Astor Perkins

Astor Perkins featured on Forbes The deep tech revolution creating a new class of wealth “Space maverick” Scott Amyx’s skills are niche – so niche that only a handful of people in the world possess his depth of knowledge about deep tech. In layperson’s terms, he’s a leader in the deep tech VC market, investing in complex scientific ideas and space technology that will one day change the world as we know it. Amyx – a Forbes Business Council Member and TEDx speaker – believes that deep tech will create the next industrial revolution, leading to profound changes in how we live and work and creating a new class of mega-wealth. SpaceX alone, for example, has a market valuation of $US140 billion ($198.8 billion) – that figure is predicted to substantially increase when the company goes public. “When we look at… the digital revolution that kind of spanned 2000s until recently — we think that what we’re looking at now [with deep space] is probably going to eclipse all of that combined,” Amyx says. “We are very much at the precipitous of being a one-planet species to being an interplanetary species. We’re going to build habitats [on other planets], and the long-term plan is to have a habitat on the moon, as well as on Mars and other planets.” As previous industrial revolutions created billionaire tycoons like the Rockefellers, Amyx predicts that the deep space revolution will see a new class of entrepreneurs – only this time, they will be trillionaires. “For the first time, we’re going to see mega industries [with players] like SpaceX and Starlink, where we’re going to create trillionaires not billionaires. Elon Musk will be just one of a few” Amyx says while 95 per cent of VCs “pile money into the same thing”, such as Web3, crypto, SAS and FinTech, deep space is a potentially massive market for innovation that very few VC experts understand. Astor Perkins’s recent deep tech investments include D-Orbit, Metawave and Lunar Station. “We are focused on backing mavericks and solving some of the hardest problems facing humanity on earth and in space. And specifically, we look at areas of climate change mitigation…longevity, human survival, and deep space.” When it comes to space travel and tourism, Amyx says history can lend a clue to where the real money will be made by the next generation of entrepreneurs. “When people came to California during the gold rush, it wasn’t the people that were mining for gold that became rich. It was actually the merchants. The same goes for the moon,” he says. https://lnkd.in/e547_7zq #forbes #space #deeptech #vc #startup

Superconducting flux qubit with ferromagnetic Josephson π-junction operating at zero magnetic field Conventional superconducting flux qubits require the application of a precisely tuned magnetic field to set the operation point at half a flux quantum through the qubit loop, which complicates the on-chip integration of this type of device. It has been proposed that by inducing a π-phase shift in the superconducting order parameter using a precisely controlled nanoscale-thickness superconductor/ferromagnet/superconductor Josephson junction, commonly referred to as π-junction, it is possible to realize a flux qubit operating at zero magnetic flux. Here, the researchers report the realization of a zero-flux-biased flux qubit based on three NbN/AlN/NbN Josephson junctions and a NbN/PdNi/NbN ferromagnetic π-junction. The qubit lifetime is in the microsecond range, which they argue is limited by quasiparticle excitations in the metallic ferromagnet layer. Their results pave the way for developing quantum coherent devices, including qubits and sensors, that utilize the interplay between ferromagnetism and superconductivity. https://lnkd.in/gAEFd2qi

Secretive Phoenix Ghost Kamikaze Drones Rushed To Ukraine Finally Come Out Of The Shadows The secretive Phoenix Ghost kamikaze drone has finally emerged publicly. We now know for sure that Phoenix Ghost is not a single design, but a family of increasingly larger and longer-ranged one-way attack munitions from AEVEX Aerospace. Phoenix Ghosts were among the first kamikaze drones the U.S. military publicly announced it would be sending to Ukraine, but it had not been previously confirmed what they were and no conclusive imagery showing one had emerged before now. It is worth noting that the development of the Phoenix Ghost family, which traces back to a project under the Air Force’s Big Safari special projects office, also predates Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022. All “AEVEX loitering munitions use visual-based navigation to autonomously identify and follow landmarks or features in their environment, enabling precise positioning and pathfinding without reliance on GPS,” according to the company’s website. “Our systems leverage alternative PNT [precision navigation and timing] solutions to maintain precise navigation and operational capability in GPS-denied or degraded environments.” In addition, “AEVEX loitering munitions automatically detect, identify, locate, report (DILR) and deliver lethal and non-lethal effects against threats across multiple scenarios and domains with unprecedented accuracy and speed” and are able to “navigate, make decisions, and complete missions without direct intervention,” the company says. However, the drones can also be fitted with line-of-sight links and/or mesh networked radios, as well as electro-optical and infrared sensors, to provide some degree of direct control. In addition to acting as kamikaze drones, AEVEX says the uncrewed aerial systems in its product line can be configured for electronic and cyber warfare and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Among the specific kamikaze drones AEVEX has now disclosed as being part of the Phoenix Ghost family are Dominator and Disruptor, which are in the so-called Group 3 category. The U.S. military defines Group 3 drones as weighing between 55 and 1,320 pounds, being able to fly at altitudes between 3,500 and 18,000 feet, and having top speeds of between 100 and 250 knots. While the Dominator was previously disclosed, Disruptor was only publicly unveiled this week. Disruptor, which has a tubular carbon fiber main body, a pair of straight main wings, and a v-tail configuration, is 10.1 feet long and has a wingspan of 15.75 feet. It has a maximum takeoff weight of 185 pounds when launched pneumatically, but this can be increased to 205 pounds by using a rocket-assisted launch method. https://lnkd.in/gm5F_73f

The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date Over the past few months, some of the most prominent people in AI have fashioned themselves as modern messiahs and their products as deities. Top executives and respected researchers at the world’s biggest tech companies, including a recent Nobel laureate, are all at once insisting that superintelligent software is just around the corner, going so far as to provide timelines: They will build it within six years, or four years, or maybe just two. Although AI executives commonly speak of the coming AGI revolution—referring to artificial “general” intelligence that rivals or exceeds human capability—they notably have all at this moment coalesced around real, albeit loose, deadlines. Many of their prophecies also have an undeniable utopian slant. First, Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, repeated in August his suggestion from earlier this year that AGI could arrive by 2030, adding that “we could cure most diseases within the next decade or two.” A month later, even Meta’s more typically grounded chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said he expected powerful and all-knowing AI assistants within years, or perhaps a decade. Then the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, wrote a blog post stating that “it is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days,” which would in turn make such dreams as “fixing the climate” and “establishing a space colony” reality. Not to be outdone, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the rival AI start-up Anthropic, wrote in a sprawling self-published essay last week that such ultra-powerful AI “could come as early as 2026.” He predicts that the technology will end disease and poverty and bring about “a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights,” and that “many will be literally moved to tears” as they behold these accomplishments. The tech, he writes, is “a thing of transcendent beauty.” These are four of the most significant and well respected figures in the AI boom; at least in theory, they know what they’re talking about—much more so than, say, Elon Musk, who has predicted superhuman AI by the end of 2025. Altman’s start-up has been leading the AI race since even before the launch of ChatGPT, and Amodei has co-authored several of the papers underlying today’s generative AI. Google DeepMind created AI programs that mastered chess and Go and then “solved” protein folding—a transformative moment for drug discovery that won Hassabis a Nobel Prize in chemistry last week. LeCun is considered one of the “godfathers of AI.” https://lnkd.in/ghuEjbRS

‘Smart’ insulin prevents diabetic highs — and deadly lows Scientists have designed a new form of insulin that can automatically switch itself on and off depending on glucose levels in the blood. In animals, this ‘smart’ insulin 1 reduced high blood-sugar concentrations effectively while preventing levels from dropping too low. For people with diabetes , controlling blood-sugar levels is a crucial — but demanding — task. Insulin keeps blood glucose in check, helping to prevent the many long-term complications associated with high blood sugar, such as cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, stroke and blindness. A large proportion of the estimated 422 million people with diabetes worldwide require insulin injections. For decades, researchers have been working to develop a system that can automatically adjust insulin activity based on the amount of glucose in a person’s blood. One common approach has been to make a compound containing deposits that release insulin when glucose concentrations rise. But a key disadvantage of this method is its irreversibility — once insulin is released, it can’t be reined in. The latest study, published today in Nature, gets around this issue by modifying insulin itself using glucose-sensitive components. Rita Slaaby, a principal scientist at pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk in Bagsværd, Denmark, and her colleagues engineered an insulin molecule with a switch that turns its activity on and off in response to glucose levels in the blood. This switch consists of two parts: a ring-shaped structure known as a macrocycle and a glucoside, a molecule derived from glucose. When blood-glucose concentrations are low, the glucoside binds to the ring, keeping the insulin in a closed, inactive state. But when glucose levels in the blood rise, the sugar displaces the glucoside and changes the shape of the insulin so that it is turned on. The researchers tested the insulin molecule, which they named NNC2215, in pigs and rats that had received infusions of glucose to mimic the effects of diabetes. They found that NNC2215 was as good as normal human insulin at lowering blood glucose when injected into the animals — and that it was able to prevent the drop in blood-glucose levels that occurred with a current insulin treatment. “This a very good study that was well designed — they did all the necessary experiments to validate that this works,” says David Sacks, a clinical chemist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “It certainly provides encouragement that this approach is worth pursuing.” The modified insulin is the first shown to target glucose, says Sacks. Weiss and his colleagues have previously demonstrated that an insulin molecule with a similar kind of molecular switch was sensitive to another sugar molecule, fructose. https://lnkd.in/eaTCRctR

Space Force funds $35M institute for versatile electric propulsion at U-M The U.S. Space Force is providing $35 million to a national research team led by the University of Michigan. It will be the first to bring fast chemical rockets together with efficient electric propulsion powered by a nuclear microreactor. The newly formed Space Power and Propulsion for Agility, Responsiveness and Resilience Institute involves eight universities, and 14 industry partners and advisers in one of the nation’s largest efforts to advance space power and propulsion, a critical need for national defense and space exploration. Right now, most spacecraft propulsion comes in one of two flavors: chemical rockets, which provide a lot of thrust but burn through fuel quickly, or electric propulsion powered by solar panels, which is slow and cumbersome but fuel efficient. Chemical propulsion comes with the highest risk of regret, as fuel is limited. But in some situations, such as when a collision is imminent, speed may be necessary. Meanwhile, electric propulsion could be much faster, such as with a 100-kilowatt Hall thruster built at U-M. The problem is finding the power to run these thrusters. “The space station generates about 100 kilowatts of power, but the solar arrays are the size of a couple of football fields, and this is too large for some of the power-hungry applications that are of interest to the Space Force,” said Benjamin Jorns, associate professor of aerospace engineering and institute director. To power faster, efficient electric propulsion, one subteam is developing a concept for a nuclear microreactor, exploring the early feasibility of a new path for safe, reliable and sustainable nuclear power for space. Others will build technologies to turn the heat from a microreactor into usable electricity, and electric engines to turn the electricity into thrust. The propulsion system design includes a chemical rocket for quick maneuvers. While chemical rockets need fuel to burn, electric propulsion needs propellant to accelerate. Both generate thrust by shooting out material opposite the direction of travel. Electric thrusters strip electrons off the propellant atoms — turning them into ions — and use electric fields to accelerate them to extremely high speeds. To simplify refueling, the team is trying to demonstrate fuels that can be used to drive the chemical rocket, and which are also effective propellant for electric propulsion. Two teams will explore how to extract the thermal energy as electricity. U-M and Spark Thermionics will investigate thermionic emission cells, which take advantage of the difference between the heat of the reactor and the cold of space to help drive an electrical current. Another U-M team will pair with Antora Energy to implement thermal photovoltaics, like solar cells that turn heat into electricity. https://lnkd.in/gugtXjbY

Lung and liver editing by lipid nanoparticle delivery of a stable CRISPR–Cas9 ribonucleoprotein Lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) ribonucleoproteins (RNPs) could enable high-efficiency, low-toxicity and scalable in vivo genome editing if efficacious RNP–LNP complexes can be reliably produced. Here the researchers engineer a thermostable Cas9 from Geobacillus stearothermophilus (GeoCas9) to generate iGeoCas9 variants capable of >100× more genome editing of cells and organs compared with the native GeoCas9 enzyme. Furthermore, iGeoCas9 RNP–LNP complexes edit a variety of cell types and induce homology-directed repair in cells receiving codelivered single-stranded DNA templates. Using tissue-selective LNP formulations, they observe genome-editing levels of 16‒37% in the liver and lungs of reporter mice that receive single intravenous injections of iGeoCas9 RNP–LNPs. In addition, iGeoCas9 RNPs complexed to biodegradable LNPs edit the disease-causing SFTPC gene in lung tissue with 19% average efficiency, representing a major improvement over genome-editing levels observed previously using viral or nonviral delivery strategies. These results show that thermostable Cas9 RNP–LNP complexes can expand the therapeutic potential of genome editing. https://lnkd.in/eh6dpJPS

Your diet can change your immune system — here’s how Scientists are exploring exactly how nutrition acts on the immune system to boost health and treat disease. Researchers have developed innovative approaches to nutrition immunology that are helping to close this credibility gap. Whereas nutrition scientists have conventionally studied the long-term impacts of loosely defined Mediterranean or Western diets, for example, today they have access to tools that allow them to zoom in on the short-term effects — both helpful and harmful — of narrower food groups and specific dietary components, and to probe the molecular mechanisms underpinning the effects of foods on immunity. The field is starting to attract attention and funding . In April, the New England Journal of Medicine launched a series of review articles on nutrition, immunity and disease, and in January, the US Department of Health and Human Services held its first-ever Food is Medicine summit in Washington DC, which explored links between food insecurity, diet and chronic diseases. Some researchers argue that modern diets, especially those of the Western world , have skewed our immune responses in ways that have undermined immune resilience. More optimistically, others say that diet could also help to treat a range of health problems , such as cancers and chronic immune disorders such as lupus. It’s early days, but many scientists in the field are hopeful. “We are learning a lot more about how you can modulate your immune system with single components or combinations of food components,” says immunologist Francesco Siracusa at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany. As a potential therapy, he says, “the blooming of the personalized nutrition field over the last five to six years is very exciting”. Many laboratories are interested in harnessing the immune system to treat one of today’s most pressing health concerns: obesity. He and others had previously observed how a type of dietary fibre called chitin, which is abundant in mushrooms, crustaceans and edible insects, activates this immune response, known as type 2 immunity. Van Dyken and his team wondered what effect a high-chitin diet might have on metabolism. So they fed mice such a diet, and observed that their stomachs stretched much more than did those of mice on a normal diet. The stretching activated type 2 immunity, which in turn triggered a chitin-digesting enzyme. But preventing this enzyme from functioning had noticeable upsides: mice that were genetically modified so that they couldn’t produce the enzyme gained less weight, had less body fat and had better insulin sensitivity than did normal mice when both were fed chitin. Chitin also triggered increases in levels of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), the hormone that Ozempic (semaglutide) and other similar weight-loss drugs mimic, which helps to suppress appetite. https://lnkd.in/gAXANx_v

New skin research could help slow signs of ageing The Human Cell Atlas project in Cambridge is one of the most ambitious research programmes in biology. One of the project's leaders, Prof Muzlifah Haniffa, said it would help scientists treat diseases more effectively, but also find new ways of keeping us healthier for longer, and perhaps even keep us younger-looking. “If we can manipulate the skin and prevent ageing we will have fewer wrinkles," said Prof Haniffa of the Wellcome Sanger Institute. "If we can understand how cells change from their initial development to ageing in adulthood you can then try and say, 'How do I rejuvenate organs, make the heart younger, how do I make the skin younger?'” Researchers have identified which genes are turned on at what times and in which locations to form the body's largest organ, skin. The researchers have essentially obtained the instruction set to create human skin and published them in the journal Nature. Being able to read these instructions opens up exciting possibilities. Scientists already know, for example, that foetal skin heals with no scarring. The new instruction set contains details of how this happens, and one research area could be to see if this could be replicated in adult skin, possibly for use in surgical procedures. In one major development, scientists discovered that immune cells played a critical role in the formation of blood vessels in the skin, and then were able to mimic the relevant instructions in a lab. They used chemicals to turn genes on and off at the right time and in the right places to grow skin artificially from stem cells. So far, they have grown tiny blobs of skin, out of which have sprouted little hairs. According to Prof Haniffa, the eventual aim is to perfect the technique. “If you know how to build human skin, we can use that for burns patients and that can be a way of transplanting tissue," she said. The skin in the dish can also be used to understand how inherited skin diseases develop and test out potential new treatments. The Human Cell Atlas project has analysed 100 million cells from different parts of the body in the eight years it has been in operation. It has produced draft atlases of the brain and lung and researchers are working on the kidney, liver and heart. The next phase is to put the individual atlases together, according to Prof Sarah Teichmann of Cambridge University. “It is incredibly exciting because it is giving us new insights into physiology, anatomy, a new understanding of humans,” she told BBC news. “It will lead to a rewriting of the textbooks in terms of ourselves and our tissues and organs and how they function.” Genetic instructions for how other parts of the body grow will be published in the coming weeks and months – until eventually we have a more complete picture of how humans are built. https://lnkd.in/gq9bBadn

Nvidia just dropped a new AI model that crushes OpenAI’s GPT-4—no big launch, just big results Nvidia quietly unveiled a new AI model that outperforms offerings from industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic, marking a significant shift in the company’s AI strategy and potentially reshaping the competitive landscape of the field. The model, named Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct, appeared on the popular AI platform Hugging Face without fanfare, quickly drawing attention for its exceptional performance across multiple benchmark tests. Nvidia reports that their new offering achieves top scores in key evaluations, including 85.0 on the Arena Hard benchmark, 57.6 on AlpacaEval 2 LC, and 8.98 on the GPT-4-Turbo MT-Bench. These scores surpass those of highly regarded models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, catapulting Nvidia to the forefront of AI language understanding and generation. Nvidia’s approach to creating Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct involved refining Meta’s open-source Llama 3.1 model using advanced training techniques, including Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). This method allows the AI to learn from human preferences, potentially leading to more natural and contextually appropriate responses. With its superior performance, the model has the potential to offer businesses a more capable and cost-efficient alternative to some of the most advanced models on the market. The model’s ability to handle complex queries without additional prompting or specialized tokens is what sets it apart. In a demonstration, it correctly answered the question “How many r’s are in strawberry?” with a detailed and accurate response, showcasing a nuanced understanding of language and an ability to provide clear explanations. What makes these results particularly significant is the emphasis on “alignment,” a term in AI research that refers to how well a model’s output matches the needs and preferences of its users. For enterprises, this translates into fewer errors, more helpful responses, and ultimately, better customer satisfaction. For businesses and organizations exploring AI solutions, Nvidia’s model presents a compelling new option. The company offers free hosted inference through its build.nvidia.com platform, complete with an OpenAI-compatible API interface. This accessibility makes advanced AI technology more readily available, allowing a broader range of companies to experiment with and implement advanced language models. The release also highlights a growing shift in the AI landscape toward models that are not only powerful but also customizable. Enterprises today need AI that can be tailored to their specific needs, whether that’s handling customer service inquiries or generating complex reports. https://lnkd.in/dfNT94Yz