Nuclear Powered Battery, Cargo Drones and What is Life?

October 3

This week we discover a new nuclear powered battery. We investigate the first commercial drone delivery airline approved for operation in Europe. We examine the affect that multiple surgeries has on cognitive decline in older patients and we ask and consider an answer to the question “What is Life?”.

Nuclear Powered Battery

A diverse team of researchers in a range of institutions in China have developed an extremely small nuclear battery that they claim is up to 8,000 times for efficient than other current nuclear batteries. The quest to build a nuclear powered battery has been underway for decades.

The device that the team has built uses a small amount of Americium. This was placed in a crystal and the radiated energy produced a light that caused the crystal to glow green. The crystal was then connected to a photovoltaic cell that converted the light to electricity. This combined device was then placed inside a quartz cell to prevent radiation leakage.

During testing the team found that the battery could remain charged for a long, long time - perhaps decades. The half life of Americium is 7,380 years however the radiation will have destroyed the holding cell and device long before the half life is reached.

The problem with this device is that the amount of power generated is very small (even though it is much more efficient than previous attempts). There may however be uses for this type of battery in modules being sent into deep space that have small energy requirements but require batteries to last for many, many years.

Multiple Surgeries and Cognitive Decline

A team from the University of Sydney have analyzed a range of data from 46,700 patients included in the UK Biobank to see if multiple surgeries had an impact on reaction time and memory. The patients were between 40 and 69 years of age. The data included over 20 years of brain scans, cognitive tests and medical records.

The study revealed that surgeries have a small effect on memory, reaction time, task switching and problem solving for older patients and increased for each additional surgery. The study also found a smaller hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory, in the MRI’s of people who had, had multiple surgeries.

For each surgery patients overall reaction time was slowed by 0.3 milliseconds. Cognitive flexibility and the ability to remember pictures and numbers also decreased. Overall the team concluded that surgeries are on average safe but that there is an increasing burden from multiple surgeries. If surgery is the only option it should be undertaken however in some instances other treatments may be preferable for older and more vulnerable patients.

The team speculated that inflammation could be the reason for the delayed cognitive recovery and understanding how this leads to brain damage will be a key step in developing processes to avoid this in future.

Cargo Drones

Bulgarian startup, Dronamics has had their autonomous drone cargo airline approved for business in Europe. Founded in 2014 by two brothers it has taken 10 years of development to gain approval. The drone called The Black Swan, carries 350 kg of cargo (the same as a small transit van) over 2,500 kilometers. The drone reduces air freight costs by 50% and emits 60% less CO2 than a similar capacity van.

Europe has over 2,000 airports however less than 1% of them are big enough to handle cargo planes. The Black Swan can land on 400 meters of runway opening up hundreds of new airport locations for cargo operations.

The Black Swan has a wingspan of 16 meters and a length of 8 meters. It can fly to 20,000 feet at a speed of 200kph and can be remotely controlled where needed. The drone currently uses biofuel however there are plans to move to hydrogen based synthetic fuels. The body is temperature controlled for perishables. The drone is also likely to be used for delivery of engineering and spare parts, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, luxury goods and e-commerce.

The company is commencing in Southern Europe with phase 2 moving to Western Europe followed by the balance of the EU. The system is likely to be most useful in more remote areas without good road access. Locations such as Africa, India and rural China will also benefit from this type of system that can bypass substandard local road networks.

What is Life?

It seems like an easy question however what is life? If we were traveling in space and came across an object, how would we determine if it was a life-form or created by life thus proving the existence of life? The universe is massive and if there is life elsewhere it is likely in a different form than life on earth.

A new branch of physics is developing a definition of what is life by trying to unite physics and biology. Evolution develops life and continuously generates a succession of novel objects that we associate with life. For example; microbes, mammals and plants. We also have many complex objects such as cars, phones and TV’s that we don’t associate with having life however they are created by life (e.g. humans created the car, it didn’t spontaneously appear from a chemical soup). None of these complex living or non living things can come into being spontaneously. They require a memory, based upon what existed in the past, to construct (or evolve) things in the present. This ability to construct or create is the proposed boundary line between life and non life. Stick with me, this is quite conceptual but reasonably straightforward explanation of what is life.

Everything in the living world requires some kind of memory and information flow. Our DNA is our information blueprint. We use it to grow and evolve. When we invent new things, they are based upon our memory of what has gone before and our knowledge of chemistry and physics. Cars for example were developed based upon our knowledge of the wheel and many other parts.

The new theory called “Assembly Theory” tries to explain how the complex objects that life creates; exist. A key conjecture is that as objects become more complex, the number of unique parts required increases and therefor the memory to store how to assemble the object from its unique parts also increases. We are made up of a massive number of chemicals all managed by our DNA to create us.

The shortest number of physical steps to build an object from its elementary building blocks is called the “Assembly Index”. For example we can work out how many steps it takes to create water or how many steps it takes to create an amino acid. Some molecules can be created through chance interactions (we see these every day, add two chemicals and they will interact). The more complex the molecule however, the less likely it can have formed due to chance. The proposition is that if a complex molecule is not formed by chance, it must be formed somehow by life.

We can measure this index for molecules using mass spectrometry and other tools. Using this system the researchers have determined that molecules with an assembly index above 15 steps are only found in living samples. The 15 steps is the boundary condition between something created by life or chance. This allows us to examine objects and determine if they may have been created by chance or if the only way that the object could exist is if it had been created by life.

The team is aiming to use the theory to measure the point in a chemical soup where the molecules become so complex that they start using information to make copies of themselves. This is the threshold where life arises from non-life. They then hope to generate a new origin of life event in the lab (what could go wrong? I am fairly sure that movies have been made about this.)

We can also use this theory when looking for life on worlds that are radically different to the Earth. Life on those planets may look so alien to us that we wouldn’t recognize them as life. Analyzing the chemical signatures from those planets and applying the boundary condition may allow us to determine if there is some sort of life or just some chemicals created by random chance.

A New World

Whilst we are talking about life and the potential for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe and how we might decide if it is life a new planet has been discovered orbiting the forth closest star to the Solar System. The three stars in the Alpha Centauri System are closer.

Barnards Star is a single red dwarf star 5.96 light years from earth. Its mass is about 16% of our sun. The new planet is 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun and it orbits in 3.15 earth days. The surface temperature is around 125C. It is also the lowest mass planet that we have found outside the solar system and one of the very few that have been discovered with a mass less than our earth. The astronomers also found some evidence of another 3 planets orbiting Barnards Star.

Illustration from European Space Observatory and M. Kornmesser

Given how close the planet is to earth if we could develop a probe that could travel at 20% of the speed of light we could arrive there in 30 years and send up to 3 gigabytes of data back within a decade. Exploration of other solar systems may not be all that far away. Could be the discovery of life follow soon thereafter?

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.