The complete field record · 2024—2026
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issues
110 weekly reports on the systems moving from experiment to infrastructure.
Every issue covers four developments, preserves its research trail, and calculates reading time at 150 words per minute for dense technical prose.
Field reports
Newest first · Filter by time- 90Frontier Mechanics Week 90: Meta buys ARI, DARPA moves compute into matter, orbital data centers meet a cost bound, and QuBeats hardens quantum sensingA social platform acquired robot behavior, a defense lab asked materials to sense and act, an arXiv paper priced radiators honestly, and an Indian startup raised for lasers that must leave the optical table.
- 89Frontier Mechanics Week 89: X-energy raises a public billion, Deep Fission drills toward an IPO, Curiosity finds larger organics, and Progress closes the loopTwo radically different reactor companies tested public markets, a rover chemistry lab stretched its last reagents, and a disposable freighter kept orbital logistics deliberately ordinary.
- 88Frontier Mechanics Week 88: Cerebras opens the wafer-scale books, Ising learns the QPU, New Glenn saves the booster and loses the orbit, and Rosalind Franklin regains a path to MarsAn S-1 exposed the economics behind giant silicon, Nvidia put neural networks into quantum control, reuse diverged from mission success, and a transatlantic rescue rewired a rover.
- 87Frontier Mechanics Week 87: Artemis II comes home, SiFive funds RISC-V servers, ARPA-E doubles down on fusion, and Cygnus XL hauls eleven thousand poundsOrion crossed the entry corridor, open instruction sets chased the data center, public money targeted fusion's unglamorous bottlenecks, and an enlarged cargo craft turned launch capacity into station time.
- 86Frontier Mechanics Week 86: Artemis II leaves Earth, Orion yields the stick, Transporter-16 carries post-quantum keys, and Shadowless opens the robotHumans departed for the Moon, a crew tested manual proximity flight, a rideshare put cryptography into orbit, and an open robot argued that repairability is part of intelligence.
- 85Frontier Mechanics Week 85: HP watches the TPM, quantum algorithms enter the grid, Sora gets a sunset, and IM-5 gets a roverA PC moved trust monitoring below the operating system, DOE asked quantum code to earn a utility problem, OpenAI retired a video product, and NASA bought a seven-payload lunar delivery.
- 84Frontier Mechanics Week 84: Rubin goes to space, Meta's agent edits ranking code, Uber orders Rivian autonomy, and America packages an AI stackGTC pushed accelerated compute into radiation, an internal agent optimized ads under evaluation, a robotaxi contract coupled milestones to capital, and export policy treated data centers as geopolitical bundles.
- 83Frontier Mechanics Week 83: Firefly returns Alpha to orbit, Mind raises $500 million, warming accelerates, and ALLEX learns to share a bodyA small launcher flew after two destructive failures, Rivian spun factory intelligence into a lavishly funded company, climate statistics found a broken slope, and an assistive robot treated contact as communication.
- 82Frontier Mechanics Week 82: Natrium clears construction, Anthropic tests procurement power, HEBI hardens an actuator, and lunar mining finds a roverA sodium fast reactor crossed a regulatory gate, an AI lab discovered the government is a market-maker, modular joints started the trip to flight hardware, and two lunar startups joined excavation to mobility.
- 81Frontier Mechanics Week 81: China standardizes humanoids, Samsung hides the S26 screen, Intrinsic moves into Google, and Artemis changes shapeA national robot standard turned a product category into infrastructure, a phone made privacy optical, Alphabet tightened the loop between Gemini and factories, and NASA traded a brittle lunar sequence for cadence.
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