Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 134th Weekly Dose of Optimism. I am writing this from snowy Park City, Utah. Let me tell you — bad day to be a moderately challenging blue.

I was worried that I wasn’t going to have time in between ski runs to write the Weekly Dose — I usually spend about 3-4 hours researching stories and another couple hours writing them up — but then the universe delivered six very worth stories into my lap by Thursday morning. Lunar landings, bullish Starlink news, wooly mammoth mice, and a bunch of encouraging research papers. I am feeling so optimistic that I may even attempt to take on a black ⛷️.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Touchdown! Carrying NASA Science, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Lands on Moon

From NASA

Carrying a suite of NASA science and technology, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully landed at 3:34 a.m. EST on Sunday near a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille within Mare Crisium, a more than 300-mile-wide basin located in the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s near side.

The Blue Ghost lander is in an upright and stable configuration, and the successful Moon delivery is part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign. This is the first CLPS delivery for Firefly, and their first Moon landing.

One small step for Firefly Aerospace, one giant leap for private space companies.

Last week, we told you about three private companies whose vehicles were en route to the moon. The Ghost has landed.

Earlier this week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully landed on the Moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, marking the company’s first lunar landing and the first successful and upright lunar landing by a private company (Intuitive Machine’s first private landing in 2024 was successful but the lander toppled over upon landing.)

Blue Ghost, carrying 10 NASA science and technology instruments, will operate for about 14 Earth days, testing lunar drilling, navigation, radiation tolerance, and dust mitigation technologies. This mission is part of NASA’s broader Artemis campaign, which is design for long-term human exploration and a growing commercial lunar economy. And the moon itself serves as a jumping off point and testbed for technologies & logistics that will make Mars missions possible.

Not to be eclipsed (ehhh) Intuitive Machines landed its Athena lander on the Moon yesterday, too! But wait… while Athena has power and is communicating it may, once again, not be upright.

Which just goes to show you that it’s really hard to land things on the Moon.

(2) SpaceX's Texas Starlink Factory Produces 15,000 Dishes Per Day

SpaceX has published a rare behind-the-scenes video of its Starlink dish factory in Bastrop, Texas, which is preparing to expand. According to the video, the factory is already producing 15,000 Starlink dishes per day — which amounts to nearly 5.5 million dishes per year.

“It is way harder to make the machine that makes the machine that it is to make the machine in the first place.” - Elon Musk.

Perhaps no man in history is betting at building the machine that builds the machine. Gigafactories. Starbases. The guy knows how to scale production.

SpaceX’s Starlink dish factory in Bastrop, Texas is already producing 15,000 units per day or about 5.5 million per year. And that facility is more than doubling, is being built out from from 700K sqft to 1.7M sqft. Estimated capacity will be about 30,000 units per day or 11M units per year.

The company already has about 5M Starlink users and estimated revenues above $5B. I don’t think demand is going anywhere — these things are only going to get cheaper, faster, and smaller. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which everyone in the country owns a couple of Starlinks and is paying $100 per month for fast, reliable internet access, wherever they are. And if that’s the case, this is just the beginning of Starlink’s production capacity expansion.

It’s no wonder Balaji thinks we should set up THE SPECIAL ELON ZONE in Texas.

(3) Sequencing by Expansion (SBX) – a novel, high-throughput single-molecule sequencing technology

From Roche

Our friend Dr. Elliot Hershberg PhD (🍾) went viral this week for his explanation of Roche’s SBX, so we’ll just copy what he tweeted:

Extremely clever new NGS tech from Roche 🧬

If it's hard to discriminate between nucleic acids accurately with a nanopore, why not synthesize a new polymer off a DNA template that is easier to sequence?

(McCormick Brothers Translation: make a copy of the DNA that’s bigger so it’s easier to read. ChatGPT Translation: Roche's Sequencing by Expansion (SBX) technology converts DNA into an expanded molecule called an Xpandomer, which is approximately 50 times longer than the original DNA strand. This expansion improves the signal-to-noise ratio, making the DNA sequence easier to read.)

It's an intuitively simple idea, but took *a ton* of creative nucleic acid chemistry + enzyme engineering to design modified NTPs and create polymers of them. It's been very interesting to see Roche move into the NGS market, and time will tell how this stacks up with the growing set of totally orthogonal approaches people are cooking up for sequencing tech.

It feels like we are entering another renaissance for biological measurement infrastructure—which is super important.

“Progress depends on the interplay of techniques, discoveries, and ideas, probably in that order." - Sydney Brenner

(These animations of sequencing tech will never get old to me. What a time to be a biologist!) (McCormick Brothers Note: What a time to be a human!)

(4) Scientists Have Bred Woolly Mice on Their Journey to Bring Back the Mammoth

Jeffrey Kluger for Time

“The Colossal woolly mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said company CEO Ben Lamm in a statement. "By engineering multiple cold-tolerant traits from mammoth evolutionary pathways into a living model species, we've proven our ability to recreate complex genetic combinations that took nature millions of years to create."

Wooly Mice!

Colossal Biosciences has successfully inserted woolly mammoth DNA into mice, creating “woolly mice” with shaggy fur and enhanced fat metabolism—traits that helped mammoths survive the Ice Age. In doing so, Colossal demonstrated its ability to reintroduce extinct traits using CRISPR gene editing. With the gene editing processes now validated, the next step is to move from mice to elephants, which as you might imagine is a much more complex process. And if all goes well there, the plan is to have a living wooly mammoth by 2028.

This breakthrough makes this news from early January make a lot more sense. At the time, Colossal raised $200M at a $10.2B valuation. Presumably investors had a bit more visibility on what was coming down the pipeline from the company than the general public, who kind of sneered and jeered at the fundraising.

A $10B Wooly Mammoth startup?! Lol.

We got Wooly Mice baby! Who’s laughing now?

(5) Aging activates escape of the silent X chromosome in the female mouse hippocampus

Gadek et al in Science

Select genes on the Xi underwent activation, with new escape across cells including in the dentate gyrus, critical to learning and memory. Expression of the Xi escapee Plp1, a myelin component, was increased in the aging hippocampus of female mice and parahippocampus of women. AAV-mediated Plp1 elevation in the dentate gyrus of aging male and female mice improved cognition. Understanding how the Xi may confer female advantage could lead to novel targets that counter brain aging and disease in both sexes.

Some good news for our female readers!

Scientists have discovered that women's brains age more slowly than men's. The study found that as female brains age, some previously silent genes on the inactive X chromosome "wake up" in the hippocampus, a key memory region. One of these genes, Plp1, plays a role in maintaining myelin, which helps brain cells communicate efficiently. When researchers boosted Plp1 in aging male mice, their memory and cognition improved, and female mice given extra Plp1 performed even better.

This discovery sheds light on why women tend to have better cognitive resilience as they age and opens the door to potential new treatments for age-related memory decline. This new understanding of the X chromosome could lead to breakthroughs in neurodegenerative treatments like Alzheimers and/or lead to the development of brainer boosters to key genes to keep minds sharper and healthier.

(6) Radioprotection of healthy tissue via nanoparticle-delivered mRNA encoding for a damage-suppressor protein found in tardigrades

Kirtane et al in Nature via InterIntellectus on X

Patients undergoing radiation therapy experience debilitating side effects because of toxicity arising from radiation-induced DNA strand breaks in normal peritumoural cells. Here, inspired by the ability of tardigrades to resist extreme radiation through the expression of a damage-suppressor protein that binds to DNA and reduces strand breaks, we show that the local and transient expression of the protein can reduce radiation-induced DNA damage in oral and rectal epithelial tissues (which are commonly affected during radiotherapy for head-and-neck and prostate cancers, respectively).

In this week’s edition of “Get Fucked, Cancer”, scientists used mRNA technology to temporarily shield healthy cells from radiation damage during cancer treatment without protecting tumors.

To do so, they copied a trick from tardigrade. Tardigrades are a tiny, water-dwelling micro-animal known for its extreme survival abilities, including resisting radiation and extreme temperatures. They make a special protein (Dsup) that shields their DNA, so researchers used mRNA to temporarily make human cells produce this same protein. They packed the mRNA into tiny fat bubbles and delivered it to areas that often get damaged during radiation therapy, like the mouth and rectum. In mice, this protected healthy cells from radiation without helping tumors, meaning cancer treatment still worked.

Add this to the growing list of reasons of why we think cancer is going to be cured in the next decade.

Have a great weekend y’all.

Thanks to Plaid for sponsoring! We’ll be back in your inbox next week.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan