MICRO JOURNEYS PODCAST

In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Brigadier General John Lloyd for a thrilling discussion about his 40-year Army career. It begins in Lockport, New York, where 17-year-old Lloyd contacts an Army recruiter unbeknownst to his parents. At the time, he had no idea how impactful that one call would become.

The conversation opens with Lloyd detailing the path that led him from private to general. From basic training to a Cold War assignment in Germany and Desert Storm, he tells Dan about how each shaped his career. Later, he shares stories of three of the most demanding recovery missions of his career: The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, the submerged M88 in a Lithuanian bog, and the search for two lost soldiers at African Lion 2026 in Morocco, which connected him with Dan.

Each story shaped his career differently, but the recurring theme of giving families closure is hard to miss. Whether clearing minefields in the Korean DMZ in 1953 or standing on a Moroccan shoreline studying a single cove, Lloyd’s work has always been rooted in bringing soldiers home.

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Lau Nørgaard, CTO of Sapient Perception, at African Lion 2026 to explore how the company’s large-area UAV ISR camera payloads are transforming how the U.S. and its allies map and understand unfamiliar terrain across the African continent. The conversation walks through how Sapient Perception’s technology captures massive, high-resolution imagery and processes it in real time, directly inside the drone, to deliver actionable intelligence to warfighters and rescue teams in the field.

The episode dives into a core challenge facing forces operating across the largely unmapped terrain of the African continent: how to build a real understanding of where troops, camps, and logistics can safely be positioned. Traditional UAV camera systems force a tradeoff between zoom and coverage, described as “looking through a straw,” where operators can either see fine detail in a narrow area or a wide view with no detail, but not both. Classical large-area mapping solves this offline, but it requires flying a mission, physically retrieving the data, and processing it afterward, a delay that doesn’t work when lives are on the line, such as in a search-and-rescue or fast-moving tactical scenario.

The solution centers on large-sensor, high-resolution camera payloads paired with onboard AI inference, processing full, uncompressed image data directly in the payload and transmitting only georeferenced findings, such as vehicles, people, or hazards, back to operators in real time while the aircraft is still in the air.

Daniel Marrujo returns to Brookhaven National Laboratory for the second day of a two-day Micro Journeys deep dive, this time heading into the lab’s quantum networking facility with a panel of the world’s leading experts in the field. Associate Laboratory Director Gabriella Carini, staff scientists Soumyajit Mandal, Julián Martínez-Rincón & Paul Stankus, and research scientists Sven Herrman & Prashansa Mukim walk through Brookhaven’s real-world quantum network test bed, a 161-mile system with five nodes spanning Long Island, Stony Brook University, Brooklyn, and Columbia University. The episode moves from entangled photons and the physics of quantum communication, to free-space telescope links capable of transmitting single photons through open air, to custom-built microelectronics engineered for the most extreme environments on Earth, and finally to a NASA-led mission searching for the universe’s earliest, darkest chapter from the far side of the moon.

At the center of the conversation is a fundamental limitation of classical networks: information sent as digital bits can be intercepted, copied, and manipulated without detection. Quantum communication solves this differently because a quantum state is destroyed the moment it’s measured, any attempt to eavesdrop is inherently detectable. But building a real, long-distance quantum network comes with steep physical costs. Photons are lost over distance in fiber, entanglement can’t simply be “boosted” the way a classical signal can, and demonstrating true quantum repeaters, the technology needed to extend range without breaking entanglement, has never been done at scale.

Brookhaven’s answer is a working test bed that generates, swaps, and routes entangled photons across real commercial infrastructure, paired with free-space telescope links and next-generation microelectronics built to operate in environments as inhospitable as liquid nitrogen temperatures and deep space, laying the groundwork for what researchers describe as an unhackable “quantum internet.”