Results (1039 found)

TechMay 21, 2026

The Bacteria That Build Buildings: How a Concrete Pill That Heals Cracks Could Double the Life of Every Bridge in America

On a test platform at MIT's Civil and Environmental Engineering laboratory, a block of concrete has been sitting under a drip-feed of salt water for eight months. The block is cracked—intentionally, with a hydraulic press that opened a fissure half a millimeter wide and three centimeters deep. In ordinary concrete, that crack would be a death sentence. Water would seep in, reach the steel reinforcement bars inside, and begin the slow, inexorable process of rust that causes concrete to spall, crumble, and eventually fail. The bridge would need repair. The building would need reinforcement. The bill would arrive, eventually, in the millions.

ImpactMay 21, 2026

Why Apple’s Scale Is Becoming a Bigger Story About Consumer Behavior, Not Just Sales

Apple’s global scale increasingly raises broader questions around habits, consumer behavior and how technology becomes part of everyday life.

TechMay 21, 2026

The Algorithm That Humiliated 12 Master Sommeliers: How AI Learned to Taste Wine—and What It Means for the Future of Food

In a conference room at ETH Zurich, twelve of Europe's most accomplished wine experts sat at a long table, glasses arrayed before them, tasting notes at the ready. They were master sommeliers, wine critics, and seasoned winemakers—people who had spent decades training their palates to detect the faintest traces of oak, the subtlest hints of blackcurrant, the almost imperceptible whisper of graphite that distinguishes a Pauillac from a Pomerol. They were the best in the world at what they did. And on this particular afternoon, they lost.

TechMay 21, 2026

The Atomic Engine That Never Stops: Inside China's 10-Newton Thruster That Could Cut the Mars Trip in Half

In the vacuum of space, a small metal cylinder has been firing continuously for eleven months. It produces no flame, no roar, no dramatic plume of exhaust. It emits a faint blue glow—the Cherenkov radiation of particles moving faster than light through water—and it pushes forward with a force equivalent to the weight of a single apple resting on a table. Ten newtons. That is the thrust. That is the entire thrust.

FundingMay 21, 2026

Travel-Fintech Is Quietly Making a Comeback as Investors Place a Fresh Bet on Scapia

Scapia’s latest funding round increasingly signals renewed investor confidence around travel-fintech models built around experiences and consumer behavior.

TechMay 21, 2026

The Flower That Glows in the Dark: How a $29.99 Petunia Is Rewriting the Future of Light—and the Rules of Genetic Engineering

On a quiet suburban street in central Nebraska, Sarah Kleiner walks out of her front door at 10 p.m. and looks at her garden. There, among the petunias, something impossible is happening. The flowers are glowing. Not metaphorically, not in the way that poets describe flowers under moonlight, but literally, physically, emitting a soft green-white light from their petals and stems, visible to the naked eye, requiring no electricity, no UV lamp, no special conditions. Just a plant, doing what no plant on Earth has ever done in four billion years of evolution.

StartupsMay 21, 2026

The Invisible Giant: How a PhD Dropout from IIT Kanpur Shaped Google, Facebook, Square, DoorDash, and Coinbase—Without Anyone Knowing His Name

Gokul Rajaram does not have a Wikipedia page. He has never been on the cover of Fortune or Forbes. He does not keynote major technology conferences, does not maintain a public relations presence, and does not, by all available evidence, seek the kind of recognition that usually attaches to someone who has helped build seven billion‑dollar companies and invested in more than 300 startups. He is, by the standards of the technology industry, almost invisible—a ghost in the machine whose fingerprints are everywhere but whose face is known only to the insiders who have worked alongside him.

StartupsMay 20, 2026

The $1 Billion Sovereignty Play: How Tata and JSW Are Trying to Break India's Dependence on Chinese EV Batteries

The most expensive, most technically demanding component of an electric vehicle is not the motor, the software, or the chassis. It is the battery—and for nearly every electric vehicle sold in India today, the cells inside that battery were designed and manufactured in China. India's EV penetration has surged past 8.5 percent, driven by electric two- and three-wheelers that have become a common sight on city streets. But the lithium-ion cells that power those vehicles, and the lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry that is increasingly used in stationary energy storage, remain almost entirely imported from a single country.

TechMay 20, 2026

The ₹67 Crore Bet That India Can Design Its Own Appliances—Not Just Assemble Them

For decades, the Indian consumer electronics industry has operated on a simple, humbling premise: design overseas, assemble in India. The air fryer in your kitchen, the juicer on your counter, the car vacuum in your trunk—the outer shell may carry an Indian brand, but the motors, the precision gears, the heating elements, and the load cells that make it work were almost certainly designed and manufactured somewhere else. India's ₹40,000-crore small-appliance market runs largely on imported components, and the companies that sell to Indian consumers have accepted this as the cost of doing business.

TechMay 20, 2026

The Microwave Plasma Maverick: How a Belagavi Martial Artist Is Turning Natural Gas Into Clean Hydrogen and Nanocarbon—at the Same Time

Prakash Mugali did not build his first microwave plasma reactor in a pristine cleanroom or a university laboratory. He built it on the outskirts of Belagavi, a tier-2 city in northern Karnataka, surrounded by foundries, hydraulic shops, and the quiet hum of small-scale manufacturing that most venture capitalists never see. He is a scientist, an engineer, a third-degree black belt in Bruce Lee's martial arts discipline, and—as of this summer—the founder of a company that may have solved one of the hardest dual-output problems in clean energy.