2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: HiNa Battery Technology and its effort to commercialize salt cells

October 6, 2025
HiNa Battery Technology is a trailblazer in developing and mass-producing batteries using sodium, a widely available element that can be extracted from sea salt. The startup’s products—already powering small vehicles and energy storage plants in China—provide a valuable alternative to lithium-based batteries, made with materials mined and processed in just a few countries. Over the…

How we picked promising climate tech companies in an especially unsettling year

October 6, 2025
MIT Technology Review’s reporters and editors faced a dilemma as we began to mull nominees for this year’s list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch. How do you pick companies poised to succeed in a moment of such deep uncertainty, at a time when the new Trump administration is downplaying the dangers of climate change,…

2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Pairwise and its climate-adapted crops

October 6, 2025
Climate change will make it increasingly difficult to grow crops across many parts of the world. Pairwise is leveraging CRISPR gene editing to develop plants that can better withstand adverse conditions. Pairwise uses cutting-edge gene editing to produce crops that can withstand increasingly harsh climate conditions, helping to feed a growing population even as the…

Another effort to track ICE raids was just taken offline

October 6, 2025
People over Papers, a crowd-sourcing project that maps sightings of immigration agents, was taken offline yesterday by Padlet, the collaborative bulletin board platform on which it was built. It’s just the latest ICE-tracking initiative to be pulled by tech platforms in the past few days.  A Padlet customer service representative told Celeste, one of the…

Waffles eat Bluesky

October 5, 2025
A waffle-centric controversy underlines ongoing tensions between Bluesky and some of its most vocal users.