Driving home from work one day in the early 2000s, Jennifer Wilcox heard an NPR segment that sparked a still-ongoing quest to scrub carbon from the atmosphere.

At the time...Wilcox, a chemical engineer, was researching how to mitigate mercury emissions from coal power plants. But after listening to an interview with MIT professor Howard Herzog about point-source capture, she decided to shift her focus.

“Mercury is a hard problem. It’s important,” she told Emerging Tech Brew. “But I was left being like, ‘I should take everything—all my tools, my entire skill set—and refocus on carbon.’”

Wilcox went on to write the first textbook about carbon capture in 2012—a time when she says chemical engineers were just beginning to establish that carbon removal would be technically feasible.

• Her research contributed to the technology behind Heirloom Carbon, a direct air capture (DAC) startup that’s raised $54 million since its founding in 2020.

Now she works at the US Department of Energy as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM), co-leading the many teams within the office. FECM invests in emerging tech meant to minimize the environmental and climate impacts of US dependence on fossil fuels.

Here’s what Wilcox thinks about the present and future of carbon capture and removal.—GD

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is often called a “time machine.”

On Tuesday, the $10 billion telescope earned that nickname after NASA released five images of the universe as it appeared ~13.5 billion years ago—or 300 million years after the Big Bang. The pictures deliver the deepest, sharpest, and most telling look yet into how galaxies merge, where stars are formed, the composition of space objects, and much more.

Compare and contrast: The Webb is 100 times faster and more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—and that’s because of tech advancements over the past three decades, Stefanie Milam, a deputy project scientist for planetary science on the James Webb Space Telescope team, told us.

• Hubble was primarily a visible-light telescope, whereas Webb uses infrared spectrometers and cameras, plus large mirrors, allowing it to deliver higher-resolution images than ever before.
• The telescope’s multi-shutter array allows it to collect information on up to 100 different galaxies at once, compared to Hubble’s one-at-a-time operation.

Take a tour through the first five photos with a James Webb scientist as your guide.—HF

The numbers are in, and in Q2, global venture funding did indeed take a big hit.

VCs dished out $120 billion in the time period, per Crunchbase—down 26% from the previous quarter, and 27% year over year.

Grain of salt time: That’s a big slowdown, but the funding amount is still 20+% more than any quarter in 2020 or 2019. On top of that, there’s a ton of dry powder left for venture investors to dip into: US VCs alone have raised nearly $122 billion so far this year, per Pitchbook, a staggering amount given that they raised a total of ~$139 billion across all of last year.

• Even Sequoia, which was among the first VCs to warn of trying times ahead, is reportedly raising two brand-new funds totaling up to $2.25 billion.

This isn’t to say that the pullback isn’t real or without consequences. Some high-flying startups, like Klarna, have raised down rounds (aka rounds at lower valuations than they once had), and some experts expect we’ll see more in the coming months.

Late-stage companies, which make up a majority of VC investment dollars, are feeling the burn the most, with a 30% decline in VC dollars compared to the same quarter last year. Early-stage companies are comparatively better off, but still down 17% year over year.

• Seed-stage companies, on the other hand, are still in 2021 mode: In Q2, they grew investment 9% year over year, to $9.1 billion.

Looking ahead…Venture funding is likely to continue trending down in the immediate months and quarters, and investors will probably continue pressuring their portfolio companies to prioritize profitability over growth. But there’s still a lot of capital sloshing around.

Read on-site.—DM

Stat: Hugging Face released Bloom, an open-access large language model that supports 46 human languages and 13 programming languages.

Quote: “Whatever the audience decides, that is the canon.”—Shawn Kittelsen, VP of creative development at Walking Dead parent Skybound, during a demo of a Walking Dead massively interactive live event, or MILE

Read: We may be getting closer to EV batteries that can charge in minutes.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• A satellite imagery startup was caught faking its pictures using Dall-E 2.
• A cultivated-meat startup wants to…invent brand new forms of meat?
• BMW is selling heated car seats on a subscription basis.
• Amazon is helping develop “personalized” cancer vaccines.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• This startup wants to invent brand new forms of meat
• Inside indoor-farming giant, Bowery Farming
• US green hydrogen production, storage gets boost