Weekly Dose of Optimism #170
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Bell Labs
15 min read
The article extensively discusses Episteme as a modern Bell Labs, mentioning transistors, Unix, C programming, Information Theory, and lasers as Bell Labs inventions. Understanding Bell Labs' unique structure and prolific output provides essential context for evaluating whether Episteme can replicate this model.
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Subsidence
10 min read
Terranova's core technology addresses subsidence by lifting cities through underground injection. Understanding the geological phenomenon of land subsidence—its causes, global prevalence, and why traditional solutions fail—illuminates why this startup's approach is novel.
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Small modular reactor
15 min read
Valar Atomics is building small modular reactors for AI data centers. This Wikipedia article explains the technology class, regulatory landscape, and why SMRs represent a different approach to nuclear power than traditional large plants.
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday!
Pope Leo XIV, the American Pope, the Villanova University graduate, the White Sox fan, blessed the timeline with a number of tech-related tweets this week, including this one, which asks entrepreneurs to ask, “How are we making the world a better place?”
That phrase - “making the world a better place” - has become a trope, often used ironically in association with gambling apps and infinite scroll feeds. But there are a ton of entrepreneurs and scientists doing just that, and our job here at the Weekly Dose is to be the communicators who spread that good word. This week, for example, we have a startup trying to save cities from floods, a new lab to fund ambitious research, funding for cheap, safe, abundant energy, factories for batteries and rockets that might transport humans to other worlds, a Blue Origin booster landing, and solar in Africa.
We need to get Pope Leo subscribed to the Dose.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Altman And Masa Back a 27-Year-Old’s Plan to Build a New Bell Labs Ultra
From Ashlee Vance for Core Memory
“It’s a broad range of disciplines,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, the chair of the Department of Astronomy at Yale and an advisor to Episteme. “It’s AI, energy, materials, novel battery systems and new kinds of superconductors. It’s inspired by Bell Labs or Xerox PARC but adapted for today’s scientific milieu. I think that’s what makes it a new kind of accelerator.”
One of the things that people in tech call for most often, second only to Manhattan Projects for X, is a modern version of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, those talent-dense corporate research labs that invented the transistor, Unix, solar panels, the C programming language, Information Theory, the laser, the graphical user interface, ethernet, laser printing, object-oriented programming, and much much more.
Part of the challenge, though, is that doing it really well requires an infinite cash machine, like a
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.