The Saturday Morning Newsletter #56
Reading, Shame, Smoke, Buses, Crops, and More
👋 Hello friends,
Thank you for joining this week's edition of The Saturday Morning Newsletter. I'm Drew Jackson, and today we're exploring 14 articles, essays, companies, ideas, podcasts, videos, or thoughts that caught my attention this week for their potential to significantly impact our future.
Before we begin: The Saturday Morning Newsletter by Brainwaves arrives in your inbox every Saturday, a concise and casual digest of current events, optimistic news stories, and other interesting tidbits about venture capital, economics, space, energy, intellectual property, philosophy, and beyond. I write as a curious explorer rather than an expert, and I value your insights and perspectives on each subject.
Time to Read: 5 minutes.
Let’s dive in!
#1: Messium
Description: Messium is a developer of satellites to monitor crop health.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Messium recently raised $3.8M in venture capital funding. Messium offers satellites that monitor crop health 24/7 from orbit. Their software enables farmers to virtually monitor nitrogen levels and recommends additional nitrogen supplements across crops to ensure proper growth stages. Their goal is to further increase crop yields without over harvesting current soil limitations.
#2: Marqvision
Description: Marqvision is a brand protection startup.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Marqvision recently raised $48M in venture capital funding. Marqvision is one of my favorite IP management companies, offering services for counterfeit protection, piracy prevention, and impersonation prevention. Their AI software provides constant monitoring across the web for infractions and other brand related fraud, helping address and eliminate bad actors immediately.
#3: Dig Energy
Description: Dig Energy is a geothermal drilling startup.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Dig Energy recently raised $5M in venture capital funding. Dig Energy is revolutionizing the field of geothermal heat and energy by providing new compact drilling technologies capable of dramatically reducing the cost, complexity, and footprint of geothermal plants. Shallow geothermal is one of, if not the most, effective solutions for energy efficiency and heat in buildings.
#4: Apex Space
Description: Apex Space is a maker of satellite buses.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Apex Space recently raised $200M in venture capital funding. Apex Space is designing standardized space modules capable of carrying payloads into orbit and beyond. Their seamless design enables them to manufacture capsules faster than anyone in the industry, meaning they’re better aligned to meet increased demand fluctuations in the near future.
#5: Fourth Power
Description: Fourth Power is an energy storage startup using thermal batteries.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Fourth Power recently raised $20M in venture capital funding. Fourth Power is developing utility scale thermal power batteries, capable of smoothing out energy fluctuations from renewable sources into a constant source of energy. Their technology can easily grow from short to long term storage, allowing flexibility and ensuring stability.
CNBC: How Investors Weigh Demand and Risk With Nuclear
Increased demand from AI datacenters has driven interest in nuclear energy, however the capital requirements and uncertain regulatory climate continues to raise questions about the sector’s fiscal capacity. The development of small reactors is still long in the future, however they have lower payback periods. Investors continue to have many issues.
IEEE Spectrum: What Will It Take to Electrify Africa
Demand is significantly outpacing supply in Africa, meaning the energy crisis is deepening. The World Bank has an initiative to bring 300M people electricity by 2030. If the population continues to grow, the number of people will similarly mirror the supply increase, so efforts will need to be increased even further.
New York Times: Top Scientists Find Growing Evidence That Greenhouse Gases Are Dangerous
A leading scientific advisory body issued a report explaining that carbon dioxide, methane, and other planet-warming greenhouse gases are threatening human health. The finding dates back as early as 2009. Trump recently has been trying to rescind the endangerment finding, however this significantly dampers those plans.
New York Times: Wildfire Smoke May Be One of America’s Deadliest Climate Disasters
A new study estimates that if the planet continues on its current climate path, exposure to wildfire smoke in the United States will kill an estimated 70,000 people per year by 2050. That’s a large amount of people dying via smoke inhalation and other factors associated with the fires. These impacts are larger than anything else that has been measured, potentially sparking some conversations about the true impact of climate change.
New York Times: Climate Change’s Toll in Europe in 2025
Scientists estimate that severe heat during the summer of 2025 killed 3x as many people in European cities as would have died had humans not warmed the planet. This is based on historical mortality totals and estimates/projections, but not necessarily actual death records. However, the results show a worrying pattern: rising temperatures are increasing the risks to human health more quickly than previously realized.
Wall Street Journal: How Much Do You Really Know About Microplastics?
I don’t want to spoil it, but microplastics are very important and almost everyone’s knowledge of them is incomplete. You should take their quiz to see how much you actually know.
Pitchbook: Top 100 Universities for Entrepreneurs
Some universities perform better than others for founders. Pitchbook has ranked the top 100, and unsurprisingly, the top universities are large, prestigious, and international. The rankings are based on the total number of founders whose companies received VC money in the last decade. Where does your university fall on the list?
The Conversation: The Philosophy of Shame
Frederic Gros’s book A Philosophy of Shame is an intriguing read. He describes shame as “the major emotion of our time, the signifier of new struggles.” We spend a large portion of our lives trying to make good impressions on those around us which is a large source of shame. Shame significantly regulates our behavior and shapes our self-image.
Anne Helen: A Life With Less Pleasure Reading
A new survey has found there are significant declines in reading for pleasure in the United States. In 2021, a study found that 75% of adults had read at least one book in the last year. For the majority of those adults, that’s a physical book.
Reading books is a sign of intelligence, curiosity, leisure, class, so people are heavily influenced to overreport their reading habits.
Another study found that less that 20% of people are reading for personal interest, meaning there’s a lot of reading being done that isn’t self-imposed.
However, the study did find that those who read for pleasure now are reading more, even as the percentage of readers reading for pleasure decreased.
Furthermore, the study found that only a small percentage of people with kids are reading with them. Only 2% of participants are reading with children on the average day.
Similarly, many people bought books throughout the pandemic, but didn’t have a chance to read them yet.
Overall, these are some interesting insights into our reading habits. We should be trying to read for pleasure as much as possible, read to kids as much as possible, and read the books we bought but haven’t read yet.
See you Wednesday for Brainwaves,
Drew Jackson
Website: brainwaves.me
Twitter: @brainwavesdotme
Email: brainwaves.me@gmail.com
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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this content are my own and do not represent the views of any of the companies I currently work for or have previously worked for. This content does not contain financial advice - it is for informational and educational purposes only. Investing contains risks and readers should conduct their own due diligence and/or consult a financial advisor before making any investment decisions. Any sponsorship or endorsements are noted and do not affect any editorial content produced.