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Normal geothermal power needs three things together: hot rock, cracks for water to flow through, and water already in them. Very few places have all three.

Fervo Energy's Cape Station in Utah needs only the hot rock. Using drilling methods from the oil and gas industry, it drills wells that turn sideways deep underground, several from one pad. It opens paths through the rock between them. Water goes down one well, picks up heat and comes up another to drive turbines. The first 33 MW unit is selling power. Two more should follow by January 2027, and a further 400 MW in 2028.

Portugal's new Porto–Lisbon high-speed line has to cross the River Douro and reach the middle of Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from Porto. There is no room on the surface for a 400 m station.

So the station goes underground, about 60 m below the city centre, inside a tunnel. Its platforms will be 405 m long. It will connect to two Metro do Porto lines. A new combined road and rail bridge carries the line over the Douro. The first 71 km section has eight tunnels and 15 viaducts. Work started on 12 October, and it should open in 2031.

France has 699 AGC regional trains, and 488 of them burn diesel for at least part of the time. Buying new trains to replace them would take years and cost a fortune.

SNCF and Alstom took the diesel engines out of three of them and put four battery packs in, from Swiss firm Leclanché. Roof units cool the batteries to about 15 °C. The trains top up from overhead wires while they move, in about 20 minutes, then run about 80 km on battery. The empty fuel tanks stay on, so the train's weight doesn't change. All three should carry passengers by the end of October.

After a big earthquake, mobile masts on the ground may be down just when people most need them.

Sceye's answer is a solar-powered airship that flies in the stratosphere, above the weather. It flew from New Mexico to Japan and back, nearly 30,000 km in 30 days. Over Shikoku it held its position and acted as a 4G base station on SoftBank's network. It also relayed live video from a drone and ran a server on board, which cut delays by more than 40%, SoftBank says. Sceye says it has made more than 25 flights.

Landing a drone on a ship is hard: the deck rises, falls and rolls. It normally relies on GPS or on radar systems costing millions, fitted to the ship. In a conflict, GPS may be jammed.

The Naval Air Warfare Center's lab wrote software that uses only what the drone already carries. Its cameras recognise the ship's shape. Its motion sensors and control software predict where the deck will be a moment later, so it can touch down smoothly. It worked in a live test at sea. The software runs on ordinary drone computers and could scale up to large military drones.

Radio signals take several minutes each way between Earth and Mars. Early rovers mostly waited for humans to plan each move, so they crept along.

Perseverance uses software called AutoNav to plan its own path past rocks, at up to 120 m an hour. A system called Mars Global Localization pins down exactly where it is, so it can plan longer drives safely. On 11 October it passed 45.22 km, the longest drive by any Mars rover. Engineers still set daily goals and mark soft sand the software can't judge. JPL has also tried using Anthropic's Claude to draft a starting route for a 400 m drive, which the team checked and adjusted.

Peugeot's E-T16, shown at the Paris Motor Show on 12 October, has three electric motors: two at the rear, one at the front. Together they make 600 kW. Software decides how much torque each wheel gets, many times a second. That lets the car turn more sharply without sliding.

The 85 kWh battery runs at 800 volts. Its cells are cooled through their sides instead of from underneath. Peugeot claims a 10–80% charge in under 15 minutes. The steering is by wire, with no shaft between wheel and tyres. Peugeot says parts of the concept will reach its next E-208.

Microsurgery means stitching vessels and nerves less than a millimetre wide. Even a skilled surgeon's hand trembles slightly at that scale.

MMI's Symani robot reads the surgeon's hand and wrist movements, filters out the tremor and drives tiny instruments. It has been used in about 3,500 operations on about 50 systems. It is FDA-cleared for microsurgery. A trial is now testing it to reconnect lymph drainage in the neck of people with Alzheimer's disease. That use is experimental. MMI raised $125m on 8 October to expand.

Bubbles that vibrate in ultrasound are good at pushing liquid around. But they normally form wherever they like, which makes them hard to control.

Cornell's chip makes them on command. A grid of nine electrodes splits water into hydrogen. The longer the voltage stays on, the bigger the bubble: 10 to 100 micrometres. Each bubble pushes hardest when its size matches the ultrasound frequency. Lines and L-shapes of bubbles create different flows. A burst of higher voltage fires off a stream of bubbles. The work is in Science Advances.