“You need to find the asteroid before the asteroid finds you.”

That’s a prime directive for NASA, which has been working to catalog near-Earth objects for over two decades, Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Emerging Tech Brew.

During that time, the organization has discovered more than 20,000 asteroids—including nearly 2,000 potentially hazardous ones, per a 2019 report from NASA. Since 2016, the job has been entrusted to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

• Currently, the main goal is to discover near-earth objects larger than 140 meters in size (think: about one and one-third football fields).
• There are an estimated 25,000 of these potentially destructive objects out there, and as of NASA’s 2019 report, the PDCO had at least an estimated 16,000 left to find.

To do that...It needs data from astronomers all over the world—and software to process it all.

“The data we’re using now is much higher quality than it used to be in the past, [and] telescopes are much more sensitive—they do a much better job of measuring the position of asteroids, even when they’re faint,” Farnocchia, who helped develop one of NASA’s primary software tools for flagging asteroids, said.

Emerging Tech Brew spoke with Farnocchia about the tech that powers its detection process. Click here to check out the interview.—HF

The buzziest EV startup in town is, fittingly, embracing the buzziest battery chemistry around.

What’s new: Rivian reported its first-quarter earnings last week and shared more information about its plans to build EVs with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, following its announcement of a “standard” LFP battery pack in March.

• The LFP batteries will be introduced later this year in the electric delivery vehicles Rivian is building for Amazon, and will be available in its electric trucks beginning in 2024, according to the company.

This move by Rivian comes as automakers in the West follow the trend of LFP adoption in China, where battery giant and EV maker BYD has embraced the chemistry.

Reminder: LFP batteries, unlike others commonly used in EVs today, do not require nickel or cobalt. That makes them less expensive to produce.

The trade-off is that LFP batteries have lower energy density than lithium-ion cells that use nickel, which means that for years the chemistry wasn’t considered viable for EVs because it provided a lower range.

• But recent improvements in pack design have increased the range these batteries can achieve, and rising prices for nickel, cobalt, and lithium, along with difficulties securing supplies of these metals, are all contributing to automakers’ embrace of LFP batteries.

“[LFP] is a hedge on nickel pricing,” Rivian CEO R.J. Scaringe told analysts last week. “And fits beautifully as a base-model configuration, and certainly for our commercial vehicle, fits really nicely.”

Zoom out: Like the rest of the EV industry, Rivian is navigating a particularly challenging supply-chain situation, which has stifled production in the first quarter of this year.

The company claims it has the capacity to build 150,000 vehicles per year at its manufacturing facility in Normal, Illinois, but said that supply-chain issues, particularly the semiconductor shortage, limited production to just 1,410 EVs in the first quarter of 2022.

• Rivian is also facing headwinds outside of supply-chain woes, including a recall of 502 of its R1 trucks and investor pressure.

Read more about Rivian’s LFP plans here.—GD

In March of last year, a fire took down a data center belonging to OVHcloud, a major hosting provider in Europe.

Smaller businesses that have moved their IT services to the cloud may not have a plan for data-center-disaster recovery, according to Kurt Seifried, Chief Blockchain Officer and Director of Special Projects for the not-for-profit Cloud Security Alliance.

“You’ve been using the cloud, and now your IT data center burned down. By definition, you don’t have the expertise to fix this,” said Seifried.

Seifried, however, does use the cloud and possesses enough expertise to fix this. In addition to being the Cloud Security Alliance’s chief blockchain officer and director of special projects, Kurt Seifried also provides IT services for the organization.

• Cloud Security Alliance promotes best practices for both the cloud industry and its customers, so, fittingly, Seifried and the CSA use an array of cloud services to operate—everything from Auth0 for public-facing authentication, Heroku for web servers, Calendly for scheduling, and Grammarly for writing assistance.

Seifried spoke to IT Brew about a set of technologies known as disaster-recovery-as-a-service, or DRaaS. Check out the interview here.—BH

Stat: In April 2021, 56% of US adults thought major tech companies should be more regulated than they currently are, per Pew. But over the last year, that figure has plummeted to just 44%, according to an April 2022 survey.

Snap poll: Speaking of tech regulation…Do you think major tech companies should be more regulated than they currently are?
Yes
No

Quote: “You can think of it as a Google Maps of the human body.”—Sarah Teichmann, head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, on the groundbreaking, just-published Human Cell Atlas

Read: Exclusive photos of IBM’s quantum research lab.

What does it take to thrive? For organizations in this new era of work, thriving looks like personalized support, finding clarity in chaos, and knowing which tools best fight burnout. Learn more in Asana’s U.S. Anatomy of Work Report 2022.*

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Last week, we pulsed our panel of emerging tech aficionados (AKA, you, our dear readers) on a top-of-mind topic: remote work. Of the ~3,500 responses we received, the vast majority of you said it’s important that your company allows remote work—71% of you, to be exact.

• Just 14% of you said it’s unimportant, while the remaining 15% of you said you can’t do your job remotely either way, so, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Bloomberg published a piece on this last week that showed pro-WFH Emerging Tech Brew readers are not alone in their sentiments. Some companies that initially took a hard line on return-to-office plans are softening their stances as many workers stand behind their preference for a remote or hybrid life.

Q: What do self-driving tractors, lab-cultivated salmon, and electric batteries have in common?

A: They’ll all be topics of discussion at our first-ever Emerging Tech Brew Summit, taking place September 29 in NYC. Over the course of the day, we’ll be talking to experts about the latest and greatest innovations in the realms of food, energy, and health. Plus, you might even have the highly coveted chance to hang out with our extremely cool editors and reporters. Limited early bird available! Get them while they last!

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Behold: The internet of plants
• Want an electric vehicle? Get ready to wait
• Starlink struck its first in-flight wi-fi deals. Here’s what it means