“A Pentagon wireless energy relay program has achieved a record transmission of power over a distance. In a recent series of tests, the Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program team delivered 800 watts of power in 30 seconds from a laser 8.6 kilometers (5.3 miles) away. It bested the previously reported record transmission of 230 watts of average power at 1.7 kilometers (1.05 miles) for 25 seconds. The test campaign in New Mexico saw the transfer of over one megajoule of energy.
‘It is beyond a doubt that we absolutely obliterated all previously reported optical power beaming demonstrations for power and distance,’ POWER program manager Paul Jaffe said after the results were confirmed.”
A weekly dispatch featuring exclusive interviews with deep tech founders & a roundup of the most important deep tech news.
- Honda successfully launches and lands reusable rocket
- China’s rare earth chokehold is just the beginning
- Chevron joins lithium production race
- NuScale advances SMR-powered desalination and hydrogen production with integrated brine reuse strategy
- FDA unveils pilot to speed some new drugs to market in just one month
- Varda to launch its first in-house built spacecraft for on-orbit manufacturing
- Firefly announces commercial lunar imagery service
- US firm launches innovation lab to combat evolving drone threats
- DARPA aims to make defense firms ‘much, much harder’ to hack with ‘formal methods’ push
- Chinese sats appear to be attempting first-ever on-orbit refueling, sat tracking firms say
- SpaceX’s Starship blows up ahead of 10th test flight
- Senate GOP bill spares nuclear and geothermal energy while hammering wind and solar
- State lawmakers go big on bills to advance nuclear power
- Is the world ready for missile defense as a service?
- China lays foundation for cislunar infrastructure with spacecraft in novel lunar orbits
- New Army National Guard electromagnetic warfare unit activated in Georgia
- Pitting defense industry primes vs newcomers only helps America’s enemies
- Silicon Valley tech execs are joining the US Army Reserve
- The U.S. Navy is more aggressively telling startups, ‘We want you’
- Finland warms up the world’s largest sand battery, and the economics look appealing
- Europe’s plan for faster space travel: Can nuclear rockets get us to Mars?
A bird’s nest woven with fiber-optic cable found in Ukraine highlights how widespread these cable-guided drones have become on the battlefield. Immune to jamming and radio detection, the drones allow Ukrainian forces to strike hidden Russian vehicles inside buildings. As production scales up and countermeasures remain limited, this marks the start of a new phase in drone warfare. (via Forbes)
- Quantum computers simulate particle ‘string breaking’ in a physics breakthrough
- Nanoparticle drug delivery system improves stability and drug loading
- AI-designed proteins created de novo with new AlphaDesign
- Brain implant captures speech tone, pitch through analyzing activity
- Scientists propose blueprint for ‘universal translator’ in quantum networks
- Nanofibers yield stronger, tougher carbon fiber composites
- Scientists harness vacuum fluctuations to engineer quantum materials
- Message in a bubble: Physics enables encoding of messages in ice
- Light-based computing with optical fibers shows potential for ultra-fast AI systems
- Biohybrid molecule uses light-driven electrons to efficiently produce hydrogen
- Gene-editing nanoparticle system targets multiple organs simultaneously
- World’s first 2D, atom-thin non-silicon computer developed
- OpenAI wins $200M contract with US military
- Draig Therapeutics unveils $140M Series A for neuropsychiatry pipeline
- Celltrio raises $15M in funding for advanced automation solutions for cell culturing and cell and gene therapy
- Defense tech company Mach Industries raises $100M in Series B funding
- Applied Intuition raises $600M as it pushes further into defense
- GeneCentric Therapeutics, a company advancing precision medicine through gene expression, holds initial closing of $8M Series C financing
- Biotechnology company Actio Biosciences raises $66M in Series B financing
- Bill Gates-founded nuclear energy startup TerraPower raises $650M from Nvidia’s VC arm, others
- Antares Therapeutics launches with $177M to develop first-in-class precision medicines for cancer and other serious diseases
- Robotic tech company Tombot raises $6.1M in Series A funding
- AI and robotics company Gecko Robotics raises Series D funding; Valued at $1.25B
- Semiconductor startup Volantis raises $9M in seed funding
- German defense start-up Helsing raises €600M in latest investment round
- Corvia Medical raises $55M for treating heart failure
- Project Eleven raises $6M to secure digital assets against quantum threats
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