Open wide and say AI, + H2O from fog and more

Open wide and say AI: Your doctor’s new assistant

😶Human guinea pigs

If you haven’t been to the doctor recently, good for you! Meanwhile, the rest of us have become guinea pigs for the AI tools now commonly used in medical examinations. It’s a mixed blessing, writes Ananya in SN’s recent article: Medical AI tools are growing, but are they being tested properly?

Integrating AI into healthcare holds potential for more efficient record-keeping,  improved diagnoses, treatment decision-making, and reporting. Scads of new medical AI tools are now available to medical practitioners, designed to summarize patient encounters and generate clinical documentation. 

🤥Unreliable narrators

But there are drawbacks: we already know that AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on, and one review of studies evaluating health care AI models, specifically LLMs, found that only 5 percent used real patient data. Few evaluations focused on real-world tasks like summarizing patient encounters. Worse, such tools can also introduce a hazard never encountered in the pre-AI days: hallucinations. OpenAI’s Whisper, an ambient AI listening app that uses speech recognition to summarize interactions, has gotten into some widely reported hot water for hallucinating racial commentary and imagined medical treatments. (OpenAI advises against using Whisper in decision-making contexts.) 

🥱Investors yawn

Yet investors are bullish about the opportunities, and this is one of the fastest growing spaces in AI. Notable companies:

• Nabla, the developer of Nabla Copilot, an ambient AI that according to its website “helps clinicians enjoy care again.” The Paris-based company has over $40 million in investment, most recently from a January 2024 Series B round.
• Nuance Communications, acquired by Microsoft in 2021 in an all-cash deal worth almost $20 billion. Their AI listening tool automatically captures patient encounters and generates clinical documentation.
• DeepScribe, based in San Francisco, has almost $60 million in investment for its AI-powered medical scribe.
• Suki AI, a Redwood City–based AI-powered voice assistant that helps physicians with various tasks, including note-taking, retrieving patient information, and completing administrative tasks, with over $150 million in investment, most recently from an October 2024 $75 million Series D round.

---

Even desert cities could pull drinking water from the air 

😶‍🌫️A cool drink of fog

Between climate-driven superstorms wreaking havoc on our communities amid demoralizing budget cuts to environmental agencies (such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. and others worldwide), there’s scant good news about earth science these days. But as Carolyn Gramling reports for SN, there’s at least one shining ray of hope: the growing capacity to transform fog into drinking water. 

💨 Behind the news

A year-long assessment of the potential volume of harvested fog water near Alto Hospicio, a city in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, found that it’s possible to collect as much as 5 liters per square meter each day, a nearly five-fold increase over previous quantities. The water is collected from fog that forms on a mesh sheet suspended vertically, facing the fog-loaded wind. Water collects on the mesh and drips into a collection system. The city currently trucks in  about 300,000 liters of drinking water weekly for the roughly 10,000 residents living in Alto Hospicio’s slums. That amount would require 17,000 square meters (more than three football fields) of similar mesh to collect. That need is projected to increase as the city grows. 

🚰Water tech

Several startups are developing innovative technologies to extract water from air, addressing water scarcity challenges like that in Alto Hospicio. Here are a few notable examples.

• Source Global, based in Arizona, develops “hydropanels” that use solar energy to extract water vapor from the air and condense it into drinkable water. Source’s hydropanels are installed in 52 countries in 450 separate projects across residential, commercial, and industrial use cases. The company has raised $150 million from investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Blackrock and Duke Energy.
• Watergen, a private company based in Tel Aviv, Israel, with an estimated $10 to $50 million in revenue, develops atmospheric water generators that use a heat exchange process to condense water vapor from the air. They offer a range of products, from small home units to large-scale systems for communities and industries, and have large projects and installations worldwide, including in the Navajo Nation, Russia, Colombia, and elsewhere. 

---

Better Reds than Red No. 3

🗞️Behind the news

The synthetic dye Red No. 3 is no longer allowed in foods, drinks and drugs. Earlier this year, as SN biological sciences reporter Meghan Rosen reports, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration enacted a ban based on a 2022 petition citing studies linking high Red No. 3 exposure levels to cancer in rats. 

🕰️Not an if but a when

A separate study links the dye to hyperactivity in children, while the cancer claim remains in dispute (​​studies conducted on humans have not produced conclusive evidence that red dye #3 causes cancer, and the effect on male rats is related to a hormonal process specific to those animals that does not occur in humans). What’s not up for debate is the ruling. Food manufacturers are required to come up with alternate products within two years, and drug manufacturers must follow suit within three years. Dozens of bills across the U.S. seek to ban synthetic food dyes. Notably, California has banned multiple additional dyes, including Red No. 40, from school meals, and West Virginia’s newly-signed dye ban will eventually impact all foods sold statewide.

🔎The hunt is on

Makers of natural biotech solutions are tickled pink, and many companies are leading the way with precision fermentation colorants. This process offers a sustainable and controlled way to create specific color molecules, avoiding the inconsistencies of traditional agricultural sources or the potential hazards of synthetic dyes. Here are three biotech ventures red-efining reds:

• Chromologics is a Danish seed-stage startup with about $10 million in investment.  The product is made from fermenting fungus combined with sugar and other nutrients submerged in water “instead of high-value raw materials like tomatoes, potatoes, insects, or beetroot.”
• Phytolon is an Israeli company with over $20 million in investment, including from an undisclosed round in November of 2024. Their colorants are made from baker’s yeast mixed with pigments from beetroot, cactus fruit, and pitaya (dragon fruit). 
• Michroma uses fermented fungi to make Red+, a natural bright colorant used in baked goods, beverages, confections, meat and alternative meat. Based in San Francisco, they raised $6.4 million in a 2023 seed round led by Supply Change Capital, a food tech VC backed by 301 INC, the corporate venture capital arm of food giant General Mills. 

Polar Power: New Fiber Outperforms Down

📸 The big picture

A new fiber inspired by polar bear fur could provide insulation against extreme temperatures, writes Jude Coleman in SN. It traps heat and insulates against cold better than down feathers.

🧊 Behind the news

The fiber’s porous core is made from a synthetic aerogel, an ultralight substance created by removing the liquid component from a gel and replacing it with gas. This process leaves behind a solid network structure, with air filling the gaps. Aerogels are great insulators but too delicate on their own to use in textiles. To create a more robust aerogel, materials scientist Hao Bai and colleagues spun and froze a thread of aerogel made from chitosan, a polymer found in the exoskeletons of shellfish. Freeze-drying the string and coating it in a pliable plastic called thermoplastic polyurethane added strength, flexibility and waterproofing. Polar bear hairs have a similar layered structure. The resulting fiber is strong enough to hold the weight of three billiard balls. And it can be knit, dyed and washed. The fiber’s texture is somewhere between plastic and cotton, says Bai, of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.

💡Why it matters

The new material is as warm as a down coat but one-fifth as thick. It also has the advantage of being surrounded by a flexible waterproof sheath. If the material can be scaled economically, a prime application will be outdoor apparel, a market valued at $35 billion globally in 2023 and expected to grow at over 6.6% between 2024 and 2032. Climate change is accelerating the demand for innovation in insulation materials and specialized performance clothing and footwear.

📈 Opportunity

Companies featuring aerogels include Cabot (NYSE: CBT), whose product line encompasses thermal management solutions for electric vehicle batteries, industrial insulation in the form of panels, plasters and paints, and outdoor gear and apparel. Apparel-specific aerogel fiber manufacturers include Oros Apparel, a Series B startup that recently secured $22M in funding to develop a new product line for boots, tents, and more. 

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Society for Science and Science News Media Group assumes no liability for any financial decisions or losses resulting from the use of the content in this newsletter. Society for Science and Science News Media Group do not receive payments from, and do not have any ownership or investment interest in, the companies mentioned in this newsletter. Please consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.