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Wind blows harder and more steadily high above the ground. But no ordinary crane can lift a turbine's nacelle, the housing for its generator, to 300 m. That height limit decides how tall turbines get.

GICON's answer at Schipkau in Germany is a tower inside a tower. First it put up a steel lattice tower, just under 160 m tall. Then it assembled an inner tower inside it, near the ground, with the turbine on top. Steel cables hauled the inner tower up through the lattice at about 9 m an hour, in roughly 24 hours. The blade tips now reach 365 m and the hub sits at 300 m. GICON says that height doubles the energy collected, compared with a normal turbine with the same rotor. Start-up is due in November.

HS2 has finished the 320 m Westbury Viaduct near Brackley, Northamptonshire, which carries the railway over the River Great Ouse floodplain. Building over soft, wet ground is slow and costly, so the team avoided working there as much as possible.

In 2024 it assembled 2,695 tonnes of steel beams on solid ground at one end, then slid them out across the piers. Pads with a non-stick coating, "similar to the surface of a frying pan", cut the friction on top of each pier. The deck was then cast in 42 m sections, moving the formwork (the temporary mould) forward each time. The design is "double composite": concrete above and below the steel forms a box beam. HS2 says this uses steel and concrete more efficiently and cuts carbon. The idea came from recent French high-speed rail viaducts.

Concrete floors are a big source of a building's carbon. Timber floors are greener, but they usually need beams and more columns. That makes them deeper, which adds height and cost to the whole building.

A University of Stuttgart team, with industry partners, made the UniversalTimberSlab. It is a flat timber-concrete floor that spans in both directions between columns, like a concrete slab. Its glued timber segments are laid along the lines the forces follow, a layout worked out with computational design. A full-size test piece spanning 8 × 4 m was 36 cm thick, the same as concrete. It carried 20 tonnes plus its own weight and bent 12 mm. It uses about 66% less reinforced concrete.

Robot hands are fragile, expensive and hard to model in computer simulations, where robots now learn many of their skills. Each extra finger adds motors, sensors and parts that can fail.

Boston Dynamics' new hand for its Atlas humanoid has four fingers. The team decided a little finger wasn't worth the complexity. The hand has 13 joints that move independently, called degrees of freedom: four in the thumb and three in each finger, each driven by its own motor. No cables cross the joints. Pressure sensors in the fingertips and palm let it feel its grip. Boston Dynamics says it was also designed to be easy to simulate accurately, so skills learned in software transfer to the real robot.

Many cargo planes are old passenger jets converted for freight. A big cargo door means cutting a big hole in the fuselage, the aircraft's main body, and then strengthening everything around it.

Airbus built the A350F as a purpose-made freighter, derived from the A350 airliner rather than converted from a passenger jet. It can carry up to 111 tonnes. Airbus says its main-deck cargo door, with a clear opening of about 4.3 m, is the largest in commercial aviation. It flew for the first time on 29 September for 4 hours 10 minutes. Two test aircraft now share about 400 hours of flying over ten months. One checks handling and performance; the other tests systems and goes on weather-testing campaigns.

The surface of Venus is about 465 °C. NASA's DAVINCI probe must fall through its atmosphere for about an hour and keep its instruments working. It also has to let the hot gas in, through special inlet ports, because measuring that gas is the point of the mission.

From 28 August to 10 September, engineers heated a test version of the probe, with a titanium shell, to 465 °C six times. Each run took about an hour to reach peak heat, matching the real descent. More than 100 temperature sensors inside tracked where the heat went. "The experiment was a rousing success," said principal investigator Jim Garvin. NASA published the results on 24 September.

Mercedes found that its 2026 car, the W17, was short of downforce and traction when leaving slow corners. Downforce is the air pressure that pushes a car onto the track. Mercedes needed to find more without adding drag, the air resistance that slows it on the straights.

For this weekend's race at Sepang in Malaysia it has changed the sidepods (the body sections beside the cockpit), the floor and the rear bodywork. The sidepod now ramps steeply down towards the rear wheels. That guides air along the car so it stays attached to the surface. The floor around the diffuser, the upswept section at the back that speeds up the air under the car, has also been reworked. A document from F1's governing body, the FIA, lists seven changed areas. The Race reports that simulations predict about three tenths of a second a lap. RacingNews365 puts the downforce gain at about 4%. Both are estimates, not measurements.

Semi-autonomous cars can warn a driver, but warnings only go one way. The driver can't tell the car they disagree until it has already acted.

A University of Michigan team, funded by Toyota Research Institute, built a steering wheel with two inflatable patches at 10 and 2 o'clock. They swell to show the direction the car plans to turn. Squeezing a patch tells the car you disagree and proposes a different move. In lab tests, drivers using it drove smoother paths, braked more confidently and reported less effort and frustration than with one-way warnings. They also regained trust faster after the system made an error. The team holds a US patent and is looking for commercial partners. The study appeared in Human Factors on 1 October.

Muscle is a soft motor that can grow stronger with exercise. But getting it to move a robot far has been hard. In MIT's previous, iris-shaped design, the muscle moved only about 100 microns.

Ritu Raman's lab at MIT switched to a flat design. The robot is a gel film about half a millimetre thick, roughly the size of a stick of gum, with two fins. A thin layer of muscle cells, engineered to contract under light, sits on top. A stiffer gel gave more force, and square grooves lined the cells up. Shine light on one fin and only that side moves, so the robot can be steered through a maze. It reaches about four body lengths a minute.

The best place to sense a signal in the body is often not the best place to act on it. Linking a sensor and a treatment device needs wires or radio, and both are bulky and use power.

Georgia Tech engineers built SWANS, a system called a body-area network, that uses the body's own salty tissue as the connection. Small electrical pulses, each with a set voltage and duration, travel through tissue to implants smaller than 3 mm that can be injected with a syringe. The receivers draw almost no power while waiting, so a receiver triggered once a day should last about a year. It only sends simple on-off commands. In rats, a movement of the front paw triggered stimulation of a hind-leg muscle, mimicking a walking pattern. Published in Science on 24 September.