Diagnostics at the Edge: Pocket-sized nanopore sequencers like Oxford Nanopore’s MinION can now run on a laptop or even a rugged tablet in the field, weighing under 130g and delivering up to tens of gigabases of sequence data in real time. During the West African Ebola crisis and later outbreaks, teams successfully sequenced viral genomes…
Cell-free Networks massive MIMO is one of the boldest ideas in 6G: instead of a few tall towers with hard cell edges, you scatter many small access points (APs) and make them cooperate as one giant, distributed antenna array. There are no cells; every user is served by a loose cluster of nearby antennas. On…
CoWoS Crunch Easing: For much of 2023–24, CoWoS—TSMC’s advanced “chip-on-wafer-on-substrate” packaging—was the villain behind AI GPU shortages. Cloud providers and model labs could buy all the 5 nm wafers they wanted, but without CoWoS capacity to marry those dies to stacks of HBM, delivery dates slipped quarter after quarter. By mid-2025, the picture is more…
Optimus Will Eliminate Poverty: At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting on 6 November 2025 in Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk unveiled his boldest vision yet for the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus. Musk told investors that Optimus will ultimately be more precise than the world’s best human surgeons and that mass deployment of such robots is, in…
IBM’s new Nighthawk processor: IBM’s quantum story just added both new silicon and new sites. The company unveiled Nighthawk, a 120-qubit chip with 218 tunable couplers engineered for deeper, cleaner circuits, and said a second experimental chip, Loon, demonstrates hardware features needed for fault-tolerant machines. In parallel, IBM Quantum System Two—the cryo-ready, modular system built…
AI Compute Wave: The Blackwell era isn’t theoretical anymore. GB200 NVL72—NVIDIA’s rack-scale system that stitches 72 Blackwell GPUs + 36 Grace CPUs into a single NVLink domain—has crossed from pilot to shipping with HPE, Dell and QCT confirming deliveries. Early friction around overheating and liquid-cooling leaks has been addressed, with suppliers reporting fixes and a…
2-nm race: The most closely watched node in foundryland—TSMC’s 2-nm (N2)—is crossing from slides to silicon. Public briefings this year reiterated H2-2025 for N2 mass production and H2-2026 for the N2P shrink, with Fab 22 flagged as the 2-nm anchor and a third Arizona site planned for N2/A16 “by the end of the decade.” In…
Agentic AI Platforms: Google’s agentic stack has moved from demos to developer docs Gemini 2.5 Flash (price-performance “workhorse”), Computer Use that operates a web browser end-to-end, and Gemini Robotics models that plan and control real robots. OpenAI, meanwhile, has leaned into small, reasoning-centric models—o3/o3-mini and o4-mini—aimed at fast coding/math and cheaper deployment. Together, they sketch…
Sodium-ion steps up: CATL has introduced Naxtra, its new sodium-ion battery line, with mass production set to begin in December 2025, positioning the launch alongside its next-generation fast-charging technologies. Early company briefings indicate an energy density of around 175 Wh/kg—comparable to LFP—combined with fast-charge performance and reliable operation across extreme temperatures, from –40°C to 70°C. …
The R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine—developed by the University of Oxford with Matrix-M adjuvant from Novavax and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII)—was recommended by WHO in October 2023 and prequalified in December 2023, unlocking UN procurement and Gavi financing. By October 27, 2025, 24 African countries had introduced a malaria vaccine (RTS,S and/or R21)…