Category: Convergence Watch
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Seagate, Western Digital, Dell EMC, and Microsoft together hold 15 US DNA-data-storage patents. Read them and they look like hard drives.
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DARPA just put $46.4M behind a single product: a powder you mix with water and run into a bleeding patient. Three companies have converged on it from three different chemistries.
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Histotripsy noninvasively liquefies tumors with cavitation bubbles — and the antigens it releases are training the immune system to find tumors the transducer never touched.
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U.S. ammonia-fuel grants jumped tenfold since 2022, and the same catalytic recipe is showing up in pickup trucks, tugboats, ship engines, and Pratt & Whitney’s turbofan IP.
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Alphabet’s TidalX has 51 US patents on cameras, anti-startling robot policies, and optical-flow water-current estimators. Salmon farms are the AV stack’s first profitable second act.
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Two patents, one mile of rock, and a Berkeley father-daughter team plan to take a nuclear reactor critical inside a Kansas industrial park on July 4.
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79 US grants for direct-to-cell satellite tech issued in 2025. Twenty-three belong to Qualcomm. Zero belong to SpaceX or AST SpaceMobile.
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Schlumberger and Halliburton just spent 2025 patenting downhole NMR and pulsed-neutron tools tuned for lithium-7. The DLE race is being won by oilfield services contractors, not chemistry startups.
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CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, has 12 US patents on perovskite solar cell fabrication. The manufacturing DNA is nearly identical. A 48,000-paper field is about to meet the factory floor.