Brian Buntz

First came “Quantum Day,” Nvidia’s March 20 showcase at GTC put CEO Jensen Huang side-by-side with quantum players he had dismissed on January 7 at CES. Now, according to The Information and Reuters, Huang is in talks to invest in photonic-qubit upstart PsiQuantum, underscoring potentially changed thinking after quipping at CES that “very useful” quantum machines…

Los Angeles is thinking outside of the box in planning for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The idea? Use electric air taxis to address its notorious traffic. L.A.’s mayor, Karen Bass, has even mused about an (almost) car-free Games. The company making the craft, Archer Aviation, hopes to enable 10–20 minute flights between vertiports.…

More than nine out of ten manufacturers (92%) say smart-manufacturing technology will be their chief competitive edge within three years, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Smart Manufacturing and Operations survey of 600 U.S. executives. Nearly 15 years after “Industrie 4.0” promised a literal factory revolution with software and sensing advances reshaping workflows. While the benefits of…

Not all solar flares are created equal. On one end of the spectrum are A-class solar flares, which are near background levels. And then there is the X-class, where an X1 event is 10,000 times more powerful in X-ray output than an A1 event. Early Wednesday, there was an X2.7 flare, the ‘2.7’ indicating it’s…

Hiring headaches are nothing new in STEM, where the pipeline of qualified scientists and engineers is in short supply. Engineering.com’s 2025 Engineering Salary Survey puts hard numbers behind the worries. Nearly 60% of the 591 surveyed engineers have been in the trenches for more than two decades, while newer graduates are relatively rare. In terms…

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), in collaboration with TUMint.Energy Research, have set a new benchmark for solid-state battery electrolytes, introducing a lithium-antimony-scandium compound that shuttles lithium ions at 42 mS/cm. The breakthrough is detailed in a research article published April 28, 2025, in Advanced Energy Materials and a news announcement. In the…

GenAI may represent one of the biggest R&D pushes in recent memory. Gartner forecasts that worldwide spending on generative AI is set to soar to $644 billion in 2025, but the road to broadly useful, and commercially reliable, AI is getting twisty. 1. Meta: Behemoth on ice Meta has slipped the debut of its next-gen large…

Laura McGill, two weeks into her tenure as Sandia National Laboratories director, addressed the organization’s New Mexico staff on May 14. She stated that the lab would double down on its core role as the nation’s nuclear-weapons system integrator while also scaling up digital-engineering and AI projects. She announced a projection of up to $5…

GreyB on Wednesday rolled out Slate, an AI search tool that promises to collapse the grunt work of patent and literature hunts into a single query. The firm says early pilots cut document-finding time “from hours to minutes.” Slate’s index reaches across more than 160 million patents filed in 100-plus jurisdictions and roughly 264 million…

Low-quality, poorly curated, and siloed scientific data costs advanced economies billions of dollars each year by draining researcher productivity, duplicating experiments, and slowing innovation. A report commissioned by the European Commission estimated that failing to adopt FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles costs Europe’s economy at least €10.2 billion annually owing to wasted researcher…

Wetzlar, Germany–based Leica Microsystems has introduced a new line of upright microscopes known as Visoria B, Visoria M, and Visoria P built for labs where a “quick look” often turns into an hour at the bench. By electronically capturing every objective change and reducing the force needed to move the stage or adjust focus, the…

Chromatography data often remains locked in proprietary, vendor‑specific formats that sprawl across instruments, labs, and redundant backups. The resulting fragmentation can force scientists to spend hours copying files, reconciling retention‑time mismatches, and manually checking assay performance from site to site. Anthony Edge, Ph.D., a veteran chromatographer and scientific business analyst at scientific data and AI…

Science inches forward on peer review and second thoughts; the news cycle stampedes on novelty and clicks. When those two tempos collide, a worst-case microplastic estimate becomes a story about consuming a “credit card” worth of microplastics each week. Or a speculative insect review morphs into an “apocalypse,” or a complex climate report becomes a…

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected thermal emission from WD 1856 b, a Jupiter-size body circling a white dwarf 81 light-years away. At 186 K (−87 °C), the planet is the coldest ever seen in emitted light, confirming its mass below six Jupiters and its survival inside a star’s post-mortem “forbidden zone.” Prior estimates…

Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) researchers, working with Seoul National University, say they have designed a fiber‑based supercapacitor that endures more than 100,000 charge‑discharge cycles without performance loss and stays stable in high‑voltage settings. “This technology overcomes the shortcomings of supercapacitors by using single‑walled carbon nanotubes and conductive polymers,” said Bon‑Cheol Ku, Ph.D.,…

Caltech engineers have turned focused ultrasound into a noninvasive “printhead,” raising tissue temperature by only a few degrees to solidify injectable bio-inks several centimeters beneath the skin. The deep-tissue in-vivo sound-printing (DISP) technique shaped drug-loaded hydrogels next to mouse bladder tumors—killing more cancer cells than a direct doxorubicin shot—and built conductive gels inside rabbit muscle…

Cat-qubit developer Alice & Bob plans to spend about $50 million on a 4,000-square-meter quantum lab in Paris, pairing Israeli quantum control system firm Quantum Machines control gear with 20 dilution refrigerators from Bluefors, a cryogenic systems maker, to speed its push toward fault-tolerant quantum chips and a 100-logical-qubit system by 2030. Alice & Bob…

The Trump administration is signaling potential revisions to the Biden-era “AI Diffusion” export control framework. The shift could mean simpler, bilateral agreements and easing restrictions for key markets, following intense lobbying from U.S. tech giants and mounting economic concerns. Reuters was among the first to break the news. President Trump has lent weight to these…

Quantum dots hold significant promise for next-generation sensors and displays, but manufacturing hurdles often stand in the way of widespread use. Traditional methods struggle to evenly coat the complex, textured surfaces ideal for advanced devices, especially over large areas or in precise patterns. To tackle such hurdles, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have conformally coated…

After an April report emerged suggesting that Elon Musk was tapping AI to keep tabs on government workers, the Tesla and SpaceX reportedly told Milken conference attendees the U.S. government is “inefficient” and AI should replace some public-sector functions. Musk is also the leader of xAI, an AI company whose chatbot is rivaling those from…

NASA has partnered with Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) to upgrade an Antarctic ground station and connect it to a cloud network, ensuring data from the SPHEREx near-infrared space observatory can be efficiently relayed to scientists. The collaboration, which involved upgrading KSAT’s Troll station antenna on Antarctica, supports the SPHEREx mission’s quest to explore the origins…

Even with tariffs on the horizon, nearly six in ten specialty chemical suppliers aren’t padding inventories, Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates (SOCMA) found in its April survey. One-third (33%) of companies have taken action to frontload inventory; this includes 26% adding one to three months’ supply and 7% stockpiling four months or more.  The…

In cosmology, invisible dark matter outweighs ordinary matter by roughly six to one. Drug discovery faces a similar imbalance: “dark data” marooned in lab systems. A bottom-up audit by scientific data and AI firm TetraScience estimated “greater than 10 million” discrete silos scattered across biopharma, everything from aging electronic lab notebooks and lone-wolf LIMS databases…

Instead of just another decimal-point upgrade to a massive language model, the latest AI move from publisher Wiley and AWS is a different breed: It’s a targeted agent from publisher Wiley and AWS: an AWS-hosted agent researchers can fork on GitHub and plug into their own pipelines. Wiley specifically mentioned its potential to cut research…

The National Science Foundation’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Coordination Office, acting for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is taking public comments through May 29 on a 2025 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan that aims to keep the U.S. “the unrivaled world leader” in AI. At…