Houston deemed one of the top 'Cities of the Future' in North America

Bragging rights

"The Houston of today looks like the United States of tomorrow," says Susan Davenport, senior vice president of economic development at the Greater Houston Partnership. Photo by Zview/Getty Images

Watch out, world. Here comes Houston.

Houston ranks fifth on a new 2019-20 list of the 10 North American Cities of the Future produced by the fDi Intelligence division of the Financial Times. New York grabbed the No. 1 spot, followed by San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal. Following Houston were Chicago; Boston; Los Angeles; Palo Alto, California; and Seattle.

The ranking is based on data in five categories:

  • Economic potential
  • Business friendliness
  • Human capital and lifestyle
  • Cost effectiveness
  • Connectivity

Susan Davenport, senior vice president of economic development at the Greater Houston Partnership, says Houston's "ethnically and culturally diverse population" coupled with its "robust and globally connected economy" help form a solid foundation for the city's future.

The North American Cities of the Future ranking is certainly not the only such accolade that Houston has garnered. Hailing Houston as "the American city of the future," Resonance Consultancy, a consulting firm, ranks Houston the 11th best large city in the U.S.

"Positive rankings and recognition like this help us continue to attract the best and brightest minds both domestically and around the world," Davenport says. "Houston has long been a place that solves the world's most complicated problems — from putting humans on the moon to pioneering open-heart surgery. But we make a conscious choice to measure ourselves not on past accomplishments but on what we do next."

Davenport cites Houston's vibrant startup scene, 21 Fortune 500 companies, and burgeoning innovation corridor, along with the presence of the world's largest medical complex, as helping position the city for economic growth.

She also mentions the fact that nearly one-fourth of local residents are foreign-born and that more than 145 languages are spoken. In April 2019, personal finance website WalletHub named Houston the most diverse city in the U.S.

"In short, the Houston of today looks like the United States of tomorrow," Davenport says.

In a March 2019 report, the Center for Houston's Future noted that Houston's economic growth — namely in the construction, healthcare and IT sectors — depends heavily on the continued influx of immigrants. Immigrants already make up nearly one-third of the region's workforce, the report says.

Between 2016 and 2036, almost 60 percent of all jobs added in the region will be filled by foreign-born workers, the report indicates.

Also on the international front, more than 5,000 Houston companies do business abroad, Davenport says, and more than 500 foreign-owned companies have invested in Houston in the past decade.

As Houston looks toward the future, business leaders will continue to diversify the economy through such sectors as life sciences, advanced manufacturing, and technology, according to Davenport. In addition, business leaders will keep driving the transition from traditional fossil fuels to "new energy" sources (like wind and solar), she says.

"Houston's future is a bright one," Davenport says. "Our young and well-educated workforce, coupled with targeted infrastructure investments, will help us become a hub for innovation in the years ahead."

Business Facilities magazine agrees with that assessment. In July 2018, it ranked Houston the No. 1 metro area for economic growth potential, stressing that the region's economy has expanded beyond Big Oil and that it's brimming with "innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship."

"Houston has a distinctly favorable business climate. The region benefits from a skilled workforce, world-class infrastructure and transportation system, and a pro-business environment that stimulates rather than stifles business growth," the magazine says.

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Houston researchers make headway on affordable, sustainable sodium-ion battery

Energy Solutions

A new study by researchers from Rice University’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Baylor University and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram has introduced a solution that could help develop more affordable and sustainable sodium-ion batteries.

The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team worked with tiny cone- and disc-shaped carbon materials from oil and gas industry byproducts with a pure graphitic structure. The forms allow for more efficient energy storage with larger sodium and potassium ions, which is a challenge for anodes in battery research. Sodium and potassium are more widely available and cheaper than lithium.

“For years, we’ve known that sodium and potassium are attractive alternatives to lithium,” Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice, said in a news release. “But the challenge has always been finding carbon-based anode materials that can store these larger ions efficiently.”

Lithium-ion batteries traditionally rely on graphite as an anode material. However, traditional graphite structures cannot efficiently store sodium or potassium energy, since the atoms are too big and interactions become too complex to slide in and out of graphite’s layers. The cone and disc structures “offer curvature and spacing that welcome sodium and potassium ions without the need for chemical doping (the process of intentionally adding small amounts of specific atoms or molecules to change its properties) or other artificial modifications,” according to the study.

“This is one of the first clear demonstrations of sodium-ion intercalation in pure graphitic materials with such stability,” Atin Pramanik, first author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in Ajayan’s lab, said in the release. “It challenges the belief that pure graphite can’t work with sodium.”

In lab tests, the carbon cones and discs stored about 230 milliamp-hours of charge per gram (mAh/g) by using sodium ions. They still held 151 mAh/g even after 2,000 fast charging cycles. They also worked with potassium-ion batteries.

“We believe this discovery opens up a new design space for battery anodes,” Ajayan added in the release. “Instead of changing the chemistry, we’re changing the shape, and that’s proving to be just as interesting.”

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This story originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

FAA demands investigation into SpaceX's out-of-control Starship flight

Out of this world

The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding an accident investigation into the out-of-control Starship flight by SpaceX on May 27.

Tuesday's test flight from Texas lasted longer than the previous two failed demos of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, which ended in flames over the Atlantic. The latest spacecraft made it halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean, but not before going into a spin and breaking apart.

The FAA said Friday that no injuries or public damage were reported.

The first-stage booster — recycled from an earlier flight — also burst apart while descending over the Gulf of Mexico. But that was the result of deliberately extreme testing approved by the FAA in advance.

All wreckage from both sections of the 403-foot (123-meter) rocket came down within the designated hazard zones, according to the FAA.

The FAA will oversee SpaceX's investigation, which is required before another Starship can launch.

CEO Elon Musk said he wants to pick up the pace of Starship test flights, with the ultimate goal of launching them to Mars. NASA needs Starship as the means of landing astronauts on the moon in the next few years.

TMC med-tech company closes $2.5M series A, plans expansion

fresh funding

Insight Surgery, a United Kingdom-based startup that specializes in surgical technology, has raised $2.5 million in a series A round led by New York City-based life sciences investor Nodenza Venture Partners. The company launched its U.S. business in 2023 with the opening of a cleanroom manufacturing facility at Houston’s Texas Medical Center.

The startup says the investment comes on the heels of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granting clearance to the company’s surgical guides for orthopedic surgery. Insight says the fresh capital will support its U.S. expansion, including one new manufacturing facility at an East Coast hospital and another at a West Coast hospital.

Insight says the investment “will provide surgeons with rapid access to sophisticated tools that improve patient outcomes, reduce risk, and expedite recovery.”

Insight’s proprietary digital platform, EmbedMed, digitizes the surgical planning process and allows the rapid design and manufacturing of patient-specific guides for orthopedic surgery.

“Our mission is to make advanced surgical planning tools accessible and scalable across the U.S. healthcare system,” Insight CEO Henry Pinchbeck said in a news release. “This investment allows us to accelerate our plan to enable every orthopedic surgeon in the U.S. to have easy access to personalized surgical devices within surgically meaningful timelines.”

Ross Morton, managing Partner at Nodenza, says Insight’s “disruptive” technology may enable the company to become “the leader in the personalized surgery market.”

The startup recently entered a strategic partnership with Ricoh USA, a provider of information management and digital services for businesses. It also has forged partnerships with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, University of Chicago Medicine, University of Florida Health and UAB Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama.

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