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Fiction Science Club

The 007 saga gets a tech upgrade for the 2020s

Kim Sherwood, author of "Double or Nothing," in an Alpine A110S sports car
Kim Sherwood checks out the driver's seat of the Alpine A110S sports car favored by her fictional Agent 003. (Photo by Rosie Sherwood)

Imagine a James Bond story with quantum computers, brain-computer interfaces, a cloud-shifting climate control system and a billionaire who owns his own launch system and satellite constellation.

Now imagine that James Bond is missing from the story.

That’s the unconventional tack taken by British author Kim Sherwood in her first-ever spy thriller, “Double or Nothing” — the kickoff to a trilogy that introduces a new cast of secret agents, plus some old favorites including M, Miss Moneypenny and CIA agent Felix Leiter.

James Bond, a.k.a. Agent 007, made his debut as the debonair MI6 spy 70 years ago in Ian Fleming’s first novel, “Casino Royale,” and went on to star in more than four dozen books and 27 movies. But “Double or Nothing” is not your grandparents’ 007 thriller.

“Ian Fleming, of course, was a product of his time, and I’m a product of mine,” Sherwood, a 33-year-old lecturer in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh, says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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Universe Today

Type One Energy raises $29M for a crazy fusion reactor

Illustration: Stellarator fusion device design
A stellarator uses a contorted configuration of magnets to confine superheated plasma. (Credit: Type One Energy)

A Wisconsin-based startup called Type One Energy says it’s closed an over-subscribed $29 million financing round to launch its effort to commercialize a weird kind of nuclear fusion device known as a stellarator.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the $2 billion clean-energy fund created by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, partnered with TDK Ventures and Doral Energy Tech Ventures to co-lead the investment round. Other backers include Darco, the Grantham Foundation, MILFAM, Orbia Ventures, Shorewind Capital, TRIREC and Vahoca.

Stellarator fusion devices rely on a pretzel-shaped torus of magnets to contain the plasma where fusion takes place. They have a design that’s strikingly different from, say, the giant tokamak that’s being built for the multibillion-dollar ITER experimental fusion reactor in France, or the laser-blasting device at the National Ignition Facility in California that recently hit an energy-producing milestone. Some have gone so far as to call stellarators the “fusion reactor designed in hell.”

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GeekWire

Zeva Aero trades in its flying saucer for an airplane

Illustration: Zeva Aero's VTOL airplane in flight
An artist’s conception shows Zeva Aero’s Argon VTOL aircraft in flight. (Zeva Aero Illustration)

Zeva Aero, the Tacoma, Wash.-based personal aviation startup that’s been testing flying saucers, is shifting its focus to a more down-to-earth design for aircraft that’ll be capable of vertical takeoffs and landings.

The startup is also getting ready to move its base of operations to Pierce County Airport-Thun Field in Puyallup, Wash. “This will give us room to expand, and the views of Mount Rainier are spectacular,” Zeva said in its announcement of the move.

Zeva founder and CEO Stephen Tibbitts told me that the roughly 18,000-square-foot leased facility will provide office and shop space, with adjacent land set aside for a future hangar. Zeva plans to move into the new headquarters by the end of May to ramp up work on its new top-priority project.

Tibbitts said the plan for pivoting away from Zeva’s original flying-saucer design took shape over the past year or so.

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Cosmic Tech

IBM marks medical milestone for quantum computers

An overhead view shows IBM's Quantum System One at Cleveland Clinic. (Photo by Ryan Lavine for IBM)
An overhead view shows IBM's Quantum System One at Cleveland Clinic. (Photo by Ryan Lavine for IBM)

IBM and Cleveland Clinic today unveiled the first quantum computer dedicated solely to research in health care and life sciences — a sleek cube of glass and metal that’s likely to generate sci-fi movie concepts for years to come.

Researchers hope IBM Quantum System One will eventually generate new biomedical discoveries as well.

“This includes quantum machine learning to design more efficient immunotherapies and designing quantum-accelerated models to predict drug combinations,” Jeanette Garcia, senior research manager of quantum computational science at IBM, said in an emailed statement.

The potential applications extend beyond medical research.

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GeekWire

Microsoft backs effort to extend fiber internet in Africa

Worker laying fiber cable in African village
Microsoft’s Airband Initiative is supporting fiber connectivity in Africa. (Liquid Intelligent Technologies Photo)

Microsoft says it’s partnering with a fiber-cable connectivity venture called Liquid Intelligent Technologies to bring high-speed internet access to an additional 20 million people in Africa by 2025.

The collaboration is part of Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which aims to help extend broadband coverage to 250 million people living in unserved and underserved areas of the world, including 100 million people in Africa.

Microsoft President Brad Smith announced the partnership with Liquid in advance of the Fifth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries, which gets underway next week in Doha, Qatar. Microsoft will co-chair the meeting’s Private Sector Forum.

“The private sector can plan an important role in creating opportunities for the 880 million people living in LDCs [least developed countries], where only 36% of the population uses the internet today, and it’s important for Microsoft to do its part,” Smith said in a blog posting.

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GeekWire

Hydrogen-powered plane aces its first flight

Universal Hydrogen plane in flight
Universal Hydrogen’s prototype plane takes flight in Moses Lake, Wash., in March 2023. (Universal Hydrogen Photo)

A prototype aircraft with a hydrogen-fueled powertrain successfully completed an initial 15-minute flight today at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Wash., marking a significant step for zero-emission aviation.

Los Angeles-based Universal Hydrogen had the 40-passenger De Havilland Dash 8-300 turboprop converted to use hydrogen to power an electric propulsion system mounted on the plane’s right wing. The system incorporates a fuel cell built by Plug Power and a megawatt-class motor built by Everett, Wash.-based MagniX. Seattle-based AeroTEC assisted with the engineering for the conversion.

The engine on the left side was left unconverted to serve as a backup in case the hydrogen-based system encountered problems.

Universal Hydrogen and its partners worked in Moses Lake for months to get the plane — nicknamed Lightning McClean — ready for today’s first aerial tryout, conducted under the conditions of an experimental airworthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The flight began at 8:41 a.m. PT and reached a maximum altitude of 3,500 feet. “We were able to throttle back the fossil-fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power,” test pilot Alex Kroll said in a news release. “The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine.”

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GeekWire

Amazon and Google make a couple of quantum leaps

Visualization of electric field energy density for metamaterial waveguide, from AWS' Palace simulation
This Palace simulation visualizes the electric field energy density for a metamaterlal waveguide. (AWS Graphic)

Today’s news from the frontier of quantum computing includes Amazon Web Services’ release of cloud-based simulation software for modeling the electromagnetic properties of quantum hardware, Google’s latest technological advance aimed at lowering the error rate of quantum calculations, and new recommendations about the public sector’s role on the frontier.

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GeekWire

Clean-energy funding gives ‘Hydrogen Valley’ a boost

Zero-emission haul truck
This ore-hauling truck is powered by a hydrogen-fueled powerplant. (First Mode / Anglo American Photo)

First Mode, the clean-energy company that was recently transformed from a Seattle startup into an Anglo American subsidiary, is getting a boost from Washington state.

The Washington State Department of Commerce awarded $250,000 in economic development funding to the Economic Alliance of Lewis County to help First Mode with design and construction costs related to the company’s future facility in Centralia, Wash.

First Mode is planning to turn a former coal mine site, leased from TransAlta, into a proving grounds for its hydrogen-fueled hybrid powertrain for heavy mining trucks. The building plan calls for providing 7,500 square feet of office space and 20,000 square feet of outdoor yard space, with an option for expansion.

The powertrains have been under development at First Mode’s lab in Seattle, and last year a prototype truck made its debut at a platinum mine in South Africa.

Eventually, Anglo American plans to have First Mode convert hundreds of ultra-class haul trucks to run on hydrogen and battery power. The technology for the trucks and the fueling and charging infrastructure will be tested at the Centralia site.

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GeekWire

Microsoft’s AI chatbot gets into some ugly arguments

Bing Chat screenshot
Users have reported getting into tiffs with Bing Chat over “fake news.” (GeekWire Illustration / Bing screenshot via Microsoft)

It turns out we’re not the only ones getting into fact-checking fights with Bing Chat, Microsoft’s much-vaunted AI chatbot.

Last week, GeekWire’s Todd Bishop recounted an argument with the ChatGPT-based conversational search engine over his previous reporting on Porch Group’s growth plans. Bing Chat acknowledged that it gave Bishop the wrong target date for the company’s timeline to double its value. “I hope you can forgive me,” the chatbot said.

Since then, other news reports have highlighted queries that prompted wrong and sometimes even argumentative responses from Bing Chat.

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GeekWire

OceanGate provides a guided video tour of the Titanic

Titanic's bow, as seen during OceanGate dive
An image from OceanGate’s Titanic expedition shows the shipwreck’s iconic bow. (OceanGate via YouTube)

The latest film about the Titanic doesn’t show Leonardo DiCaprio standing up on the bow’s railings — instead, a single slim filament of coral takes his place as the king of the world.

That’s just one of the scenes from “Titan — A Viewport to Titanic,” a newly released 20-minute video that recaps OceanGate Expeditions‘ dives to the world’s best-known shipwreck in 2021 and 2022.

The film was assembled from high-resolution video captured during a series of dives made by OceanGate’s Titan submersible — a vessel that was designed specifically to take its crews 12,600 feet deep in the North Atlantic Ocean to document the site, year over year.

“Mission specialists, scientists and Titanic experts helped OceanGate Expeditions capture over 50 hours of high-resolution 4K and 8K footage and images of the wreck site,” Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, said in a news release.

“Titan — A Viewport to Titanic” is narrated by Rory Golden, a veteran Titanic diver and explorer who’s part of the OceanGate team.

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