Robotics
Autonomous mobile robots outside the warehouse
Hospitals, hotels, factories and pavements — where wheeled autonomy has spread, and the specific reasons each environment is harder than a warehouse.
Lena Brandt
24 articles by Brandt
Energy
Reading an energy statistic without being fooled
Capacity is not generation, generation is not energy, and percentages depend entirely on the denominator chosen.
Space
How to follow space news without being misled
A small set of habits that separate an achievement from an announcement, and a schedule from an aspiration.
Energy
Fusion: reading the milestones properly
Several genuine records have been set recently, and the gap between scientific breakeven and a power station is larger than the coverage suggests.
Neurotech
Neurotech companies, funding and the hype cycle
A field with genuine progress, long timelines and investors who need exits sooner than the biology allows.
Space
Space telescopes and why they cost what they do
An instrument that must work perfectly, first time, with no repair possible, at a temperature near absolute zero, folded to fit in a fairing.
Energy
Carbon capture: the honest assessment
A necessary technology for some industrial emissions, a poor substitute for not emitting, and a category where the claims and the deployed capacity diverge sharply.
Neurotech
Neural decoding of speech
Reconstructing intended speech from cortical activity is the most striking recent result in the field, and it is narrower than the coverage suggests.
Space
The Moon: why going back is harder than it sounds
It was done sixty years ago with slide rules, and repeating it sustainably is a different and considerably harder problem.
Energy
Geothermal and the drilling problem
Firm, low-carbon, always-on power available almost everywhere in principle, and constrained by how deep you can drill economically.
Neurotech
Neuromodulation beyond the brain
Stimulating peripheral nerves and the spinal cord is less dramatic than brain implants and has reached far more patients.
Space
Starship-class vehicles and what fully reusable would mean
Recovering the second stage is the remaining hard problem, and solving it would change the economics more than booster reuse did.
Electric Vehicles
Second-life batteries and recycling
A pack retired from a car still holds most of its capacity. What happens next is an industry that barely exists yet, for a reason.
Energy
Transmission is the bottleneck nobody photographs
A great deal of clean generation is built, connected late, and curtailed — because the wires to move it do not exist.
Neurotech
Neural data and who gets to hold it
Recordings from the brain are unusually intimate, largely unregulated as a category, and several jurisdictions have started legislating specifically.
Space
Launch costs: reading the numbers honestly
Dollars per kilogram is the standard figure and it hides orbit, integration, insurance and whether the price is a price at all.
Space
Space debris: the problem nobody owns
Tens of thousands of tracked objects, millions too small to track, and a governance framework built when orbit was empty.
Energy
Nuclear power and the data centre question
A technology with an unusual cost structure meeting a customer with an unusual demand profile, and a set of claims worth checking.
Neurotech
Neural implants: the regulatory road
A device that goes inside the skull faces the strictest approval pathway there is, and the timeline is measured in years for good reasons.
Space
Why getting to Mars is harder than it looks
The launch is the easy part. Entry, landing, radiation, propellant and getting home are each unsolved at the required scale.
Electric Vehicles
Are EVs actually cleaner? The lifecycle answer
Manufacturing emissions are higher, operating emissions are lower, and the crossover point depends on where you plug it in.
Energy
Solar economics: what actually changed
Module prices fell by orders of magnitude over four decades, and the interesting question is what now dominates the cost instead.
Space
Orbits, and why the choice constrains everything
A satellite orbit is not a location. It is a set of trade-offs about latency, coverage, lifetime and how many spacecraft you need.
Space
Reusable rockets: what actually changed
Recovering a booster is an engineering achievement. Turning it around cheaply is the part that altered the industry.