Energy, space, matter
Deep Tech
Some innovations ship in a quarter. These take a decade, cost billions and change what is physically possible. We track them at the speed they move.
Long reads
Every read in Deep Tech
Deep Tech
Fusion
How close is fusion, really
Ignition happened. That was the physics. Everything between that result and electricity in a socket is engineering, and the engineering is harder than the physics was.
Deep Tech
Storage
The battery that keeps being two years away
A solid electrolyte promises more range, faster charging and no fire. It has promised that for a decade. The reason it is late is a manufacturing problem, not a chemistry one.
Deep Tech
Launch
What falls back changes everything
When a rocket stage lands and flies again, launch stops being an event and becomes a service. That shift, not any single mission, is what built the current space economy.
Deep Tech
Gene editing
From a bacterial defence to an approved medicine
Eleven years after the technique was described, a CRISPR therapy was approved for sickle cell disease. The science moved fast. Delivery and price are why the next ones will move slower.
Deep Tech
Solar
The cheapest way to make sunlight into electricity
Silicon solar is close to its physical limit. A layer of crystal a fraction of a millimetre thick on top of it breaks that limit, and the only question left is whether it survives twenty years outdoors.
Deep Tech
SMRs
Nuclear, in units small enough to finance
The argument for small reactors is not physics. It is that a large nuclear plant is a construction project that bankrupts its builder, and a small one might be a product.
Deep Tech
Additive manufacturing
Printing metal, and when it is worth it
The consumer hype ended years ago. What remains is a manufacturing process that is excellent for a narrow set of parts and ruinous for everything else, and knowing which is which is the whole skill.
Deep Tech
eVTOL
The aircraft waiting for a certificate
Electric vertical take-off aircraft fly, carry passengers and look like the future. Whether they become transport or a luxury novelty depends on certification, batteries and noise, in that order.
Basics
Explainers for Deep Tech
How large language models work
A very large function that predicts the next chunk of text. Everything these models can do is a consequence of doing that extremely well.
02What is a humanoid robot?
A robot shaped like a person, so that it fits the spaces and tools built for people. That is the entire argument, and it is a better one than it sounds.
03What is a data center?
A building full of computers, power and cooling. For AI the interesting unit is not square metres but megawatts, and that is the constraint on the whole industry.