Science Friday - NASA Delays Crewed Moon Missions | Top Technologies To Watch In 2024

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

With this week’s delays to Artemis II and III, astronauts likely won’t walk on the moon until 2026 at the earliest. Also, weight-loss drugs, AI, clean-energy tech and more: digging into MIT Technology Review’s annual list with executive editor Amy Nordrum.NASA Once Again Delays Artemis Crewed Missions To the MoonThis week, NASA announced that it was delaying two of its planned crewed missions to the moon. Artemis II, which was scheduled to launch in November 2024, was pushed to September 2025. And Artemis III, originally planned for late 2025, is now looking at a September 2026 launch date. The Artemis campaign has faced challenges with its lunar landers, spacesuits, life-support systems, and the Orion capsule’s heat shield, according to NASA. When launched, Artemis II will swing around the moon and return to Earth, while Artemis III will land on the south pole of the moon, and will mark the first time humans have walked on the moon since 1972.Joining Ira to talk about this and other top science stories in the news this week is Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at MIT Technology Review. They talk about challenges facing the offshore wind industry, a Hawai‘i coal plant that was replaced by a battery farm, why AI weather forecasting is not ready for primetime, and a new discovery that giant apes went extinct earlier than we thought—and for a different reason.Top Technologies To Watch In 2024The technology world moves so fast, it can be hard to know what to pay attention to. Sometimes it’s helpful for someone to tell you straight up who the big players are, and what technologies really could change the world.Luckily for us, MIT Technology Review compiles an annual list of the 10 breakthrough technologies they say matter most. This year, that list ranges from super-efficient solar panels to weight-loss drugs, and AI in just about everything.Joining guest host Kathleen Davis to discuss this year’s list is Amy Nordrum, executive editor at MIT Technology Review based in Boston, Massachusetts.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

What are the top technologies to watch in 2024? It's really been a wild year for AI. What we called it on the list this year is AI for everything. It's Friday, January 12th, and drum roll, please. Today is Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Each year, MIT Technology Review releases a list of the top 10 innovations to watch out for. This is super helpful for those of us who want to stay up to date,

but don't have the time to go through every new thing that comes out. We'll chat about super-efficient solar cells, new medications, and AI in just a moment. But first, Ira talks to Casey Crownheart about the biggest science stories of the week. Space fans have got some, well, sort of bad news. NASA's crude Artemis missions to the moon are delayed again. If you've been following this program since it was around in 2012, this may not come as a shotgun. but they do highlight the key challenges NASA is facing in moving the program forward. Here to tell us more about this and other top stories in science this week is Casey Crownheart,

climate reporter at the MIT Technology Review. She's based here in New York and actually in our New York studios. Nice to see you. Nice to see you guys too. Nice to have you. Okay, so some disappointing news for space fans, NASA's crude Artemis mission got delayed again. Tell us about that. Like you said, not too, too much of us.

surprise at this point, but the next two Artemis missions have officially been pushed back by NASA. The plan was to launch Artemis II this November. That's been pushed back about a year. Artemis II was the first one that was going to have people on board. It was going to have four astronauts and they were going to kind of swing by the moon and come back. And then Artemis 3 as well, that's the one where we're going to launch two astronauts to land on the moon, has been delayed from 2025 to 26. And the problem? What was the problem this time? A few different things. One of them was kind of a safety issue. They kind of found some issues with landing Artemis 1 back on Earth.

The heat shields, details, yes. You know, safety. Yeah. But then also, like, things like developing the spacesuits and the lunar landers, that's being done by private industry. And NASA says they need a little bit more time for that kind of stuff. We like safety. Speaking of challenges and delays,

Massachusetts recently powered on its first large offshore wind farm. But there's good news and bad news about that, right? Yes. This is something I've been digging into for the last month or so, and it's definitely a mixed bag of news on offshore wind. These turbines could be a really good thing for clean energy goals because they can harness these powerful, consistent winds that blow off the coast. Like you said, the Massachusetts project just started producing electricity, but we also saw in the fall, New Jersey had two major projects get canceled, and there's been some recent trouble for a couple of projects in New York. So offshore wind is, you know, slowly chugging along, but we're seeing some delays for sure. There's got to be some good news, though, right?

I think that one turbine turning on in Massachusetts is like the single shining beacon of hope for U.S. offshore wind right now. Eventually, that project is going to be huge. It's going to power 400,000 homes. So it'll take a while to get there. It's got to be the first one. Somebody's got to be the first. Somebody's got to be the first one. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, there's good news about green energy.

And I'm talking about Hawaii powering down its last coal plant, right? Yeah. So this actually, they powered down. the last coal plant in Hawaii in late 2022, but we got some great news in December where they have kind of officially replaced that coal plant with a huge battery installation. So they're able to kind of store all of the solar that's coming on the grid in Hawaii in these massive batteries to kind of power the grid there. And this is sort of a trend now, right? The batteries, these mega-fax of batteries. Absolutely. We're seeing grid storage become more and more important in places that have a

high percentage of renewables on the grid. California has a bunch of installations, about 7% of their grid's capacity can be stored in batteries. So that's really exciting. And if we're going to go to an electrical system running the country, we need this grid battery backup stuff. Absolutely. Speaking of getting the materials needed for those batteries, rare earth elements, I understand that Norway is moving towards deep sea mining. That's very controversial, isn't that? It's very controversial. So like you said, Norway's parliament just voted to authorize kind of mining exploration in that country's waters. A couple of other countries have done this as well. Japan, New Zealand, there's also kind of movement to start mining in international waters

potentially. It's because there is kind of a lot of metals down there, lithium, nickel, all of these things that are needed for batteries and other clean energy technologies. But environmentalists are a little bit concerned because there's a ton of life down there and we don't really understand it very well at all. Yeah, because you're going to dig up basically the ocean floor. And you kick up these dust plumes that we don't really understand exactly how far they'll go. And I think the other concern, too, is that we know what batteries are made of right now. But a lot of people say, you know, battery tech is really changing.

Why are we going to go and get all this stuff if maybe we won't even need it for the next generation of batteries? It's really hard to say. How far has it moved along in Norway? Does it need parliamentary procedures and things like that? This really just opens up exploration. They're not going to go down and start, you know, commercially mining anytime soon. They really don't even know what's down there in the Norwegian Sea. There's some sense that there are certain metals down there, but there's a lot of, you've got to get through

all that exploration first, and then we'll have to see more action for Parliament before actual mining kicks off. Not going to happen tomorrow or the next day. We're not too worried about it. I would say this year. Oh, that's good. That's good. And as we know, these lithium-based batteries are not always the safest, but we have some news that

scientists are using artificial intelligence? They're using it for everything and to develop batteries with less lithium now. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like you said, AI for everything. So researchers from Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Lab announced that they had used AI to develop a new kind of battery material that uses a lot less lithium. Kind of just a prototype. So I wouldn't get like too excited about this replacing all of our batteries anytime soon. But it is really, really cool to see what AI can do. Yeah, because what, what, how would you use AI in this situation? What would it do? Yeah. So basically what you do is you feed in a ton of information about known batteries and known battery materials and all their properties. You say, this battery is really, you know, this material's really

conductive. This one's really stable. And then it would kind of invent a bunch of different potential combinations and go through all of the known materials and say, hey, have you tried, you know, this, this, this, this, and spit out a list. And then researchers can take those candidates and try to make them into actual materials. So you could have. have tens of millions of possible things to plow through. So these researchers said that they looked at 32 million possible battery materials in just a few days. So it's really, really speedy. And that's what they say.

It's going to speed up the exploration a lot. I'm trying to think of people themselves going through paperwork. 32 million. No, it would take way longer. It would take years, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And continuing with this AI theme, that tech is also, AI is also moving into weather forecasting.

Yes, yeah. Can it do it better than we're doing it now, I imagine? It can do pretty well in a lot of cases, I think, is kind of the takeaway here. So researchers from Google DeepMind published a paper showing that their weather model was able to perform on par or better than major forecasting models about 90% of the time. So it's doing a really good job a lot of the time, but it kind of starts to fail at these kind of edge cases or really rare events. It's not as good at predicting stuff like that. Could they match it up and, you know, some event that's happening now and see, well, we did as well as AI did?

Yeah, so that's how they're doing this research is they're able to kind of look back at, you know, old weather patterns and see what happened. But I think a lot of people are seeing this more as a tool in their toolkit and not really worried about their jobs anytime soon just because it's, like I said, really not able to kind of predict these rare events, like big hurricanes that weren't expected. That's where we're going to need that now. Yeah, absolutely. Because climate is changing. Look at the weather going on. You know, it's going to be in the 40 below zero this weekend for the caucuses coming up. We need to know what's going to be happening.

Absolutely. And climate change just makes weather weirder, basically. And we need, we actually, I imagine we need big computers, right? We would need very strong computers to be able to take all those different mounds of data that comes in and analyze it. I mean, AI works a little bit differently. So actually, this is one way to get around limitations on computing. But we are seeing really massive X-scale computers start to make their way into a lot of different applications. And so that's another kind of really interesting area of weather forecasting that we're seeing.

I want to see them replace the weather person on the news. It's not a person, right? Just like a robot? Just like a robot doing AI weather forecast. Because then we always blame the weather person. Are you going to blame the robot now? Yeah. I love a local weather person, though. I don't know. In Alabama, there's something of a celebrity. So I'm not ready to get rid of the weather. Well, not only that, they're usually the only science person on the whole staff, right? If you want to run a science story on a local newscast, it's going to be on the weather.

It's going to be on the weather. They pick up the stuff that's going on in space. They talk about the weather, the rain. And any other kinds of things, go to the weatherman. Absolutely. Excuse me. Finally, let's talk about, I can't believe I'm going to say it, it's an extinct 10-foot-tall giant ape that's almost a ton? Tell me about this. Yes, so researchers have found out a little bit more about the largest primate to ever roam the earth. So like you said, they were, you know, around three meters or 10 feet tall, just massive creatures. It's kind of hard to wrap your brain around. And we didn't really understand why these creatures went extinct.

You know, we saw a lot of bigger animals that used to roam around aren't here anymore. And so researchers really wanted to figure out what happened to these guys. And so they went into a bunch of caves and looked at a bunch of teeth samples that they have. Teeth samples. They haven't found basically any bones of this giant ape, but they have a bunch of teeth that they've found. And they know it comes from a giant ape. They know that it comes from a giant ape. How big?

Did they give the ape a name? It's a guy that. Gigantipicus. I don't know if I'm saying that exactly right. It's pretty perfect, isn't it? Pythicus is like ape, I think, in Latin. So it was a giant ape? Giant ape, yep.

And so researchers, looking at these teeth and looking at kind of other stuff that was around where they found these teeth, they were able to put the extinction date for these apes at about between 295,000, 215,000 years ago. Wow. And that's a lot more recent than we had thought these guys went extinct. And so crucially, it was during a time when the planet was changing a lot. And so this really clued them in to why. these creatures might have gone extinct because they weren't able to adapt to this kind of changing

world that they were living in. And it shows you how an animal that big and probably that ferocious can actually go extinct. Absolutely. They weren't able to find the food that they needed as kind of their habitat was changing from really like kind of covered forests to grasslands. And so they kind of, you know, eventually died out even while kind of their relatives. So the ancient relatives of the orangutans were hanging around and were able to adapt to this. These giant apes were not. Not. Casey, you always bring us such fun and interesting stories and stuff that people will talk about tonight when they're, you know, with wherever they're meeting to meet folks for dinner tonight. So thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much for having me. Casey Crownheart, Climer Reporter at MIT Technology Review based here in New York. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And I'm SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. The technology world moves so fast and it's hard to keep track of

what we should be paying attention to. Sometimes you just want someone to tell you who are the big players and what are the technologies that could really change the world. Lucky for us, each year, the MIT Technology Review compiles a list of the 10 breakthrough technologies that they say matter most right now. Joining me to help break down this list is my guest, Amy Nordrum, executive editor of Technology Review based in Boston. Welcome back to the show, Amy. Thank you, Kathleen. to be here. So let's start with the elephant in the room. AI was everywhere last year. And I imagine with its inclusion on this list, it's probably not going anywhere, right? You're absolutely right. And it's really been a wild year for AI. What we called it on the list this year is AI for everything. And this is

really our attempt to sum up everything that happened in the last year. It's the year when the public began interacting with AI directly, you know, consciously playing around with it. using it to do different stuff, using tools that let you type in a prompt and get a written response or an image of the things that you just described in a matter of seconds. Really powerful technology. And we'll be seeing a lot more action in the space in the year ahead for sure. So how might generative AI advance in the new year? Well, the systems that many large tech companies have already built will continue to get more

powerful. There will be new releases of the models as they become more capable. we've started to see them integrate not just text, but also, you know, images and audio into their prompts. And coming up, we'll likely see them generate things like video instead of just static images. In the year to come, there's also a lot of big questions that we're going to need to grapple with about these systems. My colleague, Will Douglas Heaven, had a really nice piece about this recently. There's a lot of court challenges against these models from both artists and writers, even the photo service Getty and the New York Times about the content that they've

ingested claiming creators of these models of violated copyright. So those cases will be moving forward. And 2024 is also a huge election year, not just here in the U.S., but all around the world. A lot of different countries are having major elections, record number of people going to the polls. And as we know, these models can generate fake images. They can help spread bad information, which could potentially influence some of these contests. There's a lot that we're still going to be figuring out as a society as well about how to deal with these systems. So I remember back when smartphones really became a big thing. There was clearly a point in time pre-smartphone versus post-smartphone in my brain.

I mean, have we sort of reached that point with AI? Do you think it's really just going to be everywhere now? I think it will. I honestly think that's safe to say. I mean, all of this was really set off by the debut of ChatGPT, was just over about a year ago. Since then, there's been so many other new tools. and these are now starting to be incorporated into things that we use every day, like search, chatbots, email services,

and about a million other places online. You know, I think there's still a question out there, like what are these models going to be most useful for? We can all think of the many ways we use our smartphone today. It's not as clear, I think, with Internet of AI quite yet, where this is all headed. They're really fun to play with, but what can we actually do with them that's really going to enrich our lives?

I don't think we have a clear answer to that yet, but I'm pretty confident that, that will arrive at some answers over these next few years as people continue to adopt and play with them. So let's move towards a healthcare innovation that is on this top technologies list, and that is weight loss drugs. So we're talking about things like OZemphic, Wagovi, Munjaro, I mean, drugs that were definitely in the news a lot last year. So why did these wind up on this list of breakthrough technologies? We put them on the list because they really came into the public consciousness this past year, big way. These drugs have been around. They were originally developed for diabetes, and they've been

shown through trials with diabetes patients that they can also cause people to lose around 15% of their body weight. And so we felt the change this year was people really becoming aware of them and a huge surge of demand for these medications. So a big controversy with these drugs that I remember last year is that supply really had a hard time keeping up with demand. So people, people who needed these drugs sometimes couldn't get them. Is the hope that this is going to change? Well, that's certainly the hope. I mean, I think it's going to be hard for a while still. I mean, the companies are certainly trying to produce as many of them as they can. There are new ones coming to the market. Just recently there was a new one called Zepbound that was approved by the FDA. So there

will be new options coming onto the market. And I know that the companies, you know, obviously are eager to sell as many as they can, so they'll be ramping up production. But I think it's likely to be tight for a while because demand is so huge. What do we know about long-term effects? Well, they have been used in diabetes patients for a while. So there is some long-term data, you know, more than decade in some cases for those medications. But I think there are still some, you know, reasons to be cautious here.

I mean, there's, you know, financial considerations. These drugs are expensive, more than $1,000 a month. Not yet covered by most insurance programs. There can be side effects that people are dealing with. who get on them, gastrointestinal side effects like nausea, indigestion, diarrhea. And they are drugs that, you know, for the most part, people do need to be on for the rest of their lives once they start taking them. So these are all, you know, these are all factors, you know, to consider and talk people's doctors about. Let's move on to some energy technology, super efficient solar cells.

Tell me about the big innovations going on here. Right. This is our term for solar cells that at a layer of perovskites, which are tiny crystals that absorb different wavelengths of light than traditional silicon cells. So cells made with perovskites can be more efficient in converting energy from the sun into electricity. They're called perovskite tandem solar cells. And we put them on the list this year because one of the leading companies in this space called Oxford PV is planning to start shipping cells made this way to customers later this year. There's also been a lot of other movement too. There's major solar manufacturers, including first solar. who are investing in this technology and acquiring some of the startups that are developing it.

And, you know, there's still a lot to prove. Parovskites are kind of delicate. They are known for breaking down quite easily. So these companies will need to show that their panels can really withstand, you know, real-world use and be cost-competitive with silicon technology. But in the end, what we could end up with if this all works out, is much more efficient solar panels. Mm-hmm. I mean, a big question with perovskite cells is that,

the testing outside has been pretty limited so far. I mean, could we see that change this year? Yeah, that's really one of the biggest questions for the field. Mostly these have been tested in labs and not yet really in the real world. I think Oxford PV does have a panel up at their own facility, but tests have been pretty limited and small up to this point. There has been some good progress making these panels more enclosed so that they don't allow things in like water, which can cause proscytes to degrade. So they're making some good progress. but I think they're going to really have to show that in the tests in order to get commercial interest and show that it's reliable.

So you've got another renewable energy technology, which is on this list, and that is enhanced geothermal. What is enhanced geothermal exactly? Sure. Well, geothermal is really a great stable source of renewable energy, but it's really only been practical up to this point in places where there's a source of heat pretty close to the surface of the earth. But now using fracking techniques. developed by the oil and gas industry, geothermal companies are able to crack open rocks and inject water to create geothermal facilities in more places. And this is known as enhanced geothermal systems. And there's one company, Fervo, that has demonstrated within the last year that this is

possible. I hear that there's some concern about the drilling that geothermal energy requires and its possible links to earthquakes and seismic activity. I mean, how concerned should we be about that? Yes, this is a concern. It has been one and it hasn't gone away. You know, for Fervo's part, they say that they are following guidelines developed by the Department of Energy to minimize the risk. Companies working on this technology have invested more in trying to monitor seismic activity around their facilities. But I think it's something that definitely the creators of this technology are going to have to contend with. And it's a risk that they're definitely very aware of. Okay. The last technology that we're going to talk about today is a

little wonky, and that is exascale computers. Tell me about these. This is not something I know much about. Sure. Well, a very new, powerful generation of computers is coming online. These are exascale computers, so machines that can perform more than an exaflops worth of calculations. An exa flop. Exa flop. So that's a one with 18 zeros after it. Wow. Hard to even fathom. So these computers are the most powerful machines on Earth for computing. And the first one called Frontier was built here in the U.S. It's up and running. Europe is getting its first one later this year called Jupiter.

There's a couple more in the works planned here in the U.S. at other national labs. And these machines are really excellent at performing powerful simulations of complicated stuff, like the climate, the universe, even phenomena, like turbulence. So it's pretty exciting for a lot of scientists from a number of different fields who are now going to potentially have access to these machines and the simulations that they can run. Yeah. I mean, like, why is it so cool that we could have this incredible computing power? You talked a little bit about the different industries that might be interested, but like, what are the implications? What could we actually learn? Well, there's a number of projects in the works.

What these computers are really good at is performing simulations that can look at the macro scale of things and also zoom in to like the microscale in a really detailed way. And so they can look at different scales of really complicated problems. And so you can imagine a number of different places where that might be useful. The lab, Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee is where Frontier is based and scientists there are using it to model clouds for climate simulations. Because the process by which clouds form has been a really difficult process. to model up to this point. And now with Frontier, they're able to get the resolution down to about three kilometers, which is just under two miles. So that's a much more detailed look at that process than scientists have been able to really get before. There's other projects in the work.

Some startups are, you know, hoping to move over to what's called small modular nuclear reactors for fission power. And those should be, you know, cheaper to build and deploy. But there's another group at Oak Ridge working on using supercomputers, including Frontier, to simulate what happens inside those reactors. So there's, you know, any complicated thing that you might be able to imagine could potentially benefit from a simulation that you can run on one of these machines. Well, super interesting stuff. Thank you so much, Amy. That is all the time that we have for now. Amy Nordrum, executive editor of MIT Technology Review based in Boston. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks, Kathleen. And if you want to read the full list of break

through technologies to pay attention to this year, head to technology review.com. And that's all the time that we have for today. A lot of folks helped to make the show happen, including Annie Nero. Jason Rosenberg. Rasha-Ridi. Shoshana Buxbaum. And many more. On Monday, we'll talk about the possibilities of alien life from a scientific perspective. But for now, I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening.