Thomas's Innovation Wrap #55
🔬 Regenerating skin, 🤩 a potential digital ad bubble, and 🧊 NVIDIA's Omniverse
Greetings,
Here's your wrap of the latest technology, innovation, and finance news.
🔬 Biology
Researchers at Washington State University have identified a genetic factor that allows adult skin to repair itself like the skin of a newborn baby (see the paper).
“We were able to take the innate ability of young, neonatal skin to regenerate and transfer that ability to old skin,” said Ryan Driskell, an assistant professor in WSU’s School of Molecular Biosciences. “We have shown in principle that this kind of regeneration is possible.”
Cattle are being gene-edited so they can have grey patches instead of black, which lets them absorb less heat.
🤩 Advertising
A new book by a former Google employee argues that today’s digital advertising market is similar to the pre-2007 housing bubble. The book comes out on October 13.
Hwang’s new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, lays out the case that the new ad business is built on a fiction. Microtargeting is far less accurate, and far less persuasive, than it’s made out to be, he says, and yet it remains the foundation of the modern internet: the source of wealth for some of the world’s biggest, most important companies, and the mechanism by which almost every “free” website or app makes money. If that shaky foundation ever were to crumble, there’s no telling how much of the wider economy would go down with it.
🧊 Simulation
NVIDIA launched an open beta for the Omniverse, a virtual environment the company describes as a metaverse for engineers. It’s essentially a collaboration platform for 3D content creation.
The European Union is building a digital twin of Earth.
The European Union is finalizing plans for an ambitious “digital twin” of planet Earth that would simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land with unrivaled precision, providing forecasts of floods, droughts, and fires from days to years in advance. Destination Earth, as the effort is called, won’t stop there: It will also attempt to capture human behavior, enabling leaders to see the impacts of weather events and climate change on society and gauge the effects of different climate policies.
A 3D digital reconstruction of a body could lead to virtual autopsies with greater explanatory power.
Researchers from the institute and Melbourne’s Monash University are working with the U.S. biomedical and defense company Leidos Holdings Inc. on one method for an incision-less forensic investigation. It involves creating a 3-D digital reconstruction of a shooting victim that they can slice in multiple planes and directions using advanced computer graphics, including augmented reality.
Computer algorithms can then help determine the bullet’s trajectory, find bullet fragments, and create a 3-D-printed model that can potentially be used as evidence in a courtroom.
🌬️ Renewables
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson aims to quadruple the electric generating capacity of wind turbines installed in the seas around the country by 2030.
As Saudi Arabia is to oil, the U.K. is to wind,” Mr. Johnson said in a virtual speech to a Conservative Party conference. His proposal would expand Britain’s offshore wind generating capacity to 40 gigawatts from roughly 10 gigawatts.
🎮 Gaming
Roblox is preparing to list and could fetch a valuation of $8 billion.
Guild Esports, which is backed by David Beckham, has become the first esports organisation to list on the London Stock Exchange. The organisation was started in September 2019, raised £20 million in September 2020, and is now being valued at £42 million.
👓 Virtual and Augmented Reality
New Ekto One Robotic VR boots let you walk forward (at a very slow pace…) while staying in the same spot in order to move forward in virtual reality.
💊 Health
An AI tool that helps prevent death from sepsis was successfully implemented at the Duke University Health System, but the implementation did have its challenges.
Not only did these nurses and attendings often have no prior relationship because they spent their days in entirely different sections of the hospital, but the protocol represented a complete reversal of the typical chain of command in any hospital. “Are you kidding me?” one nurse recalled thinking after learning how things would work. “We are going to call ED attendings?”
🛍️ Ecommerce
Demand for big-box warehouses is booming.
Overall, the Colliers report said the net change in occupied big-box space—known as net absorption—rose by 51% in the first half of this year in the markets covered from the same period in 2019, to nearly 79.8 million square feet.
For sites of 750,000 square feet or more, net absorption came to 34.3 million square feet in the first six months of the year, more than double the amount recorded for all of 2019, Colliers said.
🤖 Robotics
The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) showcased several home service robots during a virtual open house (full 36-minute video).
TRI said its goal is for robots to enable people to “age in place,” prolonging their independence rather than have them be sent to expensive nursing homes.
🛰️ Space and Aerospace
SpaceX won a $149 million contract to identify and monitor missiles.
Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance chatted to Blake Scholl, the Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic, about the supersonic plane that they’re working on (10 minutes).
CNBC explains why SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin are betting on space tourism (20 minutes).
⚡ Other Snippets
A recent Pew Research Center study suggests that 26% of US adults get their news from YouTube.
“The study finds a news landscape on YouTube in which established news organizations and independent news creators thrive side by side — and consequently, one where established news organizations no longer have full control over the news Americans watch,” the authors wrote.
Personal Plug: I was featured in the Australian Financial Review on Monday talking about the fund that I run. 🙂
Have a great week,
Thomas
About Thomas Rice
Thomas Rice is the portfolio manager for the Perpetual Global Innovation Share Fund, based in Sydney, Australia. You can find him on Twitter at @thomasrice_au.