What's Possible: 3rd September, 2021

We hope you enjoy this week's hand-picked selection of important and interesting stories from the frontiers of tech.

The Dream of Carbon Air Capture Edges Toward Reality

Next month, an industrial facility in Iceland will join a growing number of projects to remove CO2 from the air and put it underground. But major hurdles, including high costs, remain before this technology can be widely deployed and play a key role in tackling climate change.

Scientists create a labor-saving automated method for studying electronic health records

A new, automated, artificial intelligence-based algorithm can learn to read patient data from electronic health records. In a side-by-side comparison, scientists showed that their method accurately identified patients with certain diseases as well as the traditional, 'gold-standard' method, which requires much more manual labor to develop and perform.

Low-code / no-code dominates the latest Y Combinator cohort

At least 18 companies in the group name-dropped no- and low-code in their pitches. They are taking on a host of industries, from finance and real estate to sales and HR. In short, no- and low-code tools are cropping up in what feels like every sector. It appears that the startup world has decided that helping non-developers build their own tools, workflows and apps is a trend here to stay.

Apple begins supporting digital licenses and IDs

The goal of digitizing licenses and IDs is convenience, rather than fixing a particular problem. But the move hasn’t exactly drawn confidence from privacy experts, who bemoan Apple’s lack of transparency about how it built this technology and what it ultimately gets out of it.

Blockchain ⇨ Disruptive decentralised finance in APAC (Link)

According to the Australian Government’s National Blockchain Roadmap, blockchain tech will be worth as much as US$175 billion by 2025 and surge to $3 trillion by 2030. Australia’s major banks are moving to avoid being disrupted by the technology. “Westpac Reniventure has invested in blockchain, as have NAB and CommBank ventures. They’re very aware of the space and the threat it presents to their business model.”

Entering the Bharat Krymo’s Musee d’Art Brings NFTs to life

Bharat Krymo is “Excited to finally launch the first of several galleries dedicated to incredible crypto art. Welcome to the Crypto Musée d'Art Moderne: https://oncyber.io/krybharat”

Mobility ⇨ Skeptics Leery of the Billions Being Invested in Autonomous Vehicle Software  (Link)

Many believe that neural nets or convolutional neural nets, aren’t capable of the learning required to ensure safe driving. “… unless we change fundamentally the way that we’re approaching this problem, it is not solvable with our current approach.”

What is sustainable investing

Sustainable investing is a confusing area of finance that often means different things to different people. Most of the time it means building investment portfolios that exclude objectionable categories, such as ‘divesting’ of fossil fuel producers in an apparent attempt to fight climate change. Unfortunately, there’s a difference between excusing yourself of something you do not wish to partake in and actively fighting against something you think needs to stop for everyone’s sake.

Rocket Lab plans to become an ‘end-to-end space company’

Rocket Lab’s larger vision, [is to become] an end-to-end space company: combining launch services with spacecraft manufacturing to be able to build in-orbit infrastructure.

“When you combine those things together, you have an immensely powerful platform that you can use to develop infrastructure in orbit and ultimately provide services.”

Roadmap: Unlocking machine learning for drug discovery

Pharmaceutical companies are spending increasingly more to develop fewer drugs. Eroom’s Law (Moore spelled backwards) states that the number of new drugs approved per billion U.S. dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every nine years since 1950, an 80-fold drop in inflation-adjusted terms. Although estimates are hotly debated, today, of the five percent of drug candidates that make it to market, the development process costs roughly $2.5 billion.

What Is Accelerated Computing?

Both commercial and technical systems today embrace accelerated computing to handle jobs such as machine learning, data analytics, simulations and visualizations. It’s a modern style of computing that delivers high performance and energy efficiency.

Interesting adjacencies

• Astra’s first commercial launch fails to reach orbit (link)
• TikTok’s parent company acquires VR headset maker Pico (link)
• Ben Evans - Do App Store Rules Matter? (link)
• Bill Gurley wakes up to Ethereum (link)
• Rechargeable batteries that store six times more charge (link)
• Cerebras bucks the trend to product the world’s largest computer chip (link)
• Median pre-money valuation for Series C+ rounds hit $1Billion (link)
• SquarEat wants people to eat all their food in cube form (link)

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