He was the Canadian head of the world’s largest pot company. His next big bet? A rare fungus worth $10,000 a kilogram – Toronto Star

 December 18, 2021 

It’s worth tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, grows out of the corpse of a caterpillar, and for centuries has only been found in the heights of the Himalayas.

Now Bruce Linton, the former CEO of cannabis giant Canopy Growth, has his eye on this fungus, and it may play a key role in his next massive money-maker.

Linton is a founding investor in Mood Science, a young company that’s researching the properties of cordyceps sinensis and other fungi with potential health benefits, dubbed “functional mushrooms.”

Mood Science is launching a line of drops, gummies and more using cordyceps, which the company claims can help with stress, energy and focus. And in the background, Mood Science will also conduct research into psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms,” which some believe are the future of mental health treatment.

Sitting at a table in Strange Love, a white-marbled financial-district cafe run by Mood Science’s sister company that boasts functional-mushroom-boosted coffee, Linton said he was struck not only by the monetary value of cordyceps sinensis, but also by its purported health benefits.

Functional mushrooms are not psychoactive like their magical cousins. Though they have been used in traditional medicine for centuries, research is still thin on their purported health benefits. But many companies in the psychedelics industry are getting into functional mushrooms.

Linton has had his eye on psychedelics for a while. After his departure from Canopy Growth, he told The Canadian Press he saw “untapped value” in the psychedelics industry.

Psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound produced by more than 200 species of fungi, is a long game, Linton told the Star, whereas functional mushrooms can go to market right now because they aren’t psychoactive.

“(Psilocybin will) become increasingly more legal in more places,” he predicts. “So what you want to be able to do is start here in the functional, build your science, your brand, your competencies, and then when you can, you smash them all together.”

Linton built Canopy Growth into the world’s largest cannabis company. But can he do the same with mushrooms? There are a lot more unknowns in the mushroom world, from tight regulations on psychoactive mushrooms, to a lack of scientific research on the growing market of functional mushrooms and fungi including cordyceps sinensis.

The functional and the fun

Functional mushrooms and fungi are finding their way into everything these days, including coffee, skin care, supplements and gummies. These mushrooms are often marketed in North America with a variety of health claims; cordyceps, for example, is often advertised as an energy booster or “Himalayan Viagra.”

Vague promises made about functional mushrooms include improving mental performance, boosting immunity and improving quality of sleep. Comedian turned podcaster Joe Rogan recommends coffee mixed with lion’s mane and chaga. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian has reportedly used skin care made with reishi.

Many of these functional fungi have been used in traditional medicine for thousands of years in countries including China, Russia and Japan to treat a variety of ailments.

Psychoactive mushrooms, on the other hand, have been illegal in Canada since 1974, but there’s a growing body of research into their potential use in psychotherapy, including in end-of-life care.

But while functional mushrooms and their magic cousins have very different effects, it’s not uncommon for a psychedelics company to get into the functional — a.k.a. legal — mushroom business, said Simeon Schnapper, general partner at JLS Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in psychedelics and technology.

For example, Silo Wellness, a Canadian-based company that offers psychedelic mushroom retreats (in Jamaica, where it’s legal), recently partnered with the late Bob Marley’s family to release a line of functional mushroom products.

The idea is to establish a brand and a revenue stream for the company, with an eye to a more colourful future, said Schnapper.

Linton was drawn in by the sleek branding of Strange Love, whose financial district location has all the trappings of a trendy cafe: tall windows, white marble, pink and green branding, a neon sign reading “All you need is love.”

He likened the Strange Love cafes to Tokyo Smoke, acquired by Canopy Growth in 2018. Tokyo Smoke started out as a cannabis lifestyle brand, said Linton, gaining market awareness before it was licensed to actually sell cannabis.

Around the same time, Canopy Growth bought ebbu, a Colorado-based hemp research company, adding to the firm’s scientific strength, said Linton. He sees the relationship between Strange Love and Mood Science in the same way, which influenced his decision to invest.

Mood Science founder David Tran was a founding investor in Strange Love, which was started by Chris Nguyen in 2016 and now has three locations in Toronto.

Both Nguyen and Tran come from a sales and marketing background, with Tran most recently in the fashion industry. Neither has a background in science. Strange Love also has a naturopathic doctor on its team.

Tran founded Mood Science during the COVID-19 pandemic after integrating functional mushrooms into his health regimen. He wants Mood Science to be “the Tesla of adaptogens,” and is betting on huge growth in the use of functional fungi in the wellness community.

“I think what we’re doing is really a reaction to the growing trend in the market,” he said. “Consumers want to go more natural, holistic, with their wellness, and they want to get away from pharmaceuticals.”

This isn’t Linton’s first foray into fungi; he is on the advisory board for psychedelics company Red Light Holland, and was on the board for psychedelics company Mind Medicine.

But now he’s interested in bringing the science of mushrooms into people’s everyday lives.

Mood Science is actively looking for acquisitions that can help bolster the science side of the company, said Linton, who is serving as an executive advisor for the company.

“The reason a winner occurs is because they make a number of rapid decisions that get their momentum and rate of acceleration going better than anyone else’s. And I think we’re in that spot,” he said.

‘People want to buy outcomes’

Cordyceps sinensis or Ophiocordyceps sinensis, also known as the caterpillar mushroom, is particularly difficult to cultivate. It grows in the wild, at high-altitude locations in the Himalayas where the parasitic fungus takes over the body of a ghost moth caterpillar, eventually killing it.

Cordyceps sinensis is used in traditional Chinese medicine to boost energy, endurance and libido, among other bodily functions.

The caterpillar mushroom has become increasingly rare due to overharvesting and the changing climate. Decades of attempts to artificially cultivate the growth from the host larvae, called a “fruit body,” were not successful. In recent years, however, researchers in China have succeeded in cultivating it in a lab.

But Mood Science is taking the insect out of the equation, cultivating the mycelia of cordyceps sinensis — like the roots of a plant without the plant itself — in liquid, in a lab in Colorado, Ohio. The result is Cordycell, Mood Science’s proprietary cordyceps sinensis compound. Tran calls it a “molecular mushroom.”

Mood Science is not the first to do this. There are a number of cordyceps sinensis products on the market today that use the mycelia, the vegetative part of a fungus, instead of the fruit body, which is easier to cultivate, said Nicholas Money, a mycologist at Miami University in Ohio.

So what makes Cordycell different from other products?

For one, Mood Science claims it has exclusive access to a strain of cordyceps sinensis belonging to Penn State University, a claim the Star was unable to verify via Penn State.

Tran said Cordycell has up to 15 times more sought-after derivatives of the fungi — such as cordycepin — than other products on the market today, and said Mood Science is able to “formulate clinically dosed products that help consumers with focus, energy, better sleep, and supporting stress.”

Money said while it’s certainly possible that Cordycell has significantly more cordycepin, further research is needed to determine cordycepin’s properties.

In fact, while Mood Science and many other natural wellness companies say mushrooms and fungi have medicinal properties, there is currently no widely accepted research to support these claims.

Mood Science bases its claims on the traditional uses of functional mushrooms, as well as some scientific studies done on their effects.

There’s more research on some mushrooms than others, but overall, the scientific community is still in the early days of exploring functional mushrooms, said Money; good research on the real effects of cordyceps sinensis and other functional fungi is “almost nonexistent” at this point, he said.

“I’m not saying that it doesn’t have these properties,” Money said. “But at the moment, this is faith-based medicine rather than medicine for which there’s a strong scientific rationale.”

Mood Science has partnered with an Ontario lab that specializes in testing cannabis and is currently developing protocols for testing Cordycell and other fungi to learn more about their properties.

Cordycell will officially launch in 2022, said Tran, in an array of products such as gummies and drops.

Mood Science is focusing on selling and researching functional mushrooms for now, but it also has two Health Canada licenses to conduct research into psilocybin.

“Not only are we gonna have the baseline infrastructure and all the fancy equipment to analyze the functional mushrooms, but we can analyze … psychedelic mushrooms,” said Tran. “We don’t know where the industry will go. But we think that knowledge will be valuable.”

One major claim made by the Mood Science team has yet to be proven, and that’s cordyceps sinensis’ potential use in treating mild depression, which as of yet has very little research to back it up.

Tran hinted that research into cordyceps sinensis’ potential mental health effects could begin in 2022.

Much like with cannabis, “people want to buy outcomes,” said Linton.

“I just think science is going to be a bigger part of this than people expect.”

This isn’t ‘Cannabis 3.0’

Science aside, Linton is betting money on the future success of the mushroom business, from the functional to the magical. But experts in emerging industries say it may be a long road ahead.

Michael Armstrong, an associate professor in the Goodman School of Business at Brock University, said while some parallels can be drawn between the cannabis industry and the psychoactive mushroom industry, there are also some key differences.

Far fewer Canadians use mushrooms recreationally, he said. So while he thinks it’s possible that psilocybin will become more widely available for medical purposes, Armstrong isn’t putting money on them being legalized recreationally.

“It’s not going to be cannabis 3.0,” he said.

But it’s not a bad idea for psychedelics companies to get into functional mushrooms, Armstrong said, so they can still get to know what customers are looking for, and build brand recognition.

It helps on the revenue side, too — Mood Science isn’t profitable right now, but Strange Love is, according to Tran.

Armstrong said the legalization of cannabis in Canada has made people more open-minded about other natural products, including previously banned substances.

“We legalized it and the world didn’t fall apart,” he said. “What else have we banned and have not studied?”

Schnapper agrees that magic mushrooms are on their way to being used in medical settings, but he also thinks that the growing popularity of microdosing magic mushrooms could signal a potential recreational market for psilocybin.

As for functional mushrooms, the more companies that get into this market, the more consumers will demand research to back up claims, said Schnapper.

The functional mushroom play has a lot of upfront costs and it’s a crowded market, but if it’s done well, it is a good revenue opportunity to help fund the science side of a business, he said.

Linton said Mood Science is moving fast, despite difficulty raising money in such an evolving market.

Nevertheless, the company has managed to attract investment, said Linton, including from Canadian fashion designer and entrepreneur Joe Mimran.

Linton said the legalization of cannabis has paved the way for psilocybin, which he predicts could be approved for medical use in five years or less, even if recreational psilocybin is a long way off.

Now, about a year into his investment, Linton is feeling good about his decision.

If he wasn’t, “I wouldn’t have done this interview,” said Linton.

Researchers identify new meteorological phenomenon dubbed 'atmospheric lakes'

by American Geophysical Union

Atmospheric lakes start as filaments of water vapor in the Indo-Pacific that become their 

own measurable, isolated objects. Credit: Brian Mapes/ NOAA ERA-Interim reanalysis 

data set.

A new meteorological phenomenon has been identified drifting slowly over the western Indian Ocean. Dubbed "atmospheric lakes," these compact pools of moisture originate over the Indo-Pacific and bring water to dry lowlands along East Africa's coastline.

Brian Mapes, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami who recently noticed and described the unique storms, will present his findings on Thursday, 16 December at AGU's Fall Meeting 2021.

Like the better-known streams of humid, rainy air called atmospheric rivers that are famous for delivering large amounts of precipitation, atmospheric lakes start as filaments of water vapor in the Indo-Pacific. These phenomena are defined by the presence of water vapor concentrated enough to produce rain, rather than being formed and defined by a vortex, like most storms on Earth. Unlike the fast-flowing atmospheric rivers, the smaller atmospheric lakes detach from their source as they move at a sedate pace toward the coast.

Atmospheric lakes begin as water vapor streams that flow from the western side of the South Asian monsoon and pinch off to become their own measurable, isolated objects. They then float along ocean and coastal regions at the equatorial line in areas where the average wind speed is around zero.

In an initial survey to catalog such storms, Mapes used five years of satellite data to spot 17 atmospheric lakes lasting longer than six days and within 10 degrees of the equator, in all seasons. Lakes farther off the equator also occur, and sometimes those become tropical cyclones.

The atmospheric lakes last for days at a time and occur several times a year. If all the water vapor from these lakes were liquified, it would form a puddle only a few centimeters (a couple inches) deep and around 1,000 kilometers (about 620 miles) wide. This amount of water can create significant precipitation for the dry lowlands of eastern African countries where millions of people live, according to Mapes.

"It's a place that's dry on average, so when these [atmospheric lakes] happen, they're surely very consequential," Mapes said. "I look forward to learning more local knowledge about them, in this area with a venerable and fascinating nautical history where observant sailors coined the word monsoon for wind patterns, and surely noticed these occasional rainstorms, too."

Weather patterns in this region of the world have received little attention from meteorologists, limited mostly to studies of rain and water vapor on a monthly rather than day-to-day scale according to Mapes. He is working to understand why atmospheric lakes pinch off from the river-like pattern from which they form, and how and why they move westward. This might be due to some feature of the larger wind pattern, or perhaps that the atmospheric lakes are self-propelled by winds generated during rain production.

These are questions that would need to be answered before Mapes and other researchers can begin to study how climate change could affect atmospheric lake systems. He plans to study these events more closely using satellite data and will look at into the possibility that these atmospheric lakes occur elsewhere in the world.

"The winds that carry these things to ashore are so tantalizingly, delicately near zero [wind speed], that everything could affect them," Mapes said. "That's when you need to know, do they self-propel, or are they driven by some very much larger-scale wind patterns that may change with climate change."

Tropical lakes may emit more methane

More information: Paper presentation: agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetin … app.cgi/Paper/910339

Provided by American Geophysical Union 

The Indian Ocean Just Dropped A New Type Of Storm: Atmospheric Lakes



ATMOSPHERIC LAKES CAN DUMP RAIN FOR DAYS. IMAGE CREDIT: BAKUSOVA / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

By Rachael Funnell17 DEC 2021

If you’re someone who likes to sit out front in a rocking chair as you stroke your chin wistfully and mutter “storm’s a-brewin,” have we got good news for you. A new weather system has been detected kicking off above the Indian Ocean, a kind of storm that's a bit like a massive puddle in the sky. Meteorologists call it an “atmospheric lake”.

The novel weather system was discovered by Brian Mapes and Wei-Ming Tsai as they were investigating atmospheric water vapor looming over the Indian Ocean, presenting their findings at the AGU Fall Meeting.

An atmospheric lake is a massive aggregation of water vapor in the atmosphere, which is slow-moving and can endure for days. Using satellite data that spanned half a decade, the researchers found 17 instances of atmospheric lakes that had held true for over six days. Their emergence wasn’t season-specific and sometimes acted as a precursor to tropical cyclones, a much more dramatic weather system.

The lakes didn’t spring up out of nowhere, instead forming out of what’s known as “atmospheric rivers”. We’ve known about these weather systems for a long time and they pretty much do what it says on the tin: form fast-moving streams or “rivers” of water vapor in the atmosphere. These rivers can pinch off and slow, forming a “lake” that can hold and eventually rain an awful lot of water.

Atmospheric lakes typically form from atmospheric rivers running in from the Indo-Pacific region. These fast-running rivers can slow as they cross to Africa’s east coast, sometimes forming into atmospheric lakes that can linger for days and bring a lot of rain. Considering the climate in this part of the world, it’s likely our shiny, new (to science) weather system plays a pivotal role in the environment.

“It’s a place that’s dry on average, so when these [atmospheric lakes] happen, they’re surely very consequential,” said Mapes to New Atlas. “I look forward to learning more local knowledge about them, in this area with a venerable and fascinating nautical history where observant sailors coined the word monsoon for wind patterns, and surely noticed these occasional rainstorms, too.”

Speaking of cool weather systems, did you know that rainforests can make their own clouds? A 2021 study found that the net cooling effect of trees is likely far more significant than previously thought as until now nobody had considered how their cloud-formation impacts the climate. Clever trees.

[H/T: New Atlas]

Big Oil Gets a Second Chance for Giant Offshore Fields in Brazil

Photo: renatopmeireles/Shutterstock

Bloomberg

December 16, 2021

By Mariana Durao and Peter Millard (Bloomberg) —

Brazil is giving Big Oil a second chance to join two massive offshore oil prospects in a test of the industry’s appetite for expansion as the world transitions to cleaner energy. 

In an auction on Friday, Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and eight other applicants will be looking at a 70% cheaper signing bonus than two years ago to bid for partnerships with Petroleo Brasileiro SA in the Sepia and Atapu fields in ultra-deep waters of the South Atlantic.

Sweeter terms and higher oil prices make the prospects an attractive opportunity to tap some of the largest oil discoveries this century, known as pre-salt deposits. But the timing is tricky: U.S. producers have been focused on boosting investor returns with dividends and stock buybacks, while European oil titans have ambitious goals to reduce their carbon emissions and invest heavily in cleaner energy in the coming decades. 

“Without placing a bet on higher future oil prices, it will be hard for bidders to justify going much beyond the minimum,” Luiz Hayum, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie Ltd., wrote in a report.

In November 2019, the two fields failed to attract bidders in what was possibly the world’s priciest oil auction, with signing bonuses alone totaling $9 billion at the exchange rate of the time. Now Brazil is asking for roughly $2 billion, a 70% discount in local currency terms. 

This time around it’s also clearer how much winning bidders will need to pay Petrobras for previous investments, at about $3.2 billion per area. Bidders win by offering the biggest percentage of the oil they produce to the government.

Petrobras, as the state-controlled producer is known, has already exercised its rights to secure operating control and a 30% minimum stake, no matter who wins. 

The lower signing bonuses send a clear signal that Brazil understands how much it needs to improve the terms of the auction in the current environment, said Schreiner Parker, the head of Latin America at Rystad Energy, said 

“With traditional exploration becoming ever harder to justify in boardrooms across the world, inorganic growth is one way to sustain a healthy reserves replacement,” he said.

The original contracts for the two fields put a limit on how many total barrels Petrobras can extract. The winners of this auction will get the right to produce volumes that exceed the original terms.

The prospects are part of an area estimated to hold as much as 15 billion barrels of recoverable crude, according to a study by Houston-based consultancy Gaffney, Cline & Associates in 2019. That also includes Petrobras’s Buzios and Itapu fields.

Petrobras already produces oil in the area, eliminating most exploration risks. The company’s partner in a block that borders on Sepia is Portugal’s Galp Energia SGPS. Galp, France’s TotalEnergies SE, and Shell are its partners in a block that borders on Atapu. 

Sepia and Atapu are the last two big fields with ongoing production and proven reserves that Brazil is scheduled to offer. 

“This is the last big auction we’ll see, the last bottle of Coke in the desert,” said Adriano Pires, director of infrastructure consultancy CBIE.

© 2021 Bloomberg L.P.

Total, Shell Emerge As Top Bidders in Brazil’s $2 Billion Offshore Auction

Photo: Shutterstock / marchello74

Reuters

December 17, 2021

By Gram Slattery, Marta Nogueira and Sabrina Valle

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 17 (Reuters) – France’s TotalEnergies , Royal Dutch Shell, Petrobras, Malaysia’s Petronas and Qatar Energy scooped up bigoffshore fields in Brazil on Friday, raking in nearly $2 billion for the country’s cash-strapped government.

While TotalEnergies, Qatar Energy and Petronas won the rights to develop the coveted Sepia field, Brazil’s state-run Petrobras, formally Petroleo Brasileiro SA, later entered the consortium by exercising preference rights.

Petrobras, Total and Shell secured the nearby Atapu field.

The auction was widely seen as a test of Brazil’s investment climate and of large oil producers’ willingness to keep spending big on traditional assets. Officials, who had been keen to attract major foreign players, deemed it a success, and analysts said the offers agreed to were relatively rich.

The results suggested that some production assets can still fetch strong interest, even as traditional E&P budgets at the world’s top oil firms are increasingly constrained amid a broad shift toward green energy.

While the signing bonuses were fixed at 7.138 billion reais for Sepia and 4.002 billion reais for Atapu, the percentage of oil produced that will be handed over to the state, known as ‘oil profit,’ varied depending on the bidder. Oil profit for the winning Atapu consortium came to 31.68%, while oil profit for the winning Sepia bid came to 37.43%.

Bids “were high, which reduces returns,” said Marcelo de Assis, head of Latin America upstream research at Wood McKenzie. “They were more aggressive than we expected.”

Brazil-listed preferred shares in Petrobras were off 2.1% in afternoon trade, underperforming the nation’s benchmark Bovespa equities index, which had fallen 0.7%. London-listed shares in Shell fell 1.8% on Friday.

Brazil attempted to sell both fields in 2019, but neither received offers, even from Petrobras. At the time, complex legal issues and rich signing bonuses kept oil majors away.

This time, bidding terms were considered more attractive, several industry sources told Reuters, largely due to big cuts in both signing bonuses and minimum profit oil.

The fields are considered attractive as Petrobras has already discovered commercially recoverable oil in both blocks, eliminating exploration risk.

Eleven companies signed up for the chance to bid on Friday: Petrobras, Exxon Mobil Corp, Shell, Galp Energia SGPS SA , Chevron Corp, Ecopetrol SA, Equinor ASA, Enauta Participacoes SA, Petronas, TotalEnergies and Qatar Energy.

Petrobras holds a 30% stake in the winning Sepia consortium, TotalEnergies holds 28%, and Petronas and Qatar Energy hold 21% each. At Atapu, Petrobras holds a 52.5% stake, Shell has a 25% stake and TotalEnergies a 22.5% stake.

A second production unit is expected to be approved in the near future to increase Sepia’s overall capacity from 180,000 barrels per day (bpd) to more than 350,000 bpd, Qatar Energy CEO Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi said in a statement.

Production at Sepia has plateaud at 160,000 barrels per day, although a second production unit yet to be approved will raise this to 350,000 bpd, TotalEnergies said in its own statement.

The two fields could boost Brazil’s oil production by 12% over the next decade and bring in almost $40 billion in investment, its Energy Ministry said on Monday. Petrobras is set to receive $6.2 billion for past investments in the two fields. ($1 = 5.68 reais) (Reporting by Gram Slattery and Marta Nogueira in Rio de Janeiro and Sabrina Valle in Houston; Editing by David Gregorio, Diane Craft and Alexander Smith)

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2021.

Paging Zefram Cochrane: Humans have figured out how to make a warp bubble

by Brandon Vigliarolo in Innovation on December 17, 2021, 

Don't pack your bags and move to Bozeman yet. This micro-scale warp bubble won't be capable of propulsion, but it could have myriad other applications, says its discoverer Dr. Sonny White.

A properly constructed Alcubierre warp bubble. As space constricts in front of the vessel and expands behind, the ship is theoretically pushed forward at speeds faster than light.
Image: LSI, White, et al.

Space is vast. Really, really vast. So vast, in fact, that it would take Voyager 1, the furthest man-made object from earth, more than 73 millenia to reach the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, at its current speed of over 38,000 mph, if it were headed that way to begin with. In short, if we're ever going to find a way to explore beyond our own solar system, we need to find a way to bend the laws of physics to make faster-than-light travel possible.

A team of scientists working with DARPA, including warp drive pioneer Dr. Harold G "Sonny" White, may have just taken us one step closer to that reality with their announcement that they've discovered a space-warping bubble, the fundamental thing needed for the faster-than-light travel of the Star Trek universe.

Before we jump ahead to romantic visions of space travel, Dr. White said, we need to think about what we could do with a microscale warp bubble, like the one his team discovered, before even dreaming of what it could be in the future. Dr. White is passionate for space travel, but says we need to start simple. "there may be lots of other things along the way before we ever get there that could have some really interesting implications," he said.

 
What is a warp bubble?

This is a pretty complicated notion that involves a ton of math, but at its most basic level, a warp bubble is a bit of space that's contracted in the front and expanded in the back. This shape in theory pushes the bubble, and its contents, forward at speeds surpassing the speed of light without ever violating the laws of physics: You're not technically traveling faster than light, you're surfing a bubble of condensed space.

Warp bubbles are also important because they eliminate a major problem of faster-than-light travel: Time dilation. Say you did manage to travel faster than light: Everything else outside of your craft would speed up, meaning that three-hour tour you took to a nice, tropical planet could have equated to years of time passing on earth. Put simply, if you plan to move faster than light while following the known laws of physics you had better say goodbye to everything you've ever loved before heading out.

Again, warp bubbles get around this problem because the space inside the bubble remains unaffected, so an hour of travel at warp speed would mean that only an hour passed for everyone else not currently in a pocket of sci-fi space.

Warp bubbles were long the domain of science fiction, until theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre came along and theorized his Alcubierre warp drive in 1994, which maintained general relativity while allowing for faster-than-light travel. The key upon which it rested, was an energy-density field that was configurable into a vacuum bubble that would make anything inside it have negative mass.

Unfortunately, the amount of energy required to operate an Alcubierre drive made it impossible, until 2012 when Dr. White proposed changes to the math and shape of the craft designed to create the field, which lowered the necessary energy from "impossible" to a power source the size of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Since then, development of an actual warp bubble or Alcubierre drive has continued to be a distant dream.

Discovering a warp bubble

Fast forward to 2021, and Dr. White, whose 2012 paper was written while he worked at NASA as Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead, is doing research funded by DARPA on objects called Casimir cavities. These cavities are formed of two parallel plates with a pillar running between them. These things are small — mere microns in size — and they do something really interesting: Create a negative vacuum between the plates when exposed to a regular vacuum.

"You would anticipate zero pressure outside and zero pressure in the cavity, but what we find when we measure is negative pressure in between the plates," Dr. White said.

"What we're trying to do is explore the quantum vacuum at a fundamental level," Dr. White said. "We think there's a bit more to these vacuums than we currently know. Some of the unknown characteristics could be used to create some really useful technologies." Hence DARPA's interest.

These uses could include amazing things, like batteries based around what Dr. White calls "quantum vacuum solar cells" that would never run out of energy. Telecommunications products that use longitudinal waves undisturbed by buildings or natural barriers could be a potential use, as could photosensors that don't suffer from chromatic aberration because they sense all elements of the EM spectrum evenly.

Potential applications aside, testing those cavities led to an interesting discovery: A negative vacuum energy field that looked just like a two-dimensional slice of an Alcubierre warp bubble.

"Our custom Casimir cavities are basically two big planes with a long pole in the middle. The Alcubierre metric, by comparison, needs a total ring of negative vacuum energy density, which means it needs to look more like a lifesaver," Dr. White said.

Having already done all the math and collected all the data that was generated by the experiment with the 2D version of the bubble that the team observed, the next logical step was to take that data and change the shape of the object in the center, getting rid of the pole and putting in the eerily Vulcan starship-esque shape shown at the top of the article.

After running simulations with the warp ship shape, the math just added up, Dr. White said. "We did a purposeful analysis using [the warp ship shape], and wow — hey, that matched the Alcubierre metric requirements."

The warp bubble team has published a paper on their findings, which Dr. White says are in no way illustrative of a warp bubble analog: Their data shows that, given the right shape placed in the same physical cavities they're experimenting with now, an honest-to-God warp bubble would be created.

"We can identify to the physics community that there is a real world type of structure that we can make that the analysis predicts. It will manifest a negative vacuum energy density, such that it would manifest a real nanoscale war bubble, not an analog … this would be a real, no kidding nanoscale war bubble," Dr. White said.
The 299,792,458 m/s question: When's first contact?

In the world of Star Trek, the warp bubble works basically the same way: The Enterprise isn't actually travelling faster than light, it's just surfing a cosmic space wave generated by its matter/antimatter warp core.

Zefram Cochrane was responsible for building the first functional warp-capable ship in the Trek universe in 2063, at which point the Vulcans, who just happened to be passing by, decided it was time to make first contact and welcome humans into the galactic community. We might be right on course, then, with Dr. White's team laying the practical groundwork for theoretical concepts that takes us away from Earth and toward the stars.

So, when can humans expect to vacation on Risa, do business on Ferenginar, and study at the Vulcan Science Academy (conditional on meeting the strict entry requirements)? Let's not get ahead of ourselves, says Dr. White.

"A lot of people wanna get straight into application: when are we gonna go make something like this fly? I get the motivation for that, but science is a slow, arduous process." Dr. White says his motto has been "crawl, walk, run," when it comes to this sort of cutting-edge stuff. Dreaming is important, he says, but so is doing the basic research that goes into finding additional applications that are practical and valuable now, in the age where we're still terrestrially-bound.

"I don't have a crystal ball more than anyone else does. I don't know when this idea could be applied to space travel, or even if that could even become a reality," Dr. White said. That's understandable given we are currently talking about warp bubbles generated in cavities smaller than the width of a human hair.

"Science will continue to turn the crank and hammer the rock, chipping slowly away at some of the unknown to get to more of the known," said Dr. White. Consider this discovery just one chip in the right direction.

 

1. Zefram Cochrane | Memory Beta, non-canon Star Trek …
   https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Zefram_Cochrane

   • Early Life
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   • Warp Drive
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   Zefram Cochrane was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in the early 2030s. His father was Jesse Cochrane and his mother was Hilde Cochrane; both were teachers. (ST reference: Federation: The First 150 Years; ST novel: Federation) He was called "Zef" or "Zee" by his friends. (TNG novel: Imzadi; ST reference: The Worlds of the Federation; TNG novelization: First Contact) 1. There are differing accounts of Co…

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NUKE ONTARIO

Construction underway on Western Clean-Energy Sorting and Recycling Centre in Kincardine

Ground breaking at new OPG sorting facility in Kincardine. (left to right): Jason Wooland of OPG; Kincardine Councillor Dorne Fitzsimmons; James Lauritsen, Managing Direcotr of Laurentis Energy Partners; Dancor Construction VP Steve Rambajan; Pat O’Connor (representing MP Ben Lobb); and Kincardine Deputy Mayor Randy Roppel. Photo credit: OPG photo/John White

By Janice MacKayDecember 17, 2021 

Dignitaries celebrated a ground-breaking ceremony Thursday for the Western Clean-Energy Sorting and Recycling (WCSR) centre in Kincardine.

The new facility will be built at the Bruce Energy Centre industrial park in Kincardine, in 2022.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) will operate this facility, sorting and segregating low-level materials from OPG’s nuclear operations, in order to support the three Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle.

The project is a collaboration among OPG, Laurentis Energy Partners and Dancor Construction. When completed, the facility will be 42,000 square feet and employ 25 people

The Carbon Capture Fantasy

The IPCC says we may need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere to keep the planet from overheating. That won’t be easy.

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