Plastic Eating Fungi, Mosquito Dome, Boltz 2, World's Largest Camera, Wireless Power - Speciale Focus #32
New Fungus That Eats Plastic - Nature Finds a Way!
Scientists at Yale discovered a fungus called Pestalotiopsis microspora in the Amazon that can break down polyurethane plastic. It can survive using plastic as its only food source—even in oxygen-free environments like landfills. This makes it a promising natural solution to plastic pollution, thanks to enzymes it produces that degrade synthetic polymers. More research is needed to scale it, but it’s a major step for sustainable waste cleanup. Read more.
Chinese Startup Builds Mosquito Dome - Laser Targeted Mosquito Strikes FTW!
Boltz 2 - New AI Drug Discovery Benchmark
MIT and Recursion Pharmaceuticals have jointly released Boltz-2, an open-source AI model that sets a new benchmark in drug discovery by simultaneously predicting biomolecular structure and binding affinity with near-FEP accuracy, but at speeds up to 1000x faster. This capability makes large-scale, accurate virtual screening of small molecules vastly more efficient and accessible. Boltz-2 builds on the strengths of earlier models like AlphaFold3, introducing joint modeling of structure, affinity, and protein dynamics, and is trained on an expansive dataset of simulations and 5 million+ assay measurements using Recursion’s NVIDIA-powered BioHive-2 supercomputer.
This model represents a significant advancement in AI-driven biopharma R&D, allowing scientists to better triage drug candidates early in the pipeline and uncover new biological insights previously too computationally expensive to explore. Boltz-2 is open-sourced under an MIT license, making the model, weights, and training pipeline available to both academic and commercial users—underscoring MIT and Recursion’s shared mission to democratize cutting-edge AI tools in healthcare. Read more.
World’s Largest Camera - In Action. What Does it Find?
The world’s largest camera at Chile’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory just captured its first images—discovering 2,104 new asteroids and 10 million galaxies in just 10 hours. With a 3,200-megapixel sensor (can spot a golf ball from 15 miles away!), it will scan the southern sky repeatedly to create a 3D movie of the universe, tracking over 20 billion galaxies and gathering more data in one year than all past optical observatories combined.
DARPA Achieves New Record For Wireless Energy Transmission
DARPA’s POWER program just smashed distance records for optical power beaming, transmitting 800+ watts over 8.6 km using lasers. The demo—called PRAD—used a new receiver that reflects the laser onto photovoltaic cells, converting it to usable power with 20%+ efficiency at short range. This is a major step toward beaming power instantly to remote or critical locations, such as battlefields or disaster zones, without relying on fuel. The program is now entering Phase 2, focused on relays and vertical transmission, with an Industry Day on May 29, 2025 for future collaborators. Read more.
That’s it folks. We’ll leave you with this for the month and come back soon with another set of wow reads specially curated for the curious you!
Until then, Team Speciale signing off!