Hi friends 👋,Happy Friday! Here in New York City, it was the sunniest of times, it was the snowiest of times, but most of all, it was the incredibly hard to keep up with all of the incredible stuff getting done and funded of times. Big week in robotics, solar, brains, world models, manufacturing, flight, AI, and even affordable luxury. Let’s get to it.Today’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by… Ramp SheetsA few weeks ago, I wrote that I wrote that “a Ramp engineer with an AI will build something better than a CFO with an AI.” Ramp Sheets is exactly what I’m talking about. See, a surprising amount of my high-leverage work ends up in a spreadsheet.A deck comes in. A CSV export lands in my inbox. I want to benchmark a market, pressure-test a company, or run an analysis for a Deep. Dive. Usually, that means a lot of manual cleanup and model-building before I get to the actual insight.Ramp Sheets skips a lot of that.It’s an AI-powered spreadsheet from Ramp that lets you upload a PDF, pitch deck, CSV, or Excel file and ask it to do the work: build a model, research competitors, clean messy data, and help you get to an answer faster. For founders, investors, and operators, that means less spreadsheet mechanics and more actual thinking.Best part: anyone can use Ramp Sheets today for free. You don’t need to be a Ramp customer to try it (but why wouldn’t you be?).Try Ramp Sheets Free(1) Swift Solar Acquires Meyer Burger to Build Gigawatt-Scale Solar FactoryAshlee Vance for Core Memory “If your technology is so good, why aren’t you using it to compete?” In Power in the Age of Intelligence, I wrote that that’s a question I’d like to see more investors ask. If the technology you’re building with is so much better, why in the world are you just selling it to someone else as a component? Why not just make a better end product? Joel Jean at Swift Solar said, “Ok bet.” I met Joel a few years back on an introduction from his brother Neal, the co-founder and CEO of Beacons. Joel, like Neal, is a genius, with a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, and he was putting that genius to work by making silicon-perovskite tandem solar cells work. The promise of perovskite is that they’re much more efficient than solar panels, meaning they can convert more incoming sunlight into electricity. Current commercial silicon panels are 22% efficient, with a lab record of 26.8% and a theoretical limit of 29%. Swift Solar’s panels are already at 28% efficiency. China’s Longi, the world’s largest manufacturer of monocrystalline silicon wafers, recently hit 34.8% with a silicon-perovskite tandem solar cell, and the theoretical limit, for which Swift is gunning, is 45%. More efficiency means more watts per panel, which means more watts per acre and a lower balance-of-system cost; 30–40% efficiency modules could cut solar system costs 20–40% while doubling power density.This all sounds great, but the problem is that tandems tend to degrade quickly outside, where the sun is. Swift thinks that they’ve cracked that, and that China hasn’t yet, which gives the west an opportunity (certainly not guaranteed, probably not even likely, but an opportunity!) to leapfrog back over China in solar production. So if you have the magic, degradation-resistant tandem cells, what do you do? Use it to compete. Swift announced that it acquired the core assets of Europe’s leading solar manufacturer, the German company Meyer Burger, to “build the next generation vertically integrated US solar manufacturer.” Meyer Burger’s former CEO joined Swift to lead the manufacturing effort. Solar panel manufacturing is one of the most cutthroat, competitive industries in the world. China keeps driving costs lower and lower and lower. It’s been all about scale. Meyer Burger itself went bankrupt after having sold solar cell manufacturing equipment to China, only for China to reverse engineer and mimic the technology. But I love it. Pressing a technological advantage into vertical integration and competing directly is the kind of thing that gets my heart racing. And this echoes a deal that hits close to home. A few weeks into Puja’s time at Harry’s, she told me the 10-month-old startup was acquiring one of the world’s oldest and best blade manufacturers, Germany’s Feintechnik. That has been an incredibly successful partnership. There’s something about a the US innovation / German manufacturing tandem.(2) Reflect Orbital Built a Space MirrorBen Nowack for Reflect OrbitalImagine you are a photon that does not want to get turned into usable electricity on earth. It’s been a really bad week for you. First, Swift’s tandem cells. Before, there was a 78% chance you’d escape once you hit the panel, but that looks like it’s going to fall. But at least you have nighttime, right? At night, you can just fly off into space at the speed of… well, you know. Run away from Earth as fast as is physically possible. Not so fast, says Reflect Orbital. CEO Ben Nowack just announced that the company had made a solar mirror, one of four huge guys that will go up on each satellite, stop the photons’ getaway, and redirect them down to Earth. Sometimes, they’ll be used to light up a concert or a remote worksite in the evening (imagine how much less creepy True Detective: Night Country would have been if Reflect existed then), sometimes, they’ll shine on crops to help them grow faster, and mostly, they’ll bounce into solar panels that capture them and turn them into electricity. Efficiency is one of solar’s challenges, but a bigger one is one that seemed almot insurmountable: the sun only really shines strongly enough for max solar output for 4-6 hours a day. What if it could shine on solar farms - out in the desert, away from homes (where it wouldn’t imapact our sleep, Huberman) - round the clock? Solar farm economics would get ridiculous, solar would get much cheaper, we’d get a lot more of it, and we’d be able to power all sorts of new, better electric things.Mostly, though, I’m sharing because that video is a bright spot in a sea of sameness. (3) The First Multi-Behavior Brain UploadDr. Alex Wissner-Gross for Eon SystemsAs big a week as it was for solar, it may have been an even bigger week for brains. A couple of weeks ago, an Australian company Cortical Labs grew brain cells on a microchip and taught it to do the first thing hackers try to do on any new computer, from TI-83s to ATMs to pregnancy tests to vape screens: play Doom. And yup, it could play Doom. On Tuesday, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross shared a video made by a company he works with called Eon Systems, that one above, that shows a virtual fruit fly being controlled by a brain with 140,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections running on a computer, mapped from a real fly’s actual connectome.The Eon team took the adult Drosophila brain connectome, the complete wiring diagram of a real fly brain, painstakingly mapped by the broader neuroscience community, combined it with a physics-simulated fly body built from an X-ray scan of an actual fruit fly, and got the two to talk to each other. Then sensory information from the virtual world enters the brain model, the brain’s neurons issue commands, and the body moves. It does all of the things a fruit fly would do in response to stimuli. It navigates toward food by “taste.” It grooms itself when virtual dust activates its “antennal mechanosensory circuits.” It “eats.” The team is careful not to oversell the accomplishment, and Dr. Doris Tsao at Astera Neuro has a good list of thoughts on connectonomics and uploads here which basically says, “This is awesome, but we’ll get further by understanding instead of blindly mapping, and anyway, it’s going to be really expensive to map bigger and more complex brains.” But still… this is sci-fi stuff. I don’t even know if it’s good. But it’s sci-fi! Meanwhile, in regular old science, two very cool brain papers: Isotonic and minimally invasive optical clearing media for live cell imaging ex vivo and in vivo. A team of Japanese scientists basically figured out a way to “make brains see-through without killing them.” Kording Lab explained: “The mechanism of this is so obvious and simple and yet brilliant. Match the refractive index inside and outside of cells - and tissue becomes transparent. Because the scaling of scattering with object size, small things don't matter much. So cool!”Scientists revive activity in frozen mouse brains for the first time. A team in Germany made progress on cryopreserving and thawing mouse brains that leaves some of the processes necessary for brain functioning like neuronal firing, cell metabolism, and brain plasticity intact. A researcher at another lab cautioned that we’re still a long way away from freezing ourselves and waking up in the future, but he also said, “This kind of progress is what gradually turns science fiction into scientific possibility.”OK, so maybe all of this is just very sci-fi. (4) Emergent Quantization from a dynamic vacuum, or Zero Point EnergyHarold “Sonny” White et al, published in APS Physical Review Research, via Andrew CôtéAndrew Côté@AndercotBREAKING: While a new War for Oil erupts in the Middle East