Petra, which was founded in 2017, sells solid oxide fuel cells ' ceramic devices that convert fuel, like natural gas, into electric power without burning it. The company markets them as a more efficient and environmentally friendly way to operate data centers and large vehicles. Petra's founder, Aaron Goodman, told TechCrunch that his company's product has significantly lower fuel costs and emissions than traditional power sources, and that they have much less of a physical footprint, too, because they're more compact and lightweight. The efficiency, and the cost savings that come with it, is what makes the fuel cells attractive. 'Combustion takes fuel and creates explosions,' Goodman said, describing how traditional power generation works. 'Those explosions create heat. That heat creates motion. The motion powers an electromotive force, which eventually creates electricity. It's a lot of steps, and they all have so much loss in them that you end up with a really inefficient system.' Petra's fuel cells skip most of these steps. 'What fuel cells do is they take the electrons directly off of the fuel, so they strip the fuel of its electrons, which creates electricity,' he explained. 'It's one step, no loss, and subsequently, in theory, at least, they're much, much more efficient.'...

Van Espahbodi has spent 25 years working in and around advanced technology for the aerospace and defense industry. He began his career as a congressional staffer before joining defense contractor Raytheon, where he worked in the CEO's office on foreign military sales. He later helped commercialize technology from a national laboratory in the U.K. A decade ago, Espahbodi co-founded aerospace and defense startup accelerator Starburst Aerospace and moved back to the U.S. to expand it. On the advice of friends at Founders Fund, he opened an office in El Segundo, California, near SpaceX, just as more alumni of that company were leaving to launch hard-tech startups of their own and next-generation defense startups including Anduril Industries were emerging. Espahbodi eventually sold his stake in Starburst and launched Generational Partners, which invests in companies spanning industrial infrastructure, manufacturing, energy and water desalination. The firm has backed 14 companies since making its first investment in January 2023....

Fusion power is getting back to its roots. As fusion startups keep chasing their ultimate goal ' putting electrons on the grid ' many are also now embracing, or returning to, the defense applications that laid the foundation for the industry. The sector emerged decades ago when physicists looked for more constructive uses of the science behind the thermonuclear bombs that proliferated during the Cold War. The national security angle never really went away. A groundbreaking fusion power experiment in 2022 happened at the National Ignition Facility, which has supported national security applications for more than 25 years. That shift has accelerated as venture dollars committed to climate tech ' the funds that typically have supported fusion startups ' have stalled. Fusion startups have captured a large portion of recent climate tech funding, but fusion is an expensive business, and VCs are always happy when their portfolio companies find other sources of money. That's where the defense industry comes in. The defense industry has explored laser weapons for years, but interest has spiked as drones have reshaped modern warfare. Traditional air defense systems were designed to target human-piloted aircraft, which tend to be larger and fewer in number. That has led to some comical mismatches between aggressor and defender. For example, about a decade ago, a U.S. ally used a $3 million Patriot missile to shoot down a $200 consumer drone. Effective, but not very efficient....

Modern processors are fast, in part, because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it's wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger. Since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see. Chipmakers and operating system developers have spent years building defenses. A new study from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shows that a key assumption behind many of them doesn't hold. The defenses work by wiping or isolating the processor's prediction machinery, removing anything an attacker might have planted. The catch, as PhD student Daniel Trujillo and MIT Assistant Professor Mengjia Yan point out, is that the wipe and the moment the predictions get used can't happen at the same instant. There is always a gap ' sometimes only a handful of instructions wide. Anything that runs in that gap can dirty the machinery all over again. The researchers call this class of attack "TONTOU."...