Issue 163
🔬 🧪 Can nanotechnology finally deliver on its promise? Creating space's first artificial eclipse factory. PayPal's Honey app: sweet savings or digital sleight of hand?
Happy New Year Bizarro Heads!
For those of you who celebrated holidays in December, I hope you had a nice time with loved ones. Despite it being the “holiday season” in many parts of the world, I was surprised at how absolutely nothing slowed down in terms of tech news. December was full of innovations in both software and hardware, all kinds of new tools launching, cybercrime tales, and more. Let’s begin with our top stories and then we’ll get into the rest.
🔬 🧪 Can Nanotechnology Finally Deliver on Its Promise?
🛸 🌞 Creating Space's First Artificial Eclipse Factory
🍯 💻 PayPal's Honey App: Sweet Savings or Digital Sleight of Hand?
Enjoy the read.
📰 From the Newsroom
🔬 🧪 Can Nanotechnology Finally Deliver on Its Promise?
65 years after Richard Feynman's "plenty of room" speech, nanotechnology is having its moment. From transforming drug delivery to revolutionizing microchip manufacturing, researchers are finally cracking the code of manipulating matter at scales so tiny that they’re difficult to even conceptualize.
To give you an idea of how small nano is: the tip of a pin spans ~235,000 nanometers and researchers at MIT.nano have been working with materials so minuscule that they are between 1 and 100 nanometers. As a mental visualization exercise, imagine (or look at) the tip of a pin and then picture yourself fitting 235,000 of something onto that tip.
Part of what has led to such breakthroughs is, surprisingly, geopolitics. With Taiwan's dominance in microchip manufacturing raising concerns amid tensions with China, the U.S. passed the CHIPS Act. This piece of legislation has resulted in a flood of funding, helping researchers overcome long-standing technical barriers.
One example of a recent innovation was in electron microscopy. Researchers were able to freeze matter in place and watch atoms move around - something previously unheard of. The easiest way to think about it, is to imagine a microscopic slow-motion camera capturing the dance of particles at the smallest possible scale.
All of these recent advancements are exciting on their own, but the next wave of research is about to accelerate even more. With the upcoming establishment of a semiconductor institute, researchers will be able to test their nanoscale innovations virtually before building them in the real world. This will save both time and money and it will affect everything from microchip production to biotech development.
🛸 🌞 Creating Space's First Artificial Eclipse Factory
In a groundbreaking mission that could revolutionize how we study our nearest star, the European Space Agency has launched Proba-3 – a pair of satellites designed to perform an astronomical magic trick: creating artificial solar eclipses on demand.
The mission tackles a fundamental challenge in solar astronomy. While the sun's outer atmosphere holds crucial scientific mysteries, including why it's hotter than the sun's surface, scientists can typically only study it during rare total solar eclipses. Proba-3 aims to change that by generating eclipse-like conditions at will.
The innovation lies in its unique two-spacecraft approach. Previous missions used single satellites with built-in light blockers called coronagraphs, but these had limitations due to light diffraction. Proba-3 splits the task between two satellites flying in perfect formation about 500 feet (152 meters) apart. One creates the eclipse while the other observes the corona in unprecedented detail.
The payoff could be extraordinary: instead of the few precious minutes of observation time during natural eclipses, scientists will get up to six hours of corona study time during each 20-hour orbit. To put this in perspective, researchers will get more corona observation time in a single month than they might otherwise get in decades.
This mission represents a leap forward in our ability to understand solar physics. While these artificial eclipses won't cast shadows on Earth, they could illuminate one of our biggest solar mysteries: why the sun's atmosphere defies our basic understanding of how temperature usually works in nature. First results are expected by mid-2025.
🍯 💻 PayPal's Honey App: Sweet Savings or Digital Sleight of Hand?
A bombshell investigation by tech YouTuber MegaLag has sparked fierce debate about one of the internet's most popular money-saving tools. His viral exposé of PayPal's Honey browser extension, viewed 8.1 million times in just the first 3 days, alleges that the free coupon-finding app has been quietly pocketing millions through sophisticated digital manipulation.
The claimed deception centers on what's known as "last click" attribution in online sales. According to MegaLag's investigation, Honey strategically inserts itself into the final moments of transactions by prompting users to click on coupon codes or PayPal payment buttons. This seemingly innocent click allegedly overwrites any existing affiliate codes, redirecting commissions from content creators to Honey – even from influencers paid to promote the service.
The numbers paint a stark picture of the alleged scheme. In one example transaction, MegaLag documented Honey collecting over $35 in commissions while paying out just 89 cents in cashback rewards to the user. Multiply this across Honey's claimed 17 million users, who the company says save an average of $126 yearly through discounts, and the potential scale of diverted commissions becomes clear.
Honey's parent company PayPal, which acquired the app for $4 billion in 2020, defends its practices as following "industry rules and practices." But several high-profile influencers who once promoted the service, including Mr. Beast and MKBHD, have reportedly cut ties after discovering the alleged commission diversion. MegaLag's investigation suggests deeper issues, including potential advertising fraud and illegal data collection.
The controversy highlights a timeless internet adage: if you're not paying for the product, you probably are the product. While Honey markets itself as a free tool helping consumers save money, MegaLag's investigation suggests its real business model may be quietly siphoning commissions from the digital creator economy – including from the very influencers it pays to sing its praises.
⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month
Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.
A Harvard study found that students using a custom AI tutor in a physics course showed double the learning gains compared to traditional active learning classes - prompting several other Harvard courses to pilot similar AI tutoring approaches.
Toyota has been building a system of generative AI agents to store and share internal expertise. The system pulls from past engineering reports, the latest regulatory info, and even handwritten documents by veteran engineers. This allows Toyota staff to troubleshoot almost anything at the drop of a dime.
A new wireless ultrasonic cutting tool called the Hanboost C1 uses 40,000 vibrations per second to precisely cut through materials like wood, plastic, and leather without tearing or scratching. The project aimed to raise $5,000 on Kickstarter and wound up with over $758,000 instead.
A woman sued SafeRent after its AI tenant screening tool rejected her rental application despite her 17-year history of timely rent payments, leading to a $2.3M settlement and the company agreeing to stop using its scoring system for housing voucher applicants for five years.
Last month, researchers unveiled Genesis, an open-source physics simulator that can train robots 430,000 times faster than real-world training by running thousands of parallel simulations, while also featuring the ability to generate 3D physics-based environments from text prompts.
Northwestern University researchers demonstrated quantum teleportation over fiber optic cables carrying active internet traffic, proving quantum and classical communications can coexist on the same infrastructure by using carefully selected light wavelengths.
Neon, a serverless Postgres platform, migrated their web application build system from Webpack to Vite, resulting in improved hot module replacement and simplified dependencies.
📽️🎞️ “Rendered to Death” is a creative short film, made with the help of AI tools, and intentionally ironical in nature, about a man who’s life was ruined when he lost his job to AI. Side note: This isn’t one of those “shows signs of future potential” projects. It’s actually really good and quite entertaining.
In a striking case of hackers-hacking-hackers, a threat actor known as MUT-1244 stole over 390,000 WordPress credentials along with SSH keys and AWS access tokens by tricking other cybersecurity professionals along with malicious actors.
When OpenAI published a demo of Sora - its AI video generator - back in February, word spread like wildfire across the web. Everyone was hyped about it. Then, in early December, it finally became available (in some regions). I took it for an extensive test run and I thought it was…well, you’ll just have to read to find out.
🎤 It’s How They Said It
"Schrödingers documentation: If there are docs, no one will read them. If there are no docs, everyone will complain."
🧮 The Numbers Game
Over 25% of all new code at Google is generated by AI, according to CEO Sundar Pichai. He made this statement during his CEO remarks on the Q3 earnings call last year.
10 times more electricity is consumed by a typical ChatGPT query compared to a Google search, according to researchers at Goldman Sachs.
$95,000,000 is the amount Apple has agreed to pay in a settlement over allegations that Siri secretly recorded private conversations without user consent and shared the data with third parties for targeted advertising.
⚒️ Tools and Resources
Rockpack: This lightweight, zero-configuration solution is perfect for quickly setting up a React application with full support for Server-Side Rendering (SSR), bundling, linting, and testing. In only five minutes, you can get up and running with a modern React app that's optimized for performance and best practices.
https://alexsergey.github.io/rockpack/
Termo: This is a simple terminal emulator that can be used to create a terminal-like interface on your website. It is inspired by the terminal emulator in stripe.dev and makes for a cool feature if your site’s target audience is other developers.
LangGraph: This open-source framework can be used to build and scale AI agent applications. It offers fault-tolerant scalability, dynamic APIs for designing agent experiences, and an integrated developer environment with features like real-time streaming and built-in statefulness.
https://www.langchain.com/langgraph
🖼️ What Am I Looking At?
The image above is Sanctuary AI's latest robotic hand innovation. This fascinating piece of tech sports 21 degrees of freedom - which, in human terms, means it can move in almost as many ways as your own hand. See those segments that look like armored fingers? They're powered by tiny hydraulic valves (think miniature power steering for each joint).
What makes this particularly cool is its durability - those hydraulic valves have been tested through a mind-boggling two billion cycles. For context, that's like opening and closing your hand continuously for about 63 years! This kind of advancement is a big deal because it brings us one step closer to robots that can handle delicate tasks with human-like dexterity. 🦾
💬 What’s the Word?
蛇足 (Jasoku / Dasoku) is a Japanese word that describes what happens when you add unnecessary complexity to something that was already perfect. Like giving a snake legs - sure, you thought you were helping, but now it's just awkwardly stumbling around! Perfect for describing that moment when your elegant code becomes a tangled mess because you tried to "optimize" it.
📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the 2% vote was purely people trolling. I don’t see how anyone can believe that it’s not likely this is going to happen.
We’ve already seen Israel use two separate AI systems - Lavender and The Gospel - for lethal purposes so the precedent has been set. And with the U.S. having such a close military alliance with Israel - to the point that a bill has been introduced to provide for the eligibility of U.S. citizens who serve in the Israeli Defense Forces to get certain protections that they’d get if they served in the U.S. military - it’s not a stretch to imagine the Pentagon convincing domestic AI giants to help them out in similar ways.
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Until we see each other again,
– Martin
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