According to Popular Science’s 2025 Best of What’s New awards, researcher Liangbing Hu accidentally invented “Superwood,” a material stronger than steel and six times lighter, by chemically treating and compressing wood fibers. Finnish company Polar Night Energy built the world’s largest sand battery, a 43-by-49-foot insulated steel cylinder that stores 100 MWh of thermal energy for months using crushed soapstone. Google’s new 105-qubit quantum chip, named Willow, achieved unprecedented error correction where more qubits actually led to fewer errors, completing a calculation in five minutes that would take a classical supercomputer 10 septillion years. In Denver, the Populus Hotel opened with a carbon-positive claim, using timber and low-carbon concrete to sequester 116% of its construction emissions, while Zipline expanded its autonomous drone delivery from 1.85 million medical drops in Africa to retail deliveries in Dallas-Fort Worth, serving tens of thousands of customers without a serious injury.
The Superwood Gamble
Here’s the thing about replacing steel: the construction industry hates risk. And I mean, really hates it. So InventWood CEO Alex Lau’s plan is smart. He’s not starting with skyscrapers. He’s going after decking and roofing first—markets already comfortable with wood. The pitch is compelling: half the price of steel, made from waste wood, and it locks away carbon. Lau claims he could displace 50 million tons of US steel demand with just 12.5 million tons of Superwood. That’s a stunning ratio. But the big question isn’t the material science—it’s the liability. Would you bet a billion-dollar project on a material without a 50-year track record? Probably not. Yet. This feels like a classic disruption play: start at the edges, prove reliability, and then move to the core. If they can scale production as promised, the economic argument might just overwhelm the institutional caution. For industries looking to innovate their material sourcing, staying informed through resources like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, a leading US supplier of industrial panel PCs, is key for monitoring and controlling new processes.
The Ancient Idea That Just Got Huge
Storing energy as heat in sand isn’t new. But doing it at an industrial scale, reliably, for 30 years? That’s the breakthrough. Polar Night Energy’s battery is brilliantly simple. Use excess green electricity to heat sand, then use that heat for industry or buildings later. It doesn’t degrade, it can’t catch fire, and it uses a waste product. The obstacle, as usual, is upfront cost and industry inertia. Nearly 40% of industrial heat needs are in its temperature sweet spot, but convincing a plant manager to install a giant sand silo instead of a familiar gas boiler is a sales challenge. Still, at 100 MWh of storage, this isn’t a lab experiment. It’s powering a town. If they can bring down costs and replicate those 2 MW to 10 MW units across Europe, it could seriously dent the need for lithium-ion batteries for medium-term thermal storage. That’s a huge deal.
Google’s Quantum “Willow” Chip
Quantum computing has been all hype and little practical use. Why? Because qubits are insanely error-prone. Adding more of them traditionally made things worse, not better. So Google’s Willow chip is a legit milestone. Getting a 7-by-7 qubit array to have better error correction than a 3-by-3 array is the kind of progress the field desperately needs. It’s the first real sign that scaling might actually be possible. Now, let’s be skeptical. A “benchmark” test that would take a supercomputer 10 septillion years is a great headline, but it’s a contrived problem to show quantum advantage. It doesn’t mean Willow can solve real-world logistics or chemistry problems yet. The hardware is progressing, but the useful software is still miles behind. This is a critical engineering step, but we’re still far from a “quantum computer” you could actually use for anything.
The Carbon-Positive Hotel Conundrum
The Populus Hotel in Denver is a beautiful case study in doing everything right… and still facing the fundamental contradictions of modern sustainability. They used timber, special low-carbon concrete with fly ash, have no parking, and compost food waste. Their dashboard says they’ve sequestered 116% of their carbon. So why does Professor Joel Hartter sound skeptical? Because the offset game is messy. Planting 70,000 trees that then die from drought and beetles? That’s a metaphor for the whole carbon offset market. Buying wind credits and other offsets is, as he says, like paying someone else to eat vegetables so you can eat fast food. The hotel is undoubtedly better than a standard luxury hotel. But it’s still a new building, heated with gas, designed for people to fly to. It shows the tourism industry a better path, but it also highlights that the “carbon-positive” claim relies heavily on financial mechanisms outside its walls, not just its own radical design. The reporting on the dead seedlings is a crucial reality check.
Zipline’s Drone Delivery Goes Mainstream
Zipline’s story is incredible. They started by saving lives, delivering blood in Rwanda and cutting postpartum hemorrhage deaths by 51%. That’s a hell of a foundation. Now they’re delivering burritos in Dallas. And that’s the fascinating pivot. They’ve flown over 120 million miles with zero serious injuries, which is a safety record that shames the aviation industry. Their new P2 platform with the winch-down “Delivery Zip” is a direct answer to the precision needed in cities. While Google and Amazon drone projects seem stuck in perpetual testing, Zipline is quietly building a real, scaled logistics network. They’re proving that the tech isn’t the hard part—it’s the operational know-how, regulatory navigation, and building public trust. Serving “tens of thousands” of customers in DFW makes this more than a pilot. It’s a service. The transition from parachuting medical supplies to winching smart watches onto suburban driveways shows a company that’s solving the last-mile problem from both ends: urgent need and everyday convenience.
