Religion, Energy, and Silicon: A Week’s Worth of Consequential Developments
Five stories broke through the noise this week – a faith-based crypto collapse that swallowed $3 million, a first-ever roadmap for deploying solar geoengineering, a chip startup recovering heat as usable energy, and a battery market caught between growth and geopolitical pressure.
When God Told Them to Launch a Coin
Eli Regalado says he first heard God speak to him and genuinely questioned whether he was having a breakdown. Over time, he and his wife Kaitlyn came to treat that voice as reliable guidance – it told them to marry, buy a house, and start a family. Then in October 2021, according to testimony the Regalados later gave in court, a new instruction arrived: get into crypto. Specifically, they said they received holdings in a little-known digital coin, and Eli heard the words: “Take this to my people for a wealth transfer.”
What followed was the creation of INDXcoin. The Regalados promoted it through family members, friends, and contacts embedded in evangelical Christian networks. More than 500 people eventually handed over money. The total: over $3 million.
Within a year, INDXcoin collapsed. Every investor lost everything. The money’s destination remains a subject of serious legal inquiry, and the episode has left hundreds of people – many of whom trusted the Regalados precisely because of shared religious community – wondering whether they were defrauded. The story, reported by Katia Savchuk in partnership with Type Investigations and with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, is part of MIT Technology Review’s Big Story series.
What makes this case notable beyond the dollar figure is the mechanism of trust. The Regalados didn’t operate through anonymous internet promotions or flashy financial promises. They moved through church circles, through the intimate architecture of faith communities where skepticism toward fellow believers can feel like a moral failure. That social infrastructure – built on spiritual authority rather than financial credentials – is exactly what made the pitch so difficult to question and the collapse so damaging.
A Roadmap for Cooling the Planet – If We Ever Decide to Try
Scientists have been studying stratospheric aerosol injection – the idea of releasing reflective particles high in the atmosphere to bounce sunlight back into space – for roughly fifty years. Hundreds of studies have examined the concept, which mimics the temporary cooling effect observed after large volcanic eruptions. Despite all that research, there is still no scientific consensus on how effective the approach would be, no agreement on its secondary effects, and no structured plan for resolving either question.
Reflective, a San Francisco-based nonprofit research organization, has now published what it describes as a detailed roadmap for the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that would be needed before any responsible decision about deploying solar geoengineering could be made. The publication, reported by James Temple at MIT Technology Review, does not argue for or against deployment. It argues for a systematic approach to reducing uncertainty – identifying what needs to be tested, in what order, and under what conditions.
The framing matters. Solar geoengineering occupies an unusual position in climate science: it’s theoretically potent enough to generate serious interest, politically fraught enough to have been blocked or restricted in several jurisdictions, and empirically uncertain enough that major gaps remain in the research. Reflective’s roadmap is an attempt to treat those gaps as solvable engineering problems rather than permanent sources of ambiguity.
Whether governments, research funders, and international bodies will engage with the roadmap as a practical document rather than a thought experiment remains to be seen. The history of solar geoengineering research is littered with proposed field experiments that never happened – stopped by regulatory uncertainty, public opposition, or the simple reluctance of institutions to be associated with deliberately altering the atmosphere. Having a roadmap is not the same as having the will to follow it.
The stakes are high enough that the question won’t stay theoretical indefinitely. As average global temperatures continue rising and conventional mitigation efforts struggle to keep pace, pressure to at least understand what solar geoengineering could do – good and bad – is only growing. Reflective’s roadmap arrives at a moment when “we don’t know enough” is becoming a harder position to defend as a reason for inaction on the research itself.
The Chip That Eats Its Own Waste
Every chip that has ever been manufactured has treated waste heat as an unavoidable tax on computation. You run calculations, heat escapes, that’s physics. Hannah Earley, 31, thinks that’s a design assumption rather than a law of nature. As cofounder and CTO of Vaire Computing, she is building chips that recover energy normally lost as heat – an approach called reversible computing.
Last year, Vaire announced a specific milestone: a chip incorporating a resonator that recovered more energy than it consumed, even after accounting for the energy required to run the resonator itself. That’s the threshold that separates theoretical appeal from engineering viability. The application Earley has in mind extends well beyond the server rack – she sees reversible computing as a path to more energy-efficient data centers, laptops, and mobile devices. Earley is among the computing and robotics honorees on MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2026, reported by Eshan Raul.
US Battery Growth and the China Question
The US energy storage market is expanding at a record pace – a development that could stabilize the electrical grid and reduce carbon emissions from power generation. The catch is structural: that growth is happening largely on the back of inexpensive Chinese batteries, which the Trump administration is actively working to phase out of the American supply chain.
Casey Crownhart at MIT Technology Review frames the resulting tension as a genuine policy dilemma rather than a straightforward case of economic nationalism versus pragmatism. Reducing dependence on any single foreign source for critical energy infrastructure carries real logic, particularly after supply chain disruptions exposed vulnerabilities across multiple industries in recent years. But developing domestic alternatives takes time and costs more – and the US grid’s need for storage is pressing and immediate, not hypothetical and future. How much efficiency a country should sacrifice in the name of supply chain independence is a question that doesn’t have a clean answer. And in the battery market, that question is now being answered in real time, through policy choices whose consequences won’t be fully visible for years.
