUNCH ITS FIRST SATELLITE
Earlier this week, Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin announced that its first Blue Ring satellite is ready to launch on the New Glenn, the company’s orbital rocket. Blue Origin said that the rocket will be making its inaugural flight later this month, though it hasn’t yet set an exact date. This is a demonstration mission for Blue Ring to test out several of its capabilities.
WHAT ELSE I WROTE THIS WEEK
With my colleagues Sarah Emerson, Emily Baker-White and Amy Feldman, I reported on the reddit account of Luigi Mangione, where one of the things he talked about a lot was his back pain.
In my other newsletter, InnovationRx, I spoke with experts about the as yet unidentified disease circulating in a remote region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
SCIENCE AND TECH TIDBITS
Biotech startup Alltrna is developing engineered tRNA molecules, which the body uses to “read” DNA to build proteins, that are designed to ignore mutations in DNA that erroneously tell them to stop. This week, it announced lab data demonstrating potential effectiveness of one of its engineered tRNAs in ignoring such mutations.
Earlier this week, Google showed off a prototype pair of glasses that uses its AI model, Gemini, to provide users information about their environment in real-time.
Researchers genetically engineered E.Coli bacteria to produce layers of bioglass on their surface, enabling them to act as living optical devices.
A team of scientists developed a kind of microparticle for delivering drugs that can be precisely targeted to a certain part of the body using ultrasound.
Scientists at Rockefeller University uncovered a new class of antiviral molecules that might be able to be used against a wide array of viruses.
PRO SCIENCE TIP: CERTAIN JOB DESCRIPTION PHRASES ATTRACT NARCISSISTS
When you’re writing a job description to recruit someone for your business, you may not think too much about how you’re phrasing the attributes you’re looking for in a candidate. But according to researchers at the University of Mississippi, particular phrases in a job placement–like looking for candidates who are “results-oriented” or “persuasive” or “think outside the box”–will tend to attract applicants who are more willing to engage in unethical behavior, particularly narcissists. The findings were published in Management Science.
WHAT’S ENTERTAINING ME THIS WEEK
I’m currently working my way through Cross, the latest adaptation of the James Patterson books. This TV series stars Aldis Hodge as the titular detective, whose psychological training enables him to get into the heads of serial killers. Showrunner Ben Watkins has constructed a timely and topical iteration of the character and Hodge gives a virtuoso performance of a single father traumatized by grief and struggling to keep it together as he races against the clock to save a killer’s final victim. All episodes are currently streaming on Amazon.
