Are good things still happening?

Some excitement, past and future.

From UNSW, new research: quantifying the urban heat island effect in cities like Sydney and Kolkata.

Community Earth System Model 3: Incoming update to the CESM series of open-source planetary physics simulators, targeted for this summer. Potentially featuring better clouds.

Upcoming NASA science missions: Including Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 landing 8 experiments on the Moon, NASA’s twin EscaPADE orbiters investigating solar wind & atmospheric plasma dynamics at Mars (via New Glenn).

Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission: 10 years on orbit as of Pi Day 2025!

LumenPNP (source): An open-source pick-and-place for mid-scale manufacturing, made in Pittsburgh.

Valar: Using a new fission reactor generator, capture atmospheric carbon dioxide, split water, synthesize storable hydrocarbon fuels, run datacenters. To be determined: are the outputs cost effective? where does the waste heat go? where do they plan to source the water?

Teleo: Supervised autonomy (including remote operation) for heavy equipment. Could enable huge production gains in infrastructure, construction, mining. (Disclosure: I worked for Teleo from 2021-2024).

Exo (source): Enroll various calculators into a matrix multiplication club.

Tiny Tapeout: Learn Verilog and design a silicon ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) for the cost of an FPGA (field programmable gate array) prototyping board.

SiliWiz (source): Learn how patterns of different elements in a silicon chip work together to make the building blocks of logic machines and energy converters.

The Merge: The Ethereum network used to burn 21 TWh of energy per year, but in 2022 they fixed the issue.


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