Heya and welcome to Five Things Tech!
This edition of Five Things Tech is a bit different. The focus is not as much Big Tech as I normally focus on, but instead I found some really interesting articles about solar energy, some weird bio tech, more bio tech, also some really interesting research about artificial meat and finally about an alternative to Teams. Teams is my arch-nemesis. I don’t know why this crappy software is even allowed to be sold legally, but apparently there are worse options out there.
I hope you like these Five Things (Bio-)Tech!
Germany smashes PV record, produces three times more solar power than Australia so far this year
By 27 September, Germany’s net electricity generation from solar in 2026 had reached 90.2 terawatt hours (TWh), exceeding last year’s total of 90 TWh, BSW-Solar said, citing data from the research institute Fraunhofer ISE.
By comparison, this is almost triple the amount of PV produced in Australia over the same period, with 31.5 TWh of rooftop and large scale solar generation on the main grid, and a further 3.2 TWh on the separate main grid in Western Australia, according to data from Open Electricity.
It’s always so sunny in Germany! Somehow this didn’t make the news in Germany, but I think it is huge. Obviously, this is not without challenges as the grid needs to improve quickly and we need more batteries, but I am confident that we will find solutions for that and then benefit even more from solar and wind energy.
A Digital Cell Predicts Which Drugs Will Be Most Effective in Deadly Breast Cancer
Researchers have long sought to speed up the process of tailoring treatments to patients, and AI might lend a hand. This month, a Chinese team developed an AI-based virtual cell for triple-negative breast cancer—a challenging form of the disease that often evades standard treatments—to predict how individuals will respond to different drugs.
Rather than reconstructing every detail of a cell’s inner workings, the virtual cell focused on just proteins. Trained on a massive, curated dataset tracking protein changes before and after drug treatments, the model outperformed existing drug-tailoring approaches and discovered new combinations that could work even better.
This is not that easy to wrap my head around, but I assume the implications could be massive when it comes to improving cancer therapy.
Tech to Replace Animal Testing Is Almost Ready. Scientists Are Not
A host of these kinds of alternatives to experiments on animals have been developed over the years. Collectively they’re known as NAMs, an acronym that stands, depending on whom you’re talking to, for new approach methodologies, novel alternative methods, or nonanimal methods. Most NAMs have yet to be rigorously tested, but early studies suggest their potential.
As NAMs have become more sophisticated, the question of how they will be implemented has become less about their technical qualities and more about the practical next steps needed to realize their potential. Validating NAMs—standardizing the systems, conducting head-to-head comparisons with animal experiments—is an enormous challenge. Moreover, simply outperforming animal models is necessary but not sufficient. The adoption of NAMs will require changes in policy, training, and culture.
A lung the size of a USB stick that actually breathes - this is not science fiction anymore. How crazy is that?
Where’s The Beef?
The event—the theatrical reveal, the PR spectacle—triggered a kind of gold rush. One hundred and forty companies sprang up in six continents, trying to replicate what Post had done with beef across a range of other species: chicken, pork, fish, even quail. Investment to the tune of $3 billion flooded into the sector. True believers claimed that cellular agriculture would not only fight climate change and global food insecurity but also slow the spread of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. A company called Upside Foods touted its plans to “set the new standard for meat” and to “make meat a force of good in the world.” A company called Vow created an enormous woolly-mammoth meatball, though no one was allowed to eat it, since the DNA came from a fossil and the company didn’t know whether it was actually fit for human consumption. The think tank RethinkX predicted that cultivated meat would decimate the U.S. beef industry by 2030, reducing demand for the conventional variety by a whopping 70 percent. As the organization wrote, “We are already on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago.”
This article really sparked my curiousity as I remember vividly how lab-grown meat, 3D-printed fish and all sorts of new ways to produce artificial meat was the coolest tech trend with the greatest impact on farming and what not. I still haven’t tried any of that, but I do find it interesting that this didn’t take off at all. Instead, people started eating less meat.
‘Absolute s–t’: EU’s Microsoft Teams alternative draws bad reviews from officials
The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams — but officials using it aren’t impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.”
The Commission introduced Element Pro over the summer as a “sovereign back-up to Teams,” according to an internal staff memo seen by POLITICO. The platform is intended to provide a fallback for Commission communications if U.S.-based Teams becomes unavailable.
While Teams remains the Commission’s main communications tool, Element Pro is an “internal back-up... that helps ensure our business continuity” in the event of a “disruption,” the memo says.
How can a product be worse than Teams?
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
🤖
— Nico