The Download: food from thin air, and finding new materials
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
These companies are creating food out of thin air
A new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are promising something that seems too good to be true. They say they can make food out of thin air.
But that’s exactly how certain soil-dwelling bacteria work. In nature, they survive on a meager diet of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor drawn directly from the atmosphere.
In the lab, they do the same, eating up waste carbon and reproducing so enthusiastically that their populations swell to fill massive fermentation tanks. Siphoned off and dehydrated, that bacterial biomass becomes a protein-rich powder that’s chock-full of nutrients and essentially infinitely renewable.
The ultimate goal of these companies is to engineer a food source far lower in emissions than conventional farming. But in order to do that, they’ll need to overcome some very real challenges. Read the full story.
—Claire L. Evans
This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review, which comes out on Wednesday and delves into the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive a copy once it lands.
The race to find new materials with AI needs more data. Meta is giving massive amounts away for free.
What’s new: Meta is releasing a massive data set and models, called Open Materials 2024, that could help scientists use AI to discover new materials much faster. OMat24 tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks in the discovery process: data.
Why it matters: To find new materials, scientists require massive data sets that are hard to come by. Creating them requires a lot of computing power and is very expensive. Many of the top data sets and models available now are also proprietary, and researchers don’t have access to them. That’s where Meta is hoping to help: The company is releasing its new data set and models today for free and is making them open source. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Elon Musk has huge sway over the US federal government
And a Trump victory could hand him even more. (NYT $)
+ Musk is giving away $1 million checks to people who register to vote…but it may well be illegal. (CNN)
+ But the billionaire’s support for Trump runs beyond simply doing business. (The Guardian)
+ The prediction-betting industry is flourishing as we near election day. (WP $)
2 America’s manufacturers are struggling
Just look at the fates of Intel and Boeing. (WSJ $)
3 Microsoft will allow its customers to build their own AI agents
Alongside the launch of 10 pre-made, ready-to-use agents. (Reuters)+ What are AI agents? (MIT Technology Review)
4 X wants to train its AI models on your data
And users aren’t happy about it. (CNN)
+ The new terms will come into effect from November 15. (TechCrunch)
5 What happens to the students wrongly accused of cheating with AI
AI text detectors aren’t 100% accurate, yet are still being deployed like they are. (Bloomberg $)
+ AI-text detection tools are really easy to fool. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Want to earn money? Get into data centers
Investors are attracted to their high returns. But it’s still a hugely risky venture. (FT $)
+ Energy-hungry data centers are quietly moving into cities. (MIT Technology Review)
7 A tiny hurricane formed near Cuba over the weekend
It may be the smallest hurricane in terms of the extent of its winds. (Ars Technica)
+ How the airborne water cycle might be supercharging superstorms. (Hakai Magazine)
8 A new wave of psychedelics bypass the tripping part
No hallucinations necessary. (The Atlantic $)
+ Mind-altering substances are being overhyped as wonder drugs. (MIT Technology Review)
9 The Tasmanian tiger could be brought back from extinction
If Colossal Biosciences gets its way, that is. (Vice)
+ A de-extinction company is trying to resurrect the dodo. (MIT Technology Review)
10 This smart toilet takes pictures of your poo 
Your excrement contains a whole lot of crucial health data. (TechCrunch)
+ How bugs and chemicals in your poo could give away exactly what you’ve eaten. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“If very powerful people are complaining loudly, it probably means antitrust enforcers are doing their job.”
—Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of review company Yelp, tells the Washington Post why he co-hosted a fundraiser for Kamala Harris earlier this month.
The big story
Inside the quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy
May 2024
When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun’s worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact group of galaxies. Some 8 billion years later, radio waves from that burst reached Earth and were captured by a sophisticated low-frequency radio telescope in the Australian outback.
The signal, which arrived in June 2022, and lasted for under half a millisecond, is one of a growing class of mysterious radio signals called fast radio bursts. In the last 10 years, astronomers have picked up nearly 5,000 of them. This one was particularly special: nearly double the age of anything previously observed, and three and a half times more energetic.
No one knows what causes fast radio bursts. They flash in a seemingly random and unpredictable pattern from all over the sky. But despite the mystery, these radio waves are starting to prove extraordinarily useful. Read the full story.
—Anna Kramer
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Oh, to be as happy as these wild boars on their slide.
+ Back to the Future 2 can’t be beaten.
+ Here’s how to get your concentration back on track.
+ In heartwarming news, this group of friends has been meeting every week for a drink and a catch up for 56 years. 
