W. Wayt Gibbs

THE SPARK By Nathan Myhrvold Non-fiction: Business/ Finance/ Economics January 26, 2026 Invention lab founder, former Microsoft CTO, and author of the James Beard Award-winning MODERNIST CUISINE and MODERNIST BREAD Nathan Myhrvold's THE SPARK: A SERIAL INVENTOR'S SEVEN PRINCIPLES TO HASTEN THE COMING INVENTION AGE, an insider's guide to harnessing the transformative power of invention to accelerate growth and solve seemingly impossible problems, told through surprising backstories of familiar inventions and the first peek behind the curtain at a laboratory that has generated thousands of patented ideas and spun out 16 high-tech startups so far, to Matthew Holt at Matt Holt Books, at auction, by Will Lippincott at Aevitas Creative Management (world).

I’m thrilled to begin a fun book project with my longtime collaborator Nathan Myhrvold and our editor Matt Holt of Matt Holt Books. Many thanks to our agent Will Lippincott for guiding us from concept to contract in just four months. Have a favorite story of invention? Let me know in the comments!

The Food Fighters With their inheritance as stake, two brothers pit ultramechanization against traditional farming practices. Now Mum must judge which does better for the family, the nation, and the climate.

In our newest addition to Anthropocene’s Climate Parables series, Prashant Vaze tells a tale from 2061. Two brothers square off to see whether intensive automation or regenerative agriculture can best meet the needs of India’s farms and farmers. Mum decides who wins. 🧪
Free to read—our gift to you!

@mims.bsky.social Thanks for the tech writing starter pack. Add me if you want; these days I’m mostly covering energy & climate tech for IEEE Spectrum and Anthropocene mag, while working on a book project.

🧪

A Skeptic’s Take on Beaming Power to Earth from Space Why we shouldn’t try to stick solar plants where the sun always shines

Could solar power beamed from space help the world head off climate change? For @ieeespectrum.bsky.social , I worked with ESA's former head of power systems engineering to take a hard look at the details of what would be involved. Our conclusion: don't bet on it. spectrum.ieee.org/space-based-...

A Hidden Savior Finds The Lyme Light It’s 2070, and Super Lyme Disease is spreading across North America. When a mother loses her child to the disease, she goes on a crusade to fight it—with help from a cold-blooded hero.

New in Anthropocene's Climate Parables series: it's 2070, and Super Lyme disease is sweeping across North America. A celebrity teams with a CDC scientist and a curious twist of biology to immunize the landscape itself. Zoe Young explores what might go *right* in a future pandemic. bit.ly/lymelizrd

Firing Brimstone With 18 supersonic shots to the stratosphere, the Pina2bo system went fully operational right under the nose of an oblivious world. But would this hand-picked party of global elites back an American t...

I'm proud to present the newest story in Anthropocene magazine's Climate Parables fiction series, contributed by sci-fi legend Neal Stephenson. This story is adapted from Neal's latest excellent novel, "Termination Shock," now available in paperback.
@nealstephenson.bsky.social

We created some terrific infographics at SciAm that explain how LIGO works for my 2002 article on the project. (PDF) Ripple in spacetime (researchgate.net)

@danirabaiotti.bsky.social Thanks for starting this! I'm a science journalist and would like to be added to the list. As it grows, consider creating separate sublists of scientists, science journalists, and science communicators who work for research institutions. Each group plays a distinct role...

This is not a drill.
National Geographic magazine has laid off the last of its staff writers (msn.com)

Line graph time series of 2023's daily Antarctic sea ice extent anomaly compared to 2016, which was the record for the largest magnitude sea ice anomaly. 2023 is a record for low for the current date. The range in sea ice anomalies between 1979 and 2022 is also shown. Anomalies are computed to a 1981-2010 baseline using passive microwave satellite data.

Well, the absolute magnitude of the Antarctic sea ice anomaly has now tied the largest on record...

More graphs here: https://zacklabe.com/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/. I am using the NSIDC's standard 5-day running mean here. 🧪

The Economist's Babbage podcast this week describes how biologists long knew that many/most non-human animals engage in same-gender sex. But they kept quiet about it, feeding widespread misperceptions that homosexuality is peculiar to humans. Can biology explain same-sex attraction? (economist.com)

New Bioinspired Robot Flies, Rolls, Walks, and More Developed at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, a new robot can autonomously choose from a variety of motions to move through a complex environment.

Clever, useful, and not the least bit creepy.
New Bioinspired Robot Flies, Rolls, Walks, and More | www.caltech.edu
The full demo is worth a watch to see it use its wheels as legs and to pop a wheelie and zip up a slope: video.waytgibbs.com/CaltechM4LabDemo.mp4