This week in R&D: the first quantum computer in space is now orbiting the Earth; a potential new treatment for Alzheimer’s, thanks to cancer drugs; a startup is breaking ground on their first fusion power plant, they say they are on track to deliver fusion energy by 2030; Google DeepMind announced their AI Earth mapping…
Google invests in fusion energy as the company’s energy use keeps climbing
Google’s recent sustainability report reveals that the company has more than doubled its electricity use in the past four years. In 2024, Google’s data centers used 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity, up from 14.4 million megawatt-hours in 2020. In 2024, data centers accounted for 95.8% of the entire company’s electricity use. While Google reported that…
24 R&D trends that redefined 2024
In many respects, 2024 was a year of building upon the foundations laid by previous technological and scientific advances. While AI continued to evolve at a rapid clip, progress was in many ways more incremental than last year when GPT-4 redefined expectations for genAI. But AI continues to make definable improvements across a range of…
Separate research groups push fusion plasma performance to new levels
Two teams of scientists have announced a breakthrough in fusion energy research, demonstrating for the first time the ability to simultaneously achieve high plasma density and confinement in a tokamak reactor. Derived from a Russian acronym, a tokamak is a donut-shaped experimental device that uses magnetic fields to make use of the energy of nuclear…