38 AD. A balcony of the palace complex, the northwest angle of the Palatine Hill. The new emperor Caligula stands before the Senate and People of Rome, his voice rising above a tumult of applause as togas ripple like surf in the sunlight. The crowd strains to catch his words. “What did he say?” asks […]
November 30, 1977, Kansas City. The Seattle SuperSonics were exhausted — three games in five nights over Thanksgiving, losses piling up, their record a miserable 5–17. The season was over before it began. They hardly knew or cared whether they were flying Frontier or Air Midwest. The coach seats were too small for the big […]
The smell of tar and cedar hung over the harbor at Fort Victoria. Rain hissed on the deck of the Royal Saxon, drumming a rhythm that only sailors and timekeepers understand. Captain Henry Ward Collier sat at his desk beneath a swinging lamp, pen scratching across damp paper — a letter home before the tide. […]
Act I — The Spark April 20, 1962 — the night air was restless with the sound of engines.In Seattle, the Space Needle stood ready to crown the Century 21 World’s Fair, a steel exclamation point aimed at tomorrow. In New York, floodlights swept the façade of the Coliseum on Columbus Circle as the International […]
Late in the season, under a slate Oklahoma sky, CVR Energy looked at its cards, and folded. Like a gambler with a hand gone wrong, the company announced it would stop making renewable diesel at its Wynnewood refinery — “unfavorable economics of the renewables business,” they said — and switch back to petroleum. Eighty million […]
The house lights dimmed and the chatter softened, the way it does when the next card might decide everything. In place of tuxedos: blazers. In place of martinis: macchiatos. Yet it had all the tension of James Bond playing Le Chiffre for every chip in Casino Royale. It’s ABLC Next, and the bioeconomy stands at […]
Comedy, Chemistry, and the Art of Realism at ABLC “There is a beautiful valley, where companies live on hype, all you need is a dream and a Series A. This…is not that place.” Laughter ripples through the crowd and builds as the opening credits roll: animated wolves skiing while talking on the phone, flying from […]
The hallways at ABLC Next ring like a refinery at shift change — loud, hot, and running on caffeine. Policy hawks, tech dreamers, financiers, and feedstock wranglers crowd the lobby, swapping figures and phone numbers. Everyone agrees on one thing: time’s running out. The bioeconomy has grown, but the world hasn’t. We’re short on energy, […]
Today, the Digest is announcing that after 12 months of development, DigestAI has arrived and was demonstrated live on stage at ABLC Next in San Francisco. It’s a place where a researcher or investor can start with a rough question — “What are the latest advances in pyrolysis?” — and, through dialogue, refine it into […]
If you work in the advanced bioeconomy, you know the feeling: the alarm clock rings, Sonny and Cher start singing “I Got You Babe,” there seem to be “a thousand people freezing their butts off to worship a rat,” and there we are again — scarce feedstocks, expensive capital, Trump-policy angst, scale-up blues. It’s Groundhog […]
