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Civil engineers at Mepco Schlenk Engineering College in India swapped half the fine aggregate in M35 concrete for zeolite and 1% of the cement for bamboo biochar. The mix, called ZB5, hit 38.49 MPa in compression, up 7.48% on the control, and 4.39 MPa split tensile, up 15%.

In a carbonation chamber it took up 1.2 g of CO₂ a day, with CO₂ reaching 15 mm into the specimen over seven days. The team is pitching it for pavements, parapets and sewer pipes. It is still a lab proof of concept, and long-term durability is untested. The paper came out in Carbon Research in 2024 and is getting fresh attention this week.

A Lloyds Banking Group report published on 22 September, Built to Last, argues that climate-resilient infrastructure won't get built without better public-private collaboration, smarter sharing of financial risk and more open asset data. It lands as the UK works through a 10-year infrastructure strategy worth more than £725bn.

The ICE also launched a policy programme this week on public engagement, aimed at speeding up delivery and rebuilding trust in big schemes.

Framatome has signed the first contract to put fuel enriched above 5% U-235 into an operating commercial reactor in the US. Deliveries start in spring 2028 from its plant in Richland, Washington, which spent four years upgrading and recently won NRC approval for higher enrichment and higher burnup.

The payoff is time. Plants refuel roughly every 18 months; this fuel stretches that to 24, cutting outages. Higher burnup also means more energy per assembly and less waste per MWh. The customer utility hasn't been named.

A University of Michigan and Idaho National Laboratory study in Nature Communications modelled 34 ammonia plants, 9 steel mills, 47 refineries and nearly 1,000 factories. Its verdict: small modular reactors can't beat cheap renewables selling into the grid, but they pay off supplying heat and hydrogen directly to heavy industry.

With the $3/kg clean hydrogen tax credit, the model sees 91 GWe viable at first, rising to 171.9 GWe as factory build costs fall. That is nearly double today's entire US nuclear fleet.

Dutch toolmaker ASM International launched XP8 Vertos Flowable Carbon on 22 September, billed as the first PECVD carbon film that flows. Standard carbon films follow the shape underneath, so bumps survive into the next layer and fabs have to add chemical-mechanical polishing or etch-back to flatten them.

The new film fills high-aspect-ratio features from the bottom up without voids or seams and leaves a flat surface ready for patterning, all in one tool. ASM says it is already in high-volume manufacturing for logic and memory.

Harry Atwater's lab at Caltech used a patterned "pump" pulse to briefly change the refractive index of an amorphous-silicon metasurface through the optical Kerr effect. A weaker "probe" beam passing through was deflected by up to 13°.

Electro-optic modulators wait for excited electrons to relax, which caps them at pico- to nanoseconds. The Kerr effect doesn't need that, so switching was limited only by the 74 fs laser pulse. Nanopillars on the metasurface trap the light long enough to make the weak effect usable. Published in Nature Nanotechnology.

IonQ researchers report that the decoder for their quantum error correction ran on a single conventional CPU and added only 0.02% to total computation time, so it didn't slow the quantum task. Decoding speed is one of the classical-engineering bottlenecks between today's machines and fault-tolerant ones.

GM and recycler Cirba Solutions took end-of-life GM packs apart, shredded them into black mass in Ohio, and refined it to battery grade. The result was cathode active material with 100% recycled nickel, cobalt and manganese. Ultium Cells, GM's venture with LG Energy Solution, made the cells, and packs were built at Factory ZERO and Spring Hill.

The first cars rolled off the line this month. Nearly 14 million EV batteries are expected to reach end of life worldwide by 2040.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory uses aluminium-chloride molten salts as both solvent and catalyst to crack polyethylene into liquid fuel. The process yields about 60% gasoline under 200 °C. Pyrolysis usually needs 450–500 °C, and this route needs no noble metals, no hydrogen and no initiator.

The catch is that the salts absorb water and lose stability, so the team is working on ways to confine them. Patent filed; the underlying paper is from 2025 in JACS.

The world's biggest battery maker began trial production on two cell lines at Debrecen on 22 September, after clearing its final permits. The site has built 537,000 modules since 2024. At a planned 100 GWh it will be CATL's largest plant outside China. No date yet for series production.

MIT's flapping-wing microrobot is the size of a microcassette, weighs less than a paperclip, and runs on soft artificial muscles. Kevin Chen's and Jonathan How's groups gave it a two-stage brain. A robust model-predictive controller plans aggressive manoeuvres offline, then a small neural network learns to imitate it fast enough to fly in real time.

Speed rose 447% and acceleration 255%. It pulled ten somersaults in 11 seconds while staying within 4–5 cm of its path in gusts. Next step: onboard sensors so it can leave the motion-capture lab. Published in Science Advances.

On its way to L2, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope cooled its Wide Field Instrument to −143 °C and switched on 18 infrared detectors, together about the size of a laptop screen. Engineers then tested the filter wheel in zero-g for the first time and exercised the focus mechanism. The detectors are heading for −183 °C.

One image will cover more sky than the full Moon at Hubble-like sharpness. The coronagraph also passed its first checks. First science images are due by early 2027.