Weekly Dose of Optimism #181

Heron Transformers, C-17 Reactor Flight, Vaccine for coughs, colds, & flus, Ineffable Intelligence, Alien Files + 8 Scientific Breakthroughs, 2 pods + Research Revival

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 181st Weekly Dose of Optimism!

This week has it all, from transformers to aliens.

We are also introducing a new segment for not boring world members: Scientific Breakthroughs from Ulkar Aghayeva. In December, we shared Frontier of the Year 2025, in which Ulkar, Gavin Leech, and Lauren Gilbert reviewed 202 pieces of scientific news from the year and assigned a score based on a probability each generalizes and how big it would be if they did. We loved it, so we asked Ulkar to do a roundup of the most important stories in science, which she did this week.

It’s our attempt to bring you even closer to the frontier. I hope you enjoy it.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Heron Power Raises $140M to Build 40GW Solid State Transformer Factory

Everything that can go electric economically will, including the grid itself.

Heron Power, founded by former Tesla SVP of Powertrain and Energy Drew Baglino, raised $140 million in a Series B led by a16z American Dynamism to build solid state transformers. This is pure not boring catnip: power electronics from the guy in charge of a lot of the Tesla power electronics stuff we wrote about in The Electric Slide, a16z putting its new funds to work, and fixing the grid by attacking one of its key constraints.

The constraint is that transformers, which take electricity at one voltage and converts it to a different voltage (step up or step down) using coiled wires, are outdated (the fundamental design hasn't really changed since the late 1800s and is based on a one-way grid), passive (electricity goes in, gets stepped up or down, and comes out), massive (built with 10 tons of grain-oriented electrical steel and copper submerged in oil), and worst, in desperately short supply. Lead times stretch up to 24 months, U.S. manufacturing meets less than 20% of demand, manufacturing has been moving to China, prices have spiked 60-80% since 2020, and demand is projected to double in the next decade.

So Heron is building Heron Link, a modular solid-state transformer that uses wide-bandgap semiconductors instead of scarce electrical steel and copper. It’s starting by selling to solar and battery farm operators and data centers, who represent huge and growing demand and for whom the solid state transformer eliminates the need for inverters. Traditional transformers can’t handle direct current, so an inverter turns DC from a solar panel or battery into AC. Heron Link can do that, so customers can skip the inverter. HL is software-defined, meaning it can use software to regulate voltage and frequency to actively manage grid stability. And it’s modular, meaning that if one of the device’s tens of power conversion modules fails, it can be swapped out in ten minutes. They also contain lithium-ion batteries that can discharge quickly to provide 30 seconds of power to smooth the transition to backup power sources.

The funding will go to building a factory that can produce 40GW worth of Heron Links per year. At 5MW per Link, that’s 8,000 transformers.

Heron isn’t the only company making solid state transformers. I hope they all do great. But I do want to call out one competitor: Raleigh-based DG Matrix, whose co-founder and CTO is Subhashish Bhattacharya, a professor at NC State University who is a long-time collaborator of… B. Jayant Baliga, the inventor of the IGBT, The GATEway of India, the hero of the Power Electronics section of The Electric Slide!

Anyway, if we have a lot of smart people using wide bandgap semiconductors to fix the grid, the future of American energy is going to be SiC.

(2) DoW Transports a Valar Atomics Nuclear Reactor to Utah on a C-17

Isaiah Taylor and Valar Atomics

The title pretty much says it all here: the Department of War transported a Valar Atomics Ward nuclear reactor from California to Utah on a C-17. It’s another sign that the government is serious about turning on reactors by the United States 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. Not much more for me to add here other than to watch the video and the others in Valar’s Operation Windlord series.

In other nuclear news, Lockheed Martin is investing in Radiant Nuclear, which we wrote about in 2024, as it prepares to turn on its first reactor at the DOME this summer. Defense is starting to play offense on nuclear.

(3) Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say

James Gallagher for the BBC h/t Simon Taylor for the find

Researchers at Stanford have built a vaccine that protects against… everything. Like, everything they’ve tested, it works against. The nasal spray works by putting immune cells in the lungs on permanent “amber alert,” ready to fight whatever shows up. In animal tests, it reduced viral breakthrough by 100-to-1,000-fold and worked against flu, Covid, common cold viruses, two species of bacteria, and even house dust mite allergens. Prof Bali Pulendran calls it “a radical departure from the principle by which all vaccines have worked” since Edward Jenner figured out the originals in the 1790s.

It’s early (animal studies, not human trials) but the team is planning deliberate infection studies in people next. The big questions are whether the effect translates to human lungs, how long the protection lasts (about three months in mice), and whether keeping the immune system dialed up causes friendly fire. The researchers don’t think it should be permanent; they envision a seasonal spray at the start of winter or a rapid-deployment tool at the start of a pandemic to buy time while a targeted vaccine is developed.

That pandemic use case alone is worth getting excited about. One of the hardest lessons of early 2020 was how long it took to develop, test, and distribute a vaccine while people died waiting. A universal nasal spray sitting on the shelf, ready to deploy on day one, could change the math on the next pandemic entirely.

And if the seasonal version works, imagine a world where “cold and flu season” just no longer exists. As a parent of little kids, please for the love of God work in humans.

(4) DeepMind Veteran David Silver Raises $1B for Ineffable Intelligence

George Hammond for Financial Times

When Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Richard Sutton last year, the father of Recursive Learning (RL) and author of The Bitter Lesson said, basically, that LLMs are a dead end and that the real Bitter Lesson-pilled approach would be to just let AI learn from experience. That resonated with me. Even with all of the recent coding and agent advances, these things are still missing something ineffably intelligent to me.

David Silver wants to fix that. Silver, who joined DeepMind in 2010, was one of the team’s star researchers. He worked on AlphaGo, AlphaStar, and the Gemini family of models. And last year, with Sutton, he wrote a paper titled Welcome to the Era of Experience.

Silver and Sutton argue that we’re moving from an era where AI mainly learns by imitating static human data (like text on the internet) to an “Era of Experience,” where the most powerful systems will learn predominantly from their own ongoing interaction with environments. Agents will improve by generating vast streams of experiential data, acting over long time horizons, grounded in real environments and rewards, which will unlock truly superhuman capabilities beyond the limits of human-written data. Which makes sense intuitively!

Sequoia is leading a $1 billion investment at a $4 billion valuation. I’m excited for this one. And it couldn’t come at a better time because…

(5) The US Government is Going to Release the ET, UAP, and UFO Files

Maybe the greatest proof that we’re in some other beings’ simulation is the fact that just as we are about to figure out how to create intelligence ourselves, we finally begin to get the truth about other intelligent life in the universe.

This is just one Truth post, and the government has a spotty (redacted) record releasing the important details in important files recently, but it seems that disclosure might finally be upon us.

It’s too early to know or speculate when we’ll get more information, what’s in the files, and how ontologically shocking it will be; it could be anything from “we’ve been holding a few craft that we don’t quite understand” to “we’ve reversed engineered the craft and understand antigravity” to “humanity is just an experiment run by far more intelligent beings” to … anything, really.

But it’s funny and kind of beautiful that just as so many people are worrying about humanity’s place in a world with AI, we may get proof that we’re part of something much larger, weirder, and more wondrous than we could ever imagine.

EXTRA DOSE: Scientific Breakthroughs, Two Podcasts, and Research Revival Fund

Subscribe to learn about 8 scientific breakthroughs this week, including gene drive-like systems to fight antibacterial resistance, potential early cancer diagnosis method from Arc Institute, DMT for major depressive disorder, and using laser writing in glass for long-term storage. Let us know what you think!