Nearly every time humans go into the deep sea, we discover new species. Scientists estimate that we have classified as little as 9% of all marine life. And the mystery extends beyond life to topography, too—at present, we’ve only mapped about 20% of the Earth’s seabed.

Making progress on the latter point—seafloor mapping—is crucial to measuring climate change and deploying ways to combat it.

• “The data we collect connects to climate science, site assessment for wind-energy farms, site assessment for potential marine resources, habitats, fisheries, marine management—anything like that,” Rachel Medley, chief of the expedition and exploration division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told us.

But, but, but...The process of scanning the seafloor is expensive and time-consuming.

Bedrock, a two-year-old, Brooklyn-based startup, aims to make the process up to 10 times faster with its electric, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) that can navigate along the ocean floor in waters up to 300 meters deep.

• Bedrock is still in the early stages of testing this tech—it has only built one AUV so far—but it raised $8 million in a seed round last March and is hiring “aggressively” to grow the current team of ~20 full-time employees, its CEO and co-founder, Anthony DiMare told us.
• Bedrock began construction on its own production facility in Richmond, California, at the end of 2021 and aims to build at least 25 of its AUVs by the end of the year, DiMare told Emerging Tech Brew.

Big picture: To begin with, the startup is tailoring its tech to the seafloor-mapping needs of the offshore-wind industry, which is gaining some momentum in the US. The Biden administration is pushing to add 30 GW of offshore wind power by 2030.

That would mean about 2,000 turbines along the coast of the US. Right now, there are only seven. Meeting that 2030 target could trigger $12 billion in annual investments in domestic offshore wind projects, and help accelerate wind power’s prominence in the US electrical mix, from about 8% today to 20% in 2030.

So, can battery-powered, seafloor-scanning robots speed up offshore wind deployment? Click here to find out.—GD

For white-collar workers who’ve spent the last couple of years hunched over laptops on their couches, smiling pleasantly into an infinite abyss of Zoom meetings, burnout has been pervasive. Zoom fatigue is now a widely recognized work-induced malady studied by university researchers, and many remote workers say they have trouble balancing work and their personal lives.

With images on screens surrounding remote workers like a labyrinthine maze of fun-house mirrors, it might seem like the last thing a burned out employee needs is to strap on a VR headset to detach from the rigors of the digital workplace.

• Nevertheless, some health care organizations are transporting their workers to the metaverse—a network of connected, 3D, virtual environments where people can interact through avatars and spatial audio—as a means of combating stress.
• It’s also a venue where employees in other industries can share laughs and simulate the watercooler revelry they’ve lacked since many offices went offline in March 2020.

But, but, but…For any organization curious about the metaverse, Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication and the founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, advised having a specific task in mind, such as addressing burnout or building camaraderie. “VR wins when it solves a hard problem,” he said.

• The broader question of how organizations will further incorporate virtual reality into their mental health programs and rapport-building exercises is largely unanswered at this point, he added.

Bailenson believes VR is a “home run for clinical use cases.” But “for this general burnout, it’s probably going to be a good tool for some people, but not a magic pill.”

Click here to read the full story, which was originally published in HR Brew.—SB

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?

Working with governments and explain[ing] how Meta tools and products can be used for better governance in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). For instance, supporting the launch of our Covid or climate authoritative information centers across the region, ensuring election integrity, and pursuing creative solutions for delivery of government services.

My job is thinking about those in government and the civic space, and their understanding and use of our tools and our products—identifying opportunities for collaboration and partnership, or helping identify opportunities and use cases to potentially create new products in some spaces or adapt them as appropriate.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

Golf and BBQ are huge passions that don’t translate to LinkedIn. I went to college in Memphis, Tennessee, and I grew up in South Carolina, so my knowledge and tastebuds of the barbeque spectrum are pretty complete, if you will.

Stat: Venture capital firms invested over $39 billion in foodtech companies last year, which—all together now—is a record-high, and more than double the 2020 total of $15.7 billion.

Quote: “Without the relevant data, without people asking the right questions of the data, it’s really hard to think of AI in medicine as a problem-solving tool, something that actually can be used in practice.”—Dr. Howard Chen, chief imaging informatics officer at Cleveland Clinic, on Nightingale Open Science’s massive new dataset for medical AI

Read: Can AI help decrypt an ancient language?

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For an EV-charging vision board: Electric Autonomy Canada held a design competition for the EV charging station of the future.

For bioreactor building: Good Meat put out a clip of a bioreactor build-out. Bioreactors = where lab-grown meat is born.

For more (potential) semiconductor subsidies: Last week, the European Commission got in on the fun and proposed The European Chips Act, which would “mobilize €43 billion (~$48 billion) in public and private investment” to strengthen the continent’s semiconductor supply chain. Its goal is to account for 20% of global chip production by 2030, up from ~10% today.

Recall that about two weeks ago, Waymo sued the California DMV to keep its crash results private because, they argue, it’s a trade secret.

This got us wondering where our readers stood on the matter. Most of you (~81%) felt the data should be publicly disclosed, while 11% answered “not sure,” and 9% said it should not be shared.

Speaking of the California DMV and AV data…The agency, which regulates the country’s biggest driverless vehicle testing program, released its annual report last week.

• Overall, AVs drove 4 million miles on California streets in 2021, up from ~2 million in 2020 and ~2.8 million in 2019. Waymo was the leading company, at 2.3 million miles.
• Fully driverless vehicles–aka those without a human safety driver in-car—traveled ~25,000 miles in 2021.

Click here to take this week’s reader poll, on central bank digital currencies.—DM

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

• A 40-terabyte dataset could make AI more useful to doctors
• Breaking down an AI-for-translation middleman
• Bill Gates’s climate fund mobilizes $1.5 billion to make climate tech less expensive