Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Savor uses chemistry to make 'butter' that tastes just like the real thing

Technology

Fats from thin air: Startup makes butter using CO2 and water

Bill Gates has thrown his weight – and his money – behind a startup making a rich, fatty spread akin to butter, using just carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And this is just the start, with milk, ice-cream, cheese, meat and plant oils also in development.

Natrium's advanced nuclear reactor design, which will be up and running as a full scale trial plant in the late 2020s, also stores several times more energy than most grid scale batteries for rapid load response

Energy

Bill Gates's next-gen nuclear plant packs in grid-scale energy storage

Bill Gates's next-level nuclear power station is small, cheap, efficient and fast to build. It also has a built-in, on-demand energy storage system 10 times bigger than the biggest grid-scale batteries. Thanks to a DoE grant, it will open before 2030.

The University of Colorado's solar toilet

Good Thinking

Waste-cooking solar toilet unveiled in India

A solar toiled that produces enough heat to convert fecal matter into biochar has been unveiled in India. The project, developed at University of Colorado Boulder, was made possible with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has given the project another round of funding.