Bio-inspired engineering by Festo. Nature has already solved many of the problems we deal with every day. 🌱 Festo produces mechanical animals called Bionics series. It combines mechanical engineering with biology and nature. Nature is a great teacher and can teach us a lot! From a flapping-wing robot that flies using bird-like wing twisting, to bionic ants that cooperate through swarm intelligence, these projects study how animals solve different problems. 🐜 Just look at these! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Every day, we're working towards making sure everyone can get any good or service they want without sacrificing our resources. This is sustainable abundance. To achieve this, our products must be accessible to all Tesla has all the pieces: AI tech + electrical-mechanical engineering + scalable production lines. No one else has that.

Meet Saket Karajgikar, with NVIDIA, one of the many volunteer leaders who are the heart and soul of the OCP Community! What is your role in the OCP Community? Saket is a Senior Engineering Manager at NVIDIA and serves as one of the principal drivers of the OCP Data Center Facilities (DCF) Project. He has been instrumental in helping align industry stakeholders around shared goals spanning infrastructure, cooling, and technology development. How long have you been involved with OCP? Saket has been volunteering with OCP since late 2022. Why do you volunteer your time to OCP? Saket believes OCP provides a powerful platform for industry alignment, helping organizations work together on common challenges ranging from supply chain concerns to technology innovation. He also values OCP’s ability to support and inspire the next generation of engineers. What impact has OCP had on you professionally? OCP allows Saket to collaborate across workstreams and disciplines, helping build end-to-end guidance that spans everything from chips to cooling systems. The experience provides valuable industry insights and broadens collaboration opportunities. What are you most excited about right now? Saket believes AI is transforming thermal and mechanical engineering in ways not seen since the rise of the internet. He sees this as one of the most exciting periods in the history of infrastructure engineering. Something people may not know about you? Saket is an avid cook and has traveled to Japan multiple times in search of specialty kitchen knives and cooking tools.

83 startups ranked this week. Five open free: Aurelius Systems @aureliuslasers, counter-drone lasers Metal Morph, wastewater metal recovery Remepy, drug plus digital therapy Centricity WealthTech @CentricityWT, advisor platform Erco Energía @ErcoEnergia, Colombian solar EarlySignals scores new startups the week they raise, launch, or leave stealth, on a potential score and a scoop score across team, product, traction, market, moat, and capital. Aurelius Systems, United States. Two founders who ran an NFT tooling startup until early 2024 now run live-fire laser tests with the Army's 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii. The turrets weigh under 30kg and track drones autonomously. A $10 million seed in September 2025 was followed by a $40 million Series A in August 2026, co-led by Draper and KAS, alongside a mobile integration partnership with American Rheinmetall. 73 on potential, 72 on scoop. Metal Morph, United Kingdom. Six water utilities covering 56 percent of the UK market have signed agreements, and no full-scale plant has run yet. The company pulls aluminium and iron coagulants back out of wastewater using Donnan dialysis in container-sized modules, validated so far at a Cranfield University pilot. Funding is a 700,000 pound pre-seed plus a 100,000 pound Ofwat innovation grant. 88 on scoop, the highest of the five firms we opened, and 68 on potential, held down by traction that is still contracts rather than plants. Remepy, Israel. A 41-patient Parkinson's Phase IIa trial moved motor scores 9.7 points on the MDS-UPDRS scale against 1.95 points for levodopa alone, published in Brain Communications this year. Remepy builds prescription digital protocols designed to work alongside existing drugs. Merck KGaA's M Ventures led a $36 million Series A in August 2026, taking total funding to $62 million. There are no named customers and no revenue, which is where a company sits before Phase III. 73 on potential, 78 on scoop. Centricity WealthTech, India. Former private bankers from IIFL Wealth, Citibank, and Kotak run an open platform connecting independent financial advisors to 80 to 85 alternate asset managers, manufacturing none of the products itself. It now carries 20,000 partners and roughly 15,000 to 16,000 crore rupees in assets, up from 4,500 distributors and 4,500 crore at seed. SMBC's Asia Rising Fund led a 280 crore rupee Series A in August 2026. 80 on potential, the highest of the five, and 72 on scoop. Erco Energía, Colombia. Two mechanical engineering graduates from EAFIT turned their 2012 capstone project into a distributed solar developer with more than 320 MWp installed or in progress, including a 26.4 MW plant dispatched in August 2025 and a 14.96 MWp site carrying 4.5 MWh of storage. Norfund, CFM, and Axon backed a $129 million Series C in August 2026, one of the largest local equity rounds in Colombia. 79 on potential, 82 on scoop. 78 more firms sit behind the subscriber wall in the August 17 issue: 16 in Europe, 13 in Canada, 13 across Israel and the Middle East, 10 in Asia-Pacific, 9 in Africa, 9 in the United States, and 7 in Latin America. Research notes, not investment advice.

Every backyard fire pit in America has one man. You know the man. He cannot be replaced. My coworker Morita met him in Idaho. Last month, our company sent Morita to a supplier in a small Idaho town for two weeks. On Thursday, the plant supervisor, Ed, told him: "Come over Friday. We're having a fire." Morita spent the next 24 hours trying to figure out who was getting fired. (Nobody. In Idaho, a fire is not an accident. It's an event. You attend it.) Friday night. A backyard. A ring of stones. Eleven people in hoodies. A cooler. A dog. And in the middle of everything, Ed, holding a stick. Ed's nine-year-old son, Colby, explained the rules. Nobody asked him to. He just felt Morita needed to know. "Rule one. It's Dad's fire. Rule two. That's Dad's stick. Don't touch it. It's just a stick. Dad found it in 2014. It's been the stick ever since. Rule three. Don't put a log on unless Dad says. Uncle Jimbo did once. We don't talk about Uncle Jimbo." Uncle Jimbo was sitting right there. He nodded. Morita understood immediately. In Japan, the tea ceremony has a whole part that is only about the charcoal. It's called sumidemae. A tea master trains for years to place a few pieces of charcoal with metal chopsticks. Nobody else touches them. Everyone else watches in silence. Morita had flown five thousand miles and found a tea master in Idaho. His name was Ed. He was wearing Crocs. So Morita did what you do at a tea ceremony. Every time Ed poked the fire, Morita bowed. Ed noticed. Ed has been poking fires in that backyard for 22 years. Nobody had ever bowed. So Ed poked again. Morita bowed again. Ed poked a little more seriously. He moved one log one inch to the left. He stepped back. He looked at it. Morita bowed deeper. Ed's wife, Trish, leaned over to her sister and whispered, "What is happening." Her sister said, "I think Ed found his people." By ten o'clock, the fire did not need anything. Ed kept poking it. Morita kept bowing. Nobody could remember who started it. Trish says it was the happiest she'd seen her husband since Boise State beat Oklahoma in 2007. Then came the smoke. Everywhere Morita sat, the smoke followed him. He moved. It followed. He moved again. It followed again. "Smoke follows beauty," Trish told him. Morita is 41. He is an engineer. In his life, he has been called many things. Reliable. Punctual. "Fine." Never beautiful. He moved six times. The smoke found him six times. The seventh time, he stopped moving. He sat in the smoke, eyes streaming, and said quietly: "I am beautiful." Eleven Americans cheered. Then came the marshmallows. In Japan, there are schools of swordsmanship that have been arguing with each other for four hundred years. In America, it's marshmallows. Trish belongs to the Golden School. She holds one marshmallow eight inches above the coals and turns it slowly for eleven minutes. She does not speak. She does not blink. It comes out the color of a church window. Colby belongs to the Burn It School. He shoves it straight into the flames, waits until it's screaming, blows it out, and eats the charcoal. Each school believes the other is a crime. Morita chose the Golden School. At minute nine, his marshmallow slid off the stick and fell into the fire. Silence. Then Ed said, very gently, "The fire takes one." Every adult nodded. "Every night, it takes one. You don't get it back. You don't ask why." Morita says it was the most spiritual thing anyone said to him in America. Uncle Jimbo says it was the most Ed has talked since 2019. Around eleven, something happened that Morita still can't explain. Everybody stopped talking. Eleven Americans. The loudest people on earth. Staring into a fire. For forty minutes. Nobody checked a phone. In Japan, we pay a lot of money for that. It's called a meditation retreat. In Idaho, it's free, and it comes with a hot dog. At midnight, Ed stood up and said, "One more log." At 12:40, he said, "One more log." At 1:15, he said, "One more log." Morita has a degree in mechanical engineering. He tried to calculate how many logs "one more log" is. There is no answer. "One more log" is not a number. It's a feeling. By two in the morning, everyone had gone inside except Morita, Ed, and the dog. Then Ed did something Trish says he has not done once in 22 years. Not for his brother. Not for the pastor. Not for her. He handed Morita the stick. Morita took it with both hands. He poked the fire once. Very carefully. One spark floated up into the Idaho sky. Ed watched it for a long time. "Good poke," he said. Morita bowed. Ed bowed back. Two grown men, bowing over a dying fire at two in the morning in Idaho. The dog went inside. Morita came home to Tokyo last week. You are not allowed to have a fire in a Tokyo apartment. So on Friday nights, he lights one candle on his balcony, sits on a cushion, and adjusts the wick with a chopstick. Last Friday, his wife reached for the chopstick. Morita said, "That's my fire."