Slack, Gmail, Monday.com, Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs—this is a (surely incomplete) list of apps and platforms used over the course of reporting and writing this story.

It may ring familiar to many digital workers who have grown accustomed to constantly toggling among the seemingly infinite number of workplace productivity tools that have come to populate our professional lives.

One of the most influential of these tools, Gmail, debuted on April 1, 2004, and is credited with forever changing the ways we use email—and influencing the trajectory of the internet and workplace tech.

At the time, the service’s offering of 1,000 megabytes of storage seemed so improbable that many assumed it was an April Fool’s joke.

“Google’s rivals have copied Gmail so thoroughly that it’s hard to remember just how terrible webmail was before Gmail came along,” Slate recounted in a story marking Gmail’s 10th birthday. “Pages were clunky and slow to load, search functions were terrible, and spam was rampant. You couldn’t organize messages by conversation. Storage capacity was anemic, and if you ran out of space, you had to spend hours deleting old emails or buy more storage from your provider. Gmail…taught us that Web apps could run as smoothly as desktop applications. And it taught us the power of cloud storage.”

Aamer Baig, a senior partner at McKinsey, recalled how in the early days of email, communications were limited within a company. Now, the entire world is theoretically connected.

“Now it is literally a countless number of channels,” Baig told Tech Brew. “You have Slack, you have text, you have email, then you have collaboration spaces in documents and workflow, in applications. On top of that you’re also getting AI that is getting embedded into all these tools.”

All of this innovation has made us more connected than ever—and yet!—somehow still exhausted and struggling to optimize our work lives. So how can we work smarter and not harder?

Keep reading here.—JG

Just a year ago, the Biden administration’s Solar for All program selected 60 states, nonprofits, municipalities, and tribal consortiums to receive a total of $7 billion in grant funding to set up solar infrastructure in low income areas.

In February, those grants were placed in purgatory after President Trump froze Environmental Protection Agency funding.

“It feels like everything’s up in the air,” Joseph Eagleman, CEO of the Chippewa Cree Energy Corporation, told Tech Brew. “If things don’t go right, it’ll leave a lot of people behind.”

Eagleman has been working to get solar power set up at the Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana through a nearly $136 million grant awarded to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation (MHA Nation). The reservation’s plan was to power 200 homes through new solar infrastructure paid for by the grant, with the first recipient being a tribal elder who struggles with high electric bills, according to Eagleman.

Luckily for grantees like the MHA Nation, Trump unfroze Solar for All funding last month, meaning all the MHA subawardees, like the Chippewa Cree tribe at Rocky Boy, are set to move forward with buying the equipment they need to build solar on Native American land. But tribal representatives told Tech Brew they’re shaken by the freezing and thawing of funds, and plan to move as quickly—and cautiously—as possible going forward.

Keep reading here.—TC

The Department of Defense is looking to collaborate with the private sector to harness nuclear energy.

Last week, the Department’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced it’s picked companies that are “eligible” to begin building “fixed on-site microreactor nuclear power systems” to operate on military bases and contribute to their power supply. Though the announcement didn’t specify how many companies are eligible for the “Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations” (ANPI) program, it did list eight of the companies, including BWXT Advanced Technologies LLC, a nuclear manufacturer that designs nuclear powered submarines for the Navy.

According to a press release, the ANPI program “directly supports” President Trump’s executive orders pertaining to US energy resources. Nuclear is not listed in the administration’s list of “energy resources” in its “Declaring a National Energy Emergency” order, but it is mentioned as a domestic energy resource in the “Unleashing American Energy” order.

“Microreactors on installations are a critical first step in delivering energy dominance to the force,” DIU Energy Portfolio Director Andrew Higier said in a statement. “The US and the DoD must maintain the advantage and leverage the best of breed nuclear technology for our national security.”

However, the ANPI program was not created in response to the executive orders: It started during the Biden administration.

Keep reading here.—TC

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Tariff tactics: There’ve been no shortage of headlines panicking about tariff-related price increases. For phones, there are two avenues to take that don’t involve plunking down four figures:

1. Buy a perfectly fine, less expensive phone, as The New York Times’s Brian X. Chen suggests.
2. Hold out for the next administration by repairing your existing phone. Wired reports on a partnership between iFixit and Back Market that aims to convince consumers their phone can last for five years—or more.

Keep it together: We’re Notion stans over here—we use it to make sure this email lands in your inbox three times a week, as well as personally to ensure we exercise enough and eat right and adequately plan for overseas vacations. The Verge reports that Notion has rolled out a mail app in its “attempt to compete with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.”

What’s powering the future of transportation? Join Rivian’s chief software officer, Wassym Bensaid, and other industry leaders from Mercedes-Benz, Waabi, it’s electric, and more on May 29 in New York or online as they break down the tech, infrastructure, and innovation driving us into an electric, autonomous tomorrow.