The Download: farming on Mars, and lab robots

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

The quest to figure out farming on Mars

Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from thick, cloudy skies. It wasn’t really so different from our own planet 4 billion years ago, except for one crucial detail—its size. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth, and that’s where things went wrong.

The Martian core cooled quickly, soon leaving the planet without a magnetic field. This, in turn, left it vulnerable to the solar wind, which swept away much of its atmosphere. Without a critical shield from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, Mars could not retain its heat. Some of the oceans evaporated, and the subsurface absorbed the rest, with only a bit of water left behind and frozen at its poles. If ever a blade of grass grew on Mars, those days are over. 

But could they begin again? And what would it take to grow plants to feed future astronauts on Mars? Read the full story.

—David W. Brown

This lab robot mixes chemicals

Lab scientists spend much of their time doing laborious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or running the same analyses over and over again. But what if they could simply tell a robot to do the experiments, analyze the data, and generate a report? 

Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers at the University of Toronto that can do exactly that. The system could automate some chemistry lab tasks using a combination of computer vision and a large language model that translates scientists’ verbal cues into an experimental pipeline. Read the full story.

—Kristel Tjandra

Both of these stories are from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review, which comes out next Wednesday and delves into the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive a copy once it lands.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Inside Elon Musk’s grassroots efforts to elect Donald Trump
His America PAC is struggling to hire door-knockers at this stage. (WP $)+ Musk has donated tens of millions of dollars to the Republican campaign. (CNN)

2 GPS jamming is messing with planes in Norway
Constant disturbance signals are the new normal. (Wired $)

3 A fentanyl vaccine could be on the horizon 
Unlike current preventative measures, a vaccine could prevent an overdose from ever happening. (Bloomberg $)

4 Europe’s biggest battery startup is plagued with issues
Making batteries is seriously hard work, and Northvolt is cracking under the strain. (FT $)
+ Three takeaways about the current state of batteries. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Meta is shaking up its core businesses
Some staff at Instagram, Whatsapp and Reality Labs have lost their jobs. (Insider $)
+ Separately, it fired staff for abusing credits specifically for buying food. (FT $)

6 These cyber athletes are being pushed to the limit
The Cybathlon competition showcases humans and machines working together. (Knowable Magazine)
+ These prosthetics break the mold with third thumbs, spikes, and superhero skins. (MIT Technology Review)

7 How BYD took over the world
The Chinese EV maker’s cars are everywhere, just as the US tries to ban them. (Bloomberg $)
+ The company has made major inroads across the world this year. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Donald Trump’s mysterious crypto business is failing
Who could have seen this coming!? (NY Mag $)
+ An investor in Trump’s social media startup has been jailed. (Bloomberg $)

9 TikTok Shop has big plans for the US
If it can circumvent that pesky ban, that is. (The Information $)
+ The depressing truth about TikTok’s impending ban. (MIT Technology Review)

10 A kinky dating app has launched its own print magazine
And it actually looks pretty good. (The Atlantic $)

Quote of the day

“There’s more to come.”

—James Silver, who runs the US Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section, predicts that the current known number of AI-generated child sexual abuse images is set to explode, Reuters reports.

The big story

One city’s fight to solve its sewage problem with sensors

April 2021

In the city of South Bend, Indiana, wastewater from people’s kitchens, sinks, washing machines, and toilets flows through 35 neighborhood sewer lines. On good days, just before each line ends, a vertical throttle pipe diverts the sewage into an interceptor tube, which carries it to a treatment plant where solid pollutants and bacteria are filtered out.

As in many American cities, those pipes are combined with storm drains, which can fill rivers and lakes with toxic sludge when heavy rains or melted snow overwhelms them, endangering wildlife and drinking water supplies. But city officials have a plan to make its aging sewers significantly smarter. Read the full story.

—Andrew Zaleski

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ A dog has been spotted at the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza (but don’t worry, they’re safe!)
+ This breaking news about the second verse of Rihanna’s SOS is truly unexpected.
+ Al Pacino’s phone case is magnificent.
+ Anyone doing these TikTok courtship dances is instantly getting blocked.