Floating blue paddles dance on the waves that lap a dock in the Port of Los Angeles, silently converting the power of the sea into usable electricity.

This innovative installation may hold one of the keys to accelerating a transition away from fossil fuels that scientists say is necessary if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

“The project is very simple and easy,” Inna Braverman, co-founder of Israeli start-up Eco Wave Power, told AFP.

Looking a little like piano keys, the floaters rise and fall with each wave.

They are connected to hydraulic pistons that push a biodegradable fluid through pipes to a container filled with accumulators, which resemble large red scuba tanks.

When the pressure is released, it spins a turbine that generates electrical current.

If this pilot project convinces the California authorities, Braverman hopes to cover the entire 13-kilometer (eight-mile) breakwater protecting the port with hundreds of floaters that together would produce enough electricity to power 60,000 US homes.

Supporters of the technology say wave energy is an endlessly renewable and always reliable source of power.

Unlike solar power, which produces nothing at night, or wind power, which depends on the weather, the sea is always in motion.

And there is a lot of it.

Tough tech

The waves off the American West Coast could theoretically power 130 million homes—or supply around a third of the electricity used every year in the United States, according to the US Department of Energy.

However wave energy remains the poor relation of other, better-known renewables, and has not been successfully commercialized at a large-enough scale.

The history of the sector is full of company shipwrecks and projects sunk by the brutality of the high seas. Developing devices robust enough to withstand the fury of the waves, while transmitting electricity via underwater cables to the shore, has proven to be an impossible task so far.

“Ninety-nine percent of competitors chose to install in the middle of the ocean, where it’s super expensive, where it’s breaking down all the time, so they can’t really make projects work,” Braverman said.

With her retractable dock-mounted device, the entrepreneur believes she has found the answer.

“When the waves are too high for the system to handle, the floaters just rise to the upward position until the storm passes, so you have no damage.”

The design appeals to Krish Thiagarajan Sharman, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“The Achilles heel of wave energy is in the costs of maintenance and inspection,” he told AFP.

“So having a device close to shore, where you can walk on a breakwater and then inspect the device, makes a lot of sense.”

Sharman, who is not affiliated with the project and whose laboratory is testing various wave energy equipment, said projects tend to be suited to smaller-scale demands, like powering remote islands.

“This eight-mile breakwater, that’s not a common thing. It’s a rare opportunity, a rare location where such a long wavefront is available for producing power,” he said.

AI power demand

Braverman’s Eco Wave Power is already thinking ahead, having identified dozens more sites in the United States that could be suitable for similar projects.

The project predates Donald Trump’s administration, but even before the political environment in Washington turned against renewables, the company was already looking beyond the US.

In Israel, up to 100 homes in the port of Jaffa have been powered by waves since December.

By 2026, 1,000 homes in Porto, Portugal should be online, with installations also planned in Taiwan and India.

Braverman dreams of 20-megawatt projects, a critical capacity needed to offer electricity at rates that can compete with wind power.

And, she said, the installations will not harm the local wildlife.

“There’s zero environmental impact. We connect to existent man-made structures, which already disturb the environment.”

Promises like this resonate in California, where the Energy Commission highlighted in a recent report the potential of wave energy to help the state achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

“The amount of energy that we’re consuming is only increasing with the age of AI and data centers,” said Jenny Krusoe, founder of AltaSea, an organization that helped fund the project.

“So the faster we can move this technology and have it down the coastline, the better for California.”

© 2025 AFP

The team members went through a process of incrementally determining what elements and molecules the bacterial strain could grow on. They already knew it could use oxygen, so they tested other combinations in the lab. When oxygen was absent, RSW1 could process hydrogen gas and elemental sulfur—chemicals it would find spewing from a volcanic vent—and create hydrogen sulfide as a product. Yet while the cells were technically alive in this state, they didn’t grow or replicate. They were making a small amount of energy—just enough to stay alive, nothing more. “The cell was just sitting there spinning its wheels without getting any real metabolic or biomass gain out of it,” Boyd said.

Then the team added oxygen back into the mix. As expected, the bacteria grew faster. But, to the researchers’ surprise, RSW1 also still produced hydrogen sulfide gas, as if it were anaerobically respiring. In fact, the bacteria seemed to be breathing both aerobically and anaerobically at once, and benefiting from the energy of both processes. This double respiration went further than the earlier reports: The cell wasn’t just producing sulfide in the presence of oxygen but was also performing both conflicting processes at the same time. Bacteria simply shouldn’t be able to do that.

“That set us down this path of ‘OK, what the heck’s really going on here?’” Boyd said.

Breathing Two Ways

RSW1 appears to have a hybrid metabolism, running an anaerobic sulfur-based mode at the same time it runs an aerobic one using oxygen.

“For an organism to be able to bridge both those metabolisms is very unique,” said Ranjani Murali, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the research. Normally when anaerobic organisms are exposed to oxygen, damaging molecules known as reactive oxygen compounds create stress, she said. “For that not to happen is really interesting.”

In the thermal spring Roadside West (left) in Yellowstone National Park, researchers isolated an unusual microbe from the gray-colored biofilm (right).

Photograph: Eric Boyd; Quanta Magazine

In the thermal spring Roadside West (left) in Yellowstone National Park, researchers isolated an unusual microbe from the gray-colored biofilm (right).Photograph: Eric Boyd; Quanta Magazine

Boyd’s team observed that the bacteria grew best when running both metabolisms simultaneously. It may be an advantage in its unique environment: Oxygen isn’t evenly distributed in hot springs like those where RSW1 lives. In constantly changing conditions, where you could be bathed in oxygen one moment only for it to disappear, hedging one’s metabolic bets might be a highly adaptive trait.

Other microbes have been observed breathing two ways at once: anaerobically with nitrate and aerobically with oxygen. But those processes use entirely different chemical pathways, and when paired together, they tend to present an energetic cost to the microbes. In contrast, RSW1’s hybrid sulfur/oxygen metabolism bolsters the cells instead of dragging them down.

This kind of dual respiration may have evaded detection until now because it was considered impossible. “You have really no reason to look” for something like this, Boyd said. Additionally, oxygen and sulfide react with each other quickly; unless you were watching for sulfide as a byproduct, you might miss it entirely, he added.

It’s possible, in fact, that microbes with dual metabolisms are widespread, Murali said. She pointed to the many habitats and organisms that exist at tenuous gradients between oxygen-rich and oxygen-free areas. One example is in submerged sediments, which can harbor cable bacteria. These elongated microbes orient themselves in such a way that one end of their bodies can use aerobic respiration in oxygenated water while the other end is buried deep in anoxic sediment and uses anaerobic respiration. Cable bacteria thrive in their precarious partition by physically separating their aerobic and anaerobic processes. But RSW1 appears to multitask while tumbling around in the roiling spring.

It’s still unknown how RSW1 bacteria manage to protect their anaerobic machinery from oxygen. Murali speculated that the cells might create chemical supercomplexes within themselves that can surround, isolate and “scavenge” oxygen, she said—using it up quickly once they encounter it so there is no chance for the gas to interfere with the sulfur-based breathing.

RSW1 and any other microbes that have dual metabolism make intriguing models for how microbial life may have evolved during the Great Oxygenation Event, Boyd said. “That must have been a quite chaotic time for microbes on the planet,” he said. As a slow drip of oxygen filtered into the atmosphere and sea, any life-form that could handle an occasional brush with the new, poisonous gas—or even use it to its energetic benefit—may have been at an advantage. In that time of transition, two metabolisms may have been better than one.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Trouble is brewing for the Digital Services Act (DSA), the landmark European law governing big tech platforms. On August 21, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), sent a scathing letter to a number of tech giants, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. The letter’s subject: the European Digital Services Act cannot be applied if it jeopardizes freedom of expression and, above all, the safety of US citizens.

The opening of the letter—signed by FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson—features a prominent reference to the First Amendment of the US Constitution, namely freedom of speech: “Online platforms have become central to public debate, and the pervasive online censorship in recent years has outraged the American people. Not only have Americans been censored and banned from platforms for expressing opinions and beliefs not shared by a small Silicon Valley elite, but the previous administration actively worked to encourage such censorship.”

The Trump Administration’s Lunge

The Trump administration intends to reverse course, and it is in this direction that the attack on “foreign powers,” the European Union and in the United Kingdom, and in particular on the Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act, begins. The letter also indirectly references GDPR, the European regulation on the protection of personal data, whose measures are “aimed at imposing censorship and weakening end-to-end encryption” with the result of a weakening of Americans’ freedoms, according to the letter.

Privacy and End-to-End Encryption: The Issues on the Table

In the letter, the US Antitrust Authority specifically asked the 13 companies to report “how they intend to comply with incorrect international regulatory requirements” (the deadline for scheduling a meeting was set for August 28) and recalled their “obligations towards American consumers under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices” that could distort the market or compromise safety.

And it is precisely on the security front, and especially on the adoption of end-to-end encryption, that the FTC calls big tech companies to order: “Companies that promise that their service is secure or encrypted, but fail to use end-to-end encryption where appropriate, may deceive consumers who reasonably expect this level of privacy.” Furthermore, “certain circumstances may require the use of end-to-end encryption, and failure to implement such measures may constitute an unfair practice.” The weakening of encryption or other security measures to comply with laws or requests from a foreign government may therefore violate Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the document states.

What Happens in Case of Disputes and Interference

In a tweet on X, Ferguson wrote flatly that “if companies censor Americans or weaken privacy and communications security at the request of a foreign power, I will not hesitate to enforce the law.”

“In a global society like the one we live in, overlaps and interferences between different legal systems are natural. Just think of those, in the opposite direction, between European privacy legislation and the famous American Cloud Act,” Guido Scorza, a member of the Italian Data Protection Authority, told WIRED. Scorza believes that in the event of significant discrepancies, “it will be up to the US government and the European Commission to identify corrective measures capable of guaranteeing the sovereignty, including digital, of each country.”

This article originally appeared on Wired Italy and has been translated from Italian.