Category: Quiet Breakouts
-
One rabbit-gut bacterium, 130 US patents, and a product ladder that climbs from steel-mill smoke to jet fuel, PET plastic, and Gucci perfume. The company is LanzaTech, its cash is nearly gone, and its patent machine just hit record output.
-
The eVTOL startups raised $15 billion and got the headlines. GE, Rolls-Royce, Pratt, and Safran hold three times as many US electric-propulsion patents, and every one of them keeps a turbine burning.
-
Histotripsy grants tripled to 12 in 2025, and Michigan plus its $2.25B spinout HistoSonics hold 83% of them. The mechanism is now migrating from liver tumors to the immune system.
-
Whey and egg white fell years ago. Casein, the self-assembling micelle that makes cheese stretch and melt, is the hard one, and three US startups now hold 19 granted patents on building it without a cow.
-
Kurzweil said evolution moves toward God’s attributes — complexity, intelligence, creativity, love. Six of the seven are now for sale. The final entry in the scorecard.
-
Kurzweil’s most mystical chapter predicted a conscious universe. What actually shipped was a patent to make a language model post on your behalf after you die.
-
Of 28 US patents since 2018 on engineered nitrogen-fixing crop microbes, Pivot Bio holds eight, more than anyone. The trick: deleting the gene that tells the bug to stop.
-
The self-replicating nanobot Kurzweil feared was never built. But his argument about it — a determined adversary defeats any centralized safeguard — just came true in a biosecurity lab, with a number attached.
-
The two largest US flow-battery patent estates belong to a Japanese cable maker and Lockheed Martin. The pure-play startup that trails them is nearly out of cash.
-
In 2024 a machine settled a value of the busy beaver function no human could ever compute by hand — vindicating Kurzweil’s bet on the limits of computation, and the wall that stops both sides.