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There's science at South by Southwest

Credit: Craig Bettenhausen/C&EN

Astrophysicist Lisa Kewley introduces a panel on using satellites and computer models to understand the dynamics of Earth’s atmosphere on March 11.

A chemist said hello as we both got off the plane in Austin, Texas, headed for South by Southwest. She'd seen my C&EN hat and correctly guessed that I work for the magazine. Her greeting was a sign that I had come to Austin for the right reason.

South by Southwest, or SXSW, is best known as a music, film, and comedy festival. But over the past few years, more and more emails have hit my inbox from chemistry businesses, academics, and assorted industry folks asking if I'd attend their talk at SXSW or if I wanted to meet there for an interview.

So this year, I decided to check out the science scene at the SXSW Conference & Festivals. Even more so than those emails hinted, I found the conference was replete with scientific content—some directly relevant to chemistry and even more on topics that most chemists would find interesting. Climate, energy, synthetic biology, and water stewardship were natural fits, but space, advanced imaging, robotics, artificial intelligence, and other adjacent topics were available for the interested participant.

The afternoon after my encounter at the airport, I sat in a rooftop bar making hard calls about what to attend over a margarita and enchiladas. It turns out I had as much trouble deciding between competing scientific talks and other events as I have had at meetings like the instrumentation conference Pittcon or an American Chemical Society national meeting. (ACS publishes C&EN but is not involved in editorial decisions.)

Packing the room for science

The first session I’d bookmarked for Friday was “10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025,” presented by Niall Firth of MIT Technology Review, a follow-up to the magazine’s January article on the same topic. It was held in Ballroom D, the convention center’s largest venue. I arrived 20 minutes early, and the line to get in already went halfway around the building, down an exterior staircase, back inside, and around another hallway.

On the MIT list were multiple chemistry-heavy innovations such as green steel, novel medicines, sustainable aviation fuel, and methane abatement, along with robotics and artificial intelligence. Or at least that’s what I gleaned from reading about it later: hundreds of people, including me, were unable to get in.

When the start time had passed and the line had stopped advancing, a backup plan emerged. In another room on the same floor, three of the four astronauts due to fly around the moon next year on NASA’s Artemis II flight were talking about their mission. That room was full as well, but the SXSW crew let me in because I was registered as a press photographer.

Credit: Craig Bettenhausen/C&EN

From left, Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen on March 7.

NASA’s Christina Koch explained to the crowd that the point of the mission is to test and optimize the life support systems and other infrastructure on the Orion spacecraft. Koch said her first task when the crew reaches space will be to activate the toilet. “I’m like the space plumber of the mission, proudly,” said Koch, a physicist and electrical engineer.

The trip, part of a 10-flight program to establish a US-led base on the moon, will be the first time humans have ventured beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972. Crewmates Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen joined Koch onstage; pilot Victor Glover was in Houston helping NASA select future astronauts.

The crew won’t land on the moon but will complete a full circuit around it. “The geologists are super pumped to hear what the moon looks like through human eyes,” Koch said. “There's a chance, depending on the illumination, that we might see parts of the moon that have never been seen by human eyes.”

Later that day, a panel on nonlithium battery technologies drew a crowd heavy with chemists and materials scientists. After the session, I sat down with one of the panelists, Tod Higinbotham, chief operating officer of the nickel-zinc battery start-up ZincFive.

Higinbotham said he had come to SXSW to reach his customers’ customers. The battery chemistry powering his firm can discharge much faster than lithium-ion technology can and isn’t damaged by sitting fully charged for long periods, he said, making it perfect for load balancing and backup power at AI computing centers. But the batteries are components in uninterruptible power supply systems made by companies like Eaton and Schneider Electric. He needs the people buying those systems to demand that ZincFive’s technology is inside them.

Credit: Craig Bettenhausen/C&EN

SXSW exhibitor Brane Audio is a speaker company founded by chemists and materials scientists in Austin, Texas. Here, a member of the Brane team displays the core voice module.

Computer science students and young professionals from the tech industry provided the economic engine that helped Austin incubate its performing arts culture, and they show up in large numbers to the conference each year. Higinbotham said his other reasons to attend were to promote ZincFive, meet with partner companies, and convince young chemists and engineers that batteries are exciting to work on.

The strong interest in his panel surprised Higinbotham. “We had heard through our moderator that there was going to be like five people in the audience,” he said. “To have a full room—almost every seat was full—that is indicative of where batteries are headed.”

How science came to SXSW

There was one SXSW team member that seemed to be helping at most of the scientific sessions I attended. An energetic man with long, gray hair, George Cummings was hard to catch as he hurried between events. But after a session on space-based atmospheric spectroscopy, I grabbed a few minutes of his time.

It turns out that Cummings was the right person to ask about science at SXSW. The SXSW Music Festival started in 1987, and he was part of the crew of tech-minded people that connected with festival organizers a few years later. SXSW already had some talks about navigating the music industry, and the conference became an extension of that format. “The driving force was technology for good—primarily education—and then humanity's well-being,” Cummings said.

The scientific content now has its own gravity, Cummings said, and more people submit abstracts for technical talks every year. Chemistry is one of the “biggies,” along with physics and engineering, that he wants to attract.

Information technology is still a central component, and an attendee following the tech industry tracks would have an even busier schedule than mine. Start-ups and big-name companies like Microsoft and the electric vehicle maker Rivian are also well represented, and Cummings said he sometimes worries about too much commercialization. “Money to fix the planet, that was never a curse. It's a necessary part of anything, it's a tool. We just don't want profiteering off nature to be the thing.”

Cummings says the SXSW science and engineering program is about getting the right people together so they can partner and build a better future. “Find something close to your heart that's working on clean air, clean water, clean food, clean energy for everybody, everywhere, all species, right? If you're not doing stuff for that, start doing it.”

The future of food

My second day was focused on food. First thing in the morning, the high-tech vegan meat maker Impossible Foods made a convincing case that the public has accepted meat substitutes. The firm had advertised a free breakfast featuring its vegan sausage. When I arrived, 7 min after the posted start time, the crowd had eaten every bite and the hotel staff had already cleared away the tables and dishes.

So, hungry, I went one door down to a session titled “‘Spaceproofing’ Food: Are We Ready to Dine on Mars?”

Credit: Craig Bettenhausen/C&EN

Science documentarian Nate Dappen spoke with artist Emily Montoya about the intersection of science and art.

Hazzaa Al Mansoori, an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, charmed the audience with strange tales of cooking and eating at the International Space Station (ISS). For example, salt and pepper come as liquids and bread is always soft, because powders and crumbs could spell disaster in the station’s air recycling system.

Food engineers supporting the ISS design custom menus for each astronaut using a data-driven process proven over many missions, Al Mansoori said. That experience will inform the next frontier: designing food for the Moon, and then Mars, he said.

On those missions, astronauts will need to grow their own food, said Arttu Luukanen, an executive with Solar Foods. The Finnish company is working with NASA to develop space-ready bioreactors that will grow protein-rich microbes by feeding them waste hydrogen and carbon dioxide generated by the spacecraft.

Fermented food was also on the menu in the afternoon with a talk on commercializing new chemical technology by Shara Ticku, CEO of the industrial biotechnology start-up C16 Biosciences. The firm uses fermentation to make alternatives to palm oil, an agricultural commodity responsible for widespread deforestation that contributes about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

C16 got its start in personal care because it is a fast-moving market with many product launches every year, according to Ticku. The company is now expanding into food and cleaning products, markets that are much larger but slower to adopt new ingredients. “Walk into a grocery store and 50% of the products have palm oil,” she said.

In a conversation after her talk, Ticku said she’s made time for SXSW twice now, for two reasons. First, C16’s customers are there, she said. “This morning, I met with the CEO of a large, publicly traded personal care company who has been on my target list.” Second, the attendees at SXSW are receptive to new technology. “It's the intersection of the early adopters and the general audience,” she said.

The hacker mindset

Futurism was a motif throughout the conference. A track called “2050” addressed it explicitly, but speakers across SXSW imagined how the near future might emerge from the science and engineering happening now.

The keynote session on Sunday was a conversation between the actor Joe Manganiello and Ben Lamm, cofounder of the synthetic biology start-up Colossal Biosciences. Just a few days earlier, Colossal revealed that it had successfully engineered mice with genetic traits taken from the woolly mammoth.

As rapper Courtenay Henderson, better known as Soup from the group Jurassic 5, warmed up the crowd, I chatted with my seat neighbor. An Austin native who retired from the tech industry, she said science content has expanded rapidly at SXSW in the past 3–4 years. The trend started with human-machine interface technology, biohacking, and human longevity studies—topics with strong followings in tech circles. Now, she said, “I don’t know how you’d get a wider view of scientific advancement” than coming to the conference.

Credit: Kelly Nunes (artwork), Craig Bettenhausen/C&EN (photo)

Visitors enjoy a moment from the Black Hole Experience, an immersive art installation with visuals built partly on chemistry, physics, and astronomy data.

Onstage, Lamm explained how the mice fit into Colossal’s larger goal of reviving the woolly mammoth, which went extinct about 4,000 years ago. The project was a way to test the firm’s method of transferring entire traits from one animal to another. In addition to thick, tufted hair, the mice got a genetic sequence related to fat metabolism that Colossal believes helped mammoths thrive in climates much colder than modern elephants can stand.

The firm is also working on the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct in the late 1600s and in 1931, respectively, and is trying to save the northern white rhinoceros, native to sub-Saharan Africa. Manganiello, an investor in Colossal, asked how any of this made sense for a for-profit company.

In the short term, the company is spinning out profitable projects such as a plastic-eating microbe and a computational biology platform, Lamm said. “Long term, there's actually billions of dollars to be made in annual recurring revenue from the rewilding of species and in carbon sequestration, biodiversity credits, and methane suppression,” he said. Mammoth migration would help compress permafrost and contain the methane within, for example.

De-extinction is just the beginning, Lamm said. “I think that we will eradicate 90% of disease states. I think we'll have clean water for everyone. I think we will remove plastics from the oceans and our bodies. I think we'll actually even invent entire new species that serve various purposes,” he said. “I think that we will get to the point that we have true dominion over life.”

My seat neighbor wondered about the wisdom of Lamm’s aspirations, especially the notion that humans may be able to extend their lifespans indefinitely. And some biologists have questioned if the creatures Colossal creates will behave enough like their extinct models to refill ecological niches—or if indeed it even counts as de-extinction. Lamm said he’s also concerned about those things, but he still feels that humanity has an ethical obligation to develop this kind of technology.

A focus on the environment

By Monday, the music and film festival components of SXSW had ramped up, but science could still be found. A session titled “How Today’s Factories Are Turning Green” dove deep into the energy and water footprint of semiconductor factories, data centers, and AI server farms.

Credit: Craig Bettenhausen/C&EN

A quick conversation at SXSW with Ticora Jones of the Natural Resources Defense Council

“Every time you put a query into ChatGPT, a cup and half of water is consumed,” said Prakash Govindan, cofounder of the water treatment firm Gradient. “At the rate at which ChatGPT is getting used, by 2027—just ChatGPT, not all AI—is going to consume more water than the United Kingdom.”

Govindan said modern recycling technology can let AI providers and semiconductor makers reuse 99% of their water. It’s both an ethical choice and becoming a regulatory requirement in water-stressed areas like Austin and Arizona where there’s massive tech sector investment, he said. “The reason we are able to deploy at this rate, the reason we are going at 100% every year over the last 5 years, is we save clients money.”

Water and the environment came up again and again during the rest of the conference. A panel one morning discussed architects and cities that are incorporating water recycling into new construction projects. Two speakers that afternoon showed the audience how they are tracking water vapor and phytoplankton with satellites to help manage natural disasters and assess the health of the ocean.

Another pair of sessions examined the use of satellites to measure pollutants such as methane, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon dioxide. Kirsten Hall, a spectroscopist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that the crossover between scientific specialties on display at the meeting is critical to tackling the biggest threats facing humanity right now.

“Climate science, atmospheric physics—all of it is inherently multidisciplinary,” Hall said. “We require expertise from data scientists, engineers, computer scientists, physicists, oceanographers. And they all have to work together, and they all have to be able to communicate with one another.”

Chemical & Engineering News

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