When Alisa Gusterer tells farmers that her company’s technology can flag that their cows are getting sick before it actually happens, the most common response is happy disbelief.

But it’s not fortune-telling—it’s just science, with some help from artificial intelligence.

SmaXtec, an agtech company that offers livestock monitoring services, rolled out a new AI-based disease-detection capability in October that applies data analysis to determine which cows will develop illnesses like mastitis days before they’d show clinical signs.

“They keep saying, ‘I didn’t think that this was possible that a computer could tell me that my cow got sick before I could,’” Gusterer said of the customer response.

The enhanced disease-detection capabilities, coupled with SmaXtec’s real-time monitoring system that tracks indicators of a herd’s health and wellness, all go toward promoting a better dairy operation.

“This technology really provides that win-win-win situation, you know, where that intersection of sustainability, animal welfare, and profitability come in,” Gusterer told us. “Those don’t have to be opposing forces.”

Keep reading here.—KG

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Battery chemistry breakthroughs are charging the US EV industry’s drive to cut costs and deliver plug-in cars with longer ranges and more affordable price tags.

First, some battery basics. Lithium-ion batteries contain two electrodes: cathodes (the positive electrodes) and anodes (the negative electrodes). Electricity is generated by the movement of electrons between the two. Many of the breakthroughs up to now have been on the cathode side, but anodes are increasingly becoming the site of new innovations.

Among the emerging developments are lithium-silicon batteries, which replace graphite, the dominant anode material used in EV batteries today, with silicon.

One of the companies at the cutting edge of this tech is Sila Nanotechnologies, an Alameda, California-based battery materials company founded in 2011. Its goal is to supply silicon anodes for millions of EV batteries in the coming years. It took strides toward achieving that when it broke ground in November on a new plant in Moses Lake, Washington, that will produce Sila’s Titan Silicon anode for Mercedes-Benz and other automotive customers starting in 2025.

Sila says its silicon-based anode delivers 20% higher energy density than the best batteries on the market today. Eventually, it aims to deliver a 40% improvement. These advances are aimed at boosting the range of EVs and reducing charging times. They can also drive cost reductions, as higher energy density enables battery makers to use fewer battery cells to achieve the same range.

“This is the biggest battery chemistry breakthrough in probably 30 years,” Gene Berdichevsky, Sila’s CEO and co-founder, told Tech Brew. “The biggest challenge now is scaling up the production of this material.”

Keep reading here.—JG