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Lloyds Banking Group published a report on 23 September called Built to Last. It says the UK is £11bn a year short of what it needs to spend adapting infrastructure to a changing climate. It wants that treated with a "national security mindset", and it wants government and private investors to share the financial risk.

Its example is the £3bn Haweswater Aqueduct programme in North West England. The aqueduct supplies about 2.5 million people, and its replacement tunnels are designed to last 120 years.

Draining a reservoir to inspect its dam is slow, costly and often impossible. A review in Communications Engineering on 21 September, led by researchers at China's Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, surveys the alternatives. They include remotely operated and autonomous underwater vehicles, crewed submersibles, armoured diving suits and saturation divers working below 300 m.

The authors say high pressure, murky water and complex currents still limit all of them. Knowing exactly where a robot is underwater, using sound-based positioning, is a big part of the problem.

French company Framatome has signed the first contract to put fuel enriched above 5% into an operating US power reactor. Enrichment is the share of uranium-235, the kind that splits, and 5% has been the industry's working ceiling for decades. The fuel will be made at Framatome's plant in Richland, Washington, which US regulators cleared in July for enrichment up to 10%.

Richer fuel lasts longer. The reactor will be able to go 24 months between refuelling shutdowns instead of 18, so it spends more time making power. Deliveries start in 2028. The utility hasn't been named.

The US Department of Energy has picked Quaise Energy's Project Obsidian, south of Bend, Oregon, for up to $25m. Drill bits wear out in hot, hard rock. Quaise instead wants to melt and vaporise its way to rock above 400 °C using millimetre-wave beams, a technique developed at MIT.

The first three wells should give 25 MW or more, and the project aims for 50 MW by 2030. That is still a plan: the wells have to be drilled first.

Quantum computers make constant small errors. Fixing them needs a "decoder", conventional software that reads error signals and works out the correction fast enough to keep up. IonQ said on 22 September that its decoder runs on a single standard computer processor, with no special chips.

In a simulation of a machine with 408 error-corrected qubits running more than 31.5 million operations, decoding added only 0.02% to the run time. It has not yet run on real hardware at that size. "Industry's first" is IonQ's own claim.

Underwater sensors and robots usually run on batteries that need changing. A team at Yunnan University in China tuned perovskite solar cells (a cheap, easily adjusted type of cell) for the blue-green light that reaches below the surface. Under simulated light at 10 m depth they converted 34.71% of it into electricity, double their 17.08% on land.

The cells were also tested in the sea near Weizhou Island, and the team estimates they will last about 5.5 years before dropping to 80% of their starting performance. The work is published in Joule.

GM and recycler Cirba Solutions took 80 worn-out GM electric-car batteries apart and turned them into more than 12 tonnes of cathode material. The cathode is the part of a lithium-ion cell that holds the valuable metals. Its nickel, cobalt and manganese are 100% recycled; the lithium is not.

The new cells went into GM cars built this month. Around 14 million EV batteries worldwide are expected to reach the end of their lives by 2040, so recycling at scale matters.

"Anode-free" lithium batteries skip one of the usual electrodes to save weight and space. Lithium plates straight onto a copper foil instead. The catch is that it grows in spiky needles, called dendrites, which short the cell.

KAIST in South Korea borrowed a patterning method from chip manufacturing to cover the copper with tiny tubes about 300 nm across. That gives the foil about four times the surface area. A 10 nm coating of MXene, a very thin conductive material, then helps the lithium spread evenly. It is a lab result, published in Advanced Functional Materials.

Last week, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope switched on its Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera. It sits about 1.5 million km (a million miles) from Earth at L2, a stable point in space where the telescope keeps pace with Earth around the Sun. Its 18 detectors are cooling to −183 °C, cold enough that the camera's own heat doesn't swamp the faint infrared light.

"We now have confirmation that it is operational in space," said Goddard's Josh Schlieder. Its second instrument, the coronagraph, also passed first checks. First science images are due in early 2027.

The oceans hold about 4.5 billion tonnes of dissolved uranium. Chemists already have materials that soak it up. The unsolved part is putting huge amounts of that material in the sea, getting it back and doing it again, cheaply, in waves.

SuperCritical Materials has teamed up with Maha Haji's lab at the University of Michigan to tackle that. They will test packing layouts and a prototype deployment and recovery system in the university's towing and wave tanks. Offshore trials come later.

A 129 kg walking robot that trips could land on someone. Agility Robotics' new Digit humanoid, reported by IEEE Spectrum on 15 September, deals with that directly. When a person comes close, it puts its load down and lowers itself into a seated position, so it can't fall on them.

Digit is 1.8 m tall and can lift 23 kg up to 2.1 m. Agility has also given it human-style knees instead of backward-bending bird legs, to make squatting and lifting easier. It aims to sell it in the UK and EU in 2027.

MIT's flapping-wing robot weighs less than a paperclip. The best controller for flying it was too slow to run in real time. So the team ran that controller offline and trained a small neural network to copy it, which is fast enough. The robot flew 447% faster than with the team's previous controller and did ten somersaults in 11 seconds.

This is December 2025 work that got fresh attention this week. The controller still runs on computers off the robot.

On 21 September, Formula 1's rule-making commission agreed to cut race distance from 305 km to 290 km in 2027. That is two or three laps at most tracks. The FIA links the change to planned refinements in how fast fuel can flow to the engine. It still needs approval from the FIA's World Motor Sport Council.

It also agreed to drop gearbox homologation for 2027. That rule freezes a gearbox design once it is approved; dropping it lets suppliers keep developing.

Critics say early electric cars were driven less and scrapped sooner, so their lifetime emissions were worse than claimed. Imperial College London researchers checked using real British driving data, published in Nature Communications on 21 September.

Battery cars came out at 88 g of CO₂ per km over their lives. Petrol and diesel cars came out at 254–270 g, and hybrids at 190 g. EVs bought now are driven about as much as petrol and diesel cars.

"Smart pills" that sense or treat conditions in the gut usually carry a small button battery, which is harmful if it gets stuck. MIT engineers built one from food-safe materials instead: a magnesium anode, a molybdenum trioxide cathode and a wax coating. It produces 1.84 volts.

In acidic lab conditions it worked for about three days, then broke down fully within a few weeks. It powered a radio tag readable from up to 1.5 m away, and it has been tested in pigs. Human trials are about two years off, the team says. Published in Nature Chemical Engineering.

During keyhole surgery, doctors watch flat X-ray images but plan with a 3D CT scan. Matching the two is hard. MIT researchers built an AI system that does it with sub-millimetre precision, reported in Nature on 16 September.

A physics simulator creates synthetic X-rays from each patient's own scan, so the model adapts to a new patient in about 5 minutes. It has been tested on past hospital data only and is not in clinical use.

Studying the brain often means inserting separate probes to record signals, deliver drugs and shine light, and each one damages tissue. A team at the Technical University of Denmark, with UCL and others, drew a single fibre that does all three. It is under half a millimetre wide, with eight tiny fluid channels around a light-guiding core.

So far it has only been tested in mice and is far from clinical use. Published in Advanced Science.