When most people think about biotechnology, they often think about medicine or science labs. But during our most recent Forum, leaders from across agriculture, manufacturing, research, and policy explored a different reality: biotechnology is increasingly becoming part of the future of farming itself.
And in many ways, that future is already here.
The conversation centered on the growing “bioeconomy,” a term used to describe products and industries powered by biological resources and life science innovation. While that may sound technical, the real-world applications are surprisingly familiar.
Paper products. Household cleaners. Clothing fibers. Food ingredients. Renewable fuels. Packaging materials. Even alternatives to plastics and industrial chemicals.
Many of these products can now be created using agricultural feedstocks and advanced fermentation technologies, opening the door to entirely new markets for farmers and rural communities.
Agriculture’s Expanding Role
Biotechnology is increasingly being viewed as a solution to some of the world’s biggest challenges, including food security, climate resilience, health, and sustainable manufacturing.
For decades, agriculture has largely focused on producing food, feed, and fuel. But biotechnology is rapidly expanding what crops and agricultural byproducts can become.
One topic discussed throughout the Forum was precision fermentation, a process that uses feedstocks like corn sugar, soy glycerol, sorghum, sugar beets, and sugar cane to create products through fermentation. In simple terms, plant materials are placed into fermentation systems where microorganisms produce ingredients and materials that can later be used in consumer goods and manufacturing.
The products created through these systems can range from natural food dyes and personal care products to polymers designed to replace petroleum-based plastics. Speakers noted that many major companies have already been using fermentation technologies in parts of their product portfolios for years.
For agriculture, that means crops may increasingly serve as the foundation for industries far beyond traditional commodity markets.
A Growing Consumer Market
Consumer awareness around plant-based and bio-based products is also growing.
Research shared during the forum showed that 67% of consumers say they use plant-based products monthly, while 86% say they are likely to include plant-based products in the next three months.
Importantly, panelists emphasized that these products are not limited to food. Consumers are already encountering bio-based materials in:
disposable food service ware
household cleaning products
paper goods
clothing and textiles
personal care products
Speakers also noted that consumers increasingly view agriculture more favorably when they understand the role farmers play in producing these materials and products.
Why the Midwest Matters
The Midwest is particularly well-positioned to play a major role in the bioeconomy because of its strong agricultural production and existing infrastructure.
Illinois, Indiana, and Nebraska were repeatedly highlighted during the discussion as regions likely to see continued growth in biomanufacturing and fermentation technologies. Biomass and agricultural feedstocks are often processed close to where they are produced because transportation can be expensive and inefficient.
Panelists also discussed how biotechnology could help strengthen rural economies by creating additional demand for agricultural products while supporting domestic manufacturing and reducing reliance on imported materials.
At a time when farmers continue to face rising input costs and economic uncertainty, many speakers described biotechnology as an opportunity to diversify markets and create additional value streams tied to agriculture.
The Biggest Barrier: Infrastructure
Despite the enthusiasm surrounding biotechnology, one challenge surfaced repeatedly throughout the forum: the United States lacks enough infrastructure to scale many of these technologies.
One speaker compared the process to baking cookies:
The lab stage is like baking in a home kitchen
Pilot facilities are like a larger commercial kitchen
Demonstration facilities represent scaling for broader production
Full manufacturing is the equivalent of getting products onto grocery store shelves
The problem, panelists explained, is that many technologies struggle to move beyond the pilot stage because building manufacturing infrastructure is expensive and complex.
The Integrated Fermentation and Biomanufacturing (IFAB) initiative was highlighted as one effort working to address this gap. Federally and state-funded investments are helping build shared infrastructure, including fermentation tanks and pilot facilities, so companies do not each need to independently build costly manufacturing systems from scratch.
Several speakers stressed the need for additional investment in pilot facilities, demonstration infrastructure, feedstock processing, and manufacturing systems to help promising technologies successfully reach commercial scale.
Without that investment, some companies may continue moving operations overseas to countries with lower costs and stronger infrastructure support.
Research and Policy Will Shape the Future
The conversation also focused heavily on the role of research and public policy in determining whether the United States can remain competitive in the growing bioeconomy.
Panelists discussed federal initiatives supporting biomanufacturing, renewable fuels, and rural infrastructure, along with state-level investments designed to position regions like Illinois as leaders in agricultural innovation.
At the same time, concerns were raised about declining agricultural research funding and increasing global competition from countries like China and Brazil.
Several speakers emphasized that continued investment in agricultural research, crop science, and biotechnology will be critical to improving yields, increasing efficiency, and developing sustainable solutions that can meet future demand without dramatically expanding agricultural land use.
Building Public Trust & Understanding
Throughout the discussion, panelists repeatedly returned to one final theme: public trust and understanding matter.
Many consumers still do not fully understand what biotechnology is, how bio-based products are made, or how they fit into everyday life. Speakers stressed the importance of transparency and communication that helps people connect these technologies to practical outcomes, whether that means safer manufacturing jobs, more sustainable materials, or new opportunities for farmers and rural communities.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Growth Energy, the nation’s largest biofuel trade association, celebrated House passage of a permanent, legislative fix offering consumers year-round access to lower-cost E15. Approved by a vote of 218 to 203, the bipartisan bill now moves to the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune has been tapped by President Trump to advance E15 legislation.
“American families are asking for help, and today’s vote brings us one step closer to delivering real savings at the pump,” said Growth Energy CEO Emily Skor. “We’re deeply grateful to bipartisan lawmakers from across the nation who always stood strong and rebuffed pressure to protect refinery profits at the expense of American consumers. All eyes are now on the Senate, where we have been working closely with our champions to clear a path forward for year-round E15. The sooner this bill reaches the President’s desk, the sooner we can deliver more savings to more communities in every corner of the country.
“We urge Senate leaders to quickly reject critics who oppose competition at the pump from lower-cost fuel. Year-round E15 simply allows retailers the option to offer a another, less expensive fuel choice to drivers. Now is the time to act.”
Growth Energy CEO Emily Skor submitted the following letter to the editor in response to a recent WSJ editorial about ethanol and E15.
In a flagrantly misleading May 11 opinion piece, “An Ethanol Extortion Play,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board again makes it clear that it cares more about protecting margins for a few oil refineries than allowing competition at the pump that can protect drivers from volatile global oil prices.
Specifically, the editorial attacks bipartisan efforts in Congress to allow year-round sales of E15. Never mind the fact that E15 reduces emissions that cause smog, or that the U.S. blew past the so-called “blend wall” years ago. Never mind that the vast majority of existing fuel infrastructure can be used for E15 the same way it is for E10, or that E15 is approved for 96% of vehicles on the road today. And never mind that the vast majority of the fuel supply chain—including most refiners and fuel retailers—support the bill to lower gas prices.
Ultimately, the most important point here is one the editorial board completely ignores—E15 sells for less and saves consumers money. If Congress finally approves year-round E15, it doesn’t mandate anything. It allows retailers the choice to offer consumers a lower-cost fuel option.
The Wall Street Journal can play games to confuse people, but it can’t argue with the signs in front of any fuel station offering E15 at a steep discount to E10. Congress should remember that when it votes on year-round E15 this week.
Boiling water to make steam for industrial processes consumes an enormous amount energy around the globe, yet it has proven remarkably resistant to electrification. In this episode, I talk with Addison Stark of AtmosZero about why replacing the standard fossil-gas boiler requires an entirely new approach to industrial heat pumps. We discuss the engineering behind his high-temperature system, the challenges of scaling up, and the growing imperative to get free of global LNG markets.
Hello everyone. Greetings. This is Volts for May 13, 2026: “Electrifying industrial steam with heat pumps.” I am your host, David Roberts.
Here on Volts, we have discussed many innovative solutions for decarbonizing high-temperature industrial processes like steel and cement production, which require temperatures of 1500°C and higher. Hot rocks. Liquid tin. Heat so hot it becomes light.
However, as I discussed with Teresa Cheng and Richard Hart last year, the much more common industrial process — used in pharmaceuticals, paper, beer brewing, and hundreds of other workaday industrial applications — is plain old boiling water for steam, which requires only 150°C.
Making steam for industry has not changed much since before the Civil War: you burn something (usually natural gas these days), boil water, and pipe the steam where it needs to go. About 8 percent of all the primary energy used on earth goes to this purpose, producing over two gigatons of greenhouse gases a year. And for the most part, we’ve left it alone.
Addison Stark
You might think that “boiling water” would be among the lesser challenges for electrification, but transition has been stubbornly slow in this area, mainly because the economics of the most common alternatives have not yet penciled out.
My guest today, Addison Stark, thinks they never will, which is why he set about to make something new. AtmosZero, the Colorado company he co-founded and runs, makes what he calls Boiler 2.0: an air-source industrial heat pump that drops into an existing boiler room in a matter of days, produces zero on-site emissions, and runs at roughly twice the efficiency of a standard electric boiler.
We are going to talk about why other electric solutions won’t work in this area, what technological advances enabled this new heat pump, whether it really competes with natural gas, and the prospects for finally electrifying the oldest process in the book.
With no further ado, Addison Stark, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Addison Stark
David, I appreciate you having me on.
David Roberts
Addison, you came up as a policy wonk through policy wonk channels. You worked at ARPA-E for many years, worked at the Bipartisan Policy Center for years. You wrote in 2020 a pretty influential paper about the need to electrify heat, which is a beloved topic here on Volts. And then in 2022, you finally pulled the trigger, left academia, and started something of your own. What was it, as you were writing about electrifying heat, that finally pulled you out of academia and into the world of entrepreneurship?
Addison Stark
That’s a good tee up for me. The way that I think back on all of this is back in 2020 I was doing two things. I was baking sourdough, and I was grinding my axe against the idea that industry is hard to decarbonize. When I was at ARPA-E, which was about a decade ago now, I was working in manufacturing efficiency. We didn’t even have the term industrial decarbonization yet. We were focusing on how do we improve efficiency across traditional processes in the industrial facility. At that time, people started to really imagine, “What does it take to go after industry as this last third of climate solutions?”
It gets people thinking about, as you noted already, steel, cement, refining, chemicals, some of these major verticals where you can imagine the necessity to reinvent processes. However, that left me unsatisfied because as you started to look beyond that into food and beverage, into pharmaceuticals, into other materials, you can’t start to imagine being able to find a way to reinvent every single synthesis process in a vertical way.
Once we started to carve and slice the data — and that led to that Joule article that you referenced that I published with my former ARPA-E colleague Greg Thiel, who now leads technology diligence at Energy Impact Partners — we saw that industrial heat, as you noted, is 3/4 of industrial emissions. When you start to slice that a little deeper, you start to see that it’s a question of the scale of what you need to solve. Not everything is as big as a refinery. Not everything’s a 100 megawatt plus installation. It’s the question of the temperature ranges, which you’ve started to explore on this show already.
One of our core insights at that time was it’s also a function of the working fluid by which that heat is delivered — flue gas coming off of combustion, hot air for drying. But the centrality of steam is really what I saw as the kernel of an opportunity to go after the boiler. Half of all industrial heat is steam. That’s really led me to go from this concept of, “Here’s a broader R&D roadmap that we published for the world to start to grapple with industrial heat as an opportunity,” to, “Well, crap, I have an idea, and I might need to quit my job and start a company.”
David Roberts
Low temperature is a different challenge than high temperature in a lot of ways. One of the ways is high temperature are these big giant industries, which means that they can potentially at least grapple with giant solutions. There is a lot of money floating around. Any given steel maker is relatively wealthy and has a lot of money to invest in technology. But these low temperature processes, as you note, just scale in a different way. It’s scale in being a lot of little things, a bunch of little things. No paper manufacturer or whatever has a ton of money to do R&D.
This is a weird different kind of scale. It’s ubiquitous small things rather than a few big things you are going after, which is a different kind of challenge. In a lot of ways, I feel almost more difficult because each one of these industries to some extent has its own internal dynamics and there are dozens and dozens of them.
Addison Stark
Picking up on your train of thought there. One of the core insights that led to what we’re doing here at AtmosZero — focusing on the boiler itself — is recognition that in 1867, Babcock and Wilcox did something fundamental. They productized the boiler. They went from stick-built, brick-by-brick built boilers being built in the early industrial facilities of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and then started to build it in a factory and built factory-built standardized boilers that really catalyzed the growth of the Industrial Revolution. What happened then was steam heat became ubiquitous not just for heat application, but also for motive power in industrial facilities.
What has occurred then over the past 160 years is that every other unit operation in the industrial and manufacturing facility has been designed around the availability and ubiquity of centralized steam production. The way we think about that is yes, when you look at all these other smaller manufacturing facilities, distributed light and medium duty industry is the way that I think about it, they still have something in common, which is a centralized boiler room that each of them use built around a common product.
That’s where we really started to see the productization of an electrified solution, of a heat pump solution, could be the thing to help unlock this in a common way that is ubiquitous across all these industries. If you walk into a brewery or you walk into a pharmaceutical facility, or you walk into a paper mill, you’re going to see the same boiler manufacturer’s boilers on site.
David Roberts
It’s just worth emphasizing that you are describing why it’s difficult to uproot this. Because it’s had over a century of scale and modularization and standardization and bringing all the costs down. This is as standardized and modularized and off the shelf a product as exists anywhere. That is precisely why it’s difficult to get rid of them, because they’re cheap and easy and standard now for everyone.
Addison Stark
Yeah. I think that’s why we’ve seen so far in the market that the thing that has gained market traction, ironically, is straight-up resistive or electrode boilers, which have been growing year over year in the mid-teens, 15 to 16% year-over-year growth, because they are productized and easy to integrate in a CapEx-efficient way. However, there is that ongoing OpEx challenge in electrification with direct resistive solutions. But it does point us to what we really need to be thinking about in terms of steam — you do need to replace the boiler and it needs to operate in the same way that these facilities have always wanted. It would be very difficult to go in and try and replace the heat on a unit operation by unit operation basis because it removes the central operating and control paradigm of all manufacturing facilities.
David Roberts
You’re not going to redesign all these processes. The only other option is to focus on the boiler. We’ve established that boilers are very productized, very standard, and extremely ubiquitous — more so than I think people really appreciate. These things are all over the place. When we talk about trying to decarbonize them, electrify them, before we get to your solution, let’s talk about the two alternatives that have been around for a while and fighting for market share and not really getting much of it. The two other electric alternatives. One is the one you just raised, which is just an old-fashioned electric resistance boiler, which I assume from the term electric resistance we’re just talking about a toaster — heating up coils with electricity that then heat up water. Is that what an electric resistance boiler is?
Addison Stark
Yeah, I would think it’s analogous to your hot water heater at home, if you’re running an electric one or an electric tea kettle, that you have a direct resistive element in contact with water or in terms of an electrode boiler, where the resistance through the water of an electric current is what directly heats it. In both ways, what we’re talking about here is one unit of electricity and one unit of steam out. You’re really focusing on turning electrical energy into thermal energy.
David Roberts
That’s one alternative to the standard boiler. The other alternative to the standard boiler is a heat pump, but it is a heat pump that attempts to make use of the waste heat produced by the manufacturing process itself to run the heat pump. I want to address both those and why you think ultimately they’re not going to be sufficient. The electric resistance boiler has the advantage of being productized and standardized and can just sub directly out. What is the drawback then with an electric resistive boiler?
Addison Stark
The drawback there is on the ongoing fuel economics. When you look at the levelized cost of steam, the LCOS, in general what you’re going to see is with a resistive unit, the CapEx over a 20-year lifetime or something like that is going to be small, it’s going to be in the single digits of percentage, but your fuel costs are going to be tremendous. 80 to 90% of the total levelized cost is going to be driven by the electricity price that you’re paying to be able to generate that heat. Traditionally, the manufacturers are operating with low-cost natural gas that’s being delivered directly to their facility. You run into essentially a spark spread issue there — the spark gap.
David Roberts
Just for every listener. This is a great term for everybody to know — the spark gap, which is the gap between natural gas and electricity prices for electricity.
Addison Stark
It’s unique in the industrial setting. Industrial electricity and gas tariffs are usually defined differently than what you might see at your home. It is a difficult thing to bridge. However, the one thing that technology — the resistive or E boiler technology — has going for it is that it is very low CapEx, very easy to install, and operationally simple.
David Roberts
You can sub that out relatively quickly, straightforwardly. It’s not going to mess with your operations, it’s not going to pause your operations or anything. But you’re going to be paying more on an ongoing basis for electricity than you would have been for the natural gas, mainly because these things use tons of electricity. They’re very power-intensive.
Let’s talk about the other alternative then, which is what if we built a heat pump? Every manufacturing process, as listeners know, generates waste heat. Almost any process generates waste heat. The thought here is, what if you could capture the waste heat and use that to power your heat pump? Then your fuel’s free in theory. Why not do that? You wrote another paper in Joule just last year slandering the name of waste heat in this context, to great outrage among an extremely tiny group of people. Explain to us then, what are the drawbacks of the heat pump powered by waste heat in this setting?
Addison Stark
Yes, I’ve been known to be called a heretic. I have openly and loudly at times claimed that waste heat is a waste of time.
David Roberts
Can I ask you, do you think that’s true just in this specific application, or do you think that’s more general — was your argument more across the board?
Addison Stark
Obviously it’s really hard to have a generality done in seven words or five words. What I think of is generally it’s very difficult to extract value from waste heat at temperatures below 100 Celsius for application in either upgrading through an industrial heat pump or capture and reutilization to generate power. I think that there are certain temperature ranges that it gets down into the second law of thermodynamics. I think that it gets down to, most importantly, the economics of returning capital for these kinds of installations, which are necessarily bespoke. Ultimately, it’s an economic challenge.
David Roberts
The key thing, and this is really the central insight, one of the things that was exciting me as I was reading about this is that we’ve, on Volts, covered learning curves, we’ve talked to people about learning curves, and we’ve talked a lot about what kinds of technologies get on learning curves.
Among other things, it all comes back to this: Is it standardized, productized, built in a factory, modular, the same every time — versus these waste heat recovery projects, which almost by definition are different every time, very bespoke to the facility.
Addison Stark
That gets back to another point where I would put some context or limits on my statement. For large-scale installations — think about 100 megawatt plus refineries, where project finance and optimization across the entire plant is very common — that’s a place for waste heat integration. Makes a lot of sense where you can look at a longer time horizon. You have big sources of it.
But when you’re talking about the small, light, and medium duty manufacturer, and I think one of the core things is most manufacturing facilities have thermal loads below 10 megawatts. That’s where if you’re running bespoke engineering projects, it doesn’t scale down in cost to be able to do all the engineering hours necessary. It just becomes harder to return that.
In the paper that you’re referring to, where I did qualify my statement to “waste heat is mostly a waste of time,” I wanted to point out that what really matters is the incremental value of that waste heat. As you look at the payback period versus a resistive boiler of an air source heat pump that’s been standardized and using ambient air to be able to source heat. Our efficiency is necessarily lower than what a waste heat driven one would be.
David Roberts
Let me emphasize that quickly because that is the question I want you to answer. The disadvantage, as we say, of the waste heat capture is this bespoke engineering often for relatively small amounts of payback. But the heat you are thereby capturing is already relatively hot and thus the work you have to do to upheat it is lower. Your advantage with just the ambient air source heat pump is it’s real easy to find ambient air and it’s a standardized technology, but you’re starting with room temperature air and you have to heat the air up much more. I’d love to hear about that trade-off.
Addison Stark
Exactly. I think the core question then for an end user is by doing a waste heat capture project, does that incremental increase in CapEx get paid back fast enough by your incremental decrease in OpEx? What we have found is, relatively speaking, no. That’s because the sensitivity to the value of the energy in the waste heat is relatively low and the OpEx savings don’t hit the hurdle rates that most industrial customers would think of wanting to achieve — sub five-year payback periods for doing that. Ultimately, that’s the finding.
For us, it brings us back to the question of what is expected of a boiler in an industrial facility anyway. There are additional complexities introduced when you introduce a waste heat capture project — you create circular control dependencies within the facility and it can create other unanticipated challenges and more reasons for an end user to say “no.”
David Roberts
Isn’t one of the other points also that to do this kind of bespoke engineering requires shutting the process down for longer? It turns out those costs are a big chunk too.
Addison Stark
Lost revenue can be a big issue with any industrial facility upgrade. It’s something we’re highly sensitive to in making sure that we have a solution that can be integrated during scheduled downtimes or integrated in the same way that the commissioning of a new combustion boiler would be done. One of the things we were successful in doing in our pilot deployment last year is to be able to validate that we’re able to install and deploy with zero downtime of the facility.
Now, if you are going into a specific manufacturing train and capturing waste heat from a unit operation reactor itself, that oftentimes necessarily requires the integration of a new heat exchanger in the main fluid flow lines and increases the number of touch points into the manufacturing lines and increases the potential of multiple day downtimes, which is direct loss of revenue. That can be a big penalty against your overall return.
David Roberts
That’s the two that are common on the market now: electric resistive heaters, which are easy to buy and install but increase your OpEx generally too much, and waste heat capture-driven heat pumps, which have low fuel costs since you’re using captured heat, but high touch points and generally don’t pencil out.
This brings us to your third alternative, which is just an air source heat pump, which is very familiar to Volts listeners from the residential application that they are all very familiar with. Is this just a big air source heat pump? What is special about this that makes it useful specifically in industrial processes?
Addison Stark
That’s a great way to frame it. We took another approach too, and I think it’s just as worthwhile, based on the conversation we’ve had so far. We didn’t pre-select heat pump technology necessarily. What I looked at is we need to think about the most cost-effective way to replace the combustor inside of a boiler. The rest of the balance of plant of the boiler — having a pressure vessel, having a control that is integrated and controlled by the pressure of the steam header, that centralized distribution of steam throughout a manufacturing facility. That’s what manufacturers buy — a boiler. They’re not buying heat.
It was really thinking about what can cost-effectively provide both a minimized OpEx and a minimized CapEx solution. Or the way we think about it is minimizing the total cost of ownership of an electrified steam boiler over the planned 20-year life cycle. It turns out that a heat pump technology is necessary there. I think that’s why we’ve seen the industrial heat pump, while it still continues to be a nascent industry, 30 years in, is still something that, through what we believe productization, can enable a scaled and manufactured approach.
In order to replace a combustor and to be able to boil water and deliver it at pressures that are industrially relevant, it’s more than just what we see in our residential heat pump at home. I think in Celsius, so I’m going to use that here. Your heat pump at home, if you want to keep your indoor temperature, call it around 25 C room temperature. On average, your heat pump is probably reaching a peak temperature about 10, 15 degrees higher than that. Call it 40 Celsius is what your heat pump needs to be capable of delivering heat at. For industrial processes, it’s 100 degrees higher.
David Roberts
But also we should emphasize it’s the gap — the amount that a residential heat pump has to increase the temperature. If it’s bringing in air at 15 degrees and it has to put it out at 40 degrees, it has to raise the temperature of the air 25 degrees.
Addison Stark
We call that the lift.
David Roberts
Your unit has a much higher lift — same temperature of ambient air, but you have to raise the temperature of the air, as you say, by over 100 degrees. How do you do that?
Addison Stark
You’re exactly right. On the air side, design principle of what we do looks just like what’s done for air source heat pumps. There are ASHRAE standards that have been designed around projecting the annual average temperature, being able to plan for the low temperature in the winter and the high temperatures in the summer, and being able to have a system that can integrate through that. But it’s on the other side, the delivery of heat sufficient to be able to deliver 4 bar saturated steam or 153 Celsius, that requires more internal engineering than what you see in residential systems.
For us, that means a multi-stage heat pump solution. It means having refrigerants optimized for each of those stages, so different ones that are best suited for the certain temperature ranges we’re optimized in. Most importantly, it’s ultra high efficiency compressor technology, which is really our core differentiation as a company — we fully in-house designed our own compressor tech to be able to deliver this.
There are two reasons, and it’s not just about superpower. The first thing is to be able to achieve the lift — call it from the coldest day in the winter to steam temperatures. You need to be able to, if you want to maintain low OpEx cost, have very high efficiency of compression. In heat pump cycles, these are essentially your air conditioner in reverse. It’s a vapor compression cycle, meaning that you’re taking vapor, compressing it, and being able to run this thermodynamic cycle. In order to drive that compression stage, you need to use some sort of compressor technology.
David Roberts
I was going to ask about that. Can you explain to a technical dummy what the compressor is and what its function is in the air source heat pump and why you needed to build a super powered one?
Addison Stark
There are a lot of different kinds out there. You see compression in pistons and engines, screw and scroll in residential and large commercial applications, and then in automotive and other high-efficiency space applications, you see centrifugal compressors. That’s exactly where we’ve focused — the very high efficiency through high-speed rotating centrifugal machines. This enables us to deliver very high efficiencies, but also through our specific designs enables flexible operation.
Ultimately, we don’t want to look like what industrial heat pumps always have looked like. We want to look like a boiler. That means being able to offer turndown, being able to offer high fire, low fire settings, and being able to adapt to the outdoor temperature. One thing that is a different challenge for us than what home heat pumps have required is we need to operate on the hottest day of the year as well as the coldest day in the winter. Being able to go through multiple temperature regimes requires a lot of operational and controls flexibility in the system — someplace we’ve done a lot of focus to integrate.
David Roberts
Do you have a temperature range in which you are effective? Are there limits?
Addison Stark
For market, we’re able to operate from -10 to 40 Celsius. As we’re going to market with our next-gen product, we’re able to operate in an outdoor temperature range of negative 20 Celsius to 40 Celsius.
David Roberts
That pretty much covers everywhere.
Addison Stark
Yes.
David Roberts
Residential heat pump owners will be familiar with the fact that when the air is colder, because the heat pump has to lift the temperature more, the efficiency declines in cold weather. Listeners will be familiar with the term COP, the Coefficient of Performance, the efficiency rating for a heat pump. We know that residential heat pumps are kind of magic. They can get up to a COP of three or four or even five, which means they’re producing 500% more energy as heat than is going into them as electricity. Two questions: one, what is the COP of your machine in standard operating temperature range? How big is the penalty for cold weather?
Addison Stark
On the first question, our product’s long-term goal and our roadmap is to be able to offer something that is a COP 2. The best way to think about that is compared to a resistive boiler, we would be using half the electricity — one unit of electricity and two units of steam out. That’s for under certain assumptions around delivering 150 C from an ambient average year-round temperature of 15 Celsius, which is an ASHRAE standard for North America or for the continental US.
David Roberts
Can I ask why your COP is lower than a residential heat pump? Is it the size, the lift? Why is your COP a little lower than residential?
Addison Stark
It ultimately comes down to the lift. The COP scales as the source temperature divided by the lift. The lower the source temperature, the more the COP decreases; the higher the lift, the more it decreases by increasing the denominator. That ultimately dictates the theoretical maximum you can reach. Then it’s all about engineering to maximize that within constraints. One insight we’ve had is that while there is much concern around the challenge of cold temperatures for home heat pumps, we also operate in the summer. The very high temperature days make up for the decrease in COP in the cold parts of winter.
David Roberts
That’s boosting your yearly average basically.
Addison Stark
Exactly. There’s a lot of consideration about how we operate efficiently in cold temperatures. The core thing that manufacturing customers require is guaranteed uptime.
David Roberts
Before you leave COP behind, how low does the COP get in, say, negative 10, when it’s super cold? What’s the minimum COP?
Addison Stark
We generally see a fluctuation of our COP around our nominal design point of about plus or minus 20% depending on the time of year.
David Roberts
Let’s put aside for the moment OpEx — how much it costs to run the thing, the fuel costs, et cetera — just on a buying it off the shelf sticker price, the CapEx, how costly is your machine relative to a standard boiler?
Addison Stark
In industrial equipment there is generally no sticker price. There is a lot of consideration that goes into the landed CapEx — how much does this cost to install relative to other solutions. It is not best to think about that.
Once you look at a total landed solution, relative to a gas boiler or resistive boiler, we’re probably talking about a heat pump solution — like ours — or a waste heat solution. Just on the base equipment, it is going to be generally running around 3 to 5x increase relative to the traditional solution.
David Roberts
The idea here is you make it up on the OpEx, you make it up on savings over time.
Addison Stark
Make it up on OpEx and make it up on being able to have fuel flexibility integrated into a facility. Particularly if you have been running on gas traditionally and you have four or five boilers there, you replace one of them, you start to be able to do some fuel flexibility and create a hedge for the future and decrease your regulatory risk.
David Roberts
Since you bring it up, I wanted to ask about this. Another one of your competitors, or one of the other solutions in this space, uses the waste heat capture technique, but then just sells heat as a service to the facility. In other words, the company absorbs the CapEx and installation, etc. The idea is, “We’ll install this in your facility. When it is cheaper to run this than your existing boilers, we will run this and sell the heat to you. When it’s cheaper to use your gas boilers, you just switch over to the gas boilers.” That sort of heat as a service. What are your thoughts about that model?
Addison Stark
I think that there is a lot of opportunity for business model innovation. I agree that this is something that can work for certain sets of companies, particularly companies that have a history of operating in larger facilities and have bought steam across the fence from a cogen facility or something like that and have complex contracting mechanisms that they are used to.
I do see at the smaller and distributed application it is a little harder to envision for the brewery down the street or the laundry facility at the edge of town. These are not as sophisticated energy actors and they are used to buying and owning and operating their own asset in their own control loop, and adding an entity there can create some additional friction.
It’s not that we’re not going to consider that with the right ESCO or energy service company partners, but as a startup generally there are only one or two big risky bets you can take at a time. Doing a technology and product development plus a business model innovation was something that we didn’t see necessary for the boiler. We really wanted to make sure we were able to deliver a boiler in the traditional channels that people usually interact with.
David Roberts
This is a silly question, but just in terms of what it looks like, does it look like a boiler? Is it the same size? What does even a boiler look like? I’m groping in the dark here. Maybe you could describe what is the size and appearance of a normal boiler and does your machine look on the surface different than that? Is it a different size or shape or what are the physical qualities here?
Addison Stark
Sure. I think this speaks to a bigger point, David, which is a lot of us just don’t know what the heart of industrial manufacturing looks like.
David Roberts
Yes.
Addison Stark
Boilers generally look traditionally cylindrical. Usually the biggest thing that you see is it looks like a large oil drum-shaped thing. You have a combustor in there, but very thick walls for a pressure vessel. A lot of focus is on the heat exchanger where the flames contact on the other side of the wall, the water where it boils. This has all been highly packaged, very tight. It goes back to the traditional realization in most of energy that the power and energy density of a combustion-driven process can be very, very high. These things are really relatively compact.
Our form factor is different. We look a lot more like what is also an industrial equipment standard — the industrial chiller or refrigeration units. Think about delivering cold to a cold chain or delivering refrigeration to the freezer aisle in a grocery store. We have a large air-sourced heat exchanger. It looks just like anything you might see on the rooftop of a commercial building and then packaged directly with a more traditional packaging of what a refrigeration HVAC system looks like, coupled with one heat exchanger that is like the boiler itself.
Our form factor is a little larger than a traditional combustion boiler. We’ve made a lot of modular design considerations to be able to make our system ready to be deployed on a roof above the boiler room, or deployed outside and run in, or split into different subcomponents. We do see ultimately that it is just a different consideration than a traditional combustion boiler, but a lot more flexibility in how it’s deployed.
David Roberts
It’s possible at least that there are some places, really small operations, where there’s just a boiler tucked somewhere which you couldn’t just drop in just for sheer space considerations.
Addison Stark
Drop into the same location, but it could be dropped in on the roof above that boiler. That boiler could stay on site if it still has 5 years of lifetime left, keep it as N plus 1 redundancy, or be able to create these fuel flexibility opportunities for early adopter customers.
David Roberts
Just flat out, however industry thinks about price, total lifetime costs — you do say this in one of the documents you sent me, a pitch for this to the food and beverage business. You say flat out on a lifetime basis this is cheaper than a gas boiler. How confident are you in that? Is that true and is that true everywhere?
Addison Stark
It’s not true everywhere, but it’s true in an increasing number of geographies and particularly in the global market. When we think about what has occurred and what has shifted in global LNG markets recently, this has been and is now even more true in Europe, in East Asia, and all these other places.
Once you start to factor in other long-term considerations — if I’m a manufacturer right now and I need to replace a combustion boiler, a gas boiler, and I’m exposed to global-priced LNG, I’m going to be asking, “Does it make sense to invest in another 20-year asset here and put in some price assumptions out in the future years?”
That really means that the total cost of ownership of this thing could have some expensive implications, for example, if gas is just not available and then we have an asset that we can’t use anymore, makes it quite expensive.
David Roberts
But on the flip side, gas is super cheap in some parts of the US. In Texas, geopolitics would have to get real crazy for natural gas in Texas next to these fields to get expensive.
Addison Stark
Yes. There are some places where direct electrification is just not going to beat combustion without major policy shifts or focus on other regulatory forcing. Some of the things we see that are driving decision making in the US are not necessarily raw spark spread or total cost of ownership consideration, but other things — NOx limits, point air source considerations — that are going to start to get priced in in different ways.
You are correct. We’re in northern Colorado as a company and within one mile of our facility is oil pumps and gas infrastructure, and it’s a very cheap source for the US. When we think in the global perspective where most manufacturing expansion is not necessarily happening here in the US, they are building out steam systems in places where those considerations are different, the spark spread is different, and therefore TCO calculus is much more attractive for a low-cost electrified solution.
David Roberts
Just in terms of the business plan and your pitch to investors, how nervous are you or how much of a risk is it? How policy dependent are you? As you say, air quality regulations can be a boost to you, carbon regulations can be a boost. Being in Europe and having your natural gas supply controlled by competing lunatics is a huge incentive, obviously. Do you view policy dependence as a risk?
Addison Stark
Here’s how I’ve thought about it. For a long time, industrial heat electrification has been framed as a climate problem. Of course it is. What’s changed over the last few years is that electrification now stands on its own as an economic and risk management decision. In 2022, we learned a hard lesson with the invasion of Ukraine. Global gas markets are more fragile, I think, than anyone assumed before that. What we’re seeing right now is the fact that LNG markets are totally shown to be entirely a tight system with no slack.
When I think about what’s going to happen next, we see that there’s a structural change in supply in the global gas market, which is different than the US one. Prices are not going to clear the market if there’s a very cold winter next year. European governments are going to start to decide whether residential heating or grid stability comes first and then they’re going to curtail industrial manufacturing. That’s essentially a continuity risk.
When I think about what we do, we don’t think of ourselves predominantly as climate tech. We’ve always thought about the value proposition in electrification as electrification, period. We want to be able to focus on a cost-effective and resilient solution no matter which way policy swings. Focusing on resilience right now is a winning narrative. Focusing on something that allows for diversification of manufacturing source is going to be critical for manufacturers. The raw economic competitiveness in West Texas might be the last place that AtmosZero wins.
David Roberts
That’s the highest bar for you.
Addison Stark
There are a lot of places that are certainly — we’re seeing that demand is going to outstrip our capacity to scale up and deliver given these new market realities.
David Roberts
You think you got plenty of runway just with the current trends? Before we move on from the physical thing, I meant to ask this also. Which is louder, your boiler or a gas boiler? Because these compressors, as anyone who has a heat pump knows, it’s the compressors that make the noise. Some of these residential heat pumps are quite loud. There are some complaints about that. I’m just curious if noise has entered your calculations at all.
Addison Stark
This is a consideration, of course. We focus on being able to design for decibel levels necessary for permitting and siting in any industrial facility. We take guidelines from the consideration of how industrial chilling is done. The loudest thing you’ll hear would be the fans that move the air through. Essentially, we need to move a lot of air to source the heat. Those are sounds that are common in industrial cooling and other things that we fit into the normal industrial soundscape and have abilities to insulate and limit the amount of noise coming from things like the compressors themselves.
David Roberts
Let’s talk about where you are right now, or at least as of last year when all these articles about your company came out. You have one full-fledged customer — the New Belgium Brewery, beloved of beer lovers across the country. Also located in Colorado near you, the New Belgium Brewery bought one of your units and it is now producing one third of the steam for the brewery. Where else are you currently and what is the roadmap?
Addison Stark
We’ve done a pilot deployment with New Belgium. We think of that as our first commercial demonstration and we’ve been able to go in and validate operation in an industrial facility and did a tremendous amount of learnings along the way of how do we truly make sure we operate in the loop — be controlled by their facility, not have us controlling it on the side — and making sure that this is really a product integrated into a real environment.
The way that I like to think about it on top of things is we’ve gone from zero to one as a company, from concept to a real deployment in the field and are now prepared for that one to a thousand journey. How I think about that as somebody who’s been in and around hardware commercialization for most of my career is it doesn’t all happen overnight. We need to focus on that 1 to 10, 10 to 100, 100 to 1000 in stages. Each of those scale-up stages is a challenge for hardware manufacturing.
What we’re focused on right now is structuring the commercial partners necessary to be able to move into volume. What we’ve done recently is started to focus on going to market the way the boilers have always gone to market. That’s through boiler reps, it’s through regional service and boiler companies.
For example, earlier this year we partnered with R.F. MacDonald, which is the largest boiler rep in the California market. We have deep working experience with their customers and understand a very complex market in California where regulation is driving in different ways. Similarly, for broader global channel entry is how we’re focused on this.
David Roberts
Do you find that the brokers are genuinely tech agnostic? Generally, you get tangled up in business models when you’re in those roles and you get financial relationships with certain companies. Are they genuinely agnostic?
Addison Stark
Different reps operate differently. One thing we certainly see is there’s an appetite in the boiler market right now for a cost-effective electrified solution. Many players in the market, and a lot of credit to our friends at R.F. MacDonald as first movers here, recognize that the writing is on the wall — needing to be able to offer an electrified solution to stay relevant in certain markets.
I think there’s an existential challenge for manufacturers in California right now. Given the need to move towards zero-emission point source means they need a cost-effective electrified solution. Otherwise, it might just make more sense to move the food processing across the border into Nevada. There’s a lot of these things that are driving sophisticated market players — like the reps in these certain markets — recognizing that electrification is necessary for them to stay relevant too.
David Roberts
What’s your manufacturing situation like? Presumably you have some sort of cap on how much you can crank out at the moment. Are you cranking out your max? Do you have your eye on building factories?
Addison Stark
We’ve established manufacturing here in Loveland, Colorado, which is about an hour north of Denver. We are currently about at capacity on what we are able to build and ship. However, we have the opportunity where we are to continue to expand our footprint and invest in our manufacturing capacity here. It goes back to how I framed it out before, which is we are focused on that 1 to 10 scale-up this year. Being able to get to that ability to ship 10 units.
David Roberts
Is Colorado helping you? Colorado is a very climate-forward, progressive — I assume they’re happy to have you. Are you getting help from the Colorado government?
Addison Stark
We chose Colorado at the very beginning and a lot of it has to do with my co-founder, who is a professor at CSU. He is somebody who I funded when I was at ARPA-E a long time ago on a different project. I saw his capability and his lab to be able to start and move quickly made a lot of sense. It was a little bit of a homecoming for me to a university where kids come here and their first car was a tractor. They learned to weld when they were 10. The ability to really draw from the trades in a rural community was great. The state of Colorado is an incredible place to build hardware.
We have also found that the governor’s office and the Department of Energy here, the Colorado Energy Office, are very interested in being able to be long-term partners of companies that are building here. Not just to build here and ship here, but to build and deploy here. There are different ways that we’re working with them to identify opportunities to help Colorado manufacturers as well. It’s a good home for innovation in industrial hardware.
David Roberts
Interesting. You’re working on that one to 10 right now. That’s the stage you’re on. You’re in a first round of customers.
Addison Stark
That’s exactly right. Being able to iterate continued learning in different environments to make sure that we continue to focus on a spec that is maximally applicable in the same way that combustion boilers always have been. Making sure that we’re learning the right lessons as we deploy these next waves and then focusing on continuing to step up in volume until we ultimately hit where the long-term goal is of having a ubiquitous product in the same way that you wouldn’t buy a combustion boiler today.
David Roberts
A question about that. As you say, part of the philosophy here is modularization. Anybody these days who wants their product to get cheaper is pushing in some way or another for that, trying to make it modular, factory-built.
On the technology itself, just on a purely technological basis, are there particular areas you are focusing on for development? Can the compressor get better? Does the heat exchanger get better? A lot of heat pump technology is pretty well developed already. I’m curious where you see room for technological improvement.
Addison Stark
When we think about technological improvement, it’s always in service of how can we make this look more like a combustion boiler — as in how does it operate more and more in the same way. The core areas that we focus on therefore are, number one, expanding the temperature range that we can deliver. Continuing to walk up past 200 Celsius is an important thing to be able to cover more types of facilities.
David Roberts
Is that mostly the compressor, or other pieces there?
Addison Stark
It’s the compressor. There are some other system-level considerations of how to expand the temperature that’s delivered based on what the refrigerants can capably do. We have a few things we’re working on there. The core thing there is what we focus on to be able to increase temperature range helps to expand meaningfully, drop-in applicability.
The other item, and I think is one of those things that we’ve gotten a lot of insight from customers recently during our focus on what does it mean to be able to drop in and replace in a lot of different applications, is turndown — the ability to turn this thing down to 30% of output.
David Roberts
Let’s grapple with this because this is a technical concept, but it’s really at the core of your value proposition. As I understand it, the basic issue here is that these manufacturing processes are not like a data center where you’re just max power all day long, same level — they go up and down, they vary up and down. You need a boiler — a boiler is capable of turning down. Thus the term turndown, as the process turns down, basically can move up and down quickly. Heat pumps, I think, traditionally have struggled with that. Talk a little bit about why turndown is important and how you’re doing it.
Addison Stark
Traditionally, industrial heat pumps have struggled with this for a couple of reasons. Number one is you don’t have enough capability within the system to enable turndown or to ramp to different levels. A lot of that is ultimately defined by the fact that you are dependent on waste heat. You have a minimum that you can go down to. Otherwise what can occur is you decrease taking that waste heat from that process you’ve plugged into. Your waste heat heat pump is serving as a cooling load for a process that, if you stop cooling that process, it could be really detrimental to your process.
David Roberts
The waste heat will just build up then if you’re not using it?
Addison Stark
That’s exactly right. You are forced into a steady state operation. We have recognized that with our ability to be decoupled from the system, we can focus on offering this as a key differentiation of our heat pump boiler technology. By focusing on this, when you look and spec out a combustion boiler, you often find that solutions are available in a high fire, low fire scenario, meaning that you can be giving 100% out or 70% out or maybe 50% out or whatever.
Similarly, we’re focused on being able to do that because if you’re in a manufacturing facility, the boiler room is like the grid where you have a mix of baseload boiler, you have some load following, and then you have some peakers. When you look at actual operational profiles in boiler rooms, you can’t just assume you’re going to be able to fully deliver it all in a steady state operation. Being able to ramp up and ramp down is better than turning on and turning off just for operational efficiency and for overall durability of systems. That’s a core thing that we’ve developed and we’re offering in the market right now.
David Roberts
As I understand it, traditional heat pumps can turn down to 70% and you can turn all the way down to 30%. Is that roughly — but 30% is your floor. What I’m trying to get at is, is it possible to eliminate natural gas boilers and fully electrify a facility with these things or is there some minimum that you can’t fully sweep up?
Addison Stark
When I think about the boiler room, there are a couple of different places that my mind goes to. Number one is I don’t think we’ll see in the near term a lot of full boiler room electrifications just because there is also the ability to have fuel switching to gas as a strong economic incentive for a lot of manufacturers. If you’re doing some cost-effective electrification plus some gas, you can avoid peak pricing. There is a lot of opportunity there. That points to hybrid deployments continuing to be an important thing whether you’re using natural gas or if you’re using RNG, or if you’re looking at a full electrified solution where you’re using a heat pump plus some sort of a resistive or E boiler where you’re willing to take that efficiency hit, use a resistive solution to be able to deliver those very, very short transient peaks that are necessary sometimes. That is a way where you can imagine hybrid deployments being done to do that.
The other opportunity is the integration of storage. At AtmosZero, me, as somebody who has thought about industrial heat for a long time, I do see heat pumps and thermal storage being very part and parcel in how there are going to be hybrid solutions deployed in the long term. We do think of these as complementary, particularly at larger scale applications. There are a lot of different ways we can think about squaring that circle. I do think it really has to do with hybridization with gas, hybridization with resistive, and integration of storage allows that last 30% of turndown to be solved.
David Roberts
But full electrification in theory is possible. Technologically you could do it if you were willing to spend the money now, with a combination of heat pumps and electric resistance boilers.
Addison Stark
Yes.
David Roberts
But the use of natural gas, just for optionality, is probably going to save most people money for a while. Do you think hybrid is going to be the standard for a while?
Addison Stark
I believe that’s correct, yes.
David Roberts
Forward looking. What is your biggest fear here? What is your biggest challenge? I guess it’s silly to ask that to a hardware company because hardware just is a challenge. But specifically, what is it you are most nervous about going forward?
Addison Stark
You’re right. Hardware is hard and there are a lot of different ways that there are going to be challenges at every stage of scale-up. What we see right now in the market is this fundamental shift in the global gas market. I don’t think it’s been fully internalized across manufacturers around the world, but as they do internalize it, my core challenge in my head right now is how do we scale fast enough? How do we deal with making sure that we’re delivering something truly reliable, dependable, operates as close to the boilers that a customer would expect to receive if they had put in an order for another combustion boiler? Being able to do that in a timeframe that’s relevant to this problem.
I think it is one of those things that a lot of electrification companies, or particularly industrial heat companies, should be thinking about right now. I think the ability to scale quickly to solve this is certainly keeping me up at night. It is definitely a good problem, but it is a hard problem.
David Roberts
I saw you got investment from Mitsubishi recently. That seems like a nice validation. I’m sure that’s helpful.
Addison Stark
Validation is nice, but it is the global reach of a major OEM player who we really see has a pulse on the industrial equipment market, understands what we are doing, and is aligned with our long-term productization vision. It is something we are really excited about and glad to be working with them for sure.
David Roberts
The flip side then, what is your greatest hope? Could you envision a time when you can confidently go anywhere in the country and say this is cheaper on a lifetime basis, or do you think it’s not necessary to get there? Is that your goal? Is that your dream? What’s your dream?
Addison Stark
Certainly, and to reframe your question slightly, I don’t see being able to go anywhere in the continental US and directly compete with natural gas anytime soon on electrification. That is very hard to do. The US is an anomaly.
David Roberts
Yes.
Addison Stark
What I think about is the world has an acute need right now that needs to be solved and has fundamentally global economics tied to natural gas. The marginal price is currently being set by the Strait of Hormuz being closed and the Qatari LNG export being bombed. I know that for the next few years most places we go in the world are going to see an economic opportunity in electrification. I think from a broader climate and electrification long-term arc that this is going to be a really formative and important next five years.
David Roberts
It’s hard to envision global natural gas markets getting calm and stable in the next 10 years. We’ve shown anything can happen, but it doesn’t seem like that’s how things are going.
Addison Stark
What I’m really seeing is that in the next couple of years industrial electrification is going to be moving from the chief sustainability officer to the chief supply chain officer. This is a core question shifting from “How much carbon can we save?” to “Will my plant be allowed to run?”
I think that’s where we get to solve both problems at once. We must solve them because one is existential to the corporate decision-making structure.
David Roberts
Well said. Thank you, Addison Stark, for coming on, walking us through this. Super fascinating stuff.
Addison Stark
I had a great time. Thank you.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. It is all supported entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf, leaving a nice review, telling a friend about Volts, or all three.
In our most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), we forecast that annual electric power generation from utility-scale solar will surpass that from coal for the first time in 2026 within the electricity grid that covers most of Texas. Solar generation is expected to reach 78 billion kilowatthours (BkWh) in 2026 in the electricity grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) compared with 60 BkWh for coal.
Scientists analyzing the genomes of thousands of people across Japan discovered evidence for a previously overlooked third ancestral group, challenging the long-accepted “dual origins” theory. The newly identified ancestry appears linked to the ancient Emishi people of northeastern Japan. Researchers also uncovered inherited Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA connected to conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
Researchers in Japan traced a hidden medieval solar storm using ancient tree rings and centuries-old sky observations. The team linked reports of eerie red auroras with spikes of carbon-14 trapped in buried wood, revealing a powerful solar radiation event around 1200 CE. The findings suggest the Sun was far more active at the time, with unusually short solar cycles.
Scientists have finally cracked the mystery behind one of climate change’s strangest fingerprints: while Earth’s surface heats up, the upper atmosphere is rapidly cooling. Researchers at Columbia University discovered that carbon dioxide acts very differently high above the planet, where it actually helps radiate heat into space instead of trapping it. The team found that certain infrared wavelengths fall into a “Goldilocks zone” that becomes increasingly effective as CO2 levels rise, accelerating cooling in the stratosphere.
Scientists have uncovered a hidden mathematical secret inside the leaves of the Chinese money plant: a naturally occurring geometric pattern known as a Voronoi diagram, something typically associated with city planning, computer science, and network design. By mapping tiny pores and looping veins in the plant’s leaves, researchers discovered that the plant organizes itself using the same kind of elegant spatial logic humans use to solve complex distance problems — without ever “measuring” anything.
Earth is quietly collecting radioactive debris from an ancient stellar explosion as our Solar System drifts through a giant cloud of gas and dust between the stars. Scientists analyzing Antarctic ice up to 80,000 years old discovered traces of iron-60 — a rare isotope forged in supernova explosions — and found evidence that this “cosmic ash” has been lingering inside the Local Interstellar Cloud for ages. The discovery suggests the cloud surrounding our Solar System was shaped by a long-ago exploding star, offering researchers a new way to study our galactic neighborhood.
Scientists in Japan have developed a new way to instantly detect elusive quantum “W states,” a major milestone for quantum technology. The breakthrough could help unlock faster quantum communication, teleportation, and powerful new computing systems.
A new quantum-inspired algorithm has cracked a problem so massive that conventional supercomputers struggle to even approach it. Researchers used the method to simulate extraordinarily complex quantum materials known as quasicrystals, opening the door to powerful new quantum devices and ultra-efficient electronics. The work could help scientists design advanced topological qubits and materials for future quantum computers.
Researchers have uncovered unexpectedly high levels of silicone-based pollutants called methylsiloxanes floating through the atmosphere across cities, rural regions, and even forests. Much of the pollution appears to come from vehicle emissions, likely linked to engine oil additives that survive combustion and escape into the air. Scientists say humans may inhale more of these compounds daily than other notorious pollutants like PFAS or microplastics.
A huge long-term study found that drinking two to three cups of coffee a day was linked to a much lower risk of dementia, especially before age 75. Researchers say caffeine may help keep brain cells active while reducing inflammation and harmful plaque buildup associated with Alzheimer’s disease. But more coffee wasn’t better — the protective effect appeared to level off after moderate intake.
Cacti may look like slow, stubborn desert survivors, but they’re actually evolving at lightning speed. Scientists studying more than 750 cactus species discovered that what really drives the explosion of new cactus species isn’t flower size or specialized pollinators, but how quickly cactus flowers change shape over time. The finding overturns a long-standing idea dating back to Darwin and reveals deserts as surprisingly dynamic ecosystems where evolution is happening fast.
A remote island between Australia and Antarctica is showing signs of a dramatic climate transformation. Scientists found storms over Macquarie Island now unleash much heavier rainfall than they did decades ago, soaking ecosystems and altering fragile vegetation. The discovery hints that the Southern Ocean — one of Earth’s biggest climate regulators — may be changing faster than expected. Researchers say the ocean could now be cooling itself by “sweating” more moisture into the atmosphere.
The little pauses, “ums,” and moments when you struggle to find the right word may reveal far more about your brain than anyone realized. Researchers discovered that everyday speech patterns are closely tied to executive function — the mental system that powers memory, planning, focus, and flexible thinking. By using AI to analyze natural conversations, the team found they could predict cognitive performance with surprising accuracy, potentially opening the door to simple speech-based tools that could detect early signs of dementia long before traditional testing does.
A medieval monk may have beaten Edmond Halley to one of astronomy’s greatest discoveries by nearly 700 years. Researchers say Eilmer of Malmesbury recognized that the blazing comet seen in 1066 was the same one he had witnessed in 989. At the time, comets were viewed as terrifying omens tied to war and royal deaths, adding even more drama to the famous celestial event shown in the Bayeux Tapestry. The discovery is sparking debate over whether Halley’s Comet deserves a different name.
UC Davis researchers created brand-new psychedelic-like compounds by shining UV light on amino acid-based molecules. These compounds activated key serotonin receptors tied to brain plasticity and mental health benefits, but surprisingly did not cause hallucination-like behavior in animal tests. Scientists say the discovery could lead to future treatments for depression, PTSD, and addiction without the intense psychedelic experience.
Humans may have returned to Britain far earlier than scientists once believed — not long after the last ice sheet began retreating. New evidence suggests people were already moving into the British Isles around 15,200 years ago, tracking herds of reindeer and horses across a landscape that was suddenly becoming warmer and greener.
Login
