Weekly Dose of Optimism #118

Scent Teleportation, Semaglutide & AD, First Generalist Policy, Semaglutide...Again, OXMAN, Astro Mechanica

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 118th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

You may have heard, there’s an election on Tuesday. You might be watching the ads and jabs and not feeling particularly optimistic.

We’re here to tell you that no matter what happens, we’ll be fine. Great, even. That’s not to say things will be perfect. But over the past eight years, four under Trump and four under Biden-Harris, high agency people like the people we cover every week in the Weekly Dose have focused on the work they can control and pushed us forward with near total disregard for who happens to be sitting in the Oval Office.

That will continue to happen. On Tuesday, you get a vote — a say in who will hold that office — but you get to vote on something more important every day after Tuesday, too. You get to vote on what you work on and how you do it. You get to vote on whether you spend your precious time yelling about how terrible the other side is, or whether you spend it rolling up your sleeves to make your family, your community, the country, and the world just a little bit better in the ways you can control.

That’s the beauty of this system. No matter who’s in office, as long as the Constitution and the rule of law reign, you can just do things.

If you disagree with us, well, good thing you got a vote. God bless America.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Scent Teleportation

People have really developed a nose for the types of thing we’re interested in over here at Not Boring. More people scent us this news than any story in Dose history.

Can you smell what Osmo is cooking?

Probably not yet, but soon you might be able to. Osmo Labs, the startup trying to digitize scent, just completed the first teleportation of scent in history.

Well, teleportation might not be the exact right term. Here’s how it works: Osmo created a "Principal Odor Map" that can predict how a molecule will smell based solely on its chemical structure. This allows them to digitally explore billions of potential molecules and predict their scents without physically synthesizing them, greatly accelerating the process of discovering new fragrances and aroma compounds. The POM then generates a formula to recreate the scent, sends the formula to a specialized printer, which then uses a combination of scent ingredients to “print” the smell. Watch the video above to get a better idea of how it works.

Vision and hearing have been digitized for decades and that digitization has shaped our digital world experiences. But smell has never been digitized, and its our oldest and deepest sense. Ever wonder why you can precisely remember the smell of your mom’s cooking but can recall like two words from that Youtube cooking video you watched? Our sense of smell is just much, much stronger than our other senses. In fact, it’s directly connected to the brain's limbic system, where emotions and memories are processed.

Digitizing smell — and thing bringing that ability to digital experiences — could meaningfully enrich the ways we interact online. That’s certainly a big, ambitious goal, but you could certainly imagine Osmo first capitalizing on its breakthrough to disrupt the $30B flavor and fragrance market before creating a world as rich in scents as it is in scenes and sounds.

(2) Associations of semaglutide with first-time diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in patients with type 2 diabetes

Wang et al in Alzheimer’s Association

Semaglutide was associated with 40% to 70% reduced risks of first-time AD diagnosis in T2DM patients compared to other antidiabetic medications, including other GLP-1RAs.

A large study suggests semaglutide may lower Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk among high-risk type 2 diabetes patients, because, of course it may.

The study reviewed health records of over 1 million patients, and found semaglutide reduced AD diagnosis risk by a whopping 40-70% compared to other antidiabetic medications, with the strongest effect observed against insulin. The benefit was consistent across age, gender, and obesity status, suggesting semaglutide's neuroprotective potential beyond glycemic control.

To be clear, the study does not suggest that semaglutide is a “cure” or even a potential therapeutic for Alzheimer’s. What the study does suggest is that semaglutide is more preventative than other diabetes drugs, like insulin or metformin, in lowering Alzheimer’s risk.

How can this be? The obesity-drug may reduce neuroinflammation and improve insulin sensitivity in the brain, which can protect against the buildup of harmful proteins linked that have been linked to Alzheimer’s. Additionally, semaglutide may enhance mitochondrial function and reduce oxidative stress, both of which are critical in preventing neurodegeneration.

Semaglutide this. Semaglutide that. We’re starting to sound like a broken record here. But hey, there’s rarely a week that goes by where a compelling study on semaglutide’s impact doesn’t drop. And if semglutide keeps dropping the hits, we’ll keep playing them.

(3) π₀: Our First Generalist Policy

Physical Intelligence (π)

In the same way that LLMs provide a foundation model for language, these generalist robot policies will provide a robot foundation model for physical intelligence.

Packy here. One of the questions I think a lot about is why people were so much more optimistic about technology in the past than they are today. Some of this is Glory Days Syndrome — if you read clippings from the time, people protested every new technology — but some of it is that new inventions made a dramatic and positive difference in people’s lives in ways that they could easily measure.

Washing machines are perhaps the most famous example. With electric washing machines, the time to do a load of laundry dropped from 4 hours to 41 minutes. Overall, electric appliances cut the average household’s weekly housework from 58 to 18 hours per week. That 40 hour delta just so happens to be the same amount of hours that are in a standard workweek. Jeremy Greenwood and others have made a compelling argument that electricity and labor-saving household appliances led to a dramatic increase in women’s workforce participation.

From that perspective, we are so back. Physical Intelligence (π), which is building “foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically-actuated devices of the future,” released its first generalist policy for robots in the form of a blog post, paper, and videos. Lots of videos. Front and center — in the blog post and the company’s tweets — they showed off robots folding laundry.

Folding laundry the way humans would is both an incredibly hard technical challenge — “while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity” — and a beautifully symbolic one.

The promise of machines is to free humans from the tasks we don’t want to do. Sometimes, that’s a euphemism for “anything a robot can do more cheaply than humans,” but sometimes, it’s just things we actually don’t want to do.

Folding laundry is one of my least favorite things to do. I will leave clothes in the dryer for days to avoid it. I, for one, welcome our new robot laundry lords.

(4) Obesity Drug Shows Promise in Easing Knee Osteoarthritis Pain

Gina Kolata for The New York Times

A study of 407 people with obesity and knee osteoarthritis found those who got semaglutide had an average reduction of 41.7 points on a 100-point scale while those who got the placebo had a reduction of 27.5 points.

And right on cue — fricken semaglutide out here solving knee pain issues! The same drug that is basically solving the world’s obesity pandemic is also reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s AND reducing knee pain? You said miracle drug, not me!

Researcher’s believe there are two drivers of the reduced pain: semaglutide’s anti-inflammatory properties and its weight-reducing effects. Makes sense to me. Reducing inflammation and lowering weight your knees need to support would seemingly reduce knee pain. The crazy thing is scale of that pain reduction: patients who received semaglutide reported a nearly 50% reduction in pain— this level of relief previously only achievable through costly, painful, and temporarily debilitating knee replacement surgery.

The. hits. keep. coming.

(5) Meet O°

Neri Oxman for OXMAN

Here’s to a future where products can grow from—and reincarnate into—plant matter.

Elliot has been banging the “grow everything with biology” drum for a while, and Neri Oxman’s company, OXMAN, is making him look like a prophet.

Yesterday, the company / lab (hear more about it in her conversation with Lex Fridman) announced its first product, O°: “a revolutionary class of biologically programmed, computationally grown, and robotically manufactured shoes and textiles that give biodegradable bioplastics the design that their biology deserves.”

OXMAN has the talent and resources to bring grown products to mass market. In addition to the biology for the materials, they’re using crazy tech like 5 axis 3D printing to bring a new class of products to life.

This is what the future should look like. Let’s replace plastics with biological material printed at scale. As a bonus: no plastics, no microplastics.

Bonus: Astro Mechanica Test Fire Videos

You’re going to start hearing a lot more about Astro Mechanica. When Not Boring first covered the company in a deep dive last April, it was in the earlier stages of pursuing its goal of being able to offer affordable, supersonic flights anywhere in the world. The feasibility of that goal hinged on the company’s ability to develop a novel jet engine, called the Turboelectric Adaptive Engine. This type of engine combines traditional turbine power with electric components to adapt fuel efficiency and performance dynamically.

Since then, the company has been proving out its ability to do just that. Astro Mechanica recently conducted its first hotfire tests of its Gen 3 turboelectric adaptive engine. That’s a big deal and its attracting some really cool coverage.

1. From Freethink

2. Jason Carman’s S3

Astro Mechanica is pulling off some really hard, impressive stuff right now that, if successful is going to benefit each of us in very practical ways: cheaper, faster, better flights.

One day, we’re going to be the old people — probably like 200 or 300 years old if semaglitude keeps it up — telling our kids about the days when computers just smelled like metal, we had to fold our own laundry, and a flight from New York to San Francisco took six hours, each way.

When that day comes, remember, you heard it here first.

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Have a great weekend y’all.

Thanks to Kalshi for sponsoring! We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan