What if all the heat your car engine, a factory, or a power plant throws away could run the grid instead? A new engine turns that waste heat into electricity, even the low-grade stuff today's best systems struggle with. It has no moving parts, and the wild part is who built it. Dr. Lonnie Johnson, t
How a Saltwater Battery Desalinates Seawater and Captures Carbon. Drop your phone in the ocean and you learn fast that seawater destroys batteries. So a seawater battery that actually runs on the stuff sounds backwards. Yet researchers in Korea have spent over a decade building one. This single syst
For over 200 years, we've been generating electricity essentially the same way: by boiling water. And it's worked! Today, steam turbines power the vast majority of the world's electricity. But this technology, which has powered us since the industrial revolution, might not be up
BEST Things I Saw in Vegas at CES 2026 CES can be a mixed bag. But between the robot invasions…and AI takeovers…I encountered tech that really stopped me in my tracks. First, a solid-state battery claim so bold that even battery skeptics are doing a double take. We&
What if you could power cities just by mixing river water with seawater? Around 15,000 TWh of energy pours into the oceans each year as freshwater blends with saltwater at river mouths. That amounts to roughly half the energy the world consumes in electricity every year.12 And we
Thanks to reusable rockets that fly, land, and fly again, launch costs are coming back down to Earth. And that’s revived a ‘70s dream to beam clean solar energy from orbit. Space agencies around the world are revamping blueprints for giant solar farms capturing sunlight 24/7 and wirelessly
If you or someone you love has ever undergone chemotherapy, you know how brutal it can be. The drugs attack both cancer cells and healthy ones, too, leaving patients sick, weak, and exhausted. Or think about a stroke. Every minute a blood clot blocks blood flow, brain cells are dying.
Google just built a computer that solved a problem in 5 minutes that would take our best supercomputers 10 septillion years … that's not a typo. That's a 10 with 24 zeros after it. The universe is only 13.8 billion years old, so we're
Two and a half years ago, I told you about a company using "death rays" to drill deeper into the Earth than anyone has before. The goal? Unlock cheaper and more plentiful geothermal energy for the world. Well, I just got back from Houston, Texas, where I watched
Imagine a world where the homes we live in, the clothes we wear, and even the sensors in our electronics weren’t manufactured, but grown. Mycelium, the root structure of fungi, is shaking up everything from sustainable construction to meatless bacon. It’s turning agricultural waste into walls, hemp into
Solar panels are built to last around 30 years, weathering all kinds of abuse during that time.1 That’s a solid run for any piece of tech, but what if we could push that even further? What if solar panels could last… forever? That’s the promise behind a
It’s no secret that tech companies are racing to build “artificial general intelligence,” or AI that can match a human brain without needing a lifeline. But here’s the kicker: our brains already have the home field advantage. They do the same heavy lifting with just a fraction of