No Creds Notes #13
On Multiplanetary Self Driving, Salt Batteries, and Cancer Tests
👋Hey,
Hope y’all are doing well! After a 1 week hiatus of No Creds Notes, I’ve got the bases covered this week with topics including space, self driving, salt batteries, and cancer. Let’s get to it!
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Self Driving Goes Multiplanetary
For 28 years, every Mars rover drive has been planned by hand. Human drivers at JPL study orbital images, identify hazards, plot waypoints, and beam the instructions across 140M miles. It works, but with a 20+ minute signal delay each way, it can be painfully slow, with a full roundtrip communication cycle needed for every correction.
Last December, that process hopefully took a step in a smoother direction when the Perseverance rover drove for 2.5 hours on a route planned entirely by Claude’s vision-language models. The model analyzed the surface of Jezero Crater, identified boulder fields and sand traps, plotted a safe route, wrote the commands in Rover Markup Language (NASA’s coding language for deep space hardware) and even reviewed its own work before handing it off to the team.
Based on the mission’s success, we might just see self driving become ubiquitous on Mars before it does here on Earth! I can’t claim to know the first thing about how it would work, particularly with regard to energy, but to me it seems like it would be a no brainer to stock future rovers with enough computing power to run models with at least some basic maneuvering and obstacle avoidance locally, getting closer and closer to full autonomy on Mars.
A Battery Worth Its Salt
In January, BYD shipped the world’s first mass-produced sodium-ion battery product in the form of an industrial-scale forklift. To put the importance of this tech in perspective, for as much as we talk about AI and next-gen nuclear energy, sodium-ion batteries beat out both industries to top MIT’s list of top breakthrough technologies for 2026. So what’s the big deal and why should we care about swapping one type of battery for another?
The Lithium Problem
Lithium-ion batteries are incredible. They power our phones, our EVs, and, increasingly, our power grids. Unfortunately though, its namesake component, lithium, has become a bottleneck. High environmental hurdles and decade-long permitting cycles make new mines notoriously difficult to open. Even once the ore is out of the ground, nearly all of the world’s refining capacity is concentrated in China, creating a fragile, high friction supply chain that’s prone to huge price swings. For a world trying to electrify everything, building that future on a volatile, concentrated supply chain is risky.
Enter Sodium
Sodium is comparatively omnipresent, with estimates calling it as much as 400x more abundant than lithium, making the raw material costs structurally lower and the supply chain far less fragile.
Beyond supply chain concerns, sodium-ion batteries outshine lithium-based approaches on a number of categories:
Temperature tolerance: BYD’s sodium-ion forklift operates from -40 to +60 degrees Celsius, solving the well-known problem of lithium batteries dying in extreme cold, an important feat both for cold-chain warehousing and cold northern climates in general.
Cycle life: BYD announced their 3rd-gen sodium-ion platform supports up to 10k charge cycles, compared to 2k-3k for mainstream lithium batteries.
Safety: Sodium-ion cells are more chemically stable and less prone to thermal runaway (the technical term for your battery catching on fire)
Cost trajectory: With scale, sodium-ion costs are expected to drop 30%+ below current levels, undercutting even the cheapest lithium chemistries
However, they aren’t without tradeoffs. Namely, sodium-ion batteries have lower energy density than lithium-ion, meaning they store less energy per unit of weight. For your phone or a performance EV, that matters quite a bit, but for a warehouse forklift, a grid-scale battery storing solar energy, or a low speed delivery vehicle, it does not.
Why Now?
Sodium-ion batteries have been around for awhile, with CATL (a leading Chinese battery maker) launching their 1st gen back in 2021 to much applause but limited initial impact. A few drivers have now converged to make 2026 the year that brings them from a nice hypothetical to a real-world product. First, the raw chemistry matured, bringing energy density and cycle lives to a level that makes commercial sense. Second, the manufacturing infrastructure caught up with both BYD and CATL launching production-scale factories in 2025. Lastly, the recent explosion in renewable energy is driving significant demand pull for grid-scale energy storage where longevity and cost-per-cycle are more important considerations than energy density.
Sodium-ion batteries won’t be replacing your iPhone or Tesla batteries anytime soon, but expect to see them grow exponentially in places where cost and durability matter more than weight like grid storage, industrial vehicles, and even lower range, higher affordability EVs.
The electrification of everything is a story of efficiency and curve convergence and progress in sodium-ion batteries is an important step along the way.
15 Minute Spit Take
ErlySign, a biotech startup coming out of Nagpur, India, just received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for a saliva-based oral cancer detection test. The test takes 15 minutes, is completely non-invasive, and targets biomarkers that flag precancerous conditions before tumors even appear.
Across trails of roughly 1,000 patients at multiple cancer care institutions, the test showed 98% sensitivity and 100% specificity, meaning those receiving a negative result are actually negative 98% of the time and those receiving a positive result are actually positive 100% of the time.
Especially exciting was seeing that a number of patients who were marked as healthy by traditional clinical exams were flagged as high risk and then, over 6 months of monitoring, eventually became positive by traditional clinical standards. Catching oral cancer so much earlier would be incredibly transformative for patients because, even in a country with a well-developed healthcare system like the US, nearly 75% of oral cancer cases aren’t caught until they’ve spread regionally or even metastasized. Depending on severity of the spread, catching it late (as we currently typically do) can decrease survival rates by anywhere from 20% to 60%+, so shortening the timeline to diagnosis will meaningfully save lives.
What excites me most is the broader trend ErlySign represents. We’re entering a period where detection is getting radically earlier (catching disease before symptoms even appear) while treatment is getting radically more precise (base-edited gene therapies, personalized CRISPR treatments, etc.). When those 2 curves converge, catching sooner and treating better, the impact on healthcare outcomes could be staggering.
No Creds Reading List
Matt Shumer wrote a convicted take on the turning point we’re hitting with AI
Nick Corvino at ChinaTalk broke down the self driving competition between China and Waymo
Matt Jones wrote on the increased dollarization of the world via stablecoins
Nick Maggiulli shared his thoughts on “skimpflation”
Thanks for reading this week’s No Creds Notes! If you enjoyed any of these stories and want to know more, just let me know! And if you haven’t yet, consider subscribing!
Great reading !! Thanks