Heya and welcome to Five Things Tech!
Sorry, I won’t be talking about Apple’s foldable phone here, even though everybody else is excited or irritated about it. Instead, you can read about European Space Tech, how Israeli tech is securing Europe, what a city in Denmark is doing with the heat from a data center, how researchers at Stanford found out how to massively reduce the heat emissions from CPUs, and how a disembodied fly brain is doing some crypto speculation.
Enjoy.
Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment
After working for the traditional European space industry for about a decade, at heavyweights Airbus and ArianeGroup, Huby founded The Exploration Company five years ago. Initially, the company focused on building a relatively small cargo capsule to deliver supplies to, and return from, low-Earth orbit. This work has resulted in the Nyx spacecraft, which is now undergoing NASA safety reviews for a cargo mission to the International Space Station as early as November 2028.
But Huby’s bigger passion has always been human spaceflight, and her company has begun preliminary work on a crew spacecraft that could serve either the International Space Station or private space stations under development by US companies.
$450 million in Series C funding is incredible - and it will push forward the European space industry. I am sure this will spark a whole bunch of interesting new startups that will lead to new advances in space tech.
How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security
A complete picture of Israel’s role in European defense is difficult to establish. Many contracts are undisclosed on national-security grounds, and some Israeli companies operate through European subsidiaries. But dozens of entries in the European tender database reviewed by POLITICO show Israeli firms becoming go-to suppliers for military communications, surveillance and electronic warfare.
While I wish we didn’t need all the cybersecurity and military tech, I am glad we partner closely with innovative Israeli companies who give us a serious tech advantage.
A data center in Denmark gives away heat that data centers often waste. It runs water from the city’s heating network through its cooling units and into heat pumps that raise it enough to fill the radiators of 11,000 homes
The method is less exotic than it sounds. Water from the city’s district-heating network is run through the data center’s cooling units, where it picks up the low warmth coming off the servers. It then travels to a nearby plant full of heat pumps, which lift the temperature the rest of the way before the water goes out to homes.
The engineering consultancy Ramboll, which designed the recovery system for the district-heating company Fjernvarme Fyn, says the ammonia heat pumps raise the water to 70 to 75°C, hot enough for radiators, before it enters the network.
I think we need to treat data centers more like factories and not like an evil new thing. They will be around for a while now and it is smart to think about how to integrate them into environments.
To make computers more energy efficient, SLAC researchers follow the heat
As data centers proliferate, researchers are racing to find ways to make computing more energy efficient. One way to do that is to increase the percentage of energy that does useful work.
But first, researchers must find a way to measure heat dissipation at the smallest levels. That’s no small feat, considering that even personal computers contain billions of transistors – where much of the energy leaks away into heat via mechanisms that are difficult to track.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University developed a new way to measure just how much energy has dissipated into heat in an electrical system.
The team, led by Stanford professor Aaron Lindenberg, also optimized the shape of the voltage pattern used to control the device, which reduced the waste heat by more than 60 percent.
Of course then the data centers won’t be able to heat cities, but I guess we cross the bridge when we come to it.
Disembodied fruit fly brain joins the crypto speculation swarm
Stonkfly is different. It uses a model of a male fly’s brain and ventral nerve cord, rather than the female brain scan used in the earlier experiment. It has no body, and engineered interfaces feed it market information and translate neural activity into trading decisions.
The explanation on GitHub – it is an open source project – makes clear that the model uses engineered reinforcement signals, not modeled pain receptors, while synaptic changes “do not establish that it learns to trade profitably.”
The underlying network is substantial, comprising 166,700 nodes, 25,582,938 directed connections, and 124,177,617 synaptic contacts.
Sure, why not? How do people come up with these kinds of ideas?
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
🤖
— Nico