In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at the risk of depending on AI to “think” for you, mass-producing satellites, a startup helping NASA avoid space junk, and more. To get The Prototype in your inbox, sign up here.
A study published this week in The Lancet examined the impact of an AI tool for colonoscopies on the skills of doctors. The researchers tested doctors’ abilities to find certain abnormalities in patients for three months before using AI, then tested them again after they’d used the tool for three months.
They found that doctors’ ability to spot those abnormalities on their own degraded after using AI. And while that might not be a big deal a few decades down the road when AI-assisted detections are the norm, it does pose a problem right now, because these tools aren’t universal. A doctor accustomed to using AI at one hospital might find their performance declines working at a hospital that hasn’t adopted it yet.
It also raises larger questions about letting AI do your “thinking” for you, because what’s lost might be more than one particular skill. Studies have shown, for example, that overreliance on GPS for driving could degrade your spatial memory. As we enter a brave new world of AI, it will be increasingly important to not only know how to use it, but also when not to use it.
Stay tuned.
Apex Wants To Bring Henry Ford-Style Mass Production To Satellites
Satellite manufacturing has long been a bespoke business with spacecraft customized for the missions they are sent on. Elevated costs and delays come with the territory.
With more and more small satellites being launched into low-Earth orbit, Lost Angeles-based Apex has developed standardized spacecraft it says are a faster and more affordable option. The company is marketing three standardized satellite bodies with power and control systems that can be quickly customized by clients with sensors and payloads. Like, say, weapons to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles, as envisioned for President Trump’s Golden Dome.
Similar to automakers, Apex offers different versions of its satellites, with options like more power, a fancier communications system and a choice between electrical or chemical propulsion.
“You either take it or you leave it,” CEO Ian Cinnamon said.
Read the whole story at Forbes.
DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: DEVICE LETS USERS COMMUNICATE WITH THOUGHTS
Neurological disorders like ALS can make it difficult for people to communicate. And while there are devices that can help them speak, they’re often much slower than the speech that people take for granted. A team of researchers have invented a new device that may change this: a computer device implanted in the brain that can pick up the neural activity associated with speech-based thinking and translate it into words. The technology is still in its infancy, but opens the door to brain-computer interfaces that may one day give patients the ability to communicate as quickly as they think.
FINAL FRONTIER: LEOLABS WANTS TO HELP NASA AVOID SPACE JUNK
Menlo Park, Calif.-based space startup LeoLabs has entered into an agreement for NASA to evaluate its data for use in evaluating the risk of satellite and spacecraft collisions. The goal would be to integrate LeoLabs’ data, which is collected by multiple radar systems around the world, with the Air Force radar systems that NASA currently uses to track objects in space. (To learn more about LeoLabs, check out a story I wrote about the company a few years back.)
FORBES CALLED IT: HELPING DOGS LIVE LONGER
Every year, Forbes selects 25 VC-backed companies for our Next Billion-Dollar Startups List, highlighting those whose growth puts them on track to become worth $1 billion or more. Making the list this year is biotech startup Loyal, which is developing pills that could extend dogs’ lifespans. The company is currently testing its medication on several hundred canines in a clinical trial, with hopes of bringing it to market soon.
We’ve had our eye on Loyal for a few years now: its founder, Celine Halioua, is an alumna of our 30 Under 30 list, and I wrote about her company’s progress a couple of years ago. If Loyal is successful in extending the life of dogs, its next goal will be even more ambitious: extending ours. “I think the general public will be blown away when they realize they can go to the vet and get a drug to extend their dogs’ lifespan,” Halioua told my colleague Amy Feldman. “Then they’ll ask, ‘Why can’t I do this for my grandma?’”
WHAT ELSE I WROTE THIS WEEK
Earlier this week, I wrote about biotech startup Tahoe Therapeutics, which just raised $30 million in investment to support scaling up its dataset of how different molecules interact with living cells. Their goal? To train AI models to simulate cells as a way to accelerate the discovery of new medicines. Right now, data is the limiting factor in training AI, but recently the company released a dataset with 100 million cellular datapoints to improve those models.
In my other newsletter, InnovationRx, Amy Feldman and I looked at how misinformation about vaccines led to the recent shooting at the CDC, a company building programmable mRNA to fight cancer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fight with a medical journal, and more.
SCIENCE AND TECH TIDBITS
The federal government has pulled funds for California’s high-speed rail, but the project may have an unlikely savior: AI data centers.
Google is teaming up with pollster Scott Rasmussen for a project that would use AI to produce better political polling outcomes.
Researchers at Texas A&M have developed a new carbon-fiber material that can heal itself when broken and is harder than steel.
Scientists have developed a “skin in a syringe”—a gel that contains living skin cells–that can be 3D printed into a skin graft and applied to a wound, enabling burns to heal without leaving scars.
PRO SCIENCE TIP: THINK OUTSIDE THE SEARCH ENGINE
Have you ever fired up Google during a brainstorming session to help your teammates generate ideas? You might think twice about doing so again. A recent study explored how creativity varies between groups when one has access to the internet and one doesn’t. 244 people were divided into small groups with half of them given access to a search engine. The groups were tasked with coming up with as many ideas as possible for using a particular object. One object didn’t have many results on Google when searching; the other had many. The researchers found that those who didn’t use Google tended to come up with more creative and effective ideas than those who did. What’s more, when there were a lot of Google search results, the groups tended to converge on the top answers given rather than coming up with their own creative responses.
WHAT’S ENTERTAINING ME THIS WEEK
I’m a few episodes into the new season of King of the Hill, the first since it was cancelled in 2010. The show’s creators chose to advance the series in time a little bit, meaning that we get to see Hank and Peggy Hill struggling to navigate retirement while their son navigates early adulthood. If you’re a fan of the original iteration, you won’t be disappointed by the new episodes. And my favorite touch? In the year 2025, resident conspiracy theorist character Dale Gribble doesn’t have his craziest ideas ignored anymore. Instead, he’s got a Substack and a bunch of willing subscribers.