What’s Possible: 8th October, 2021

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

A new restaurant launched on Deliveroo and UberEats in Paris: Cala

“We wanted to make sure that the quality of the product was what was really driving customers to come to a restaurant,” says Ylan Richard, who founded Cala in 2019, when he was 19 . “No one knew there was a robot behind the restaurant on the platforms.”

Look out below: What will happen to the space debris in orbit?

Almost every week, it seems, more private companies and governments announce new concepts, flights, and projects.

The recent activity, although exciting, raises some concerns. The amount of space debris is growing, despite requirements for satellite deorbit and disposal, and the problem will soon escalate. About 11,000 satellites have been launched in the 64 years since Sputnik 1 in 1957.

Rocket Lab Selected to Launch NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System

Just as a sailboat is powered by wind in a sail, solar sails employ the pressure of sunlight for propulsion, eliminating the need for conventional rocket propellant.

Building ‘space heritage’ key to global space supply chains

“If you really want to get the Australian space industry embedded into the global space industry, you need what’s called space heritage, in what in the lingo we would call TRL (Technology Readiness Level) 8 and TRL 9”.

“Once you’ve gone into space, every one of those companies can then say ‘My product worked in space.’ That’s exactly how the global space market works. It’s the currency of the global space sector.”

Our DNA is becoming the world’s tiniest hard drive

Our genetic code is millions of times more efficient at storing data than existing solutions, which are costly and use immense amounts of energy and space. In fact, we could get rid of hard drives and store all the digital data on the planet within a couple hundred pounds of DNA.

Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

Fusion, theoretically, has no scarcity issues; our planet has enough of fusion’s primary fuels, heavy hydrogen and lithium, which are found in seawater, to last thirty million years. Fusion requires no major advances in batteries, it would be available on demand, it wouldn’t cause the next Fukushima, and it wouldn’t be too pricey—if only we could figure out all the “details.”

CRISPR Bioinformatics in the Browser

With the right tools, biologists could run most analyses, in minutes, on their own. This is why we built LatchBio, a web platform for biologists to run CRISPR bioinformatics without code.

Sky Mavis raises $152M at nearly $3B valuation for Axie Infinity play-to-earn NFT game

The game uses NFTs to uniquely identify cute characters. Players spend real money to acquire those characters and engage in battles with other players. They can level up the characters and sell them to other players, and that generates income for the players.

Notion now offers free credits to any startup globally, partners with AWS and Stripe

Notion is launching a new startup program to offer a credit of at least $500 to any startup globally to try its product for free — regardless of its size and funding status. Based on the size of the team, the credit could give startups access to Notion’s premium offerings at no cost for as long as a year — if not longer.

When Notion originally launched the program, it was attempting to “make sure that startups around the world adopt Notion,” said Akshay Kothari, chief operating officer.

Network effects in the Exponential Age

[Network effects are] like having another thousand employees at your company... you set up the conditions and then the network grows and then the network density increases and the value gets greater and greater to all your users and they get happier and happier with you. Even though what's adding value to you, your company is actually the addition of new people.

Interesting adjacencies

• Crypto Endangered: Confronting An Existential Threat (link)
• Rex Woodbury: Squid Game and the Consumer Fintech Renaissance (link)
• Chris Dixon: The Web 3 playbook: using token incentives to bootstrap new networks (thread)
• Ben Thompson: Facebook Political Problems (link)
• A16z shows off deep crypto pockets (link)

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