Load/Path

HS2 has to cross the M6 near Birmingham, one of the busiest stretches of motorway in the country. Closing it for weeks to lift in a bridge was not an option.

So the contractor, Balfour Beatty VINCI, built each steel deck in sections behind one end of the crossing. Strand jacks, hydraulic jacks that pull on bundles of steel cable, then hauled the deck out over the road in stages. Each push added length at the back and moved the front further across. The west deck went over in four stages; the last one moved it 76 m in nine hours, on 24 October. There are two decks, each 320 m long, sitting 100 mm apart on concrete piers. The M6 stayed open the whole time.

To run electric trains in Fife, Network Rail must put up overhead wires. Bridges over the line have to be raised to make room for them. That kind of work is usually done in short weekend closures, over many months.

Instead, Network Rail shut the line for 18 days in one go, from 10 to 27 October. Many jobs ran at the same time, day and night. Crews knocked down three bridges and put in 29 concrete beams for higher replacements. They put in more than 200 foundations for the overhead-line masts, replaced 26 pieces of old signalling equipment and cleared more than 209,000 m² of vegetation. Network Rail says this was up to six months of weekend work. The scheme is part of £311.5m to electrify 118 km of railway.

Power from two new offshore wind zones has to come ashore in the Netherlands. The cable route crosses the Veerse Meer, a lake used for water sports.

The marine contractor DEME, working with cable maker Prysmian for grid operator TenneT, built a custom pontoon for the job. It carries reels of cable and lays the high-voltage cable, spare cables and a fibre-optic line at the same time. High-pressure water jets briefly turn the sand underneath into a fluid, so the cables sink to at least 3 m deep. The sand then settles back behind the pontoon. The contractor says this keeps the water from clouding up. Work runs until spring 2027 and is timed to leave the lake free in summer.

The International Space Station's original solar wings were fitted between 2000 and 2009, and they are wearing out. NASA is adding new ones rather than replacing them.

On 29 October, astronauts Anil Menon of NASA and Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency fitted the seventh of eight roll-out arrays. The spacewalk took 7 hours 11 minutes. Each array is about 18 m (60 ft) long and makes about 8 kW. It sits in front of an old wing, and the parts of the old wing it doesn't shade keep working. Once released, the array unrolled in about 10 minutes with no motors, driven by energy stored in its bent carbon-fibre booms. NASA says all eight together raise the station's power from 160 kW to about 215 kW.

New nuclear plants are often late and over budget, which makes them hard to fund. Blue Energy, a start-up founded by an MIT graduate, wants to change how they are built and paid for.

Its idea has two parts. First, make the plant in shipyards as "Blue Blocks" of about 1,360 tonnes (1,500 US tons) each, then float them to the site on barges. The company says a unit could be assembled in about a year. Second, start the plant on gas. Gas turbines would make steam for the plant's own steam turbines, so it can be financed like a gas plant. The reactors come later. Its first project, in Victoria, Texas, would start with 1 GW of gas power in 2030. Up to five small reactors, adding 1.5 GW, would follow from 2032. Blue Energy filed the first part of its construction application with the US regulator in September.

Inside AI data centres, chips swap huge amounts of data over copper wires. Copper is struggling to keep up on power, heat and speed. Light could carry the data instead, but the light source has to switch on and off very fast.

Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign tested blue gallium nitride micro-LEDs from 100 µm down to 2 µm across. Smaller LEDs have less capacitance, so they charge and discharge faster, and that sets how fast they can switch. A 5 µm LED reached a record modulation bandwidth of 2.75 GHz. That is roughly how fast its brightness can be varied to carry data. Below 5 µm, resistance in the electrical contacts rose and the LEDs matched badly to standard 50 Ω circuits.

Smartwatches measure pulse by shining light into the skin. Their optical sensors are less accurate on darker skin, and they need batteries and circuits.

Researchers at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, made a thin, clear patch of silicone rubber with no electronics. One side has a nano-scale pattern that changes colour when it stretches. Each pulse stretches the skin slightly, and a smartphone camera reads the colour change. A 2% stretch gives a 9% change in colour intensity. The other side has tiny suction cups, inspired by octopus suckers, which grip 65% better than flat silicone. In tests on 13 volunteers, the readings closely matched clinical equipment. The team says it could also measure how stiff the arteries are, which smartwatches struggle with. Because it reads movement, not light through skin, skin colour should matter less.

Insulin lowers blood sugar by pushing glucose into cells, but it doesn't remove the extra energy. Earlier approaches relied on genetically engineered biological parts.

A team at ETH Zurich used chemistry and electronics instead. The implant is graphite felt coated with gold and platinum particles. When it is switched on, it turns glucose into gluconate, which the body passes out in urine. A sensor on the upper arm sends glucose readings by Bluetooth to a phone or watch. That switches the implant on, using wireless power at 13.56 MHz, and off again at the target level. In diabetic mice over six weeks, it controlled glucose with no tissue damage.

Noise is one of the main complaints about delivery drones. Zipline says it has made its fixed-wing drones quieter mainly by changing how they fly.

Each drone carries wind sensors and an acoustic model. It plans its climb, cruise and descent to use gravity and wind, rather than its motors, to speed up and slow down. In cruise it can shut down all but one motor. Zipline's own modelling says this and other changes cut the sound people hear per flight by 68%, compared with its 2025 fleet. Peak loudness fell by 24%. It says the flying method alone cut energy per flight by 21%. No decibel figures or independent measurements were published.