Daniel Oberhaus

Daniel Oberhaus (DMO) is a staff writer at Wired magazine, where he covers space exploration and the future of energy. His first book, Extraterrestrial Languages, is about the art and science of interstellar communication. He writes about AI and mental health at Strangemind.Daniel here. The electric battery is older than Jesus, but it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the battery as we know it took shape. It started with an Italian chemist attaching bits of metal to frog legs and quickly evolved into more sophisticated types of power cells that didn’t involve dismembered amphibians. Still, the basic principle behind all these batteries was the same. Two metal electrodes, one positive and one negative, trade molecules through a conductive medium called an electrolyte. When the molecules interact with an electrode, it shakes loose some electrons and the battery generates electricity. Within that basic framework, there’s a lot of room for innovation. You can mix up the kinds of metals that are used for the electrodes and the composition of the chemical soup that sits between them. For example, new types of battery anodes made with silicon can make batteries last much longer per charge, and using nanoengineered ceramics for a battery’s electrolyte can make them virtually immune to exploding. (This is a big problem if you want to use batteries for large scale industrial applications like ships.)  But the one thing that’s barely changed at all in nearly 200 years is the battery’s form factor—it’s always been a cylinder, a jar, or a pouch. Why is this interesting?Today, most batteries you encounter are lithium-ion cells. They’re great because they hold a lot of energy, can be recharged in minutes, are relatively lightweight, and they won’t lose much of their capacity over thousands of cycles. Lithium-ion batteries aren’t without their problems—the reactions in some types of lithium-ion cells can cause them to swell and explode, and some use materials like cobalt that are often mined with child labor. But on the whole, they have been an enormous net benefit to society—enough so that the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists who made the lithium-ion battery possible. We put them in our phones, computers, and other small gadgets, and we’re getting pretty good at putting them to use for more heavy-duty applications like driving and storing energy for the electric grid. (NASA’s even using a lithium-ion battery to power its new Mars helicopter that will make the first-ever flight on another planet next year.) I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that modern life wouldn’t be possible without the lithium-ion battery. And yet, this electrochemical wunderkind has one glaring shortcoming: it merely provides energy. A diagram of Stanley Whittingham’s 1970s battery.A few years ago, I read an article in Smithsonian Magazine about a Swedish engineer named Leif Asp who is trying to build a better battery. Or rather, he’s trying to make the battery disappear. In the article, Asp describes the modern battery as a “structural parasite,” and it’s a phrase that’s stuck with me ever since. From an engineering standpoint, a battery is a whole lot of deadweight. Sure, it provides a critical function—storing and releasing energy—but it doesn’t really contribute anything else to whatever it’s powering. A lot of things in life have dedicated functions; no one faults a lawnmower for its inability also to trim the trees. The problem with batteries is that they tend to eat up a lot of space and weight whenever they’re used. If you pop off the back of your phone, you’ll find that it’s mostly a battery. In a Tesla Model S, the battery pack alone accounts for roughly a quarter of the weight of the car. But if Asp has his way, the days of standalone batteries will soon be a thing of the past. Instead, they’ll be replaced by so-called “structural batteries” that provide both power and mechanical support, which can drastically lower the weight and size of most battery-powered machines.Asp’s research focuses on structural batteries made out of carbon fiber, a versatile material that is several times stronger and stiffer than steel. Carbon fiber is widely used as both a building material and in electronic components, but there’s a tradeoff involved. The types of carbon fiber that are good at conducting electricity aren’t great at bearing heavy loads. His goal is to create a carbon fiber composite that’s the best of both and use it for the electrodes of an ultrastrong lithium-ion battery that could be molded into any conceivable shape.Asp leads a research consortium called SORCERER that has partnered with a number of large organizations like Airbus, BAE Systems, and Imperial College London to bring their idea out of the lab and into the real world. He anticipates the first real applications of structural batteries to be hyperniche; for example, they could serve as the body of a Formula E race car. In the future, these structural batteries may also enable more mainstream applications like lithium-ion jumbo jet fuselages or entire office buildings that store excess renewable energy for the grid. Generally speaking, there’s an inverse relationship between the maturity of a digital technology and its conspicuousness. It wasn’t that long ago that you had to schedule an appointment to feed punch cards into a computer the size of a room.  Now your smart toaster has a more powerful chip inside of it than those machines ever did—and you don’t even think about it as a computer. Mature digital technologies don’t really “disappear,” they just become embedded in the world around them. But functionally speaking it’s the same thing. Is your smart toaster a computer or a kitchen appliance? The question doesn’t even make sense because it’s both. It was only a matter of time until a similar phase transition happened with energy storage, and the battery vanished into the gadget.Videosphere of the Day:I was in an antique store in New Jersey a few weeks ago and found a JVC “videosphere” coated in dust sitting toward the back of the shop. Apparently JVC sold these globular TV sets throughout the 1970s and its aesthetic perfectly captures the transition between the late modernism of the 60s and the emerging cyberfuturism of the 80s. I’m not sure what the contemporary equivalent of the videosphere will be, but my money’s on the iPod. (DMO) (Image via Wikipedia)Quick LinksThe wild world of online murder for hire (DMO)Almost everything on the internet will be forgotten (DMO)The race to mine the bottom of the ocean (DMO)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Daniel (DMO)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Battery Edition

Daniel Oberhaus (DMO) is a staff writer at Wired magazine where he covers space exploration and the future of energy. He writes a newsletter about artificial intelligence and psychiatry called Strangemind. Previously he wrote the WITI battery edition. Daniel here. About a year and a half ago, I found myself lying on a couch in a back office at Johns Hopkins University having one of the strongest psychedelic experiences of my life. The office I was in had all the hallmarks of a living room—soft lighting, tasteful art on the walls, an oriental throw rug—but it was actually a laboratory for studying people under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. In this instance, I was the 12th and final volunteer in a first-of-its-kind study designed to image the brains of neurotypical individuals as they tripped on salvinorin A, the psychoactive chemical in a plant called salvia divinorum. This trip was a test run to prepare me for the main event the following day, when I would be put into an MRI machine and given a comparable dose of salvinorin. As anyone who has ever tried salvia divinorum knows, it can be a difficult experience even under the best of circumstances. The hallucinations come on rapidly—usually within 30 seconds of exhalation after smoking it from a pipe—and can cause the user to lose contact with base reality. The trip only lasts a few minutes, but it's incredibly intense. And as I would soon find out, an MRI machine is about the last place you’d ever want to trip. For those of you who have never had a doctor use magnets to peer into your skull, it involves laying almost perfectly still in a very confined space for more than a quarter-hour while a hulking machine makes deafening otherworldly sounds. But as a longtime advocate of psychedelic research, I had decided to loan my brain to science in the hopes that it could shed some light on this poorly understood substance. Although salvia is typically thought of as a recreational drug, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that its active ingredient— salvinorin A— might have beneficial medicinal qualities. Perhaps the most noteworthy application is its potential role as an alternative to opioids for pain relief and a treatment for opioid abuse since it appears to act on the same receptor, which is almost totally unique among psychedelics. But before salvinorin can become a medicine, neuroscientists need to understand what it’s actually doing in our brain. A few weeks ago, I reached out to the researchers, who told me they were in the final stages of preparing the data from the experiment for publication. No one has ever observed a human brain tripping on salvinorin before, so no matter what they find, it will be groundbreaking. And with any luck, it could forge a path toward life-saving medications. Why is this interesting?Salvia divinorum is endemic to the cloud forests of southern Mexico, where indigenous Mazatec shamans have used the plant ritualistically for generations. It was first introduced to westerners and scientifically described in the 1960s after Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann (the famed discoverer of LSD) separately traveled to Mexico to learn about indigenous rituals involving hallucinogens and took a few specimens of the plant back with them for further study. As they discovered, this so-called “the diviner’s sage” is a member of the salvia genus, which is the largest genus in the mint family. Many species of salvia can be found in gardens across the US and are admired for their flowers and aroma. But only salvia divinorum produces a psychoactive chemical called salvinorin A that can induce intense hallucinations when smoked or chewed. Salvia divinorum is also strange in that it rarely produces seeds. The only way to propagate the plant is with clippings, so it is essentially impossible to crossbreed new strains as you might with other psychoactive plants like cannabis. This means that any salvia divinorum plants you encounter in the US today are highly likely to be the distant offspring of one of the original plants brought back by Hofmann and Wasson half a century ago. Because of the challenges associated with cultivation, salvia divinorum remained an underground phenomenon in the psychonaut community for decades. To get some, you had to know the right people.The internet changed everything. All of a sudden anyone who was interested in salvia could connect with a grower online. It also helped that the plant was totally legal, which facilitated its spread. Unlike cannabis, coca, and psilocybin, salvia divinorum had avoided scheduling by the DEA partly because it was so rare and partly because many people find its effects deeply unpleasant, which made it unlikely to be abused. By the late 90s, anyone over the age of 18 could procure salvia at their local head shop and for many people it became their introduction to psychedelic drugs.But increased access to salvia also brought increased scrutiny. Viral YouTube videos like “Gardening on Salvia” and a litany of others showing teenagers (including Miley Cyrus) hitting salvia from a bong and almost instantly going catatonic attracted the attention of lawmakers and concerned parents. Salvia was demonized and many states passed legislation to outlaw the plant. It appeared that salvia, like so many psychedelics before it, was going to be made illegal before scientists had a chance to understand this bizarre and potentially medicinal drug. It was only because the neuroscientist Roland Griffiths, who now leads the psychedelic research program at Johns Hopkins, made an impassioned plea in defense of salvia to Maryland’s congress that the drug avoided being outlawed in the state, which would have effectively killed the salvia research program I participated in at the university. If you or anyone you know has ever tried salvia, there’s a good chance that it was an uncomfortable experience at best or a terrifying experience at worst. This was certainly true for me. By the time I enrolled in the Johns Hopkins study, I had tried salvia on several occasions as a teenager and it sucked every single time. But as I discovered last year, a salvia trip can also be an incredibly beautiful and meaningful experience when it’s conducted in a safe environment with an experienced guide. I don’t know what the researchers at Johns Hopkins will find in my brain scans, but it's clear that salvia has a lot to teach us if we allow ourselves to become students. (DMO)Prescription of the Day:As a participant in the Johns Hopkins trial I was issued a prescription for a salvinorin A. It’s not often a doctor suggests you smoke anything, much less a hallucinogen. (DMO)Quick Links:Why salvia is changing the way chemists think about chemicals (DMO)The incredible true story of the most brazen bank heist in Argentina (DMO)How a plan to save the power system disappeared (DMO)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Daniel (DMO)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Salvia Edition

Daniel Oberhaus (DMO) is a science journalist turned content marketer based in New York City. His first book, Extraterrestrial Languages, is about the art, science, and philosophy of interstellar communication. He previously wrote the WITI battery edition and the WITI salvia edition.Daniel here. Earlier this year, Facebook’s moderation bots deleted the page for a small town in northeastern France for ostensibly violating the social media platform’s terms and conditions. The town’s crime? Using it’s real name for its Facebook page: Ville de Bitche. Shortly after it was taken down, the Bitche admins tried to contact the company to get the page reinstated, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. It was only after the story of Bitche’s plight went viral that Facebook acknowledged the error and restored the township’s page. In case it isn’t obvious what happened, Bitche bears a close resemblance to a rude epithet in English, which would violate Facebook’s T&C if it were used as the name of an official page for a city. So the platform’s automated moderation system flagged it for removal and swept it into a digital dumpster with the thousands of other rude, lewd, and occasionally illegal posts it scrubs from its platform every day. Why Is This Interesting? This wasn’t Bitche’s first run-in with the Facebook police. The town had a similar issue on the platform when it first set up its page in 2016. And it's hardly the first to be censored by a well-meaning algorithm. In fact, the issue is so common it even has a name: this is what computer scientists call “The Scunthorpe problem.”Scunthrope is a mid-sized industrial town in the UK about an hour’s drive from Leeds and in 1996 it exposed an intractable challenge at the heart of automated content moderation. Like Bitche, Scunthorpe contains a naughty word, which prevented its residents from signing up for AOL using their real location. Although AOL soon fixed this specific problem for Scunthorpe’s residents, the general challenge of mistaken obscenity hasn’t gone away. It’s still a very real problem for people with last names like Weiner, Medick, Butts, Dyck, or Schmuck. And paleontologists giving virtual talks on pubic bones. And history buffs headed to Plymouth Hoe. On the surface, these are funny gaffes that allow us to feel superior to machines for a little while longer and revel in the timeless humor of punny nomenclature. Ben Dover. Mr. Glascock. Ville de Bitche. These will still elicit giggles from the back of the classroom long after the machines have taken over.But the Scunthorpe problem is an instance of the very serious issue of ceding responsibility—and power—to algorithms. It’s fundamentally a problem of mistaken identity that occurs when a machine lacks the context to differentiate between a legitimate input and a malicious one. In every case, the result is the same: a user is wrongfully denied access to a tool, platform, or information. And in many cases, the user doesn’t have recourse to fix the problem. Bitche’s admins discovered this firsthand when they contacted Facebook and were stonewalled. The usual excuse is that the Scunthorpe problem is a necessary evil. Facebook manages a platform used by 2 billion people and it must balance user safety with user freedom on an unprecedented scale. It has legions of human moderators working around the clock to scrub the most heinous content from the platform—child porn, gore, animal abuse, you name it—and they can’t possibly catch everything, even with an assist from an army of bots. So sometimes, as in the case of Bitche, the algorithms use a bit too much caution and remove content that only appears to break a rule. But this is a dangerous abdication of accountability from organizations that have taken it upon themselves to police online spaces. By Facebook’s own admission, more than 1 in 10 posts it removes from its platform have not violated any rules—that shakes down to about 300,000 wrongfully deleted posts per day. Of course, most of these posts are not instances of the Scunthorpe problem, which was only a bellwether for a far larger problem resulting from the increasing automation and corporatization of the modern web. Facebook gets the most scrutiny due to its size, but it's a problem that is found everywhere that bots act as gatekeepers. And it’s only getting worse.Nearly a quarter of a century after the Scunthorpe problem was given a name, we still lack an adequate solution. Ask the technologists and they’ll tell you we need smarter AI that can understand human content in context. Ask the Luddites and they’ll tell you content moderation is a job only fit for humans. Ask the content moderators and they’ll tell you they’re sick of doing a robot’s job. Before we find a solution, we need to acknowledge the urgency of the problem. We stand on the cusp of a future where “computer says no,” but this time Carol is nowhere to be found. (DMO)Pun of the DayWhen the US 100th Infantry Division came from South Carolina and liberated Bitche, France, they adopted the nom de guerre "Sons of Bitche.” Image via Ville de Bitche (DMO)Quick Links: Boyfriend brings his deceased girlfriend back to life as a chatbot (DMO)Can AI predict suicide? (DMO)How China combines human and AI moderators--in real life (DMO)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Daniel (DMO)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).