The Cell That Still Needs Someone to Feed It
Kate Adamala's SpudCell completed a real, chemically defined cell cycle — feeding, growing, dividing across five generations. What it hasn't completed yet is peer review, or a life of its own.
Rana Iqbal
Rana covers long-horizon research — fusion, energy, the science that does not fit a quarterly report — and has a famously low tolerance for moving goalposts. She holds a PhD in plasma physics she insists is 'mostly decorative now.'
Latest by Rana Iqbal
Fusion's real wall isn't the plasma. It's the blanket no one has ever tested.
A new US facility will try to build the first full-scale fusion breeding blanket — the part that has to survive the neutrons, capture the heat, and make its own fuel. That it is only now being designed tells you how far "net energy" still is from a power plant.
An AI invented 465 new ways to protect a quantum computer. None has run on one yet.
IBM let a language model search a space no human could and it found error-correction codes that beat the textbook. The distance between a better blueprint and a working machine is still measured in years.
The Energy Department has a roadmap to fusion by the mid-2030s. Read the part that commits no money.
Washington just finalized a national plan to put fusion on the grid within a decade. The science behind it is real and the document is unusually honest — which is exactly why its most truthful sentences are the disclaimers.
The fusion startup that raised $100M by promising 2034
Thea Energy’s oversubscribed Series B is real money for a real machine. The interesting question is what the money is actually buying — and on what timescale.
A power plant that has not worked yet
Commonwealth Fusion has applied to plug a 400-megawatt fusion plant into the grid. The reactor it depends on has not yet produced a single watt of net energy — and that is the whole story.