Diesel fuel powers everything from shipping to agriculture, and with prices hitting record highs in recent weeks, governments around the world are scrambling to contain the fallout. 

For now, that’s meant releasing fuel from stockpiles, but in the coming years, the answer might be a new technology from an MIT startup called LNK Energies.

LNK has created a way to convert existing heavy-duty trucks from diesel to hydrogen, slashing pollution and costs while shielding operators from the price spikes that result from geopolitical instability like the war in Iran. “If you look at total cost of ownership of a Class 8 truck, it’s 13% cheaper than diesel,” Alexis Huynh, chief technology officer at LNK Energies, told TechCrunch. (Class 8 is the heaviest category of trucks, including big rigs.)

Automotive companies have been exploring the use of hydrogen in long-haul trucking in part because refilling a hydrogen tank is faster than recharging the massive batteries those trucks require. But hydrogen is challenging to move to refilling stations, and the pressure tanks required to store it on the truck are large and costly. 

LNK’s approach is to carry hydrogen chemically attached to another compound. Liquid organic hydrogen carriers, or LOHCs, are liquids that can absorb and later release hydrogen, and they have been widely studied, but mostly for moving large quantities of hydrogen from refineries to fueling stations. The equipment needed to separate hydrogen from the LOHC, known as a reactor, has been too big to fit onto a truck.

“A lot of the reactors that LOHC companies have today are really large. They’re about the size of a shipping container,” Huynh said. “We have shrunk that basically to the size of a mini fridge.”

Moving the reactor onto the truck saves a surprising amount of energy. When hydrogen is stored on a truck, it must be pressurized to more than 11,000 psi (800 bar), roughly 800 times normal air pressure, and squeezing it that hard takes a lot of power. Because LNK’s fuel carries the hydrogen in liquid form and releases it on board as needed, that step goes away. “We’re eliminating the expensive compression step,” Sayandeep Biswas, co-founder and CEO of LNK Energies, told TechCrunch. 

In LNK’s system, once the hydrogen is released on the truck, it can be burned in a conventional internal combustion engine, the kind in today’s diesel trucks, with just a few modifications. The company uses waste heat from the engine to help power the on-board reactor. Or, if the trucking company wants to fully eliminate combustion emissions, it can use fuel cells instead, which convert hydrogen into electricity to power electric motors.

The LOHC can be stored in a traditional fuel tank and dispensed using pumps, just like diesel. “The entire hydrogen infrastructure doesn’t need to exist,” Biswas said. “It’s just a standard diesel station.”

Biswas and Huynh have a demonstration reactor working in the lab that can power an engine from a lawnmower. In 18 months, they plan to install a larger version in a commercial truck. 

The trucks will cost more up front, but promise to be cheaper to operate. The duo are confident that they can undercut diesel at a price of $6.50 per gallon after they’ve made just 50 to 100 trucks. None of their projections include government subsidies. “The idea isn’t to have a technology that is cheaper at scale, but one that is cheaper even during that adoption period,” Biswas said.

LNK will present live on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday Oct 13-15 as part of our Startup Battlefield pitch competition. Come join us in San Francisco and take part in the action.

Your vibe-coded applications can now be easily run on Android smartphones without having to first go public on the Google Play Store, the tech giant announced on Tuesday. A new feature will allow users to launch their own personal apps on their device via Google Play using their standard Google account, but they will remain completely private.

These personal apps won’t show up in Google Play’s search or listing pages, and won’t be shared with anyone except for the app’s creator.

The idea comes as more people are experimenting with building their own applications via AI for specific, personal needs. However, being able to use that app on their own Android device has meant publishing to Google Play, making it accessible to the Play Store’s some 3 billion users. That led many to limit their vibe-coding efforts to web apps that could run on any device instead of something built natively for Android.

Now, Google says Android device owners can vibe code an app using Google AI Studio, then launch it for their own use.

These apps are still required to comply with Google Play’s existing policies, but allow users to experiment more directly with building apps for Android.

Initially, the feature will be available to users in the U.S., age 18 and up.

“That’s why the future of apps on Google Play is personal, secure, and built by everyone — and it’s why Play is leading the charge and moving from ‘there’s an app for that’ to ‘there’s an app for me,’” said Sam Bright, Google’s VP & GM for the Google Play and Developer Ecosystem, in a press briefing ahead of Tuesday’s launch. “We started Google Play with a simple goal: to connect you with the apps you love. But after today, we hope it’s clear: Play has evolved to become so much more than that.”

In the months ahead, the company said that users will be able to share their vibe-coded creations with a network of trusted friends. That means the apps you built for family or friends, or maybe your child’s T-ball league, could be used with a small group of people, without having to go public on the Play Store.

And if the app ever really becomes popular, there will be a way to shift the personal app to one that’s published on the Google Play Store for everyone to try, after completing the trust and safety reviews.

Related to AI’s impact on app development, Google said it’s also building better ways to curate the Google Play experience — for instance, by leveraging Google’s AI to create a personalized game recommendation engine, called Game Finder. The feature, first available in the U.S. in English, will be based on what the user likes to play combined with Google’s knowledge derived from its game community’s 1.2 billion players.

Google will also allow users to curate their own lists of games, post questions about games to a new Community Posts section, and join new 48-hour gaming challenges called Sprints, among other gaming-related feature updates.

Plus, the Play Store’s built-in AI assistant, Ask Play, is being updated to offer comparisons, allowing users to see the key differences between similar applications. Google Play apps and games will also be more deeply integrated into Gemini’s conversations.

The changes are rolling out alongside Google Play’s new support for an age range feature that allows parents to share their child’s age range, but not their exact birthdate, with developers to get an age-appropriate experience.

The way Rama Afullo tells it, he saw orbital data centers coming.

The Kenyan American engineer previously worked in Google’s cloud computing business before a brief stint at SpaceX’s Starlink communications network in 2024. His experiences convinced him that there was untapped potential for computers in space.

“When I was at SpaceX, I tried to pitch this internally. They said no. When I was at Google, I tried to pitch this internally. They said no,” he tells TechCrunch.

So he left SpaceX and co-founded Satlyt, a new company with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and Nairobi, to build software for satellites that he hopes will let many satellites share the work of large computing jobs in space. The company has raised an $8 million seed round, Afullo exclusively told TechCrunch.

The timing looks good for him. SpaceX has since gone all-in on orbital data centers, and Satlyt’s software is set to launch Thursday on a SpaceX rocket alongside the first prototype for Google’s space data center effort, Project Suncatcher.

Unlike SpaceX, Google, or startups like Starcloud and Cowboy Space Company, Satlyt isn’t planning to build its own spacecraft. Afullo’s team is building the software to operate AI models on satellites, comparing his approach to VMware and Snowflake — companies whose platforms let users run complex software without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

“The folks like SpaceX who are doing orbital data centers — if they are the iPhone, we’ll build Android as a horizontally integrated, open ecosystem,” he said. In other words, Satlyt wants to offer software that works across many companies’ satellites.

Satlyt has already flown its software on two demonstration missions. The initial focus is finding operational efficiencies for spacecraft, which typically depend on flight controllers on the ground to solve any problems that arise. Sending data back to Earth, known as downlink, is expensive and often slow, so using AI to make decisions on the spacecraft can mean real savings, either when resolving anomalies or by processing sensor readings on the spacecraft instead of on the ground.

Earlier this year, Satlyt deployed Google DeepMind’s Gemma AI model onboard a spacecraft operated by Momentus. The model cut the size of a transmission about onboard software errors by more than 60%, the kind of efficiency that Afullo says can save hundreds of thousands of dollars per satellite each year.

This week’s launch will put Satlyt’s software to work onboard a spacecraft built by TakeMe2Space, an Indian startup that builds computing hardware for satellites. The mission involves three customers: NASA, which is paying the company to test protocols for cloud computing in space; Stellerian, a startup focused on space surveillance (tracking objects in orbit) that wants to test image processing workloads; and TakeMe2Space itself, to show the satellite can host other companies’ software.

Right now, few high-powered GPUs are in orbit. For now, the most likely opportunity lies in the kinds of workloads Satlyt is working on. But the company’s next project is to show that it can create a shared computing system — a cloud — spanning two different satellites, which it expects to attempt next year. If successful, it will allow the company to build a true compute cloud in orbit as a third-party provider to spacecraft builders.

The way to think about it is that we turn your satellite into a revenue-generating managed service,” Afullo said.

Satlyt’s seed round was led by Houston-based Non Sibi Ventures, where partner Bernard Harris, who served as a NASA astronaut for more than 20 years, helped ground the firm’s conviction in a novel, space-based business.

One reason the firm invested was that Satlyt doesn’t depend on a highest-octane vision of space data centers, which faces uncertain economics and a launch bottleneck. “We don’t need data centers in space for Rama to be wildly successful, right?” Non Sibi partner Kent Lucas told TechCrunch. “It can just be driven by the number of satellites going up.”

Afullo’s hope is to be live on 20% of satellites by the end of the decade, when he expects virtually every spacecraft builder to be putting GPUs and similar advanced processors in their satellites.

“If you’re putting up a satellite without putting up a GPU on it, at the very least, you’re doing yourself a disservice, right?” he says.

Satlyt is among dozens of other startups vetted by TechCrunch and appearing at Disrupt as part of our broader Battlefield competition happening this week in downtown San Francisco. It all kicks off on Tuesday. Learn more here.