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DTN 185: America's new era of private science

Plus: Endurance Energy taps underwater volcano as energy source, Rivian acquires world model startup Third Dimension, Electric Plant Company uses AI to decipher the language of plants, Astrolab's plans to run LLMs on the moon, EraDrive lands DoW contract for spacecraft autonomy, and more.

23 Oct 2026 — 7 min read

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America’s new era of private science

“The years since the second world war have been good to American science. The country's researchers sent men to the moon, invented the modern computer and led the sequencing of the human genome. Its government funded basic research in academia and national labs, which could then pass on findings with commercial promise to firms.

Now there are signs the innovation machine is breaking down. The system's critics fret that America's scientific infrastructure encourages groupthink, since a small number of committees distribute a large share of funding for basic research. They worry that universities are ill-suited to the interdisciplinary work that much of 21st-century science requires. And America is no longer an undisputed scientific superpower: China's research and development (R&D) spending has caught up with Uncle Sam's in purchasing-power terms, and is growing faster. In 2024 China overtook America in the Nature Index, a measure of publications in the most prestigious scientific journals.

Advocates of "metascience", the study of scientific discovery, have spent years pointing out the foibles of the system. Lately they have been putting their ideas into practice. Private institutions, many of which were founded within the past five years, say they are building the future of science. The history of American innovation suggests they may be right." (via The Economist)

One of the devices making up the Smart Wireless Autonomous Networking System (SWANS) sitting inside a syringe. SWANS was designed small enough to be injected and embedded deep in muscle tissue. Image: Candler Hobbs/Georgia Institute of Technology

"When a rat's front paw moved, its hind leg answered. Normally, such coordination is the nervous system's job, carried out by little electrical signals traveling along nerves. This time the message went off-roading, traveling through the animal's tissue as a faint electrical pulse and switching on an implant that jolted a nerve in that leg.

The experiment showcased the Smart Wireless Autonomous Networking System, or SWANS, which researchers described in the journal Science last week. It's a bid to build a sort of digital nervous system for medical devices. If it holds up in people, a sensor tucked in one corner of the body could someday tell an implant in another corner far away when to get back to work. ‘The body is not just where the devices sit,’ says Yoon Jae Lee, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgia State University and a co-author of the study. ‘It's become a part of the communication network.’" (via Scientific American)