Beewise
Calls to “save the bees” are not without good reason.
The bee population has been in decline for years due to factors like climate change, pesticides, pests, and disease. According to the USDA, more than one-third of all crop production in the United States requires insect pollination, yet the number of honeybee hives has declined from around 6 million in the 1940s to just ~2.5 million today.
Bzzz, bzzz: California-based startup Beewise aims to help address the issue by using a combination of technologies to automate oversight of beehives for beekeepers. The company has raised over $118.7 million in funding since its founding in 2018, including an $80 million funding round in March of this year.
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US beekeepers lost 45.5% of their managed honeybee colonies from April 2020 to April 2021, per the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit that runs an annual survey on beekeeper colony losses.
- The startup claims its tech-powered “Beehome” decreases the number of failed colonies to just 8%.
How it works
The Beehome’s solar-powered robot uses cameras, AI, and neural networks to monitor bees and address needs like food, water, temperature, humidity, and pests, and administer medicine to sick bees.
Big picture: Olivarez Honey Bees, a family-run northern California operation that claims to produce the most queen bees in North America, has been trialing Beewise’s tech since September 2021, according to its owner, Ray Olivarez Jr.
Olivarez told us he found the Beehome useful in managing his bee colonies, but emphasized that until the tech is widely deployed, it is too early to tell how effective it actually is.
“They’re just getting started. But I think they’ve gotten off to a pretty good start. That’s pretty radical, having a robotic arm—it is in this world, in my world,” Olivarez said.
Click here to read the full story.—JM
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Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images
It’s been a chaotic spring for the solar industry.
Rewind: Hundreds of solar projects were delayed or canceled after the US Department of Commerce began an investigation into whether solar panel and solar-panel-parts suppliers in Southeast Asia—where the vast majority of US solar panels come from—were dodging tariffs on components made in China.
What’s new: Last week, President Biden signed an executive order that aims to address some of the recent upheaval by halting new tariffs on solar panels from Southeast Asia for two years and accelerating solar production in the US.
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“This is a get-back-to-work order,” Scott Buckley, president of Vermont-based solar installer Green Lantern Solar, told the New York Times. “That’s the way I think about it. Let’s clear the logjams.”
Big picture: Renewable energy deployment is urgent not only because of recent high fuel prices and the need to decarbonize the grid—which accounts for about one-quarter of US greenhouse-gas emissions—but because other “clean-tech” can’t be considered truly clean if it’s powered by electricity that comes from fossil fuels.
- From charging EVs, to electrolysing green hydrogen, to capturing CO2 from the air, technologies aiming to mitigate emissions across different sectors need a cleaner grid to deliver on their promises.
Looking ahead...The US Department of Energy predicts solar power could generate ~40% of the nation’s electricity demand by 2035. That would require between 760 and 1,000 GW of solar power capacity, the DOE estimates.
The US had just over 60 GW of large-scale solar capacity at the end of 2021, according to the US Energy Information Agency, and it’s forecast to add at least 20 GW this year.
Read the full explainer here.—GD
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Illustration: Francis Scialabba; Photo: Joshua Miller
Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?
I run a team at Gradient Health that works on putting together labeled datasets for healthcare. The easiest way to think about it is like this: In order to build software that can do stuff like help a doctor diagnose patients, you need to show that software a bunch of examples of what different diseases look like for it to learn from. Our job is to put together those examples.
What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?
One of the most important parts of building good medical AI is to make sure you have diverse data, which can be hard to come by. In order to build global datasets that represent patients around the world, you need to make sure you get datasets from every region possible. One of the coolest things we’ve put together is a network to get data from countries around Africa—a lot of the data gets shipped by thumb drive via DHL!
What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?
As weird as it is to say it, I’m both most excited and least excited by healthcare AI. I love the idea of making diagnostics cheaper and more available, which I think AI is a critical piece of. On the other hand, we can also accidentally make healthcare less equitable if the AI is only trained on a small, non-representative portion of the population.
What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?
I’m a huge fan of Nikhil Krishnan’s Out-of-Pocket newsletter!
One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?
I worked on a chicken farm in high school, and made the mistake of naming all of the chickens.
What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?
I think a lot about my team—we’ve got a really goofy/fun bunch of folks, and I like to think about how we develop a good team culture.
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Francis Scialabba
Stat: A photonic quantum computer took just 36 microseconds to complete a calculation that would take a traditional computer 9,000 years, quantum startup Xanadu claimed. Photonic qubits are a departure from the quantum norm.
Quote: “When companies don’t face robust competition, or when they’re allowed to just squash out competition, they can become too big to care.”—FTC Chair Lina Khan on regulating Big Tech
Read: A battery crunch is hamstringing the US’s rollout of renewable energy.
Inflation intel: For CFOs, tracking external inflation is a huge priority. That’s why Oracle NetSuite’s guide, 4 Inflation Metrics to Watch Now, breaks down tracking tools and offers free resources for pivotal decision-making. Get it here.*
*This is sponsored advertising content.
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Ethereum devs have completed a “dress rehearsal” for the planned migration to proof-of-stake, a much less energy-intensive consensus mechanism.
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Meta faces eight lawsuits across US states that allege its algorithms are addictive and harmful to youth.
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The EU has voted to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars after 2035.
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The NHTSA upgraded its investigation of Tesla’s Autopilot feature.
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Calling all innovators, executives, and self-proclaimed “tech nerds”! We’re hosting our first-ever Emerging Tech Brew Summit and trust us, you won’t want to miss it. We’ll be chatting with leaders and innovators from some of the biggest orgs in the industry to ask the question: What technology is unfolding today to help us solve challenges across food, energy, and health tomorrow?
Join us September 29th in NYC for a day of conversations and insights with the best and brightest minds in the space. Don’t miss out on our early-bird pricing and snag your ticket today!
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Francis Scialabba
In this week’s news quiz: shortages, laggards, and a potential recession.
We promise it’s more fun than it sounds. Click here to play.
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Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:
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