80% of crops require insect pollination, but growers can no longer rely on the biggest pollinators, with the population of wild bees dwindling (because of drought, climate change, mites, excessive use of agricultural chemicals & colony collapse disorder). In comes Israel-based BloomX (formerly Bumbelbee AI), which develops "bio-mimicking" pollination technology. Their platform pinpoints the optimal window for pollination & then sends crop-specific hardware devices to replicate the natural pollination process. Its 1st product “Robee” (focused on blueberries, with 1.8m plants pollinated already) uses mechanical arms mounted on an electric vehicle that vibrate the stems to release pollen grains on the flower’s stigma - said to increase yield by up to 55%: “years of research &...

A (relatively) new technology called “coherent transmission” has made enormous scaling of optical network transmission possible (allowing operators to upgrade the said, without replacing the physical fiber structure in the ground). In contrast to “direct detection” (first introduced a decade ago) (where only the amplitude of light is used to encode info), in coherent transmission amplitude is combined with phase modulation & polarization to send optical signals to a new type of digital signals processor (DSPs) (that combines them into one/ coherent high-speed data signal), which has enabled a 100x increase in wavelength speed & the ability to transmit signals over much longer distances. As coherent transmission tech progresses, the optical components to transmit &...