For generations, science has published its recipes while quietly losing its cooks — the researchers whose hands, timing, and unspoken instincts make experiments succeed where identical written protocols fail. A startup called Transfyr, working out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has now raised $25 million to confront this ancient gap between documented knowledge and lived expertise, deploying cameras, microphones, and AI to capture what scientists do but cannot say. The effort touches something Michael Polanyi identified decades ago: that human skill exceeds human language, and that the invisible