TopTechTrends

This founder is making cheaper, cleaner steel

September 8, 2026
The steel industry isn’t exactly known for innovation. Very little has changed about purifying iron ore since the process was invented and commercialized in the 1850s. The majority of steelmakers melt solid iron ore at dizzyingly high temperatures inside blast furnaces, where the material reacts with gases to trigger chemical reactions that remove oxygen. It…

This geneticist’s age-reversal tech could help restore sight

September 8, 2026
Yuancheng (Ryan) Lu is obsessed with aging. And with eyes. As he steps outside the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his aviator glasses darken automatically in the sun. Age-related blindness runs in his family. A great-aunt in China, the story goes, was killed crossing a road because she couldn’t see oncoming traffic. And Lu’s own…

Eric Wu’s newest company, out of stealth since May, is going after construction’s labor crunch

September 8, 2026
Eric Wu, who built and ran Opendoor before stepping away in 2022, has had his new company, NavigateAI, out of stealth since May — building AI copilots that give construction workers real-time, hands-free guidance through smartphones and Meta’s AI glasses, backed by $25 million from Elad Gil, Khosla Ventures, and Lennar to tackle a labor shortage severe enough that data center projects alone now need 4,000 to 5,000 workers apiece.

The Download: the hunt for underground hydrogen and more rogue OpenAI agents

September 7, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How much hydrogen awaits us underground? A flurry of exploration efforts is searching for underground stores of hydrogen gas, which could provide a valuable source of zero-carbon fuel. The hunt has…