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How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town

If, in 2017, you had taken a gamble and purchased a comparatively new digital currency called Bitcoin, today you would be a millionaire many times over. But while the industry has provided windfalls for some, local communities have paid a price.

Cryptocurrency is created by computers solving complicated mathematical equations—a process that took off after a Chinese company called Bitmain started selling a machine in 2016 with application-specific integrated circuits that made it possible to do this specialized computing much more quickly. “Almost overnight,” says Colin Read, a professor of economics and finance at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, “a crypto-mining arms race began.”

Each Bitcoin transaction consumes 1,173 kilowatts 

People began scouring the world for cheap sources of energy to run large Bitcoin-mining farms using these circuits. Cryptocurrency notoriously devours electricity; each Bitcoin transaction consumes 1,173 kilowatts—more than the average American uses in a month. In 2020, the world’s crypto mining required more energy than the whole of Switzerland. At the time, Plattsburgh had some of the least expensive power anywhere in the United States, thanks to cheap hydroelectricity from the Niagara Power Authority. 

It didn’t take long for a subsidiary of the popular mining firm Coinmint to lease a Family Dollar store in Plattsburgh. The city’s building inspector, Joe McMahon, remembers that the man who signed the lease, Prieur Leary, wanted everything done quickly. “Overnight, he wanted power on,” McMahon says. “We were all uneasy about it but didn’t know the harm.” 

Coinmint filled the building with servers, running them 24 hours a day. When the miners wanted to expand into a nearby shopping center, Bill Treacy, the manager of the Plattsburgh municipal lighting department, told them that they would have to invest $140,000 in new infrastructure. He was surprised when they weren’t discouraged. Soon, the company was regularly drawing over 10 megawatts, enough power for about 4,000 homes.

Other miners were quick to follow. Treacy recalls one prospector calling to see if he could get five gigawatts—“I said, ‘Excuse me. That’s a quarter of what New York state uses on a given day!” Plattsburgh was soon receiving a major mining application every week.

In 2018, Plattsburgh was receiving a major crypto-mining application every week.

“I’m pro–economic development,” says Colin Read, professor of economics and finance at SUNY Plattsburgh, “but the biggest mine operation has fewer jobs than a new McDonald’s.”

In January 2018, there was a cold snap. People turned up their heat and plugged in space heaters. The city quickly exceeded its quota of hydropower, forcing it to buy power elsewhere at much higher rates. McMahon says his Plattsburgh home’s energy bill jumped by $30 to $40 a month. “People felt there was a problem but didn’t know what to attribute it to,” he says.

As the long winter began to thaw, neighbors noticed a new disturbance: mining servers generate an extreme amount of heat, requiring extensive ventilation to avert shutoffs. Those fans generated a constant, high-frequency whine, McMahon says, “like a small-engine plane getting ready to take off.” It wasn’t just the decibels, but the pitch: “It registers at this weird level, like a toothache that won’t go away.” Carla Brancato lives across the river from Zafra, a crypto-mining and hosting company owned by Plattsburgh resident Ryan Brienza. She says that for several years her condo vibrated from its noise, as if someone were constantly running a vacuum upstairs. 

Meanwhile, the automated nature of these servers meant that the new mines provided few local jobs. “I’m pro–­economic development,” Read says, “but the biggest mine operation has fewer jobs than a new McDonald’s.” Plattsburgh doesn’t have a city income tax, and most miners lease their buildings, meaning they aren’t paying property taxes. Elizabeth Gibbs, a city councilor, was shocked when she went to tour one of the operations. “I was blown away by how hot it was—so hot and so loud,” she says. She describes a warehouse filled with hundreds of servers in stacks, connected by umbilical-like wires, with doors and windows left wide open to let cool air in.

Once it was online, Coinmint was regularly drawing over 10 megawatts, enough power for about 4,000 homes.

GABRIELA BHASKAR

Read, who became mayor in 2017, decided to impose a moratorium on new crypto mines until the city could figure out what to do. First, the New York Public Service Commission created a rider requiring high-density users to pay higher rates. It also required crypto companies to cover specialized infrastructure up front and put down a security deposit to ensure that their bills got paid. Based on two months of electricity use, Coinmint’s deposit was $1,019,503. The company spent two years pursuing appeals with the New York State Department of Public Service. “In the end, they lost,” Treacy says. 

Next, Plattsburgh updated its building codes and noise ordinances. (As an established business, Coinmint voluntarily agreed to work with the city.) 

Brienza, for his part, doesn’t think the moratorium was necessary. “The city could have attracted a lot of business,” he says. Zafra’s new facility, he says, has made noise reduction a priority; Brancato says after the city worked with Zafra to turn down its fans last summer, her home is finally quiet.   

Now Plattsburgh is again accepting new crypto-mine applications. Yet with the new regulations in place, they’ve seen little interest. Instead, mining has surged in the nearby town of Massena, where Coinmint signed a long-term lease for a former Alcoa aluminum plant. In 2021, Massena also halted new crypto-associated businesses. “Our goal is not to prevent business, but to make sure the character and safety of our town is protected,” wrote a town board member in an emailed statement.

From 2016 to 2018, crypto mining in upstate New York increased annual electric bills by about $165 million for small businesses and $79 million for individuals, a recent paper found. “Obviously if you’re an investor, you see the value of crypto,” McMahon says, “but me, living in this community? I don’t.” 

Economist Matteo Benetton, a coauthor of the paper and a professor at the Hass School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, says that crypto mining can depress local economies. In places with fixed electricity supplies, operations suck up grid capacity, potentially leading to supply shortages, rationing, and blackouts. Even in places with ample access to power, like upstate New York, mining can crowd out other potential industries that might have employed more people. “While there are private benefits, through the electricity market, there are social costs,” Benetton says. 

These impacts are now being felt across the country. Benetton says there are strong profit incentives to keep as many servers running as possible, and he is now calling for greater transparency in these companies’ energy usage. That’s not a popular opinion within the industry. But, says Benetton, “if you’re really doing good, you shouldn’t be afraid to disclose the data.”

The federal government does not currently monitor cryptocurrency’s energy consumption, but Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler recognizes that there are gaps in regulation. In a 2021 speech at the Aspen Security Forum, he referred to the industry as “the Wild West.” 

As long as mining is so profitable, Read warns, crypto bans just shift the harm to new locations. When China banned crypto mining in 2021 to achieve its carbon reduction goals, operations surged in places like Kazakhstan, where electricity comes primarily from coal. As a result, a recent study found, Bitcoin’s use of renewable energy dropped by about half between 2020 and 2021, down to 25%. 

Even when the industry invests in renewable energy, its sheer consumption makes it a significant contributor of carbon emissions.

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Read dismisses the promises that green investments or greater efficiencies can solve this problem. In a recent working paper, he found that cryptocurrency’s energy usage will rise another 30% by the end of the decade—producing an additional 32.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. As long as the price of Bitcoin goes up, the rewards of mining increase, which spurs energy use, he says. He refers to this situation as “the Bitcoin Dilemma.”

Those 32 million metric tons of carbon dioxide will make the climate crisis even worse, whether the emissions are coming from upstate New York or Kazakhstan. “We all suffer as a consequence,” says Read.

Lois Parshley is an investigative science journalist.

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A $620 million hack? Just another day in crypto

The FBI said on Thursday that the Lazarus Group, a prolific hacking team run by the North Korean government, is responsible for the March 2022 hack of a cryptocurrency platform called Ronin Network. 

The hackers stole $620 million in the cryptocurrency Ethereum. That’s an eye-catching number in almost any context. But in the Wild West environment of crypto, the Ronin hack is just one of eight megaheists in the past year in which hackers have stolen more than $100 million in cryptocurrency.

“Things are going too fast for people to keep up with,” says Kim Grauer, director of research at the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. “People bake into their investment strategy a kind of acceptance of the risk that you might get hacked or it all might go to zero.”

In 2021, criminal hackers stole approximately $3.2 billion in cryptocurrency, six times more than they made off with in 2020, according to Chainalysis. That year included six hacks of at least $100 million stolen and dozens of smaller hacks involving tens of millions.

Now 2022 is off to its own headline-grabbing start. The year in heists began when Qubit Finance, a new decentralized finance protocol, lost $80 million to hackers in January. When the anonymous crypto blog rekt.news chronicled the incident, the writer captured the strange feeling around the blistering pace of these enormous hacks: “But will anyone remember this next week?”  

It was a prescient question. Before that week was out, the cryptocurrency platform Wormhole was hacked for $325 million when attackers exploited an improperly applied security fix.

Why does this keep happening? In the cryptocurrency industry, businesses are spun up quickly, security is often an afterthought, scams are prevalent, and investors often don’t truly analyze the risk across a wide range of novel investments. 

“This industry is growing so fast,” Grauer says. “There are so many opportunities for new businesses to come online that people are investing at unprecedented rates and are investing in platforms that are not super well structured or managed. It’s a common investment strategy to maybe invest in 50 different protocols and tokens and hope that one of them goes to the moon. But how are you going to do proper due diligence on all 50?”

The normal answer: You do not.

Poorly managed teams running open-source code are common in crypto (and elsewhere). Hackers know it, and they take advantage to the tune of enormous sums.

In February’s hack of Wormhole, a decentralized finance (known as “DeFi”) platform that provides a “bridge” between blockchains, a hacker struck after open-source code to fix a critical vulnerability was not applied to the main project. Weeks after it was initially written, the code was finally uploaded to the public GitHub page. But the project was not updated right away, and the hacker found the security code first. The vulnerability was exploited within hours.

The biggest crypto thefts used to involve funds stolen from centralized exchanges. That type of crime still totals approximately $500 million per year, according to Chainalysis, but pales in comparison to how much now gets stolen from DeFi platforms, which totaled nearly $2.5 billion last year.  

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DeFi—an idea similar to smart contracts—is all about transparency and open-source code as an ideology. Unfortunately, in practice that too often means rickety multimillion-dollar projects held together with tape and gum.

“There are a few things that make DeFi more vulnerable to hacking,” Grauer explains. “The code is open. Anyone can go over it looking for bugs. This is a major problem we’ve seen that does not happen to centralized exchanges.”

Bug bounty programs—in which companies pay hackers to find and report security vulnerabilities—are one tool in the industry’s arsenal. There’s also a cottage industry of crypto audit firms that will swoop in and give your project a seal of approval. However, a cursory glance at the worst crypto hacks of all time shows that an audit is no silver bullet—and there is often little to no accountability for either the auditor or the projects when hacks happen. Wormhole had been audited by the security firm Neodyme just a few months before the theft.  

Many of these hacks are organized. North Korea has long used hackers to steal money to fund a regime that is largely cut off from the world’s traditional economy. Cryptocurrency in particular has been a goldmine for Pyongyang. The country’s hackers have stolen billions in recent years.

Most hackers targeting cryptocurrency are not funding a rogue state, though. Instead, the already robust cybercriminal ecosystem is simply taking opportunistic shots at weak targets.

For the budding cybercrime kingpin, the more difficult challenge is successfully laundering all the stolen money and turning it from code into something useful—cash, for example, or in North Korea’s case, weapons. This is where law enforcement comes in. Over the last few years, police around the world have been investing heavily in blockchain analysis tools to track and, in some cases, even recover stolen funds. 

The proof is the recent Ronin hack. Two weeks after the heist, the crypto wallet holding the stolen currency was added to a US sanctions list because the FBI was able to connect the wallet to North Korea. That will make it harder to make use of the bounty—but certainly not impossible. And while new tracing tools have started to shed light on some hacks, law enforcement’s ability to recover and return funds to investors is still limited.

“The laundering is more sophisticated than the hacks themselves,” Christopher Janczewski, who was formerly lead case agent at the IRS specializing in cryptocurrency cases, told MIT Technology Review. 

For now, at least, the big risk remains part of the crypto game.

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Embracing culture change on the path to digital transformation

Like many banks, National Australia Bank (NAB) decided to outsource a large part of its operations in the 1990s. “We pushed all our operations and a large part of our development capability out to third parties with the intent of lowering costs and making our operations far more process driven,” says Steve Day, the chief technology officer of enterprise technology at National Australia Bank.

Unfortunately, achieving these goals had an unintended consequence. “We froze our operations in time,” says Day. “If you roll forward to 2018, we realized that we were still operating like we’re in the 1990s. We were very waterfall driven. Our systems were highly processed driven, but in a very manual way, and it took us a very long time to roll out new products and services that our customers really needed.”

Meanwhile, young financial services companies were coming to market with innovative products and services and NAB was finding it difficult to compete. “Many customers today are expecting an Amazon experience, a Google experience, a Meta experience, but we were still operating in the 1990s,” says Day. “We stood back, and we looked at it, and we decided that our entire culture needed to change.”

What ensued was nothing less than an internal transformation. “Our original teams didn’t have a lot of tech skills, so to tell them that they were going to have to take on all of this technical accountability, an operational task that had previously been handed to our outsourcers, was daunting,” says Day.

Day and his team rolled out a number of initiatives to instill confidence across the organization and train people in the necessary technical skills. “We built confidence through education, through a lot of cultural work, a lot of explaining the strategy, a lot of explaining to people what good looked like in 2020, and how we were going to get to that place,” says Day.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Infosys Cobalt.

Full transcript:

Laurel Ruma: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Laurel Ruma. And this is Business Lab. The show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace. Our topic today is digital transformation. Most organizations have begun the journey to digitize their services and operations, and some are further along than others in bringing disruption to the marketplace. How do you bring transformation to organizations that are in highly regulated, service-based industries where competitive differentiation requires innovation?

Two words for you, internal transformation.

My guest is Steve Day, the chief technology officer of enterprise technology at National Australia Bank.

This podcast is produced in partnership with Infosys Cobalt.

Welcome, Steve.

Steve: Thank you, Laurel. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Laurel: National Australia Bank or NAB is undergoing a significant digital transformation. Gartner recently found that IT executives see the talent shortage as the largest barrier to deploying emerging technologies, specifically cloud-based technologies, but NAB uses insourcing. Most listeners are familiar with outsourcing, what exactly is insourcing and how does it relate to outsourcing?

Steve: Yeah. I think it’s all in the name. Insourcing would be the exact opposite of outsourcing. And to give you a little bit of history, National Australia Bank, like many banks, decided to outsource a large part of its operations in the 1990s. We basically pushed all our operations and a large part of our development capability out to third parties with the intent of lowering costs and making our operations far more process driven. I think those two objectives were achieved, but we did have an unintended consequence. We basically froze our operations in time, and that created a situation. If you roll forward to 2018, we realized that we were still operating like we’re in the 1990s. We were very waterfall driven. Our systems were highly processed driven, but in a very manual way, and it took us a very long time to roll out new products and services that our customers really needed.

It was about at that time that we realized we needed to do something different. We spoke with our outsources, of course, but to be honest, they weren’t motivated to reduce our internal costs and to help us become far more agile. They were very happy for us to be paying them large amounts of money to do large amounts of work. So at that point, we decided to bring our capability back into the business.

Laurel: So waterfall being the opposite of agile, right? You were finding that was hindering your progress as a company, correct?

Steve: It really was hindering our progress. We were very slow. It took us years to roll out new products and services. We had some young financial services companies knocking on the doors, startups, and the like, that were agile and able to compete really quickly, and we needed to change. We needed to look at a different way to roll out our products so that we could give customers what they’re expecting. Many customers today are expecting an Amazon experience, a Google experience, a Meta experience, but we were still operating in the 1990s. That’s when we really pushed our call too. We stood back and we looked at it, and we decided that our entire culture needed to change.

We did that by building a series of tech guilds. We built a cloud guild, a data guild, an insourcing framework. We built our NAB Engineering Foundation and with a goal of building a culture of innovation of cloud, of agile, and being able to deliver great products and services to our customers in a cost effective, but very safe way. And as part of that, we started on our cloud migrations and that is really moving at pace now.

Laurel: Insourcing seems to be working so far, but it didn’t happen overnight, as you said. And even though 2018 wasn’t that long ago, what was the journey like to first realize that you had to change the way you were working and then convince everyone to work in a very different way?

Steve: We did realize that if we didn’t get the culture embedded that we would not be successful. So building that capability and building the culture was number one on the list. It was five years ago. It feels like a very long time ago to me. But we started that process and through the cloud guild we trained 7,000 people in cloud and 2,700 of those today are industry certified and working in our teams. So we’ve made really good progress. We’ve actually moved a lot of the original teams that were a bit hesitant, a bit concerned about having to move to this whole new way of working. And remember that our original teams didn’t have a lot of tech skills, so to tell them that they were going to have to take on all of this technical accountability, an operational task that had previously been handed to our outsourcers, was daunting. And the only way we were going to overcome that was to build confidence. And we built confidence through education, through a lot of cultural work, a lot of explaining the strategy, a lot of explaining to people what good looked like in 2020, and how we were going to get to that place.

Laurel: NAB’s proportion of apps on public cloud will move from one third to about 80% by 2025, but security and regulatory compliance have been primary concerns for organizations and regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. How has NAB addressed these concerns in the cloud?

Steve: Initially, there was a lot of concern. People were not sure about whether cloud was resilient, whether it was secure, whether it could meet the compliance requirements of our regulators, or whether the board and our senior leadership team would be happy to take such a large change to the way we did business. We actually flew the board over to meet with many of the companies in the Valley to give them an idea of what was going on. We did a huge education program for our own teams. We created a new thing called The Executive Guild, so that middle management would have a great feel on what we were doing and why we were doing it. And as part of that, we created a set of tools that would help us move safely.

One of those was CAST, a framework that we use to migrate applications to cloud. CAST stands for Cloud, Adoption, Standards, and Techniques. And it really covers all the controls we use and how we apply those controls in our environment to make sure that when we migrate applications to cloud, they are the absolute safest they can be. It’s safe to say that when we built CAST, we actually did an uplift in our requirements. That enabled a lot of people to see that we were taking it very seriously, and that it was actually quite a high bar to achieve this compliance. But we were willing to invest, and we invested a lot in getting the applications to that level.

Another thing we did was build compliance as code. Now, infrastructure as code, what cloud is built on, allows you to then create compliance as code. So all of the checks and balances that used to be done manually by people with check boards, I used to say, are now being done in the code itself. And because a server is no longer a piece of tin in the corner, it’s an actual piece of code itself, a piece of software, you can run a lot of compliance checks on that, also from software.

A third thing that we did to give everyone a sense of comfort is we didn’t pin the success of NAB to the success of any one cloud company. We came up with a public, multi-cloud strategy, and that meant that at least for all our significant applications, we would run them on two different cloud providers. Now that would be expensive if you did every cloud in the most robust way, which would be active-active across both clouds. So we created our multi-cloud framework, which was about categorizing each application across multi-dimensions, and then assigning that workload to one of six multi-cloud treatments. Multi-cloud treatment one being, basically no multi-cloud, it’s an app for convenience. It doesn’t really matter if that application goes away. We allow that to sit in one cloud all the way through to our most critical applications, which we insist on running active-active across both clouds. And in our case, that would be MCT6. So given all of those frameworks, the tools, and the focus that we put on that, I think we gave the organization and the leadership at the organization some confidence that what we were doing was the right move and that it would give us our ability to serve customers well, while also remaining safe.

Laurel: How has cloud enabled innovation across NAB? I can see it in the teams and you’ve even upskilled executives to be comfortable with technology and what agile means and how you’re going to change the way that things are done. But what else are you seeing that’s just brought some kind of a particular efficiency that is a particularly proud moment for you?

Steve: I think I would go back to that description I just gave you about infrastructure as code being an incredible enabler of innovation. I mentioned compliance as code, but there’s also all kinds of operational innovation that you can perform when your infrastructure is software rather than hardware. Just being able to replicate things very quickly. The fact that you can have as many development environments as you need to develop your applications quickly and efficiently, because when you’re finished with them, you just turn them off and stop paying for them. The fact that we can move to serverless type applications now that don’t actually require any infrastructure sitting below them and enable our application team to not have to interact with anyone and just get on and develop their applications. Things like grid computing, which create massive computing power for a short burst of time. You pay a lot, but you only pay a lot for a very short amount of time. So you end up paying not very much at all. But to achieve massive things in predicting what the market’s going to do at times of concern and things like that.  Infrastructure-aware apps, some of the amazing things we are doing in cyber at the moment to understand cyberattacks, to be able to thwart them in a much more elegant way than we have in the past. Financial operations that enable us to take control of the elasticity of that cloud environment. And all of those things sort of add up to this platform of innovation that people can build things on that really create creative innovation.

Laurel: And how does that turn into benefits for customers? Because user experience is always an important consideration when building out tech services and as you mentioned, customers certainly expect Google- or Meta-like experiences. They want online, fast, convenient, anywhere they are, on any device, so how is something like artificial intelligence at an ATM serving both the need for improved security and improved user experience?

Steve: Great question. I think for improved security, fraud is a great one. There are so many scams going on right now, and AI has really enabled us to be able to detect fraud and to work with our customers, to prevent it in many cases. We’re seeing patterns of fraud or the ways that fraudsters actually approach their victims, and we’re able to pick that up and intervene in many cases. Operational predictions on things that are going to fail or break. And then things that are just better for customers like faster home loans. A large number of our home loans are approved in under an hour now because the AI allows us to take calculated risks, basically to do risk management in a really fast and efficient way. And then there are small things. There’s some great stuff like if I get a check, I just take a picture of it from my banking app on the iPhone and it’s instantly processed. Those sorts of things are really leading to better customer experiences.

Laurel: That’s my favorite as well, but a home loan under an hour, that’s pretty amazing.

Steve: And that’s because we have a history of what that customer’s done with us. We no longer have to have that customer fill in large surveys of what their monthly spending is and what their salary is and all of that. We have all that data. We know all that about the customer and to have to ask them again, is just silly to be frank. We can take all that information and process it directly out of their account. All we need is the customer’s permission. The open banking legislation and things that have come through at the moment that allow us to gain access to information with the customer’s permission through their other financial services, that also enables us to have a good understanding of that customer’s ability to meet their repayments.

We also do a lot of AI on things like valuations. The amount of AI going into valuing the property now is absolutely incredible. In the past, you’ve had to send somebody out to a house to do the valuation so that they can appreciate things like road noise, right? How much road noise does that property have? What are the aspects of that house? And through being able to look at, say, Google Maps and see how many cars per hour are flowing past that house, what the topology of the landscape is around that house, we can actually do calculations and tell exactly what the road noise is at that property. And we’re able to use layers and layers and layers of information such as that and that goes along with, is the house on a flood plain? Is the house overflown by aircraft, what material is the house made of? We can pick all of that from satellite imagery. Does it have a swimming pool? Does it have solar panels? We can gather a lot of that and actually do the valuation on the property as well, much faster than we have in the past. And that enables us to then provide these really fast turnarounds on things like home loans.

Laurel: That’s amazing. And of course, all of that helps keep innovation up at the bank, but then also improve your own efficiencies and money. Making money is part of being a business. And then you put the money back into making better experiences for your customers. So it’s sort of a win-win for everyone.

Steve: Yeah, I think so. I haven’t loaned money for a house since all of that has been put into place, but I’m really looking forward to the next time I do and having such a good experience.

Laurel: Collaborating with your customers is very important and collaborating with your competitors could be as well. So NAB teamed up with cloud providers and other global banks on an open digital finance challenge to prototype new banking services on a global scale. Why did NAB decide to do this? And what are some of the global financial challenges this initiative was looking to solve?

Steve: I think creating great partnerships to encourage innovation is a path forward. Like everything, we don’t have a monopoly on great ideas. And I think if we limited ourselves to the ideas we came up with, we wouldn’t be serving our customer’s best interests. Searching globally for great ideas and then going through a process of looking to see whether they can actually be productionized, it’s a great way of bringing innovation into the bank.

My favorite at the moment is Project Carbon, which is seven banks around the world all getting together to create a secure clearinghouse for voluntary carbon credits, which if you think about that and where the world’s going and how important that will be going forward, it’s just absolutely wonderful that we’ve got this situation being built today. But yeah, there’ll be things that create more secure payments, faster payments, more convenient payments, more resilient ledgers, and I mentioned faster home loans, etc. It’s just an exciting time to be in the industry.

Laurel:  And to be so open and willing to work with other folks as well. What else are you excited about? There’s so much innovation happening at NAB and across the financial services industry, what are you seeing in the next three to five years?

Steve: I’m seeing a faster pace of change. One of the things I’m aware of at the moment, things are changing so fast, that it’s really hard to predict what is going to come up in the near future. But one thing we know for sure is we will need a platform that enables us to pivot quickly to whatever that is. So I’m actually most excited about the opportunity to build a platform that is incredibly agile and allows us to pivot and to move and to exploit some of these great ideas that are coming in from global partners, or internally or wherever they’re coming from. Our new graduates come up with quite a few themselves. How do we get those ideas to production really quickly in a safe way? And I think that is what really excites me is the opportunity to build such a platform.

Laurel: Steve, thank you so much for joining us on the Business Lab. This has been a fantastic conversation.

Steve: Thank you, Laurel.

Laurel: That was Steve Day, the chief technology officer of enterprise technology at National Australia Bank, who I spoke with from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT and MIT Technology Review overlooking the Charles River. That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Laurel Ruma. I’m the director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And you can find us in print, on the web, and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyReview.com.

This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review. This episode was produced by Collective Next. Thanks for listening.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

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5G technology is about much more than just connecting people

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

5G-powered digitization promises to accelerate connectivity-led transformation in an increasingly hyperconnected world, ushering in a new range of possibilities for both individuals and enterprises. The transformative approach of 5G is pushing for an open standards, disaggregated, and cloud and edge-based approach for building networks.

Click here to continue.

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Aging clocks aim to predict how long you’ll live

Age is much more than the number of birthdays you’ve clocked. Stress, sleep, and diet all influence how our organs cope with the wear and tear of everyday life. Factors like these might make you age faster or slower than people born on the same day. That means your biological age could be quite different from your chronological age—the number of years you’ve been alive. 

Your biological age is likely a better reflection of your physical health and even your own mortality than your chronological age. But calculating it isn’t nearly as straightforward. Scientists have spent the last decade developing tools called aging clocks that assess markers in your body to reveal your biological age.

The big idea behind aging clocks is that they’ll essentially indicate how much your organs have degraded, and thus predict how many healthy years you have left. Among the hundreds of aging clocks developed in the last decade, though, accuracy varies widely. And researchers are still grappling with a vital question: What does it mean to be biologically young?

Most aging clocks estimate a person’s biological age based on patterns of epigenetic markers—specifically, chemical tags called methyl groups that are layered onto DNA and affect how genes are expressed. The pattern of this methylation across thousands of sites on DNA seems to change as we age, although it’s not clear why.

Some clocks promise to predict life span by estimating how a person’s body has aged, while others act more like a speedometer, tracking the pace of aging. Clocks have been developed for specific organs of the body, and for multiple animal species.

Proponents of aging clocks are already trying to use them to show that anti-aging interventions can make individuals biologically younger. But we don’t yet know enough about clocks, or what they tell us, to make such claims. 

Tracking time

The first epigenetic aging clock was developed in 2011 when Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, volunteered to participate in a study with his identical twin brother, Markus. The study was looking for epigenetic markers in saliva samples that might explain sexual orientation. (Steve is straight and Markus is gay.) 

As a biostatistician, Horvath offered to analyze the results and found no link to sexual orientation. But he also looked for links between the volunteers’ age and epigenetic markers. “I fell off my chair, because the signal was huge for aging,” he says. 

He found that patterns of methylation could predict a person’s age in years, although the estimates differed on average by around five years from each person’s chronological age.

Horvath has worked on aging clocks ever since. In 2013 he developed the eponymous Horvath clock, still among the best-known aging clocks today, which he calls a “pan-tissue” clock because it can estimate the age of pretty much any organ in the body. Horvath built the clock using methylation data from 8,000 samples representing 51 body tissues and cell types. With this data, he trained an algorithm to predict a person’s chronological age from a cell sample.

Other groups have developed similar clocks, and hundreds exist today. But Horvath estimates that fewer than 10 are widely used in human studies, primarily to assess how diet, lifestyle, or supplements might affect aging.

Measuring age

What can all these clocks tell us? It depends. Most clocks are designed to predict chronological age. But Morgan Levine at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, says: “To me, that’s not the goal. We can ask someone how old they are.” 

In 2018, Levine, Horvath, and their colleagues developed a clock based on nine biomarkers, including blood levels of glucose and white blood cells, as well as a person’s age in years.

They used data collected from thousands of people in the US as part of a different study, which followed the participants for years. The resulting clock, called DNAm PhenoAge, is better at estimating biological age than clocks based solely on chronological age, says Levine. 

A one-year increase in what Levine calls “phenotypic” age, according to the clock, is associated with a 9% increase in death from any cause, as well as an increased risk of dying from cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. If your biological age is higher than your chronological age, it’s fair to assume you’re aging faster than average, says Levine. 

But that might not be the case, says Daniel Belsky at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City. He says there are many reasons why biological age might exceed a person’s years.

Belsky and his colleagues have developed a tool to more accurately measure the rate of biological aging, based on work that tracked the health outcomes of 954 volunteers at four ages between their mid-20s and mid-40s. The researchers looked at biomarkers believed to indicate how well various organs are functioning, as well as others linked to general health. Then they developed an epigenetic “speedometer” to predict how these values would change over time.

Another popular clock, also developed by Horvath and his colleagues, is called GrimAge, in a nod to the Grim Reaper. Horvath claims it’s the best at predicting mortality, and he’s been applying it to his own blood samples. 

His results were consistent with his chronological age two years ago, he says, but when he ran another test around six months ago, his GrimAge was four years older than his age in years. That doesn’t mean Horvath has shaved four years off his life span—“You cannot directly relate it to how long you’ll live,” he says—but he thinks it means he’s aging faster than he should be, though he’s still puzzled as to why. 

Noisy clocks

Others have used changes in their results to infer that their rate of aging has slowed, usually after they started taking a supplement. But in many cases, the change can be explained by the fact that many epigenetic aging clocks are “noisy”—prone to random errors that distort their results. 

The problem is that at each area of the body where methyl groups attach to DNA, very slight changes take place over time. These subtle changes can be magnified by errors in methylation estimates. It ends up being a huge problem, says Levine, and results can wind up being off by decades. 

To answer this, they are “breaking apart” existing clocks and comparing them. They hope to work out what different clocks are measuring, and how to build better ones in the future. 

Levine and her colleagues have been working to get rid of this noise. She’s also trying to understand what aging clocks actually tell us. What does it really mean to have a lower biological age? And how can this knowledge be applied? 

While aging clocks may be a good indicator of your overall health, they simply aren’t accurate enough to count on in most cases. “I think they haven’t realized their full potential yet,” says Levine. 

That potential could lie in clinical health checks, says Horvath, where clocks could be used alongside tests of blood pressure and cholesterol to help people understand how fit and healthy they are, or whether they are at risk of disease. 

“Epigenetic clocks will never replace clinical markers, [but] the clocks add value to them,” he says. “I think five years from now we will have human blood-based clocks that are so valuable that they could be used [clinically].”

In the meantime, eating a healthy diet, avoiding smoking, and getting enough exercise remain some of the best ways to stave off the impacts of aging. We don’t need new aging clocks to prove that those strategies can help keep us well. 

Our readers selected aging clocks as the 11th breakthrough in a poll for our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Explore our picks below.   

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[dodikawouk]

In praise of the dollar bill

“We are cashless,” proclaims a sign on the gleaming glass door of the cafe I frequent. The sign predates the glossy list of covid-19 measures taped beside it, but together they present a united declaration of touchless efficiency—the promise of experiencing public space, social interaction, and consumer exchange with utmost convenience and cleanliness. Yet for all the friction that the cashless coffee shop aims to eliminate, it reproduces far weightier social barriers and inequalities. 

For individuals and communities, transactional technologies—digital wallets, mobile payments, and the like—can increase their autonomy in decision-making, their flexibility and resilience in times of crisis, and their ability to fight victimization, exploitation, and indignity. Trust in these technologies builds the capacity for long-term planning and building—of wealth, of infrastructure, of the foundations of prosperity for future generations—as well as for experimentation and risk. Of course, the corollary is also true: malign versions of these tools can rob communities and individuals of their agency.

Cash is the best transactional tool for increasing community and individual autonomy that we have invented so far. It offers many affordances that prove hard to replicate. Cash does not need someone else’s signature to spend. It does not specify where you can spend it, or on what. It is anonymous: no one needs to know who you are for you to spend it. It generates no data about your transaction for third parties. It transacts without fees for the payer or the payee. You know how much you have on hand: it cannot be frozen in your account by an opaque third-party payment processor on a whim, or reversed by a scammer, or eaten away by fees until you tip into overdraft without realizing it. It does not rely on many layers of brittle infrastructure of both hardware and software in order to operate at the point of sale.

What happens if cash goes away?

There are some lessons from history that are worth paying attention to. Cash—defined as a universal, public, printed monetary medium—is a relatively new technological and political achievement. Historically, money has been, more often than not, private and plural. In the United States, state-issued currency was not fully consolidated until after the Civil War. Previously, foreign currencies, private bank notes, and scrip produced by railroads, insurance, companies, and other private businesses circulated alongside currency issued by the US Treasury. 

This monetary cacophony meant that everyday spending required considerable street smarts. Bills might have come from a failed or fictitious bank or might have been a counterfeit copy of a note from a functioning, real bank. Bills that were accepted at face value in one city might have been accepted only at a lower value in others. Daily life involved navigating a messy, complex monetary media environment.

The chaotic situation also created highly stratified transactional communities. While the wealthy used notes issued by stable banks and redeemable for letters of credit and bullion, the poor were more likely to use low-value bronze or copper “petty coin” or deprecated bank notes. 

The future of transactional media might look something like its past. An industry consultant once told me that “in the future cash will be the ‘c word,’ not something nice people use.” Indeed, the future is likely to be cash-light rather than fully cashless. Those relegated to cash-only status will transact on unequal terms.

Today, cash is a universal, print technology—a mass media form. But it does have major flaws. Cash can be lost, destroyed, stolen. Most important, perhaps, it can’t be spent online, and therefore it does not move at the speed of the rest of our communicative lives.  

We don’t yet know the shape of tomorrow’s transactional media or the terrain of its transactional communities. We might work to prevent money that acts like today’s social media platforms: privatized and rooted in data-driven business models. 

In the cryptocurrency community, I often hear variations on the phrase “If cash were invented today, it would be illegal.” The point here is that cash is low cost, difficult to censor, and difficult to surveil. At a time when nearly all of our communication, transactional or otherwise, is channeled through monopolistic and controlling platforms that collect rent in the form of fees, data, or both, it’s hard to argue with this line of thinking. 

At the same time, we need to ensure that new forms of money are reliable and stable in value, something that has proven difficult for cryptocurrency to achieve. For all its unique affordances as a transactional medium, cash—and whatever its digital inheritors are—must be stable in value in order to work well. 

So as I pay for my cortado, I look at that “We are cashless” sign with a researcher’s eye. The stakes are high. We are empowered or disempowered by the transactional tools to which we have access. As we imagine money for the internet era, the big question is how to design payment media in the public interest. We need something that does all the things cash does well—as well as the things cash doesn’t.

Lana Swartz is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, and author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media. 

To support MIT Technology Review’s journalism, please consider becoming a subscriber.​

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[dodikawouk]

Cloud-based digital platforms will power the future of work in manufacturing

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

As manufacturers increase investments in digital technologies to meet the demands of the changing environment, there is a realization that technology must be coupled with an empowered workforce to ensure the successful execution of an organization’s strategy. 

Click here to continue.

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[dodikawouk]

Syngenta’s cloud-first strategy for digital farming, Agile and DevOps, and employee wellbeing

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Watch Christian Bayer, global head of ERP, data and analytics platforms, Syngenta, in conversation with Dinesh Rao, EVP and global head of enterprise package application services, Infosys, in a series that discusses a cloud-first strategy for digital farming, Agile and DevOps, and employee wellbeing.

Click here to continue.

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How important is data privacy in mergers and acquisitions?

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Data privacy and security must be built into the data, technology, and governance mechanisms underpinning a mergers and acquisitions deal, rather than being an afterthought. This can promote increased customer confidence, improved regulatory approval rates, and a healthy balance sheet.

Click here to continue.

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[dodikawouk]

UiPath is democratizing automation to make it more pervasive

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Watch Daniel Dines, co-founder and CEO, UiPath Automation, speak with Ravi Kumar S, President, Infosys, on the future of automation and its role in enhancing human achievement.

Click here to continue.

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[dodikawouk]

A climate-focused venture firm plans to invest $350 million into carbon removal startups

The venture capital firm Lowercarbon Capital has raised a $350 million fund dedicated to carbon removal startups, in another sign of the surging interest in a space that barely existed a few years ago.

The goal of the new fund, which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively, is to accelerate the development and scale-up of these companies, says Ryan Orbuch, a partner who recently joined the venture firm from Stripe to lead the fund. The firm will look specifically for startups developing ways of storing away carbon reliably and for long periods, helping to create the carbon removal capacity that could be required in the coming decades.

“The companies starting today will make this one of the world’s fastest-growing industries by the end of the decade,” Orbuch said in an email.

A variety of studies have found that by midcentury the world may need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year, on top of rapid emissions reductions, to halt warming at 2 ˚C or pull the climate back into a safer zone. That’s because nations have already emitted huge amounts of greenhouse-gas pollution, and it’s likely to take decades to overhaul our existing energy systems. We also don’t yet have affordable ways of cleaning up certain sectors and products.

The problem is we don’t know how to do carbon removal on anything like these scales. Our current options include things like planting trees, building carbon-sucking machines, and spreading around carbon-absorbing minerals. But all of these are expensive, unreliable, short-lived, untested, limited, or otherwise challenging.  

Lowercarbon Capital was founded in 2018 by Chris and Crystal Sacca, who oversaw early-stage investments into Instagram, Slack, Twitter, and Uber at their previous firm, Lowercase Capital. It has quickly emerged as one of the most prominent firms focused on climate tech. 

The firm, which raised a separate $800 million climate fund last summer, backs companies “buying us time to unf**ck the planet” through three main approaches: adapting to the rising dangers, cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, or removing those gases from the atmosphere. Earlier investments in the latter area include Heirloom, which is using minerals to capture carbon dioxide; Running Tide, which is relying on seaweed; and Verdox, which has developed an electrochemical approach.

In a letter to potential contributors to the new fund, Chris Sacca wrote that “left to its own devices, Earth could take up to 100,000 years to cool back down to safe levels,” adding: “Therefore, in addition to dramatic emissions reductions, we need to suck CO2 back out of the sky and put it into the ground.”

Clay Dumas, a founding partner at Lowercarbon, says there’s a rapidly swelling market opportunity in this area given the growing purchases of tons of removed carbon by companies like Airbus, Microsoft, Shopify, and Swiss Re. He also notes the emergence of numerous platforms promising to help corporations assess and purchase reliable means of carbon removal, like Patch, Pledge, Sourceful, and Stripe Climate, which allows its customers to dedicate a portion of their revenue to purchasing future tons of removed carbon.

In related news, Stripe itself announced on Tuesday that major companies including Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey had committed to buying $925 million worth of permanent carbon removal between now and 2030. The online payments company is also an investor in Lowercarbon’s new fund, and it plans to reinvest any profits from those investments into additional carbon removal.

There are concerns surrounding this emerging sector, including fears that companies or policymakers will count on carbon removal instead of figuring out ways of cutting emissions.

Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe, stresses that “radical emissions reductions” should remain the priority of governments and companies.

“It’s really important for folks like Stripe and all the partners working on [the carbon removal program] to loudly reemphasize that this is not a silver bullet by any stretch of the imagination,” she says. “The math is clear: we need both.”

There are also questions around how cheap we can ever make carbon removal, who will perpetually cover the costs of pulling down billions of tons, and why.

Much as with emissions reductions, achieving truly significant levels of carbon removal will likely require government policies that either encourage or mandate such practices, like a steep price on carbon. A few supportive measures are already in place, and a handful of additional proposals are under consideration.

Ransohoff says policy will be essential, noting that the level of carbon removal that may be needed by 2050 could cost around $1 trillion, which is about 1/100th of this year’s expected global GDP.

“It’s very difficult to imagine voluntary markets scaling to that size,” she says. “Voluntary markets are great for getting us to first base, but policy is going to have to get us the rest of the way there. I don’t really see any way around that.”

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[dodikawouk]

The Download April 14 2022: Kenya’s mobile gambling problem and earthquake algorithms

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

How mobile money supercharged Kenya’s sports betting addiction

Mobile money has mostly been hugely beneficial for Kenyans. But it has also turbo-charged the country’s sports betting sector. Since the middle of the last decade, experts and public figures across the African continent have been sounding the alarm over the rising popularity of sports betting. The practice has produced tales of riches, but it has also broken families, consumed college tuitions, and even driven some to suicide. Nowhere, though, is the craze as acute as it is in Kenya, the country often dubbed Africa’s “Silicon Savannah” for its status as a regional tech powerhouse. But while Kenya’s mobile money revolution has played a well-documented role in encouraging savings and democratizing access to finance, today, it’s easier than ever for those in fragile economic circumstances to squander everything. Read the full story.

—Jonathan W. Rosen

A deep-learning algorithm could detect earthquakes by filtering out city noise

Cities are loud places. Traffic, trains, and machinery generate a lot of noise. While it’s a mere inconvenience much of the time, it can become a deadly problem when it comes to detecting earthquakes. That’s because it’s difficult to discern an approaching earthquake amid all the usual vibrations in bustling cities. Researchers from Stanford have found a way to get a clearer signal. They’ve created an algorithm trained on tens of thousands of samples of seismic noise in cities. They claim it could improve the detection capacity of earthquake monitoring networks in cities. Places like South America, Mexico, the Mediterranean, Indonesia, and Japan could especially stand to benefit. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 TikTok has created a pro-war echo chamber in Russia While anti-war hashtags and content has disappeared. (WSJ $) + Ukraine’s intelligence services are doxxing Russian soldiers. (Wired $) + Russians are hiding bombs and landmines across Ukraine. (NYT $) + The state of Russia’s trucks suggests its troops are struggling. (CNN) 

2 Millions are grieving loved ones lost to covid And their mourning is made even tougher by the public’s desire to “return to normal.” (The Atlantic $) + Two omicron subvariants are sweeping across New York state. (NYT $) + Pfizer’s booster shot is effective in children aged between 5 and 11. (NYT $) + Robot dogs are patrolling Shanghai to ensure residents stick to its lockdown. (FT $)

3 Plastic batteries are cheaper and longer-lasting than lithium-ion So it makes sense they could store renewable energy on the grid. (TR)

4 Elon Musk has offered to buy 100% of Twitter He says if his offer is refused, he’s going to reconsider his position as a shareholder. (FT $) + It’s been a rollercoaster week for both Musk and the platform. (The Verge) + But he’s still being sued over claims he was too slow to disclose his shares in Twitter. (Sky News $)

5 How the joke conspiracy theory Birds Aren’t Real took flight

  Actual conspiracy theorists seem to really struggle to spot satire. (The Guardian) + A Capitol Hill rioter has blamed Trump for ordering him to storm Congress. (NYT $)

6 Mark Zuckerberg wants you to see the metaverse through his AR glasses He thinks they’ll go on sale in 2024, but even that sounds wildly optimistic. (The Verge) 

7  A travel influencer wrongly claimed to be the first woman to visit every country She was, however, the first to boast about it on social media. (WP $)

8 Endangered animals are still being trafficked through Facebook That’s despite Meta’s promise to crack down on the practice years ago. (The Guardian)

9 At what age should we talk to kids about crypto? What a question. What a time to be alive. (Vox) + The guy who bought an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $2.9 million is struggling to sell it for anything other than a giant loss. (Coindesk) + Wikipedia has voted against receiving cryptocurrency donations. (Ars Technica) + Soccer clubs and crypto are not a good mix. (FT $)

10 Vending machines may exist until the end of time They’re mostly unloved, yet relied upon by millions of us every day around the world. (The Guardian) + No, please, not an NFT vending machine. (Axios)

Quote of the day

“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t come. I had to. I couldn’t sleep.”

—An American man tells The Guardian about his decision to travel to Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ A fascinating look at what could be the world’s oldest dessert, though it won’t be to everyone’s tastes. + Whatever you do, watch out for these feisty geese. + This Smiths x Flo Rida mashup is living in my head rent-free. + If you hate shopping for jeans as much as I do, this guide is a must-read. + Wait, what—mushrooms speak to each other!? + This marine mammal livestream is healing my soul.+ May your weekend be as chilled as this capybara living its best life with some duck pals.

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[dodikawouk]

How mobile money supercharged Kenya’s sports betting addiction

Hitchhiking in the cab of a sand truck late one Saturday night in 2018, Bill Kirwa had almost forgotten about the bet. The wager he’d placed that afternoon had been a long shot: to win, he’d need to correctly pick which team was ahead, at both halftime and full time, in four soccer matches on three continents. On the road and broke, Kirwa had been so preoccupied with finding a ride home he didn’t notice that the first three games had turned out just as he’d predicted. Then, 5,000 miles away at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, Lorenzo Insigne launched a ferocious shot on goal that secured his squad, Napoli, a 2–1 win in the team’s first contest of the Italian Serie A season. Kirwa had gotten this one right as well—and as the lorry he’d flagged down lurched through Kenya’s western highlands, his Infinix smartphone dinged with a notification. The bet of 3,500 Kenyan shillings he’d placed with mobile money, then worth approximately $35, had just turned into nearly $8,500. He almost let out a yelp, but glancing at the driver, he thought better of it. “I didn’t want that guy to notice,” he recalled recently. “From the day I was born, I had never seen so much money.”

Kirwa, now 26, put the windfall to good use, purchasing a car that enabled him to drive for Wasili, an Uber-style ride-hailing service in the nearby town of Eldoret. But he continued gambling, and over time, his losses mounted. In just a few years, he’s effectively erased his big win.  

Mobile money has widened financial opportunities in Kenya. It has also made sports betting, which still persists in brick-and-mortar locations even easier.

Kirwa’s experience is hardly unique. Since the middle of the last decade, elected officials, community leaders, and researchers from Kenya and across the African continent have been sounding the alarm over the rising prevalence of sports betting. The practice has produced tales of riches far greater than Kirwa’s, but it has also broken families, consumed college tuitions, and even driven some to suicide.

Sports betting in Africa is not an entirely digital phenomenon: dingy betting parlors filled with underemployed youth have long been fixtures of the urban landscape. Increasingly, though, gambling has moved online, aided by the rapid spread of technologies like smartphones, high-speed internet, and mobile money platforms, which enable payments via phones without a bank account. Today, gambling happens almost anywhere: on college campuses, in far-flung villages, or even, as Kirwa admits with a hint of embarrassment, behind the wheel while driving. Experts say this ease of access is driving up participation and making betting more addictive across Africa—in economic powerhouses like Nigeria and South Africa; in poorer, more fragile states like the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and in soccer meccas such as Senegal, home to the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations champions, where online betting got a late start but is now growing by 50% each year. 

Nowhere, though, is the craze as acute as it is in Kenya, the country that gave birth to the continent’s first mobile money service, M-Pesa, and is often called Africa’s “Silicon Savannah” for its status as a regional tech powerhouse. While the country’s mobile money revolution has played a well-documented role in encouraging savings and democratizing access to finance, M-Pesa’s role in betting presents something of a paradox. Today, it’s easier than ever for those in fragile economic circumstances to squander everything. Although estimates on the prevalence of gambling vary, a December 2021 survey by the US research firm GeoPoll found that 84% of Kenyan youth polled had tried betting, and one-third of those reported betting on at least a daily basis. The vast majority, like Kirwa, do so on their smartphones using mobile money.

84% of Kenyan youth polled had tried betting, and one-third of those reported betting on at least a daily basis.

“Most people who bet in Kenya are not doing it for recreation—they’re doing it because they want to make money,” says Fabio Ogachi, a professor of psychology at Nairobi’s Kenyatta University. Ogachi says a significant proportion of Kenyans who bet show signs of gambling addiction—behaviors that include betting to recover lost funds, staking increasing amounts, and lying about one’s habit. Technology, he adds, has been a major driver of the sports-betting phenomenon: “We’ve been using mobile money for so many years, it’s become part and parcel of how we conduct business. When online betting came along, it found this ideal system was in place.”

When financial inclusion isn’t enough

That mobile money would become so ubiquitous in Africa—let alone fuel a betting epidemic—is in many ways an accident of history. The technology has its roots in a 2006 experiment, conducted by the telecom firms Vodafone of the UK, and Safaricom of Kenya, that sought ways to increase access to finance among those who’d previously been excluded from traditional banking.

That mobile money would become so ubiquitous in Africa—let alone fuel a betting epidemic—is in many ways an accident of history. 

The original idea was to use phones to disburse and repay microfinance loans. But participants in a pilot scheme in Kenya began using it for something else: sending money home. In a country where young people continued to abandon family farms to seek out opportunities in towns and cities, mobile money filled an essential niche. Previously, supporting relatives often meant sending cash by bus or post, which was unreliable and expensive. Safaricom invested heavily in building a network of agents who acted like human ATMs so recipients could withdraw cash from their digital wallets. Over time the system, called M-Pesa (M for for “mobile” plus the Swahili word for money), expanded to include a range of other payment and loan services, and eventually it began to replace cash entirely. Today, Safaricom boasts 30 million active M-Pesa accounts in Kenya, roughly equivalent to the country’s adult population. In the 12-month period leading up to March 2021, the service processed transactions worth $193 billion, a figure nearly twice the size of Kenya’s GDP.

True to the experiment’s promise, M-Pesa’s growth produced tangible benefits. In 2006, according to the Central Bank of Kenya, only 27% of Kenyan adults had access to formal financial services, such as means for saving, borrowing, or making non-cash payments. Thanks to M-Pesa, 84% do now. Research published in 2016 by the economists Tavneet Suri and William Jack found that access to M-Pesa helped pull 2% of Kenya’s households out of extreme poverty, in part by enabling women to move away from subsistence agriculture and into retail businesses. Studies from countries where mobile money has spread have found that its use improves resilience to financial shocks and facilitates higher rates of household saving. The technology’s global footprint continues to grow: as of 2020, according to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, there were 310 mobile money services available in 96 countries, with 300 million active accounts—more than half of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

M-Pesa may have been a great success, but it was still no magic fix for Kenya’s wider economic challenges. Although the country’s GDP doubled in the 15 years before the pandemic, vaulting it to World Bank–designated “lower middle income” status, citizens have long complained that this new wealth hasn’t trickled down. Many lament a recent infrastructure binge that has included new highways, a major expansion of the power grid, and a $3.6 billion Chinese-built railway to the coast. Watchdogs say the budgets of these projects have been inflated by kickbacks. That has boosted government debt, weakened the Kenyan shilling, and created new taxes, causing living costs to spike in turn. 

Finding employment hasn’t gotten easier, either. According to government statistics, Kenya, with a population of 54 million, had just 3.1 million official salaried jobs in 2019. Pandemic restrictions contributed to a net loss of nearly 200,000 of them in 2020. But even before the coronavirus, annual job growth was barely enough to put a dent in the onslaught of new high school and college graduates looking for work. Even graduates of Kenya’s elite universities often struggle for years to find suitable employment. The rise of social media has also offered up-close confirmation that their counterparts elsewhere have it better. “People are comparing themselves not just with their neighbors but with everyone, even strangers from across the globe,” Ogachi says. “That breeds an even higher level of frustration.”

Betting becomes the hustle

With so many shut out of employment, young Kenyans are increasingly forgoing the job search entirely, turning instead to entrepreneurship—or as many call it, perhaps more accurately, “hustling.” Kirwa’s hustle began in 2017, after he abandoned plans to become a teacher. He’d struggled to pay his university tuition, so he dropped out, took the money he had left, and opened a kiosk where customers could access desktop computers and perform M-Pesa cash-outs. For extra cash, he started selling printouts with information about foreign soccer matches. Customers, he’d noticed, were increasingly tethered to their phones to bet on Kenya’s favorite pastime.

With so many shut out of employment, young Kenyans are turning to entrepreneurship— or as many call it, perhaps more accurately, “hustling.”

Kenya’s status as an early tech adopter helped fuel the trend. New undersea cables and an influx of Chinese-branded smartphones had drastically reduced the cost of getting online (today an estimated 85% of the population has access to a connection). In a country where most people still lacked bank accounts or credit cards, M-Pesa offered a fast and secure means of payment. And a barrage of loosely regulated third-party lending apps that can link to M-Pesa meant bettors could indulge even if their accounts were empty.

Kirwa, who saw his father placing bets as well, was soon taken by the craze himself. He tried out multiple sites, which came with ever-expanding options: dog racing, rugby, e-casinos, even darts and table tennis. Like most young Kenyans, though, he mainly stuck to soccer, betting in ever larger amounts. Sometimes he’d choose to bet rather than eat. Convinced he could outsmart the bookmakers, he began to analyze past results—“Googling the potential of teams,” as he puts it—and following self-styled experts on social media. Kirwa’s life-changing bet was based on advice from a Nigerian tipster he found on the messaging service Telegram. By that point, betting had become central to his hustle. “Nowadays in Kenya, we term betting as a job,” he says. “People believe that when you do genuine bets, when you take time to do good analyzation, you can win.”

Hempstone Ngare, who’s worked for several betting firms, says he’d prefer to return to journalism, but he also has rent to pay and parents to support.

BRIAN OTIENO

In the long run, of course, that belief is incorrect: sports betting is not a game of skill, and the odds always benefit the house. Yet with enough people buying into that narrative, or at least putting faith in their luck, the industry exploded. SportPesa, a firm founded in Nairobi by a group of Bulgarian and Kenyan investors, including a former mayor of the city, was the vanguard. Established in 2014, it offered a sleek online interface that allowed users to fund accounts via M-Pesa and place bets on matches from around the globe within seconds. By 2018, according to figures obtained by the British investigative outlet Finance Uncovered, Kenyans were spending $1.3 billion a year to place bets on the platform—more than the annual budget of the country’s Ministry of Health. At its height, SportPesa sponsored teams and athletes in rugby, boxing, Formula One, and soccer—including the English Premier League squad Everton. Wayne Rooney, one of the most prolific goal scorers of his generation, plied the pitch with “SportPesa” emblazoned on his chest.

Other companies followed SportPesa’s lead. Hempstone Ngare, a former radio reporter hired in 2017 to manage social media for one of the company’s competitors, recalls a period of especially aggressive marketing: billboards placed across the country, “good-looking ladies” offering T-shirts in exchange for sign-ups, unsolicited text messages, and Ngare’s own posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, designed to lure followers who could later be converted into customers. Opportunity was rife. One 2016 poll at Kenyatta University found that 78% of male and 57% of female students had tried betting, with nearly half gambling at least once per week (and 80% reporting net losses). Subsequent surveys by GeoPoll consistently found that more than three-quarters of youth in Kenya and more than half across Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa had indulged, most of them on their phones with the aid of mobile money.

By 2018, Kenyans were spending $1.3 billion a year to place bets on the SportPesa platform.

As sports betting became entrenched, addiction followed. A 2020 study of Kenyan student bettors by Ogachi diagnosed nearly seven out of 10 with gambling disorders. Nelson Bwire, who led the Kenyatta University poll while an undergraduate, was so alarmed he founded a nonprofit, the Gaming Awareness Society of Kenya, that seeks to reduce gambling harm. Bwire has counseled students who’ve been forced to leave school after betting away their tuition, and workers who’ve been jailed for squandering their employers’ money.

A habit that’s not easy to kick

Some argue that Kenya should ban sports betting entirely. There is certainly precedent: the practice is highly restricted in many parts of the world, including most of Asia and the Middle East. Yet those who know the Kenyan sector well say that dramatic reforms aren’t likely. For one thing, taxes derived from betting have become an important source of revenue for Kenya’s cash-strapped government. Many of the country’s leading betting houses also have close financial links to politicians or their associates; some believe that could be part of the reason a 2019 bill calling for a new regulator with stronger teeth did not gain traction in the Kenyan parliament. And betting firms themselves have become important sources of employment: Ngare, who’s worked for several of them, says he’d prefer to return to journalism, but he also has rent to pay and parents back home to support. 

Still, there are signs that Kenyan authorities have had some success in reining in the industry’s excesses. New taxes on stakes and winnings appear to have incentivized some bettors to cut back. A law passed last December gives the Central Bank new powers to regulate digital lenders. And thanks to restrictions put in place by the country’s Betting Control and Licensing Board (BCLB), gambling firms can no longer advertise on radio and TV during daytime hours. But the industry is still pushing forward. In July 2019, the board refused to renew the licenses of 27 betting firms, including SportPesa, in a row over the payment of back taxes. Some returned, and new firms saw an opening. Today, the BCLB lists 99 licensed bookmakers, more than before the crackdown.

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In an interview at its Nairobi headquarters, BCLB director Peter Mbugi told me the number of Kenyans betting and the total volumes staked are lower today than in 2019, though he declined to share any figures. Mbugi attributes the drop to tighter regulations and a growing awareness that sports betting is “not as rosy” as many had thought. But others say a reduction in numbers could be a temporary blip caused by the 2019 shake-up and the pandemic, which put a squeeze on household finances and disrupted global soccer leagues for months. Data from Safaricom, which controls more than 99% of Kenya’s mobile money market, shows that M-Pesa users’ transactions with betting sites were worth $737 million in the six months ending in September 2021, up from $436 million in the same period of 2020. Meanwhile, there are new African markets to explore. Karen Njerenga, who leads marketing in Kenya for Betway, a global firm with operations in seven African countries, says the company has its sights on several others. Chalkline Sports, which helps betting companies acquire and retain customers, has described the continent’s “untapped potential” in online gaming as “incredible.”

Nelson Bwire (seated) and fellow activist Weldon Koros (standing) partnered with the British company Gamban to introduce an app that allows addicts to block gambling sites on their device.

BRIAN OTIENO

Some hope the same sorts of technologies that enabled this industry to thrive could also mitigate the damage it can cause. Last year, for example, Bwire and fellow activist Weldon Koros partnered with the British company Gamban to introduce an app that allows addicts to block access to all gambling sites on their devices. Uptake of the software, which cannot be uninstalled, has been modest so far, but Bwire says it has helped some people “reduce temptations.” Bwire and Koros have also had some success in lobbying universities to block betting sites on their networks: if students have to pay for data, the thinking goes, they might spend less time on their devices. And the men laud Safaricom’s 2021 launch of a “smart mobile payment system” for student loans, which prevents tuition fees from being diverted for betting. But Bwire would like to see the company do more, including placing tighter restrictions on text-based advertising and the overdraft facilities that many bettors use to place bets on credit, in addition to loans from outside apps. (A spokesperson for Safaricom, which earned $37 million from betting-related fees in the 2021 financial year, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Betting has become so core to his identity, Kirwa says, it’s hard for him to fathom life without it.

New digital products could sway some bettors toward alternative hustles. Kevin Kegera, a third-year student at Kenyatta University, says he tried sports betting after high school but gave up after realizing the odds were rigged against him. These days, he’s moved on to trading foreign currency: FXPesa, an app that lets him use mobile money to do so, launched in 2019, and others have followed. Many of his friends also use apps to trade in foreign currencies, cryptocurrency, or foreign stocks—options that weren’t unavailable even a few years ago. Kegera, who aspires to be “Kenya’s Warren Buffett,” suspects greater awareness of these products will continue to lure some educated Kenyans from betting, though probably not the masses. “It’s very hard to convince someone who hasn’t been to college about markets,” he says.

Kirwa, for his part, is unlikely to kick his habit. One evening in Eldoret, I joined him in his red Toyota Vitz, a hatchback he had outfitted with tinted windows and electric-blue interior lighting. The Afrobeats blaring from the stereo would have been less tinny if he still had his old sound system, he lamented, but he’d sold it to repay a loan used to place a bet. Despite Kirwa’s poor record in the years since his big win, he says he has no plans to quit. Betting has become so core to his identity, he says, it’s hard for him to fathom life without it. Plus, it’s so convenient. His smartphone and M-Pesa wallet will always be right there in his pocket—and there’s always a chance luck will be on his side again.

Jonathan W. Rosen is a writer and journalist reporting from Africa.

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Mapping the atmosphere on Mars can help advance science on our own planet

With its Emirates Mars Mission, also known as the Hope Probe, the UAE has established itself as only the fifth country in history to reach Mars and the seventh in the world to reach the orbit of another planet. The UAE’s first mission to Mars, Hope’s goal is to provide the first, complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers to help scientists understand the planet’s climate better.

The Emirates Mars Mission is unique in that the troves of data collected by Hope are being released to the public. “This contributes to a more knowledge-based economy and fosters the science community’s capabilities as a collective. This step was taken to encourage the science community to break the barriers and work together for the greater good,” says Maryam Yousuf, a data analyst for the Emirates Mars Mission.

The Hope probe has three main objectives, the first is to understand the lower Martian atmosphere and its weather and climate. Yousuf continues, “The second objective is to correlate the lower atmosphere conditions with the upper atmosphere to explain how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen. And the final objective that we have is to understand the structure and variability of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and why Mars is losing them into space.”

The focus on space for the UAE comes at an important time as mapping Mars will contribute to the work of not just the knowledge economy of the UAE, but advance science for the whole world. “The UAE is basically investing in space, as investing in the space sector means investing in the human capital towards a better future for all,” says Yousuf.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with the UAE Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai.

Show notes and references

Meet the Emirati engineers of Hope Probe Mars Mission, Gulf News, February 10, 2021

Full transcript:

Laurel Ruma: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Laurel Ruma. And this is Business Lab. The show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.

Our topic today is the Emirates Mars Mission, also known as the Hope Probe. Hope aims to be the first probe to provide a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers. The data collected by Hope will help answer key questions about the global Martian atmosphere and the loss of hydrogen and oxygen gases into space over the span of one Martian year.

Two words for you, space data.

My guest today is Maryam Yousuf, who is a data analyst for the Emirates Mars Mission.

This podcast is produced in association with UAE Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai.

Welcome, Maryam.

Maryam: Hi, Laurel. Thank you for having me.

Laurel: To begin with, I want to congratulate you and your team. The United Arab Emirates is the fifth country in history to reach Mars and only the seventh in the world to reach the orbit of another planet. And to top it all off, the performance of the spacecraft is exceeding expectations. What does this mean for the UAE? And what kind of impact is it having on the UAE’s aspiring scientists?

Maryam: Thank you for the congratulations. And it’s for everyone, I think, having this mission to go to Mars and get the unique data that we have. Hope Probe is the vision of the late founder of the Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, where he envisioned the UAE leading in the sector one day. One of the predominant project goals is developing the science and technology sectors within the UAE, in terms of capacity building and forging new pathways for the younger generations in research and development in the natural sciences domains, as they lay the foundation for any space exploration initiative in the future.

Laurel: That is very inspiring. The UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center with the international Mars science community is defining the objectives for the mission. What are those objectives and how will they further international goals to understand Mars?

Maryam: The Emirates Mars Mission will be the first mission to provide the full global picture of the Martian atmosphere. So three scientific objectives. The first objective is to characterize the Martian lower atmosphere to understand the climate dynamic and the global weather map. The second objective is to correlate the lower atmosphere conditions with the upper atmosphere to explain how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen. And the final objective that we have is to understand the structure and variability of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and why Mars is losing them into space.

Laurel: No small feats. These are big goals, for sure. Hope aims to provide the first comprehensive picture of Mars’ climate and atmosphere. Hope’s unique 25-degree elliptical orbit enables it to collect data and high-resolution images of the planet’s atmosphere every 225 hours or 9.5 days. What data is the Hope Probe collecting? How does it actually collect it?

Maryam: We have three instruments on board of Hope Probe. Two are studying the lower atmosphere and one is studying the upper atmosphere. If we speak about those that are studying the lower atmosphere, we have the Emirates Exploration Imager or EXI, which is a digital camera that is capable of taking 12-megapixel images while maintaining the radiometric calibration needed for the detailed scientific analysis. It will capture high resolution images of Mars, which is the RGB. And then it will measure optical depth of water ice at the range of 305 to 335 nanometers. And it will also measure the abundance of ozone at the range of 245 to 275 nanometers. All this is basically the ultraviolet bands.

The second instrument, which is the Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer or EMIRS, collects its data from the lower atmosphere. It is an interferometric thermal infrared spectrometer that will give a better understanding of the energy balance in the current Martian climate by characterizing the state of the lower atmosphere and the processes that are driving the global circulation. It’ll measure both the surface and the atmospheric temperatures, as well as the optical depths of water ice, and dust, and the abundance of water vapor. All of this will be measured from 6 to 40 plus micrometers.

For the upper atmosphere, we have the final instrument, which is the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer, which is EMUS. It is a far ultraviolet spectrometer that will measure oxygen and carbon monoxide and the thermosphere, and then it will measure the variability of the hydrogen and oxygen and the upper atmosphere.

Laurel: That absolutely is comprehensive. It will have a really good idea of a map of Mars from everything, from the surface to the atmosphere.

Maryam: Yeah.

Laurel: As a data analyst on the Mars Probe, what is your job like? How do you analyze so much data, and what are you looking for?

Maryam: For me personally, I only use EMIRS data for now. I basically study the impact of varying atmosphere conditions to the lower atmosphere on the out thermo-physical properties, on the Martian surface. And the thermo-physical properties are the properties that affect the energy budget itself.

All the instruments that we have on board of the Hope Probe are built on heritage data, which means we built the instruments based on the instruments used during previous Mars missions. When it comes to EMIRS specifically, we can use data from the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES), which was on board of the Mars Global Surveyor and before the launch and so on, I used to build my code and models using TES data. Now I basically use EMIRS instead of TES.

Laurel: That’s pretty exciting. You came to the mission itself as a recent graduate with a background in biomedical engineering and now you’re exploring space data from Mars. How have you been able to use your own analytic skills to make that transition?

Maryam: It was very challenging, but I like to challenge myself, and I like to seize any opportunity that is presented to me. So when this opportunity was there, I was like, why not? Because everything that we need to know, we can learn it from experts or we can learn it online. I challenged myself by learning programming, which is Python language, through online courses and online sources available that we can get our hands on. And then when it comes to the science, the space science in particular, the Emirates Mars mission was built on a knowledge transfer program. So we have experts from the United States that monitor the project that we’re working on. So, I have mentors that teach me about all this amazing space science that relates to Mars as well.

Laurel: That is amazing because this data will actually help the entire planet address climate change. Correct?

Maryam: I wouldn’t say there is a known correlation between earth and Mars. But Mars, billions of years ago, had a very similar atmosphere to earth. It had a warm, wet, and thick atmosphere that was capable of accommodating life. Now it’s basically dry, cold, and it has a very thin atmosphere. When we understand the evolution and what’s currently happening to Mars that might aid us in answering questions like, what happened and what could happen to our own planet. So yeah, I can’t really pinpoint the correlation between both the planets, but exploring other planets might help us in understanding our own planet.

Laurel: That’s a very good point for clarification. Thank you. The Emirates Mars Mission is unique, in that the troves of data collected by Hope are being released to the public. So that means anyone — me, our listeners, and more importantly, scientists based in more than 200 universities and research institutes globally — can go to the Mission’s website and register to access the data. Why is this important to the Mission, that all of the data be available at this scale?

Maryam: As a team, we have our objectives and hypothesis that we want to achieve or confirm. And when we share the data with everyone, they add on their knowledge and perspective to our current understanding. This contributes to a more knowledge-based economy and fosters the science community’s capabilities as a collective. This step was taken to encourage the science community to break the barriers and work together for the greater good.

Laurel: Releasing all of this data in an open way and sharing it is certainly going to be exciting to young scientists and engineers and people around the world who are perhaps looking for different kinds of data sets to experiment with. What do you think it means to do this in such a collaborative way?

Maryam: A lot of things come from this. If we talk about the UAE community itself, we do a lot of outreach activities here, and we get approached by the youth and even researchers within the UAE that have used the data itself for their own projects or research. So that’s one of the program objectives is basically to encourage more people to be involved in the STEM fields and so on. Another thing is when we go to conferences and other people will come to us and they basically want to collaborate, and they want to make a connection between their own projects and our projects and basically the objectives or whatever we’re seeing with the data. For example, maybe they had a hypothesis about it and they want to confirm it through our data because we have such unique data. So that’s really exciting. And the more we see people are into using our data, we basically want to produce the data as soon as we can.

Laurel: To keep that excitement going. Yeah.

Maryam: Yep.

Laurel: Before Hope even arrived at Mars, the probe was gathering valuable data. In November 2020, the European spacecraft, BepiColombo, was headed to Mercury. Both BepiColombo and Hope instruments were facing each other, so scientists took the opportunity to measure the amount of hydrogen between the two probes. What other unexpected opportunities has the mission encountered?

Maryam: Another observation that we haven’t put our mind into is basically with the EMUS instrument. The EMUS instrument is very sensitive when it comes to the EUV, the extreme ultraviolet bands. So this basically allows us to see the discrete Aurora and this is basically not from our objectives. From about 400 observations that we’ve seen, we saw discrete Aurora more than 60% of the time. And that wasn’t an expectation that we had or something any other mission has seen before. So, yeah, that was exciting for us.

Laurel: Speaking of other observations, the Hope Probe has made a number of them, right? With the Martian atmospheric phenomenon, including discrete aurora on Mars’ nightside, remarkable concentrations of oxygen and carbon monoxide, and never-before seen images of Martian dust storms. When you see this data and the images come in, which one of these, or perhaps there are other events, has caused everyone to sit up and say, “Wow, that is from Mars. No one’s ever seen that before. And we’re the first ones.”

Maryam: I’d have to speak about myself on this one. Personally, I find dust storms very fascinating. One, because I live in a country that has a tropical desert environment, which means dust storms are very common here. Every time it becomes very dusty here, I wonder if it’s the same thing that’s happening on Mars atmosphere or not. But if I speak about the team, I can tell you that we see all observations of value and impact.

Laurel: Oh, I’m sure. How is the success of Hope fueling other space exploration initiatives by the UAE? Because this has been successful, what else is possible?

Maryam: The Emirates Mars Mission is just the beginning of exploring the frontiers of space. Hope Probe is the gateway to space exploration in the UAE. So currently the UAE is working on multiple initiatives in the space sector, such as the UAE Astronaut program, which prepares Emirate astronauts for scientific space exploration missions. And the new Emirati interplanetary mission, which involves an expedition to the orbit of Venus followed by an exploration of the asteroid belt, which is beyond Mars. And then in addition, we have the Emirates Lunar Mission that is launching Rashid rover by the end of this year. So that’s really exciting for us. The UAE is basically investing in space, as investing in the space sector means investing in the human capital towards a better future for all.

Laurel: Maryam, thank you very much for joining us today on Business Lab.

Maryam: Thank you for having me.

Laurel: That was Maryam Yousef, a data analyst for the Emirates Mars Mission, who I spoke with from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT and MIT Technology Review, overlooking the Charles River.

That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Laurel Ruma. I’m the director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And you can find us in print, on the web, and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com.

This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review. This episode was produced by Collective Next. Thanks for listening.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

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A deep-learning algorithm could detect earthquakes by filtering out city noise

Cities are loud places. Traffic, trains, and machinery generate a lot of noise. While it’s a mere inconvenience much of the time, it can become a deadly problem when it comes to detecting earthquakes. That’s because it’s difficult to spot the telltale signal of an approaching earthquake in seismic sensor data amid the general human-generated vibrations typical of bustling cities, known as urban seismic noise.

Researchers from Stanford have found a way to get a clearer signal. They’ve created an algorithm, described in a paper in Science Advances today, that they claim improves the detection capacity of earthquake monitoring networks in cities and other built-up areas. By filtering out urban seismic noise, it can boost the overall signal quality and recover signals that may have previously been too weak to register. 

Algorithms trained to sift out urban seismic noise could be of particular use to monitoring stations in and around bustling earthquake-prone cities in South America, Mexico, the Mediterranean, Indonesia, and Japan.

Earthquakes are monitored by seismic sensors, also known as seismometers, which continuously measure seismic waves from vibrations in the ground. The Stanford team’s deep-learning algorithm, called UrbanDenoiser, has been trained on data sets of 80,000 samples of urban seismic noise and 33,751 samples that indicate earthquake activity. They were collected in California from busy Long Beach and rural San Jacinto, respectively.

When applied to the data sets taken from the Long Beach area, the algorithms detected substantially more earthquakes and made it easier to work out how and where they started. And when applied to data from a 2014 earthquake in La Habra, also in California, the team observed four times more seismic detections in the “denoised” data compared with the officially recorded number.

It’s not the only work applying AI to the hunt for earthquakes. Researchers from Penn State have been training deep-learning algorithms to accurately predict how changes in measurements could indicate forthcoming earthquakes—a task that has confounded experts for centuries. And members of the Stanford team previously trained models for phase picking, or measuring the arrival times of seismic waves within an earthquake signal, which can be used to estimate the quake’s location.

Deep-learning algorithms are particularly useful for earthquake monitoring because they can take the burden off human seismologists, says Paula Koelemeijer, a seismologist at Royal Holloway University of London, who was not involved in this study. 

In the past, seismologists would look at graphs produced by sensors that record the motion of the ground during an earthquake, and they’d identify patterns by sight. Deep learning could make that process quicker, and more accurate, by helping to cut through large volumes of data, Koelemeijer says.  “Showing that [the algorithm] works in a noisy urban environment is very useful, because noise in urban environments can be a nightmare to deal with, and very challenging,” she says.

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These plastic batteries could help store renewable energy on the grid

A new type of battery made from electrically conductive polymers—basically plastic—could help make energy storage on the grid cheaper and more durable, enabling a greater use of renewable power.

The batteries, made by Boston-based startup PolyJoule, could offer a less expensive and longer-lasting alternative to lithium-ion batteries for storing electricity from intermittent sources like wind and solar.

The company is now revealing its first products. PolyJoule has built over 18,000 cells and installed a small pilot project using inexpensive, widely available materials. 

The conductive polymers that PolyJoule uses in its battery electrodes replace the lithium and lead typically found in batteries. By using materials that can be easily created with widely available industrial chemicals, PolyJoule avoids the supply squeeze facing materials like lithium.

PolyJoule was started by MIT professors Tim Swager and Ian Hunter, who found that conductive polymers ticked some key boxes for energy storage. They can hold charge for a long time and charge up quickly. They are also efficient, meaning they store a large fraction of the electricity that flows into them. Being plastic, the materials are also relatively cheap to produce and sturdy, holding up to the swelling and contracting that happens in a battery as it charges and discharges.

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One major drawback is energy density. The battery packs are two to five times larger than a lithium-ion system of similar capacity, so the company decided that its technology would be better suited for stationary applications like grid storage than in electronics or cars, Paster says.

But unlike the lithium-ion batteries used for that purpose now, PolyJoule’s systems don’t require any active temperature control systems to make sure they don’t overheat or catch fire, he adds. “We want to make a really robust, low-cost battery that just goes everywhere. You can slap it anywhere and you don’t have to worry about it,” Paster says.  

Conductive polymers could wind up being a major player in grid storage, but whether that happens will likely depend on how quickly the company can scale up its technology and, crucially, how much the batteries cost, says Susan Babinec, who leads the energy storage program at Argonne National Lab. 

Some research points to $20 per kilowatt-hour of storage as a long-term target that would help us reach 100% renewable energy adoption. It’s a milestone that other alternative grid-storage batteries are focused on. Form Energy, which produces iron-air batteries, says it can reach that goal in the coming decades.

PolyJoule may not be able to get costs that low, Paster acknowledges. It’s currently targeting $65 per kilowatt-hour of storage for its first systems, reasoning that industrial customers and power utilities may be willing to pay that price because the products should last longer and be easier and cheaper to maintain.

So far, Paster says, the company has focused on building a technology that’s simple to manufacture. It employs a water-based manufacturing chemistry and uses commercially available machines to assemble its battery cells, so it doesn’t need the specialized conditions sometimes required in battery manufacturing.

It’s still unclear what battery chemistry will win out in grid storage. But PolyJoule’s plastics mean a new option has emerged.

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With 5G, AI at the edge promises a compute-everywhere future

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