A tiny soft lithium-ion battery made from droplets
University of Oxford
The smallest soft lithium-ion battery ever made consists of just three tiny droplets formed from a silk-based hydrogel. The droplet battery can deliver defibrillator electric shocks to beating mouse hearts, along with providing pacemaker-style control – but it may eventually power biomedical implants and wearable electronics for humans.
“Potentially, our tiny battery could be used as an implantable microrobotic battery, which can be moved to target locations by a magnetic field and then release its energy for medical treatments,” says Yujia Zhang at the University of Oxford.
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Zhang and his colleagues designed the tiny batteries as three connected droplets that can self-assemble in a liquid solution, after the various ingredients are injected into the liquid by micro-syringe. One droplet contains lithium manganese oxide particles and acts as the battery’s negative electrode, while a second droplet contains lithium titanate particles and represents the positive electrode. A central droplet filled with lithium chloride separates these electrodes. UV light activates the battery by rupturing the layers separating each droplet and allowing lithium ions to flow freely between them.
The droplet batteries are 10 times smaller in length than previous soft lithium-ion batteries. At just 600 micrometres, it is about six times the width of a human hair. The batteries are also 1000 times smaller in volume than similar flexible lithium-ion batteries. And because the central droplet can incorporate magnetic nickel particles, the batteries can be controlled remotely via an external magnetic field.
Such miniature batteries also deliver an unprecedented amount of energy given their tiny size, says Wei Gao at the California Institute of Technology. “This energy density is notably higher than what has been achieved in other similar-sized batteries,” he says.
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The droplet batteries were tested in mouse hearts that were removed from the animals’ bodies. They successfully acted as defibrillators to restore a normal heartbeat and pacemakers to regulate heartbeats. Additional testing showed that the batteries retain 77 per cent of their original capacity after 10 charge and discharge cycles.
The simplicity and scalability of such droplet batteries could represent a potential advantage over traditional battery manufacturing in the future, says Gao. He suggested that such batteries can power minimally invasive biomedical implants and biodegradable medical devices.
“What impressed me most was how this soft battery mirrors the aqueous environment of human tissue by being hydrogel-based,” says Gao. “However, we still need to consider the safety and biocompatibility of the materials used in this battery, especially as we move toward commercialisation or further research applications.”
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The Verge last night published an exclusive and seemingly well researched and sourced report (it’s great in my opinion, read it here) from journalists Kylie Robison and Tom Warren stating that OpenAI plans to launch another new frontier AI model, codenamed Orion — which may or may not be GPT-5 — by December.
Altman hasn’t elaborated much since then from what I’ve seen, and the response is notably not exactly a direct denial of the claims — he didn’t write “No” or “this is false,” much less describe which part of the detailed article is wrong: is OpenAI not working on a new frontier model called Orion? That would contradict prior reporting from outlets including The Information that it does have such an effort internally — which to my knowledge, OpenAI never directly denied. Is it not planning to release later this year?
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But it is clearly an attempt to push back on the reporting as it stands.
It’s an interesting quasi-denial given how precise The Verge report is, noting specific details about Orion’s supposed release plans and the fact that it appears to be geared toward enterprise customers and possibly would be served up through an application programming interface (API) only at first:
“Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally.“
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OpenAI’s last release of a new frontier model — o1 preview and o1-mini — occurred in early September, a little more than a month ago. Yet the wider reception of these large language models (LLMs) has been largely muted, in part because they are expensive for both the company and developers to operate, and also because they are of a new “reasoning” architecture and are more limited in many ways than OpenAI’s GPT family of models, unable at this time to accept file uploads, or to generate and analyze imagery.
Whether OpenAI does end up releasing a new frontier model later this year or not, we’ll be following closely. For now, it seems, fans of the company and its models shouldn’t get their hopes up too soon.
VB Daily
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Medical and administrative staff are increasingly overwhelmed with piles of paperwork they have to fill out every day.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of startups, are seeing opportunities to make those bureaucratic processes less burdensome with the help of generative AI. These companies are building AI medical scribes, platforms for pre-authorizing health insurance payments, and products for automatically extracting medical coding from patients’ electronic medical records (EMRs.)
But Pharos, a company that was a part of Y Combinator’s summer 2024 cohort, is applying AI to tackle another somewhat under-the-radar administrative function for hospitals: quality reporting to external clinical registries.
Organizations like Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the American College of Surgeons aim to measure each healthcare centers’ record on delivering safe and effective care for patients. Although reporting to these registries is not always mandatory, it’s often in the best interest of hospitals. These external organizations play a crucial role in identifying quality issues (such as an increase in post-surgery infections), which can be addressed to improve patient care.
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However, reporting to the registries is extremely time-consuming. Nurses and other staff must manually sift through each patient’s electronic health record to extract the precise data required for each registry. “A single case can take up to eight hours” to report, said Ryan Isono, a partner at Felicis, “It’s a big problem, but one that you only know about if you’re deep in the industry.”
Indeed, Pharos was co-founded by Felix Brann and Matthew Jones, who had some exposure to the challenges of reporting data to medical registries from their prior work at Vital, a startup that develops software for emergency rooms. They recognized that AI can take unstructured data from EMRs and automatically populate forms required by registries. As they went through YC earlier this year, they added another co-founder – Alex Clarke, a medical doctor who also holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from Imperial College London.
On Friday, Pharos announced that Felicis, with participation from General Catalyst, Moxxie and Y Combinator, led its $5 million seed round.
Pharos caught Felicis’ eye not only because the company could save hospitals money and free up nurses’ time for taking care of patients, but also because the area still doesn’t have other startups going after it, Isono said.
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Brann (pictured center above) predicts that other quality reporting companies will emerge soon. “We have five years of experience selling and deploying into hospitals, and we have top-tier AI talent,” he said.” That Venn diagram doesn’t normally overlap. That’s why we think we’re going to win.”
For now, the entire Pharos team consists only of the three co-founders, but they will be using the capital to hire a team that will help the company sell the product and maintain relationships with hospitals.
On February 12, criminals used compromised credentials to remotely access a Change Healthcare Citrix portal, an application used to enable remote access to desktops. The portal did not have multi-factor authentication. Once the threat actor gained access, they moved laterally within the systems in more sophisticated ways and exfiltrated data. Ransomware was deployed nine days later.
Landmark Admin, a third-party administrator (TPA) specializing in administrative support services for life insurance and annuity companies, has confirmed suffering a serious ransomware attack recently.
The company revealed the news in a filing with the Maine Office of the Attorney General, in which it said that people’s data was stolen in an attack which took place in mid-May 2024.
Following the breach, Landmark Admin shut down its IT systems and remote access to its network to contain the effects, and brought in third-party security experts, who found the personal information of 806,519 people had been stolen.
Identity theft
“The forensic investigation determined that data was encrypted and exfiltrated from Landmark’s system,” the company said. “However, there was insufficient evidence available to identify which files had been compromised. The unauthorized activity occurred between May 13, 2024, and June 17, 2024.”
When the investigation concluded, the company understood that the information grabbed by the hackers included first name/initial and last name; address; Social Security number; tax identification number; driver’s license number/state-issued identification card; passport number; financial account number; medical information; date of birth; health insurance policy number; and life and annuity policy information.
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“Please note that the information above varies for each potentially impacted individual. Affected individuals will be notified by mail of information that was impacted,” Landmark said.
So far, no threat actors assumed responsibility for the attack, so we don’t know if there were any ransom demands.
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Since the information stolen is highly sensitive, users are advised to be extra vigilant for potential phishing attacks, social engineering, or possible wire fraud. Landmark is offering credit monitoring and identity theft protection services through IDX, which include 12 months of credit and CyberScan monitoring, a $1,000,000 insurance reimbursement policy, and fully managed id theft recovery services.
The Call of Duty series is one of the best-selling games in history
It has been eagerly anticipated, but this year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has finally dropped for gamers to get stuck into.
The Call of Duty (CoD) series is one of the best-selling in history with more than 425 million lifetime sales and has made billions of dollars.
But this latest edition comes with a bit of a difference, with it being available straight away to subscribers of Microsoft’s Game Pass service – a first for a game of this size.
It means those with the existing Netflix-style subscription do not need to pay anything extra to play.
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Game Pass, like Sony’s rival PlayStation Plus service, lets Xbox and PC players play hundreds of video games for a monthly fee.
Earlier this year, Microsoft raised prices for all subscribers and added a tiered system.
As it’s the first mainline CoD game to be released since Microsoft completed its takeover of maker Activision Blizzard in the gaming industry’s biggest ever deal, there’s naturally a lot of focus on this approach.
Some experts feel it could bring more subscribers to the Game Pass service, but at the expense of actual game sales, with its true impact only being revealed in the coming months.
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CoD content creator BennyCentral feels Game Pass is “one of the biggest elements this year”.
“The fact that it’s going to give people so much access, whether they’re playing on Xbox or they’re playing on PC, they’re going to be able to play the full game as part of that subscription,” he says.
Benny
BennyCentral loves the fast-paced nature of CoD
Benny, who has Game Pass, tells BBC Newsbeat it will “widen the player base” of people that may not have played Black Ops in the past.
“They might be more likely to kind of hop on and try it for the first time.”
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Fellow creator OllMS, who uses the Battlenet platform instead, agrees and thinks this approach by Microsoft can make the game “more accessible to a wider range of audience”.
“Especially younger people who may not be able to buy the game straight away, who would maybe wait until Christmas to get the game given to them by their parents.”
CoD has regularly topped PlayStation charts for its top-selling game, and Microsoft signed a 10-year deal to keep the game on Sony and Nintendo gaming platforms.
But while there have been some concerns around what it could mean for PlayStation users, who still have to pay the full price, OllMS thinks it’s also a boost from the perspective of content creators.
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“It’ll be really exciting to be able to make content for even more people right from the launch.”
Microsoft Activision Blizzard
Benny and OllMS are fans of the omnimovement in the new game
The CoD Black Ops spin-offs are generally well-regarded by fans for their single-player campaigns and the developers will be hoping this one lands well after the poor reception of last year’s Modern Warfare 3.
Benny and OllMS, who both had access to the beta version, are excited for the game because of some of the newer features.
With Black Ops 6, Benny points to omnimovement as a feature he is excited for, saying he feels it could “revolutionise how CoD is played”.
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“The fact that you’ve got that complete 360-degree movement, is going to give players a huge opportunity to shoulder opponents, kind of bait people in and create some incredible plays,” he says.
“We saw a few in the beta already, with people doing some incredible things with sniper rifles.”
OllMS is also a fan of some of the weapons, which he says were in earlier versions and have been brought back, such as the AS VAL – a type of assault rifle.
“Which is going to be fun to use, in combination with the omnimovement,” he says.
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“There’s going to be ways of making content and making plays that people have never seen before.”
OllMS
OllMS is looking forward to getting his hands on weapons like the AS VAL
Going back several decades for its setting is something Bennie is a fan of, particularly as he likes Black Ops games which contain things happening “behind the curtain”, and wants to see how that will play into this setting.
“It will be nice to see what kind of elements that they use, because it’s not an era where we’ve got smartphone technology.
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“It’s the way that world is built up, and how they’ve built up the missions.
“Every single mission is supposed to be a unique experience that you’re going to take away and be like ‘wow’.”
But with regular yearly releases, is there such a thing as too much Call of Duty which could dull excitement?
Not for OllMS.
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“I don’t think there can be too many CoD games that come out, because it’s something brand new,” he says.
“It’s something that a lot of young people and older people can get invested in, whether that’s playing with friends or playing solo.”
And they both think the game will continue to generate excitement because of what it means to gamers.
Benny says he loves Black Ops “especially because of the fast-paced nature of the game”.
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“There’s incredible score streaks and kill streaks.”
OllMS meanwhile loves teaming up with people online.
“And I think especially with Warzone, being part of a squad of four and making memorable plays with your friends, that you absolutely love is just one of the best things.
“And you can make content out of that so easily, because you’re doing something you enjoy,” he says.
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The next generation of nuclear technology could be moving closer to becoming a reality, driven by the tech sector’s growing demand for electricity to power artificial intelligence. Small modular reactors (SMRs) promise to reduce capital costs and accelerate construction timelines that typically plague nuclear plants, but the technology has struggled to reach the commercial stage. The difference now is the appetite of tech companies for fossil-free fuel. Amazon and Google, a unit of Alphabet , made back-to-back announcements this month putting real money behind these reactors. “In the absence of these tech companies, no one was going to build an SMR in the public utility world,” Paul Zimbardo, managing director at Jefferies, told CNBC. Demonstrating its faith in the technology, Google agreed to buy power from Kairos, a private developer of small modular reactors. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Amazon is investing more than $500 million in the development of advanced reactors across several projects. As a result, the outlook for SMRs is improving and the potential market is far larger than appreciated, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco wrote in a research report to clients on Wednesday. The market for SMRs could grow by two gigawatts to five gigawatts by 2035 assuming big tech companies make up a majority of the demand, Percoco said. That would represent between 6 and 17 reactors if each SMR averages 300 megawatts. Tech as a catalyst Utilities themselves have been reluctant to invest in SMRs due to the high costs associated with building a first-of-a-kind project, Zimbardo said. They have a responsibility to shareholders to make prudent decisions at the lowest cost, he added. The tech companies, meanwhile, need reliable, carbon-free electricity to power AI data centers and are increasingly willing to pay a premium for nuclear-fueled power as a consequence. Microsoft , for example, agreed to pay $130 per megawatt hour for electricity from the mothballed Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania that Constellation Energy is restarting, according to Percoco. “The cost of an SMR is highly uncertain but could potentially be feasible [at that] price level,” the Morgan Stanley analyst said. Investor options limited Investors who want exposure to SMRs have limited options right now. “There are not really large, liquid companies involved in SMRs,” Zimbardo told CNBC. The small, pure-play advanced reactor companies NuScale and Oklo are options, but their stocks are volatile and business outlook uncertain. NuScale, with a market value of $4.7 billion, is up 54% in the past month, while Oklo, worth about $2.5 billion, has more than doubled. Neither are involved in the Google and Amazon power deals. NuScale tried to deploy SMRs at a site in Idaho but the project was canceled last year as the price tag ballooned due to inflation and high interest rates. Oklo is promising to build microreactors that range in size between 15 megawatts and 100 megawatts. The startup, backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, hopes to have its first reactor up and running, also in Idaho, in 2027. GE Vernova offers some exposure to SMRs, albeit inside a sprawling business mostly focused on gas- and wind powered turbines. The company is slated to start construction on its BWRX-300 small modular reactor in Ontario next year, with the plant scheduled to come online in 2029. But GE Vernova doesn’t expect SMRs to become “a meaningful part of our income statement with revenue and growth until early into the next decade,” Chief Financial Officer Kenneth Parks told investors during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. SMR OKLO 1M mountain NuScale Power has climbed 54% and Oklo by 117% in the past month.
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