Boosted Breeding, Electricity Free Desalination and Alpha Fold 3

May 23

This week we look at a breakthrough in plant breeding that leads to increased robustness of plants and much higher yields per hectare for crops. We discover a new electricity free desalination process that will help local communities to easily desalinate water for consumption and agriculture. We examine the latest version of Alpha Fold and its capability to predict the structure and interactions of the molecules responsible for life. Finally we consider the Dead Internet theory. Is AI destroying the human internet?

Boosted Breeding

Ohalo, a Californian startup, has developed a breakthrough agricultural cross breeding technique that should massively increase the yield per hectare of many plant crops. The technique allows plants to pass 100% of the genes to their offspring during cross breeding. Current cross breeding techniques only pass a random 50% of genes to offspring. Industry standards for successfully cross breeding plants is a 1.5% improvement in yield per year. The team achieved improvements of 50 to 100% for most plants and some considerably higher results.

Ohalo applies a specific protein (found in nature not genetically modified) which then causes both parent plants to pass on all their genes to their offspring. The result is a plant with more genes and a much greater chance of survival and greater natural crop production. Think of it like a toolbox. Each new plant has more tools with which to deal with whatever nature throws at it. If there is a disease, drought or other condition which makes optimum growth unavailable the plant now has the tools or genes to deal with the problem.

This process does also occur in nature but not consistently. The process is called polyploidy. Humans are diploids with two sets of chromosomes, wheat is hexaploid with six sets and strawberries can have up to eight sets. The more genes the plant has the better. The result is larger and more resilient plants which produce higher crop yields.

Potato is the third largest source of calories on earth for humans. In their experiments the boosted potatoes developed by combining two different varieties yielded a total crop weight of 682 grams from a single plant. This compares to the two parent plants that yielded 33 grams and 29 grams respectively.

The productivity gains don’t stop with potatoes. The team is working on every major type of potato and many other major crops to implement this technology. Potatoes are grown from seed potatoes. The seed potatoes are left in the sun to grow new shoots and then planted. This takes about 20% of the crop yield to grow the next generation. The team has worked out to grow potatoes from perfect seeds with this technology, immediately improving crop yield and reducing cost of planting significantly.

It is expected that new varieties of plants will be developed to enable growth in a much wider range of growing conditions. One of the issues with food production currently is that much of it is not grown where it is needed. This leads to starvation and food shortages. Increasing the ability of some crops to grow in a wider range of conditions will help alleviate this problem.

Electricity Free Desalination

A team from Australian National University (ANU) have developed a new method to desalinate water reducing the energy required by about 80%. Available freshwater is a growing problem around the world. Desalination is the most used solution.

The energy required by desalination has fallen by a factor of 10 since the early 1970’s however it still accounted for 100 billion kilowatt hours in 2018. Most current desalination techniques are materials based e.g. reverse osmosis, or thermal e.g. solar based evaporation. The resulting brine is also harmful for the ocean ecosystems.

The new method can use waste heat from industrial production or low grade heat from sunlight. Thermodiffusion is then used to separate the salt. Salt will move to the colder side of a smooth temperature gradient from hot to cold. The water remains liquid.

The prototype used a plate heated to 60C and a plate cooled to 20C. Both attainable with heat from sunlight. Low salinity water emerged from the channel at the top and high salinity water from the lower part of the channel. The channel was half a meter long, one millimeter high with flow rates of between 1 and 16 milliliters per minute. Each pass through the channel decreased salinity by 3%. After repeated cycles the salinity can be reduced from 30,000 parts per million to less than 500 ppm. This makes the water suitable for agriculture.

The group is now building a larger multichannel device in Tonga which is in the midst of a severe drought. The entire apparatus will be powered by a solar panel the size of a human face.

Alpha Fold update

We have spoken about Alpha Fold from Google for several years. They initially placed 1st in a protein folding prediction competition in 2018. By 2020 they had predicted the way that all the proteins used by humans to live would fold. Alpha Fold 3 has just been released and it can predict the structure and interactions all of life’s molecules.

The goal is to accurately predict the way that proteins and other molecules fold and interact. This will transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. Over the past 4 years there have been 20,000 citations of Alpha Fold in the scientific literature. It has been used by millions of scientists.

In addition to predicting the base structure and behavior of many biomolecules it also can model chemical modifications to these molecules which control the healthy functioning of cells, that when disrupted can lead to disease.

Given the enormity of the breakthrough, Google is working with a range of domain experts to ensure the safe use of the technology. The free use of the tools of Alpha Fold will allow researchers to accelerate discovery over may open questions in biology. According to Google, this is just the beginning.

The Dead Internet

With the rise and rise of AI and AI generated content more and more of the internet is being created by AI rather than humans. For example if you search for Shrimp Jesus you find dozens of images of AI generated crustaceans with the face of Jesus. These images are gaining thousands upon thousands of likes and engagement.

The dead internet theory argues that it appears that AI and bot generated content has surpassed the human generated internet. This includes huge numbers of social media accounts that are predominately being created and automated by artificial intelligent agents.

Many of these accounts are purely engagement farming. Click and get paid. The model where X (formerly Twitter) pays users that generate content which builds engagement will be short lived as the bots take over. Fake engagement does not motivate advertisers. That is where the money to pay for engagement comes from.

The future is more sinister. Almost 50% of Australian 18 to 24 year olds get all their news from social media. That almost doubled in the past couple of years. This produces a generation ripe for bot fueled disinformation. This is happening more and more every day.

The dead internet theory does not claim your day to day transactions are fake however the internet is no longer created by humans for humans. My expectation is that humans are collectively very smart. We will shortly move on very quickly. The age of the dominance of centralized social media is likely almost over. The next big step in human interaction over ether is likely already being developed.

Paying it Forward

If you have a start-up or know of a start-up that has a product ready for market please let me know. I would be happy to have a look and feature the startup in this newsletter. Also if any startups need introductions please get in touch and I will help where I can.

If you have any questions or comments please comment below.

I would also appreciate it if you could forward this newsletter to anyone that you think might be interested.

Till next week.