LONDON (AP) — Officials in Ireland began work Monday to excavate the site of a former church-run home for unmarried women and their babies to identify the remains of around 800 infants and young children who died there.
The long-awaited excavation at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway in western Ireland, is part of a reckoning in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country with a history of abuses in church-run institutions.
The home, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961, was one of many such institutions that housed tens of thousands of orphans and unmarried pregnant women who were forced to give up their children throughout much of the 20th century.
In 2014, historian Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who died at the home in Tuam between the 1920s and 1961 — but could only find a burial record for one child.
Investigators later found a mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children in an underground sewage structure on the grounds of the home. DNA analysis found that the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks gestation to 3 years.
A major inquiry into the mother-and-baby homes found that in total, about 9,000 children died in 18 different mother-and-baby homes, with major causes including respiratory infections and gastroenteritis, otherwise known as the stomach flu.
The sisters who ran the Tuam home had offered a “profound apology” and acknowledged that they had failed to “protect the inherent dignity” of women and children housed there.
“It’s a very, very difficult, harrowing story and situation. We have to wait to see what unfolds now as a result of the excavation," Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said Monday.
Daniel MacSweeney, who leads the exhumation of the babies' remains at Tuam, said that survivors and family members will have an opportunity to view the works in coming weeks.
“This is a unique and incredibly complex excavation," he said in a statement, adding that the memorial garden at the site will be under forensic control and closed to the public from Monday.
Forensic experts will analyze and preserve remains recovered from the site. Any identified remains will be returned to family members in accordance with their wishes, and unidentified remains will be buried with dignity and respect, officials said.
The works are expected to take two years to complete.
FILE - Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin talks to the media outside the government building in Dublin, Jan. 22, 2025.(AP Photo/Peter Morrison, File)
MIAMI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan 13, 2026--
For decades, battery manufacturing has stood still despite advances in battery chemistry. Today, Material Hybrid Manufacturing Inc. (MATERIAL) announces it has raised $7.1 million in Seed funding, co-led by Outlander VC and Harpoon Ventures, with participation from GoAhead Ventures, Myelin VC, Demos Capital and Giant Step Capital, to break this stagnation and usher in a new era of energy design.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260112647458/en/
Dead space is dead
MATERIAL’s proprietary HYBRID3D™ technology prints energy directly into a component of any shape and size, removing the barriers between design intent and manufacturing reality. This category-defining method produces batteries which adopt the shape of the object rather than forcing the object to accommodate a rigid, cylindrical or pouch cell. The platform unites multiple advanced additive and semiconductor manufacturing techniques to print energy into the very structure of a device.
“The world doesn't need another breakthrough in battery chemistry; it needs a breakthrough in how we make energy storage,” said Gabe Elias, CEO of MATERIAL and 7-time Formula One World Champion design engineer. “We are building the tools to make electrical energy formless. Whether it’s filling the hollow profile of a fixed-wing drone or conforming to the body of a wearable device user, our platform allows electrical power to behave like a fuel design element. Our technology allows us to deploy anywhere and print exactly what the application demands.”
Validating the Mission: $1.25M Air Force Contract
Already demonstrating its value proposition, MATERIAL is currently partnering with the United States Air Force to execute a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award for a $1.25 million project.
As part of this project, MATERIAL is collaborating with PDW and other leading U.S. defense developers to integrate conformal batteries directly into Class I unmanned aerial systems (UAS). By eliminating the "dead space" inherent in standard cylindrical cell arrays, MATERIAL’s technology is projected to dramatically increase pack-level energy densities by over 50% and reduce module weight by more than 22 percent for this study.
“MATERIAL’s ability to tailor battery geometry to our airframe would allow us to push endurance and payload limits further,” said Darsan Patel, Director of Product Design at PDW. “Conformal energy technology bridges the gap between rapid prototyping and field-ready performance.”
This partnership is an initial step towards edge manufacturing and domestic supply chain stability, in which MATERIAL would be able to deploy containerized units to produce mission-critical power supplies on demand, breaking reliance on fragile global supply chains.
Giving investors a reason to believe
“MATERIAL is creating an entirely new paradigm for the battery industry,” said Jordan Kretchmer, Senior Partner at Outlander VC. “Gabe and his team aren’t competing with gigafactories; they are rendering them obsolete for high-performance applications by enabling batteries to be designed around any product structure, instead of the structure having to be designed around the battery. This is the category-defining shift Outlander lives to back.”
Harpoon Ventures, utilizing its "Freedom Stack" thesis, identifies MATERIAL as a critical node for national resilience. “We invest in companies that give the U.S. and its allies an unfair technological advantage,” said Larsen Jensen, Founder and General Partner at Harpoon Ventures. “Current defense platforms are strangled by the geometry of commercial batteries. MATERIAL eliminates that constraint. Their ability to decouple energy storage from rigid form factors is a game-changer for our national industrial base. This is what manufacturing sovereignty looks like.”
Unlimited power, unlimited commercial possibility
On the commercial side, MATERIAL is working with consumer electronics partners on next-generation products. Additional pilots are underway across mobility, robotics, and wearables.
About Material Hybrid Manufacturing Inc.
Material Hybrid Manufacturing Inc. is rewriting the rules of energy storage. Its core technology, HYBRID3D™, is a chemistry-agnostic platform that 3D prints full-stack batteries in custom geometries. By merging the precision of semiconductor manufacturing with the flexibility of additive techniques, MATERIAL enables the creation of conformal batteries that fit seamlessly into the structure of any device. Headquartered in Miami, FL, MATERIAL is teaching the world how to manufacture autonomy.
For more information, visit www.material.inc.
From left: Founders Miles Dotson, Gabe Elias and Christopher Reyes, PhD
