The Big Picture
“The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday announced $34 million in funding to support a dozen projects focused on improving the nation’s power resilience by moving some grid infrastructure underground. The projects span 11 states, and are being developed by small and large businesses, national labs, and universities. They are being funded through the Grid Overhaul with Proactive, High-speed Undergrounding for Reliability, Resilience, and Security program — aptly known as GOPHURRS — and managed by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. Projects include multiple worm-inspired digging approaches, an artificial intelligence and aerial drone solution, ground penetrating radar and advances in cable deployment and splicing. The U.S. electric system spans more than 5.5 million line-miles and contains over 180 million power poles, “all of which are susceptible to damage by weather and its effects, and account for a majority of power outages in the country each year,” DOE said. “Undergrounding power lines is a proven way of improving the system reliability for both transmission and distribution grids.” (Utility Dive)
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Deep Tech News
JPEG of the Week
This is that “extracorporeal,” or outside-the-body, genetically edited pig liver that was successfully attached to the veins of a brain-dead man by surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania for 3 days in December 2023.
The initial test of the system was run in collaboration with the biotech company eGenesis and is designed to help people survive acute liver failure, which can be caused by infection, poisoning, or (most commonly) too much alcohol. In earlier studies, at the University of Maryland, two men with terminal heart disease had their hearts replaced with hearts from pigs developed by another company, United Therapeutics. Remarkably, each was able to live with the animal heart, but only for a short time; both died within two months of the transplant. Scientists continue to scrutinize why the hearts failed, but at least the second patient’s heart showed signs of rejection. The use of a pig organ that’s kept outside the body might prove easier to pull off, since it only needs to work for a limited time. (via MIT Tech Review)
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