Energy density is a constant pursuit for those who make batteries for electric vehicles. If the clunky batteries found in electric cars and trucks could simply be made lighter, the vehicles would have far better range.

In fact...California–based startup Cuberg says by using light-weight lithium metal, its batteries can provide 70% increased range and capacity, as reported in TechCrunch. The only problem? It isn’t cost effective on the ground, and it likely won’t be for nearly a decade.

That’s why Cuberg has its eye on the sky.

“Aviation has a much stronger drive to get next-gen cells, because when you’re carrying weight around in the air, it’s much, much more expensive than a car,” said CEO Richard Wang, who founded the company in 2015 when he was still a PhD student at Stanford.

In the short-term, the industry provides a market for cutting-edge battery technology. Farther down the road, the rise of electric aviation could help mitigate the environmental impact of air travel—which currently accounts for about 3–4% of all US greenhouse-gas emissions—and create an airspace buzzing with drones, air taxis, and electric planes.

• Cuberg, which was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt in March, is now sharing commercial prototypes of its batteries with companies building these electric aircraft.

We spoke to Wang about what light-weight batteries could mean for the future of aviation.

On timelines

“The two-seater flight-school planes are already starting to be commercially sold. Some have already been certified.

You have a number of planes that are a little larger, kind of like a Cessna four- or six-seater kind of plane. Some of them are like seaplanes. Those will probably come in about the next two years. You’ll start to see those for island-hopping applications.

And then you’re going to start, I think, seeing the 20-seater kind of planes, maybe around 2025 or 2026, which is also the time when you’ll start seeing the early air taxis coming into operation.”

On limitations

“There is a limit. With better batteries, you can go to bigger designs. I think maybe you could get to a 30- or 40-person plane that’s fully electric, but when you get bigger, you have to start getting into hybrid electric. And hybrid electric might take you to like the 100-passenger range, but that’s still a lot smaller than like a typical Boeing or Airbus.

For those really big planes, batteries simply are too heavy—even with next-gen improvements—for those longer flights with more people.”

Click here to read the full interview.—GD

From the center of hurricanes to the loneliest expanses of the ocean, autonomous boat company Saildrone has made a business of mapping and surveying difficult waters and treacherous seas.

Last week, the company announced $100 million in Series C funding, with the cash expected to fund the creation of, you guessed it, more humanless boats. In total, it’s raised about $190 million since its founding in 2012.

What they do: The boats function as eyes and ears in the ocean, monitoring the seven seas for everything from wind patterns and storms to illegal fishing, piracy, and trafficking. Its partners include NASA, the US Coast Guard, the National Weather Service, and NOAA.

• Saildrone says its drone-boats have collectively traveled 500,000 nautical miles and spent more than 15,000 days at sea providing ocean data, maritime security, and ocean mapping. (The circumference of the earth at the equator is ~21,600 nautical miles.)

Saildrone operates three types of uncrewed boats of varying length, relying on machine learning, radar, and four on-board cameras to navigate the seas autonomously. And like most “autonomous” tech, the boats are monitored by human pilots who chart waypoints the boats navigate to on their own.

Since the boats are crewless, Saildrones can embark on more dangerous voyages than conventional ships.

• In September, one of its drone-boats became the first research vessel to capture footage from the eyewall of a hurricane, when it was directed into category 4 Hurricane Sam.

Zoom out: Saildrone isn’t the only company looking at autonomous boat technology. Outside of scientific research applications, Japan is developing autonomous cargo ships, with hopes to deploy by 2025.

Read the full story on-site.—JM

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Stat: Russian officials claim they now have the ability to censor 100% of mobile internet traffic, and 73% of broadband internet in the country.

Quote: “​​Getting published really is a nightmare right now.”—A senior AI researcher at Google told Insider

Read: How some crypto miners are attempting to go green.

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All week: It’s another big earnings week. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, AMD, Spotify, Samsung, Apple, Amazon, Shopify, LG Electronics, *pauses, takes breath* and Sony all report earnings this week. Relevant morsels will make their way into the next few issues of this newsletter.

Tuesday: Facebook and Instagram may be in focus right now, but YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat are also testifying to the Senate about how their products may affect children. It’s the first time the latter two platforms have ever testified in front of US lawmakers.

Wednesday: Facebook Connect, the company’s annual AR/VR (metaverse?) conference takes place. The buzzy thing to watch for: FB rebrand. On a more substantive level, we’re looking for updates to its Oculus headsets, progress on Oculus content, and plans for the 10,000 employees it plans to hire to work on the “metaverse” in Europe.

Scientists from the US, Netherlands, and Spain used a brain implant to create a form of vision for a blind volunteer, per a paper published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

How it worked: The researchers implanted a microelectrode array into the visual cortex of the patient, who has been blind for 16 years, and left it for six months. The patient wore camera-equipped glasses, which fed first-person video to a software program that translated the images into visual data and shuttled it to the implant in her brain.

The results? The patient was able to “identify some letters and recognize object boundaries.”

Looking ahead...The researchers said that while this is a step forward for the science, there’s a long way to go before this technique is viable as a clinical therapy.

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

• A 200-year timeline of the semiconductor industry
• A national EV charging network is coming. So are cybersecurity threats
• Foxconn, a key Apple supplier, unveils its first EV prototypes