Microsoft has announced that Windows 11, the next generation for its industry-leading operating system, is set to launch on October 5. The new OS will be available for free for all Windows 10 users and be released in waves to customers.
Like the rollout for Windows 10, Microsoft will first prioritize new devices in the release for Windows 11. This means that on launch day you might not be able to upgrade immediately, with Microsoft saying that in-market devices will be prompted to upgrade in the weeks and months that follow. The upgrade process will be handled by the Windows Update Assistant, which will identify devices compatible with Windows 11 and notify users when they can update.
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Now Playing: Which Nvidia 30 Series Card Is Right For You? (RTX 3090, 3080, and 3070)
Some features of Windows 11 won’t be ready for launch, however. Most notably, the ability to run Android apps natively on Windows 11 will be coming later, with the feature first being offered to Windows Insiders after launch. Windows 11 will also usher in support for Direct Storage, which will allow dedicated graphics cards to communicate directly with storage devices and bypass CPU communication for faster read performance akin to the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Microsoft is also brining this to Windows 10 in the future.
Microsoft did revise the requirements for Windows 11 recently, especially in the wake of its early PC Health Check App marking many modern systems as incompatible. A lot of this has to do with TPM 2.0, or Trusted Platform Module, support, which often ships disable on most modern motherboards. This means that you might need to adjust in your BIOS before being able to pass the health check or invest in an aftermarket module to be compliant.
With that in mind, Microsoft is allowing users to upgrade to Windows 11 using an official ISO, too, but says that these versions may be locked out of future Windows updates and security patches. You can find the system requirements for Windows 11 below.
Windows 11 System Requirements
CPU: 64-bit 1GHz dual-core processor
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 64GB
Additional: TPM 1.2 chip
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
Tesla might be best known as a company that pumps out (with a few exceptions) electric vehicles, but it looks like it might be selling electricity straight to the people pretty soon.
That’s according to a new report in Texas Monthly detailing Elon Musk’s newly instated subsidiary—Tesla Energy Ventures—that just filed with Texas’s Public Utility Commission to sell electricity straight to the residents in the state. Details on the project, which was formally registered on Aug. 17, are pretty thin right now; but we know that it’ll be helmed by Tesla’s director of regulatory credit trading Ana Stewart, and flanked by its current lead of energy and charging products, Rohan Ma.
According to the PUC filing, Tesla’s plan for the new venture is to target its current customers throughout the state. And undoubtedly, there are going to be some Tesla die-hards in Texas that are looking for an alternative in a state where the majority of the grid is powered by fossil fuels. That grid, you may recall, failed catastrophically during a February cold snap, leaving millions without power and hundreds dead. Subsequent peer-reviewed research has teased out the exact causes of the failure, and much of the blame rests at the foot of fossil fuel infrastructure that was unprepared for the weather, leading to widespread power losses right as people cranked up the heat. (Some Texans even turned to using electric vehicles that had been fully charged before the storm to stay warm.)
The fallout has come hot and heavy since then. Power providers across the state have come under fire from lawsuits for price gouging, regulators have been firedor resigned with abandon, and numerous utilities have filed for bankruptcy or sued the state’s energy grid regulator, ERCOT. Yet lawmakers have done basically nothing to help the situation, thanks to entrenched fossil fuel interests, and the grid once againteetered this summer.
In other words, there’s a pretty big gap in the Texas energy market right now that Tesla could fill. The state does have a healthy renewables industry, particularly when it comes to wind. Texans also have installed 1 gigawatt of small-scale solar capacity, but maximizing the panels that are there and beefing up storage and capacity further is essential to addressing the climate crisis. It could also improve electricity access, and trade unions have gone all-in on an all-electric future for Texas. (It could also, of course, be a way for Tesla to make money.)
G/O Media may get a commission
In March, another Tesla subsidiary called Gambit Energy Storage started work on a new energy storage facility based out of the suburban city of Angleton, Texas. The facility, when it’s finished, is essentially a massive battery that could plug directly into the Texas grid and power 16,400 homes in the state.
Musk’s company has also scaled up energy storage systems in Australia as well. Tesla built a utility-scale battery storage facility and created a “virtual power plant” that allows customers with rooftop solar and Powerwalls in their homes to act as a network to move and store electricity. The venture in Texas could mirror those efforts, with Texas Monthly noting the PUC filing shows Tesla will approach existing customers.
Last year, Musk told investors that he thought Tesla’s energy business rival the company’s electric car ambitions. “I think long-term Tesla Energy will be roughly the same size as Tesla Automotive,” he said. “The energy business is collectively bigger than the automotive business.”
Musk doesn’t only have a professional relationship with the state, but a personal one, too, considering how he made a big show of his move down there at the end of last year (much to the chagrin of some Austin residents). If Tesla emerges as a power player in the state’s struggling energy market, Texans will be more willing to warm up to the guy. But if his power grid ambitions are anything like his robot plans, he could be setting himself facing a Texas-size disaster.
As usual, Tesla is unreachable for comment because it shut down its PR department last year.
Alphabet’s fully autonomous driving unit Waymo is ready to offer rides to select passengers in San Francisco, the company announced on Tuesday. Starting later today, residents can sign up to become “Trusted Testers.” With an invite to the program, you can use the Waymo One app to take rides in the fleet of Jaguar I-Pace vehicles Waymo will have stationed in the city.
Waymo describes the Trusted Tester program as a “research-focused” effort designed to help it collect feedback on its ride experience, with an emphasis on gathering information related to accessibility.
“We kicked off this program last week with a select few and are now expanding the program to all interested San Franciscans,” the company said. “We’ll begin with an initial group and welcome more riders in the weeks to come.” Much like it did in Arizona, Waymo won’t let the cars drive without supervision right off the back. The company will have employees in the cars to ensure its fifth-generation Waymo Driver technology doesn’t get lost on San Francisco’s tricky one-way streets and hills. The company also told Bloombergpassengers will ride for free.
The expansion comes after Waymo recently announced CEO John Krafcik was leaving the company to pursue other projects. Some saw Krafcik as being too slow to push the company toward commercialization.
This article by I. Bonifacic originally appeared onEngadget.
From pacemakers and insulin pumps to mammography machines, ultrasounds, and monitors, a dizzying array of medical devices have been found to contain worrying security vulnerabilities. The latest addition to that ignoble lineup is a popular infusion pump and dock, the B. Braun Infusomat Space Large Volume Pump and B. Braun SpaceStation, that a determined hacker could manipulate to administer a double dose of medication to victims.
Infusion pumps automate delivery of medications and nutrients into patients’ bodies, typically from a bag of intravenous fluids. They are particularly useful for administering very small or otherwise nuanced doses of medication without errors, but that means the stakes are high when problems do arise. Between 2005 and 2009, for example, the FDA received roughly 56,000 reports of “adverse events” related to infusion pumps “including numerous injuries and deaths,” and the agency subsequently cracked down on infusion pump safety in 2010. As a result, products like the B. Braun Infusomat Space Large Volume Pump are extremely locked down at the software level; it’s supposed to be impossible to send the devices commands directly. But researchers from the security firm McAfee ultimately found ways to get around this barrier.
“We pulled on every thread we could and ultimately we found the worst-case scenario,” says Steve Povolny, head of McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research group. “As an attacker, you should not be able to move back and forth from the SpaceStation to the actual pump operating system, so breaking that security boundary and getting access to be able to interact between those two—it’s a real problem. We showed that we could double the rate of flow.”
The researchers found that an attacker with access to a health care facility’s network could take control of a SpaceStation by exploiting a common connectivity vulnerability. From there they could exploit four other flaws in sequence to send the medication-doubling command. The full attack isn’t simple to carry out in practice and requires that first foothold in a medical facility’s network.
“Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow a sophisticated attacker to compromise the security of the Space or compactplus communication devices,” B. Braun wrote in a security alert to customers, “allowing an attacker to escalate privileges, view sensitive information, upload arbitrary files, and perform remote code execution.” The company further acknowledged that a hacker could change the connected infusion pump’s configuration, and with it the rate of infusions.
The company said in the notification that using the latest versions of its software released in October is the best way to keep devices secure. It also recommended that customers implement other network security mitigations like segmentation and multifactor authentication.The McAfee researchers note, though, that most of the bugs haven’t actually been patched in existing products. B Braun, they say, has simply removed the vulnerable networking feature in the new version of its SpaceStations.
Once hackers gain control of the SpaceStation by exploiting the first network bug, the hack plays out by combining four vulnerabilities that all relate to lack of access controls between the SpaceStation and a pump. The researchers found specific commands and conditions in which the pumps don’t adequately verify the integrity of data or authenticate commands sent from the SpaceStation. They also discovered that the lack of upload restrictions allowed them to taint a device backup with a malicious file, and then restore from the backup to get malware onto a pump. And they noticed that the devices send some data back and forth in plaintext without encryption, exposing it to interception or manipulation.
The Boston genetic engineering company Ginkgo Bioworks and its CEO, Jason Kelly, have been spectacularly successful selling a story: that synthetic biology will transform the manufacture of physical products. What computers did for information, Kelly says, biology will do for the physical world. Instead of making a chemical from petroleum, why not have Ginkgo’s multi-floor “foundry” in Boston’s seaport design a yeast cell to manufacture it instead from a broth of sugar water?
I first saw Kelly, a boyish figure in a tight sport coat and sneakers, give his pitch a few years back. It was the same talk he’d been giving successfully in Silicon Valley for years. One slide featured a photo of an Apple computer, an iPhone, a camera, and a metal watch on a gray desk decorated with a potted plant and a black swivel lamp. “What’s the most complicated device on this table?” Kelly asked.
Of course, it’s the house plant. The point is that biology can make just about anything. Think of its incredibly sophisticated miniature machines, like the swirling flagellum that helps a bacterium swim. In Ginkgo’s hands biology would become programmable, revolutionary, and insanely lucrative, just like those famous tech products in the slide. “This is a much more powerful manufacturing platform than any of those other things,” Kelly said.
Given Kelly’s spiel, it is surprising that 13 years after it was founded, Ginkgo can’t name a single significant product that is manufactured and sold using its organisms. To the company’s fans, that’s no problem. They say Ginkgo embodies the biggest trends in DNA science and surely will become the Intel, Microsoft, or Amazon of biology. Kelly has compared Ginkgo to all three. To skeptics, however, Ginkgo is a company with modest scientific achievements and little revenue, and its greatest talents lie in winning glowing press coverage and raising money.
Ginkgo’s story matters because it has become the face of synthetic biology to many investors as it prepares to begin trading as a public stock in September following a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, called Soaring Eagle. A SPAC is a shell company that sells shares to the public in an IPO with the intention of merging with a promising private business, thereby taking it public too. SPACs can open exciting (and risky) young tech companies to ordinary investors, although it’s at a price negotiated by a small circle of dealmakers. Earlier this year, Soaring Eagle announced it would merge with Ginkgo in a deal that valued the Boston company at $15 billion. Kelly’s stake will be worth well more than $700 million.
Some biotech investors believe this valuation is excessive for a company with little revenue; in 2020 Ginkgo brought in $77 million providing research services and covid-19 tests but lost plenty of money while doing so (more than $137 million, to be exact). “It looks like a great example of a clever story that caught the attention of investors,” says Jean-François Formela, a venture capitalist at Atlas Venture in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “If you boil down the message, it’s that biology is programmable. But it’s not that easy,” he says. Formela adds that the $15 billion valuation “seems insane.”
But in today’s bull market, being a skeptic doesn’t pay. So it’s difficult to say with any certainty what Ginkgo is really worth. After all, a single Bitcoin now costs $48,500 and Tesla has a market capitalization of around $700 billion, more than 10 times that of Ford. “Speaking with assurance on certain types of companies belies how difficult it is to know,” says Doug Cole of Flagship Pioneering, an organization that forms biotech startups in Cambridge. That’s especially true with companies that, like Ginkgo, are “creating new markets.”
Ginkgo’s success telling its story and raising money without introducing significant products has some skeptics wondering whether it will be next in line to crater once reality sets in. Earlier this month Zymergen, a competing synthetic-biology company, saw its stock price plunge 75% in a day after it said sales of its main product, a biological film for foldable phones, would be delayed by at least a year. Zymergen’s CEO, Josh Hoffman, who had also touted a coming era of “biofacturing,” resigned as well.
In a phone call, Kelly said his company purposely isn’t betting on any one product. Instead, he says, Ginkgo is a science and engineering “platform” for other companies to use. He compared Ginkgo to an online app store, except that the apps are programmed cells. Like an app store, Kelly says, Ginkgo will eventually profit by taking a cut of customers’ revenues, in the form of royalties or shares. It will be up to them to make and sell the biomanufactured products.
“I am not a product company, and I have no desire to be a product company,” Kelly told me. “People in biotech are brainwashed to think only products matter.”
Super unicorn
Ginkgo was started in 2008 by Thomas Knight, an MIT computer engineer who had become fascinated with “standardizing” biological research, along with four graduate students, including Kelly. At first the company got by on government grants and cast-off equipment salvaged from MIT’s campus; “we had $150,000 and a U-Haul,” says Kelly. It was a time flush with funding for “synbio” companies, many dreaming of brewing transportation fuel, and Ginkgo barely stood out.
Its fortunes were transformed in 2014, when the startup entered the Y Combinator entrepreneurship program in Silicon Valley. Soon Ginkgo was selling the dream of biology West Coast style, likening it to computing, and investors’ successive injections of cash put it on a path to “super-unicorn” status. It was a private, profitless company that investors were valuing at $1 billion by 2017 and $4.8 billion by 2019,according to PitchBook.
“They were the first real biotech company to come through Y Combinator,” says Michael Koeris, a professor of bioprocessing at the Keck Graduate Institute, who once ran a startup, Sample6, in the same building as Ginkgo. “I think the YC people taught them to package the story so that it is fundable. That is a skill. A lot of science doesn’t get funded because there’s no story.”
Kelly’s gifts as a pitchman are widely acknowledged, and his company is famous for its lavish scientific window dressing. Last year it started printing its own glossy vanity magazine, Grow by Ginkgo,which exists to “tell creative stories” about the endless possibilities of synthetic biology. A recent issue contained a scratch-and-sniff card impregnated with the scent of an extinct flower.
“Times must be good when a young biotech company can afford to hire people to write unrelated magazine-style articles,” snarked Dirk Haussecker, a savvy biotech stock picker who is active on Twitter.
Kelly says the magazine was inspired by Think, a periodical printed by IBM starting in the 1930s. “Why did they do that? Well, no one knew what the heck a computer was,” says Kelly, who sees Ginkgo playing a similar role as an evangelist for the possibilities of genetic engineering.
During a podcast, journalists with Stat News compared Ginkgo to a “meme stock,” or “stonk,” positioned to appeal to an investing public chasing trends without regard for business fundamentals. When the SPAC deal is finalized—sometime in September—the company is going to trade under the stock symbol “DNA,” once owned by Genentech, an early hero of the biotech scene. “Ginkgo Bioworks does not deserve to use the DNA ticker,” said Stat stock reporter Adam Feuerstein.
SPACs are aWall Street trend that offers an IPO path with a little less than the usual scrutiny of a company’s financial outlook. Will Gornall, a business school professor at the University of British Columbia, believes that they democratize investor access to hot sectors but can also overestimate companies’ value. Some deals, like the one that took Richard Branson’s space company Virgin Galactic Holdings public, have done well, but five electric-car companies that went public via SPACs were subsequently pummeled with what Bloomberg called “brutal” corrections.
Gornall can see a bettor’s logic to the Ginkgo gamble. In recent years stock market profits have been driven by just a handful of tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—each now worth more than a trillion dollars. “The valuation could make sense if there is even a 1% chance that biology is the computer of the future and this is the company that achieves that,” says Gornall.
Other people’s products
Since it was founded, Ginkgo has spent nearly half a billion dollars, much of it building labs equipped with robots, gene sequencers and sophisticated lab instruments such as mass spectrometers. These “foundries” allow it to test genes added to microorganisms (often yeast) or other cells. It claims it can create 50,000 different genetically modified cells in a single day. A typical aim of a foundry project is to assess which of hundreds of versions of a given gene is particularly good at, say, turning sugar into a specific chemical. Kelly says customers can use Ginkgo’s services instead of building their own lab.
What’s missing from Ginkgo’s story is any blockbuster products resulting from its research service. “If you are labeling yourself ‘synbio,’ that is setting the bar high for success—you are saying you are going to the moon,” says Koeris. “You’ve raised so much money against a fantastic vision that soon you need to have a transformative product, whether a drug or some crazy industrial product.”
To date, Ginkgo’s engineering of yeast cells has led to commercial production of three fragrance molecules, Kelly says. Robert Weinstein, president and CEO of the US arm of the flavor and additives maker Robertet, confirmed that his company now ferments two such molecules using yeast engineered by Kelly’s company. One, gamma-decalactone, has a strong peach scent. The other, massoia lactone, is a clear liquid normally isolated from the bark of a tropical tree; used as flavoring, it can sell online for $1,200 a kilogram. Running a fermenter year-round could generate a few million dollars’ worth of such a specialty chemical.
Organism engineers: The five founders of Ginkgo Bioworks met at MIT. From the left: Reshma Shetty, Barry Canton, Jason Kelly, Austin Che, Tom Knight.
GINGKO BIOWORKS
To George Church, a professor at Harvard Medical School, such products don’t yet live up to the promise that synthetic biology will widely transform manufacturing. “I think flavors and fragrances is very far from the vision that biology can make anything,” says Church. Kelly also sometimes struggles to reconcile the “disruptive” potential he sees for synthetic biology with what Ginkgo has achieved. Church drew my attention to a May report in the Boston Globe about Ginkgo’s merger with Soaring Eagle. In it, Kelly said his firm was an attractive investment because the world was becoming familiar with the extraordinary potential of synthetic biology, citing the covid-19 vaccines made from messenger RNA and the animal-free proteins in new plant burgers, like those from Impossible Foods.
“The article was a list of achievements, but the most interesting achievements were from others,” says Church. “It doesn’t seem to add up to $15 billion to me.” Still, Church says he hopes that Ginkgo does succeed. Not only is the company his “favorite unicorn,” but it acquired the remains of some of his own synthetic-bio startups after they went bust (he also recently sold a company to Zymergen). How Ginkgo performs in the future “could help our whole field or hurt our whole field,” he says.
While Ginkgo’s work has not led to any blockbusters, and Kelly allows it’s “frustrating” that biotech takes so long, he says products from other customers are coming soon. The Cannabis company Cronos, based in Canada, says by the end of the year it will be selling intoxicating pineapple-flavored candy containing CBG, a molecular component of the marijuana flower; Ginkgo helped show it how to make the compound in yeast. A spinout from Ginkgo, called Motif FoodWorks, says it expects to have a synthetically produced meat flavor available this year as well.
More recently, Ginkgo has sought to play a bigger role in the manufacture of new biotech drugs, a more lucrative arena. For instance, it says it helped a research supply company called Aldevron improve the production of capping enzymes, which are used in the manufacture of mRNA vaccines. Those enzymes are in high demand because of the covid-19 crisis, and if the process is commercialized, they will represent the most important product Ginkgo has been involved with. That product could see several hundred million in annual sales, which Kelly says Ginkgo will collect part of as royalties.
One problem some see is that making real money in industrial biology is notoriously difficult. Engineering a microbe that performs well in a laboratory reactor is just a first step. Often the organisms need to be further tweaked to grow and thrive under pressure in steel tanks before it’s possible to actually manufacture something. But the trickiest part is making bioproducts inexpensively enough to compete with existing chemical production.
“The biotech landscape is scattered with bodies of companies that couldn’t scale or didn’t think about the economics,” says Chris Guske, a chemical engineer who has worked on some of the world’s largest biorefining products. “Just because you have a bug that produces a gram per liter in a flask doesn’t mean you are ready to be commercial.”
John Melo, CEO of Amyris, another synthetic-biology company, says Ginkgo does not have expertise in large-scale production, and he thinks Kelly is “paranoid” that betting on products “equates to difficulty and failure.” Amyris itself almost collapsed after it failed in a plan to sell biofuels for transportation but is staging a turnaround by manufacturing and selling beauty ingredients and flavors. In Melo’s view, unless things are made with biology at large scales, the dream of renewable manufacturing won’t be any closer. “I think this notion of not being a product company misses the point,” he says. “How can you be enabling sustainability if you don’t make a product?”
Circular revenue
All of biology is being pushed forward by the ability to read DNA, write it, and use those instructions to program organisms or human cells. By automating the use of these technologies, Ginkgo’s backers believe, the company is uniquely positioned to take a commanding position. Harry Sloan, a lawyer and Hollywood executive, is one of the business figures behind Soaring Eagle and previously took the fantasy sports betting company DraftKings public. “These are companies that are not only leaders in their field but actually created the field themselves,” he told the Globe. “That is certainly the case with Ginkgo and synthetic biology.”
Showcase lab: A promotional photo showing a view into one of Ginkgo Bioworks “foundries” in Boston, where it engineers microorganisms.
GINGKO BIOWORKS
In its presentations to investors, Sloan’s group predicts that within four years Ginkgo’s app-store model will have five hundred clients and generate billions of dollars in cash flow. Ginkgo frequently issues press releases announcing new customers, suggesting a growing clamor for its scientific resources. However, many of its customers are not fully independent from Ginkgo. According to Ginkgo’s financial documents, more than half its foundry’s 2020 revenues came from a few “related” companies that it partly owns.
One way Ginkgo creates demand for its services is to form spinout ventures, which then become the customers of its foundries. These deals have sometimes been financed by Ginkgo’s own largest investors, which include the hedge fund Viking Global and Cascade Investments, Bill Gates’s investment firm. Besides Motif FoodWorks, which operates in the same building, Gingko created Allonnia, a company developing microbes to break down pollution, which also subscribes to its foundry services.
Another example of how Ginkgo has financed demand for its services was a collaboration it announced in June 2019: a ”transformational” project with a startup called Synlogic, which is engineering E. coli bacteria to treat serious metabolic disorders. In ongoing studies, patients are swallowing pills filled with germs that have been programmed to carry out helpful functions, like digesting certain excess amino acids, the cause of a disease called phenylketonuria. The deal was important because it signaled that Ginkgo could get involved in potentially profitable new drugs, not only industrial ingredients.
But the way the deal was structured, it was Ginkgo that ended up paying for most of the R&D, not Synlogic. As part of the agreement, Synlogic did cut a check for $30 million in cash to Ginkgo for foundry services aimed at improving its strains. But Ginkgo simultaneously invested $80 million in Synlogic at a sizable premium to its stock price at the time. In effect, the money took a round trip, starting as cash in Ginkgo’s bank account and ending up as payment for foundry services.
Even though Ginkgo underwrote the research, Kelly has touted the collaboration to investors as an example of its successful business model. After adding DNA to organisms and testing them, he explains, “we give you a tube the size of a thimble that’s got a cell with the genome that you need. And that is all that leaves that big factory. And then you as the customer would grow that in your big tanks … if you’re Synlogic, it’ll go into clinical trials as a therapeutic, right?” In preparation for the SPAC merger, Ginkgo also told investors that it improved the performance of one Synlogic strain of E. coli several times over.
Aoife Brennan, Synlogic’s CEO, says Ginkgo “has absolutely demonstrated” it can improve the performance of E. coli strains, particularly if the job involves an automated “bake-off” between versions of a genetic pathway to see which is best. With its investment in automation, Ginkgo says, it is constantly lowering the cost of experiments and increasing the number of organism designs that it can test, a metric it refers to as “Knight’s Law,” after its founder. In this case, Ginkgo screened more than 1,000 genes and created several hundred strains.
Inbound marketing: Ginkgo publishes a vanity magazine, called Grow. It is modeled on Think, a highbrow periodical once published by IBM.
That type of automated procedure, Brennan says, is helpful “when you know what you are looking for” but is “sometimes is still not what we need.” Often, research problems are instead solved by scientific “tinkering,” she says, or tests that aren’t easily automated. Indeed, the particular organisms Ginkgo helped engineer were not successful after they failed to “reach our criteria to advance the project” into clinical testing, Brennan says. Instead, this summer Synlogic announced it would begin human tests of a new version of its E. coli engineered by enEvolv, a startup recently purchased by Zymergen, which she says brought capabilities to the project that Ginkgo did not have at the time.
By forming spinouts and taking equity in its customers, Ginkgo can seem to be acting as much like a venture capital firm as a research company. For instance, Kelly, along with his company’s largest outside investor, Viking Global (it owns 20% of Ginkgo), came to the financial aid of Genomatica, a company making plastic precursors and facing a costly push to commercialization. That company wound up largely owned by Viking and Ginkgo, while also becoming one of Ginkgo’s customers. A person formerly close to Genomatica described Ginkgo as acting as “an arm of Viking” whose true business could be described as financial engineering, not genetic engineering. This person called Gingko “effective” because of how they can use capital to “organize the market” and “reignite interest in synthetic biology.”
Ginkgo’s practice of juicing up demand by investing in its customers, trading foundry work for equity, and financing demonstration projects was the subject of a 2020 Harvard Business School case study, which concluded that the arrangements were useful for “explaining Ginkgo’s future growth and untapped potential” to its own investors. But the arrangements make Ginkgo’s finances a little harder to figure out, even for Ginkgo.
Kelly confirmed that some of the CEOs of Ginkgo’s partners, including the head of Motif, raised concerns to him about the unpredictable way Ginkgo was expending the foundry credits they’d been awarded. Basically, Ginkgo was dividing the cost of running its foundry between whatever customers it happened to have, rather than billing them at fixed rates, which it does now. Brennan says the “loosey-goosey” accounting created challenges for her company, which is public already and had to file quarterly reports with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. After the group raised the concerns, Kelly quickly solved the problem. “You can fix a lot of things with money,” says Brennan. “And they have a lot of money.”
In an interview, Brennan says she is pleased to have Kelly involved with her company, calling him a supportive shareholder whose view is that “if we are successful, then they are too.” Kelly’s belief in synthetic biology is unflagging, and his support has continued even as Synlogic’s stock price has slumped, erasing about three quarters of Ginkgo’s investment on paper.
“He is very charismatic,” she says of Kelly. “It is nirvana to have an investor who also believes engineered bacteria will be on the shelf at CVS helping people one day.”
via Technology Review Feed – Tech Review Top Stories https://ift.tt/1XdUwhl
Interested in scooting through a wormhole, the ultimate cheat-code through space and time? Perhaps you’d like to hop from star system to star system across the universe without breaking a sweat? But first, you’d better make sure your wormhole is traversable.
“Any traveler trying to cross a wormhole that does not satisfy this will be crushed inside as the tunnel collapses,” João Rosa, a physicist at Aveiro University in Portugal, told Live Science.
Rosa is attempting to virtually “build” a stable, traversable wormhole, one that can be safely crossed without the theoretical passageway collapsing or trapping its occupant. And he has recently found that it is indeed possible, but only if we tweak our understanding of gravity.
Wormholes are deceptively easy to build — on paper. You start with a theory of gravity. In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity defines the relationship between matter and energy, and space and time. The trick to building a wormhole is to find a configuration of matter and energy that allows you to form a tunnel — usually called a “throat” in wormhole research — bridging two distant points in space.
In principle, that throat can be as long or as short as you want, but the more interesting wormholes happen when the throat is far shorter than the normal distance between two points, making the wormhole a convenient shortcut. Oh, and wormholes can also act as time machines, sending you into the future or past, depending on how they’re constructed.
The idea of such a whimsical shortcut has captured the imaginations of scientists and science-fiction writers for decades.
“The possibility to visit other stars (or even other galaxies), possibly finding alien civilizations, and the possibility to revisit the past or not having to wait for the future have been part of the human imagination and fantasy for a long time, and wormholes provide a (relatively) simple and unified solution for both of these problems,” Rosa told Live Science in an email.
But wormholes constructed based on the criteria laid out by general relativity suffer a major problem: They’re not actually traversable. The entrances of general relativity wormholes are hidden behind event horizons, which are one-way barriers in space. That means if you were to enter the wormhole, you could never leave, which would defeat the purpose.
The other problem is that they are ridiculously unstable. The moment even a single photon, or light particle, enters the throat, the whole wormhole catastrophically collapses before that packet of light can escape.
Bummer.
A new gravity
In order to solve these problems in general relativity and stabilize a wormhole, a cosmic traveler must fashion the wormhole out of an incredibly exotic ingredient, a form of matter that has negative energy or negative mass. Negative mass (also known as exotic matter) is exactly what it sounds like: If something weighs negative 10 pounds, it would have negative mass. Scientists have not observed negative mass anywhere in the universe. Negative energy is slightly more attainable, which is just a condition where the energy in a particular location is negative relative to its surroundings, but that can only be achieved at microscopic, quantum scales.
“What happens is that these gravitational effects needed to guarantee the traversability of the wormhole happen naturally if one modifies gravity.”
João Rosa
“The presence of this matter is essential as it prevents the wormhole throat from collapsing upon a traveler, but it is also problematic,” Rosa explained. “It presents a negative average energy density, an extremely rare characteristic of matter in the universe that is only observed in very specific situations at the quantum level.”
Since such matter is so rare, building an entire wormhole out of the exotic matter would seem impossible in our universe.
But all this talk about wormholes is predicated on general relativity. And while that theory of gravity has survived every single observational and experimental test thrown at it over the last century, we know that general relativity isn’t the last word on gravity. Relativity is incapable of describing the centers of black holes, the earliest moments of the universe and the link between itself and quantum physics.
So maybe a new, improved theory of gravity would allow wormholes to exist.
Making the trip
That’s exactly what Rosa investigated in a new paper published online July 29 to the preprint journal arXiv, meaning the study has yet to be reviewed by peers in the field.
Rosa employed a tweaked form of gravity called generalized hybrid metric-Palatini gravity. This theory of gravity is built on general relativity, but allows more flexibility in relationships between matter and energy, and space and time.
Earlier research had found that traversable wormholes might be possible in this modified theory of gravity, but they still required negative energy outside the wormhole throat. Rosa found that by layering the entrances to the wormholes with double thin shells of regular matter, the wormhole becomes traversable without any negative energy.
“What happens is that these gravitational effects needed to guarantee the traversability of the wormhole happen naturally if one modifies gravity, and exotic matter [matter with negative mass] is no longer needed to serve this purpose,” Rosa explained.
What’s next? Rosa wants to test this particular theory of modified gravity. “This is just a very small step towards the final goal: One must now use experimental data and observations (e.g. gravitational waves and trajectories of stars near the center of the Milky Way) to test and (hopefully) confirm the validity of these theories,” Rosa wrote.
While general relativity has so far explained all measurements of gravity (including gravitational waves and the vicinity of black holes), the story isn’t over. Future observations might find a crack in that venerable theory, and if generalized hybrid metric-Palatini gravity better explains cosmic observations, then wormholes made for travel might be possible.
But the questions wouldn’t end there. Wormholes can also act as time machines, so a viable wormhole solution would mean that time travel into the past is possible; that, of course, raises all sorts of difficult problems (like the so-called “grandfather paradox” and questions about causality). Knowing for sure that traversable wormholes could exist wouldn’t just make our sci-fi dreams come true, it would totally upend our understanding of physics.
Twitter user Cuchillo Lope just dropped an inadvertent bomb on the social media platform, asking users for the kinds of movies that, when recommended, feel like green flags for your relationship with the recommender (as opposed to, well, red ones):
