Category: Convergence Watch
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Nike holds 45 structural-color patents to Toyota’s 20. They build the same nanoscale optics filter, then point it in opposite directions.
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US patents for carbon-fiber ‘massless’ batteries tripled since 2022. The two deepest American portfolios belong to a carmaker and a Pentagon think tank, not a battery company.
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A mechanism that won the 2006 Nobel and became a six-figure human drug class is now the first RNA pesticide you can spray on a field, and the US patent race was quietly won years ago by the old GMO giants.
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The 60-gigahertz radar chip built to stop your car is now being pointed at sleeping chests, and a hot-car safety rule is paying to make it cheap enough for cribs, nightstands, and hospital beds.
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From 2022 to 2025, US ammonia engine and turbine patents nearly tripled. The new fuel for marine shipping and gas-turbine power is a chemical the fertilizer industry has been moving by the supertanker for a century.
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Seven reactor designs, one reaction. The hydrogen industry the petrochemical majors are quietly building doesn’t need water, and its byproduct is tire filler.
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A failed wearable energy-harvesting tech just became the front-runner for battery-free, sometimes-dissolving nerve-stim implants. Every recent US patent in the class is Korean.
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Volkswagen, Carrier, Harvard, and MIT just filed patents on the same target from four different physics: a cooling cycle with no HFC inside.