The workflow is a mix of human and automated labor. Once the drone delivery system gets an order (customers order specific items marked for drone delivery in the company’s app), a runner (human) goes to the restaurants, all located a few flights down in the shopping mall, to pick up the order and brings it to the launchpad. The runner places the food and drinks in a standardized cardboard box, weighs it to make sure it’s not too heavy, seals the box, and hands it off to a different worker who specializes in dealing with the drones. The second worker places the box under a drone and waits for it to lock in.
One worker sealed the package before another worker took it to the drone.
ZEYI YANG
Everything after that is highly automated, says Mao Yinian, the director of drone delivery services at Meituan. The drones’ movements are controlled by a central algorithm, and the routes are predetermined. “You can know in advance, at every precise second, where each drone will be and how fast its speed is, so the customers can expect the arrival time with a deviation of two seconds, instead of three minutes or even 10 minutes (when it comes to traditional delivery),” he tells MIT Technology Review.
The company has a centralized control room in Shenzhen, where staff can take control of a drone in an emergency. There are now more than a hundred drones that can be deployed for deliveries in the city. On average, one operator is watching 10 drones at the same time.
Not all human labor can or should be replaced by machines, Mao says. But the company has plans to automate even more of the delivery process. For example, Mao would like to see robots take over the work of loading packages onto drones and changing their batteries: “Our ground crew may have to bend over a hundred times a day to load the package and change the batteries. Human bodies are not designed for such movements.”
“Our vision is to turn the [launchpad] into a fully automated factory assembly line,” he says. “The only work for humans is to place the nonstandardized food and drinks into a standardized packaging box, and then there’s no more work for humans.”
Regulatory and economic constraints
Today, there are few technical obstacles left for drones delivery of food and packages, says Jonathan Roberts, a professor of robotics at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, who has researched drones since 1999. “We definitely can do reliable drone delivery, but whether it makes financial sense is a little bit hard to know,” he says.
Regulation often determines where companies choose to set up shop. In 2002, Australia was the first country in the world to introduce legislation on unmanned aerial vehicles, as drones are technically called. The law allowed universities and companies to conduct drone experiments as long as they obtained official licenses. “So [Australia] was the perfect place then to do testing,” says Roberts. That’s why Alphabet’s Wing tested and launched its drone deliveries in Australia before trying them in any other country.
It was a similar story for Meituan and the city of Shenzhen, where the municipal government has a strong drone manufacturing supply chain and has been particularly friendly toward the industry. On a national policy level, the central government has also permitted Shenzhen, one of the country’s designated Special Economic Zones, to have more flexibility when it comes to commercial drone legislation.
Matt Kaeberlein is what you might call a dog person. He has grown up with dogs and describes his German shepherd, Dobby, as “really special.” But Dobby is 14 years old—around 98 in dog years.
Kaeberlein is co-director of the Dog Aging Project, an ambitious research effort to track the aging process of tens of thousands of companion dogs across the US. He is one of a handful of scientists on a mission to improve, delay, and possibly reverse that process to help them live longer, healthier lives.
And dogs are just the beginning. One day, this research could help to prolong the lives of humans. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
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.)
+ All hail the unsung women of indie sleaze. + It’s officially October! + This list of sartorial advice has been entertaining us at MIT Technology Review—how many points do you agree with? + Put down the expired milk, it’s got a whole lot more to give. 🥛 + Some top tips for remembering your dreams more fully: should you want to, that is.
The technology would likely be used first on infants born at 22 or 23 weeks who don’t have many other options. “You don’t want to put an infant on this device who would otherwise do well with conventional therapy,” Mychaliska says. At 22 weeks gestation, babies are tiny, often weighing less than a pound. And their lungs are still developing. When researchers looked at babies born between 2013 and 2018, survival among those who were resuscitated at 22 weeks was 30%. That number rose to nearly 56% at 23 weeks. And babies born at that stage who do survive have an increased risk of neurodevelopmental problems, cerebral palsy, mobility problems, hearing impairments, and other disabilities.
Selecting the right participants will be tricky. Some experts argue that gestational age shouldn’t be the only criteria. One complicating factor is that prognosis varies widely from center to center, and it’s improving as hospitals learn how best to treat these preemies. At the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, for example, survival rates are much higher than average: 64% for babies born at 22 weeks. They’ve even managed to keep a handful of infants born at 21 weeks alive. “These babies are not a hopeless case. They very much can survive. They very much can thrive if you are managing them appropriately,” says Brady Thomas, a neonatologist at Stead. “Are you really going to make that much of a bigger impact by adding in this technology, and what risks might exist to those patients as you’re starting to trial it?”
Prognosis also varies widely from baby to baby depending on a variety of factors. “The girls do better than the boys. The bigger ones do better than the smaller ones,” says Mark Mercurio, a neonatologist and pediatric bioethicist at the Yale School of Medicine. So “how bad does the prognosis with current therapy need to be to justify use of an artificial womb?” That’s a question Mercurio would like to see answered.
What are the risks?
One ever-present concern in the tiniest babies is brain bleeds. “That’s due to a number of factors—a combination of their brain immaturity, and in part associated with the treatment that we provide,” Mychaliska says. Babies in an artificial womb would need to be on a blood thinner to prevent clots from forming where the tubes enter the body. “I believe that places a premature infant at very high risk for brain bleeding,” he says.
And it’s not just about the baby. To be eligible for EXTEND, infants must be delivered via cesarean section, which puts the pregnant person at higher risk for infection and bleeding. Delivery via a C-section can also have an impact on future pregnancies.
So if it works, could babies be grown entirely outside the womb?
Not anytime soon. Maybe not ever. In a paper published in 2022, Flake and his colleagues called this scenario “a technically and developmentally naive, yet sensationally speculative, pipe dream.” The problem is twofold. First, fetal development is a carefully choreographed process that relies on chemical communication between the pregnant parent’s body and the fetus. Even if researchers understood all the factors that contribute to fetal development—and they don’t—there’s no guarantee they could recreate those conditions.
The second issue is size. The artificial womb systems being developed require doctors to insert a small tube into the infant’s umbilical cord to deliver oxygenated blood. The smaller the umbilical cord, the more difficult this becomes.
What are the ethical concerns?
In the near term, there are concerns about how to ensure that researchers are obtaining proper informed consent from parents who may be desperate to save their babies. “This is an issue that comes up with lots of last-chance therapies,” says Vardit Ravitsky, a bioethicist and president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute.
Last week, Elon Musk made the bold assertion that sticking electrodes in people’s heads is going to lead to a huge increase in the rate of data transfer out of, and into, human brains.
The occasion of Musk’s post was the announcement by Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, that it was officially seeking the first volunteer to receive an implant that contains more than twice the number of electrodes than previous versions to collect more data from more nerve cells.
The entrepreneur mentioned a long-term goal of vastly increasing “bandwidth” between people, or people and machines, by a factor of 1,000 or more. But what does he mean, and is it even possible? Read the full story.
—Antonio Regalado
This story is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
Everything you need to know about artificial wombs
Earlier this month, US Food and Drug Administration advisors met to discuss how to move research on artificial wombs from animals into humans.
These medical devices are designed to give extremely premature infants a bit more time to develop in a womb-like environment before entering the outside world. They have been tested with hundreds of lambs (and some piglets), but animal models can’t fully predict how the technology will work for humans.
