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Cornell engineers grew thin films of silicon-doped aluminium gallium oxide on sapphire. Its bandgap is above 7 electron volts (eV), up from the previous record of about 6 eV. The bandgap is the energy needed to free an electron so it can carry current. A wider one lets a material stand a stronger electric field before it breaks down.

The team then built a transistor, which they call the AlphaFET, and a diode. Current changed by more than four orders of magnitude, or 10,000 times, between off and on. The catch: Cornell calls the devices preliminary and says many defects remain. Its article gives no voltage rating. The study appeared in Nature on 7 October. Cornell publicised it this week.

Aisin and Tohoku University built a 16 nm chip with STT-MRAM, a magnetic memory that keeps its data with the power off, built in beside the processor. The chip holds both its operating system and its AI model on board. It reads boot data and model weights from that nearby memory, not from outside the chip.

The partners say kernel boot (the core of the operating system starting up) fell from 2,535.3 ms to 65.7 ms, 38.59 times faster. That is not the whole start-up time. AI processing fell from 594.6 ms to 58.5 ms. They presented it at an IEEE circuits conference in Taiwan on 1–4 November. It is a research chip, and all figures are the partners' own. They target cars first, then robots, machinery and sensors.

Stellar Alpina is a Swiss start-up founded about nine months ago. All four founders came from the Academic Spaceflight Initiative Switzerland (ARIS), a student-led group that built a rotating detonation rocket engine demonstrator in 2024. That kind of engine burns fuel in a shock wave that races round a ring-shaped chamber, not in a steady flame.

Its Genziana engine is designed for 1 to 5 kilonewtons of thrust, burning propane and hydrogen peroxide. The company reports more than 150 hot-fire tests across 23 engine configurations. It has now revealed a lander, Morpho, to put up to 50 kg on the Moon. It would be built on Monarch, a transfer vehicle that would carry up to 200 kg into orbits out towards the Moon. Monarch comes first. These are announced plans, with no timeline. A CHF 3.5 million pre-seed round closed in May.

The company Stillstrom has finished building and factory-testing a vessel container unit. It holds the 11 kV connection equipment that links a service operation vessel, the ship that carries technicians to turbines, to charging gear at sea. Class society DNV witnessed the factory tests. The unit is modular and can go at the bow, stern or below deck, on a new ship or an existing one.

In an August trial, the operator Esvagt and the contractor Semco Maritime paid out and pulled back the charging cable while the ship held position. It used dynamic positioning, thrusters steered by satellite positioning. That trial tested the cable control, not this unit. The first unit is being built in Esbjerg, Denmark, for spring 2027. Offshore trials are expected by summer 2027. It has not yet worked at sea, and the report gives no power rating for the unit.

Honda has explained why both Aston Martins retired after five laps in Mexico. Shintaro Orihara said the cooling circuit for the energy recovery system (ERS, the hybrid system that recovers and redeploys electrical energy) was under heavier stress than anticipated. Honda says it underestimated how much cooling the high-altitude track would need. The circuit sits about 2,240 m above sea level, where thinner air carries less heat away.

The stoppage was blamed on abnormal pressure in the power unit's systems. Earlier, Fernando Alonso's qualifying ended in the first session with a suspected water-pressure problem linked to the ERS. Honda says the three practice sessions showed no warning signs. It plans to use the lessons in a redesigned power unit for 2027. This is Honda's own account.

Volkswagen is adding manual preconditioning to older electric ID. models through a software update, ID. Software 3.9.1. Preconditioning warms the high-voltage battery before a fast charge. A cold battery limits how much power it will accept, so warming it on the way to the charger lets it use more of what the charger offers. Newer software generations already do this automatically when you navigate to a charger.

The update covers ID.4 and ID.5 cars built before October 2023, the ID.3 up to 2024, early ID. Buzz and older Škoda Enyaq, according to electrive citing InsideEVs. It also changes the thermal management and cools the battery better after a fast charge. It arrives over the air, needs a connected-services contract, and the battery must be at least 50% charged. Electrive gives no figure for how much faster charging gets.