Welcome to 2023, Perennial Rice and a new kind of Refrigerator
January 12
Welcome to 2023. As I enter my 5th year of writing I thought it might be a good time to stop and reflect on the changes that we have seen in the last 100 years before looking at the future. A few things that were invented in 1922 include:
Water skis, Ralph Samuelson first tied two planks of wood to his feet in an attempt to emulate snow skiing on water
Insulin was used for the first time
The first convertible car hardtop was invented
The electric blender was developed
Vitamin E was discovered and
Vegemite was invented and became part of Australian culture.
Compare this list to the James Webb Space Telescope, CRISPR, ChatGPT3, Quantum Computing and the fact that we just discovered that Hamsters handle alcohol much better than Elephants (not all science is useful but apparently it is very difficult to get a Hamster drunk, please do not try this at home).
Ray Kursweil (serial entrepreneur and founder of Singularity University) has predicted that there will be more scientific advances and new inventions in the next 10 years than there was in the last 100 years. The next decade will be an amazing time.
This week we will look at a new strain of rice that is perennial and produces rice more often than current strains. We investigate a new way to refrigerate without using hydrofluorocarbons. We discover the largest prime number currently known and we solve a 2,500 year old grammatical puzzle.
Perennial Rice
Rice is a staple food for a large portion of the world’s population. It is the grain most consumed by humans. Rice production is very labor intensive as current varieties of rice must be replanted every year.
In Yunnan, China a high yielding perennial rice has been developed by cross breeding annually cultivated rice plants with Oryza longistaminata, a perennial cousin of rice that is found in Africa.
In trials on a range of farms covering 15,333 hectares the new perennial rice produced 8 harvests over 4 years. Each harvest was equivalent to the previous annual harvest yield (so double the amount of rice was produced). The farmers used 60% less labor and spent almost 50% less on seed, fertilizer and other inputs. The soil was also found to be healthier than soil with annual plantings.
I could not find any information on the all important taste test. For the perennial rice to be an effective substitute it will have to taste similar or better than other varieties.
A new kind of Refrigerator
A team of researchers from Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory have used a common naturally occurring phenomenon to build a new kind of refrigerator. Humans have used salt to melt road ice for many years (technically the salt does not melt the ice, the salt’s darker color attracts heat which melts the ice and the salt then lowers the freezing point of the resulting water, preventing the ice from reforming).
The team found that a similar process could cool materials simply by mixing it with sodium iodide. Repeatedly cooling a material will also cool the environment in which it is contained. This is achieved by removing the salt and adding it again, over and over.
The process is called “ionocaloric refrigeration”. The team built a prototype to prove that the process works and that it is approximately as efficient as current refrigerators. The major advantage of the process is that it does not emit any hydrofluorocarbons or other pollutants. Hydrofluorocarbons are one of the main causes of the hole in the ozone layer. The downside of the new fridge is that it initially takes the mixed solution quite a while to cool. This should not be a problem for fridges that are kept cool all the time.
New Largest Prime Number
A collaborative computer project called the “Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search” found the largest prime number that has been discovered so far. The number was found on a computer owned by Floridaian, Patrick Laroche.
The number is way too big to write down here. It has 24,862,048 digits. It would take over 9,000 pages to write the number down. If you wrote 5 digits per inch every second, it would take 55 days to complete the 120 kilometer long number. The number is more than 1 million digits longer than the previous largest known Prime.
The number was discovered by multiplying together 82,589,933 twos and then subtracting one. It is known as a Mersenne Prime number, named after the 17th century mathematician and monk Marin Mersenne.
2,500 year old Grammatical Puzzle
Sanskrit scholars have been trying to solve a grammatical puzzle in ancient Sanskrit texts since the 5th century BC. Not understanding the grammar made it extremely difficult to translate the ancient texts with any accuracy.
A PHD student at the University of Cambridge, Rishi Rajpopat, has solved the problem by using a rule taught by the father of linguistics, Panini (an Indian scholar that lived sometime between the 6th and 4th century BC, his work was only rediscovered in the 19th century). The new discovery makes it possible to derive any Sanskrit word.
Panini’s “language machine” is a set of 4,000 rules that explains the structure of Sanskrit and the structure of words. It is like a linguistic algorithm. The problem was that when two or more of the rules were applied simultaneously it would lead to conflicts. Dr Rajpopat discovered for words where the rules were applicable to the left and right sides of a word, the rule applicable to the right side needed to be used.
Panini’s language machine allows for new vocabulary to be created that can be easily understood and decoded. This new discovery will allow computers to be programmed to better understand language. The system is suitable for Natural Language Processing systems (which were abandoned 50 years ago as too difficult). Computers will be better able to understand how to combine the speaker’s intention with Panini’s rule based grammar to produce human speech. Words can be better understood without knowing the context of their use.
Current Human Speech systems such as GPT3 are based upon training from writing samples. The system reproduces what it has seen before. This breakthrough may allow these systems to create their own Sanskrit speech and understandable words.
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.