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NEW EPISODE

MONITOR

Boosting how to make chemicals at scale with plants instead of oil

Solugen, a startup that’s been steadily cultivating bio manufacturing know-how to scale up its chemienzymatic processes, just got a big enormous government loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to the tune of 213MM $USD. Chemical jargon aside, it means that there’s growing government support to find new ways to manufacture chemicals, such as with enzymes that can do so with better, more sustainable, means of production. A prerequisite for showing that this works is to build a bioforge, with a new one named Bioforge Marshall in the works in Minnesota. Read what Solugen has to say about this.

The White House held a summit 🎥 on biomanufacturing so if you want to get up to speed (and have 3 hours to do so), it could be worth a skim.

DNA could be basis for robust cybersecurity

Since I’m on the topics of biology, quantum sciences, and artificial intelligence, let’s just combine them and see what we get. One potential result is the use of DNA for enhanced authentication for the cybersecure (insecure?) world that comes after “Q-Day” – the figurative and inevitable future event when quantum computing gets sufficiently capable to break pretty much all of our current password schemes. There’s a paper by scientists at ETH Zurich disclosing a novel cryptographic one-way function that is based on a series of nucleotides, which are the biological basis for DNA and the encoders of life . If reading about physical unclonable functions (PUFs) gets you excited, read the peer-reviewed paper. (🚩Nature)

Quantum physics is reshaping privacy

I often find it helpful to have a review of the past and present, since it can help us to understand what could come ahead. From a cryptographic perspective, our most private digital data has been protected by the work of Bennett and Brassard, while Shor’s work in the space continues to serve us well for privacy protection. (He’s the S in the stalwart “RSA” family of cryptographic protection.) More recently, Chen and Regev are among the new cohort of notable names who are advancing our understanding of cryptographic primitives and how to stay head of the (elliptic) curve. Pun intended. Ben Brubaker synthesizes the research well.

BLIPS

Deep sea mining is growing in popularity, but it’s not helping us with our renewable energy needs. ⊙ The U.S. military is great at creating acronyms that don’t exactly roll off the tongue, so here’s a new one: NIPRGPT, a chatbot for Air Force Airmen and Space Force Guardians.

No One Builds Alone.

/N1BA

Telemetry is written by JMill of The End Effector.