Innovations
The mines that warm the town above them
Gateshead dug coal for two centuries. Now the flooded old tunnels warm the town, cleanly, from below.
Bright ideas
Innovations
Bright ideas working in the real world: clean power, clever materials and tools that make it easier to live lightly.
Innovations
Glass a bird can see
A window is invisible to a bird. The new answer is a pattern etched into the glass itself, which the bird reads as solid and you barely notice at all.
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Innovations
The nets that catch a cloud
In Chile's dry north, a farming community harvests its water straight out of the morning fog.
Innovations
The Perth pair growing tomorrow's plastic in a seaweed tank
An ocean scientist and her cofounder ferment seaweed into little pearls that behave like plastic, then vanish like a leaf.
Innovations
The seeds that think the lightning came
In Cairns, a Maiawali inventor and his cofounder wake seeds up with gentle electricity, the way storms have done for ten thousand years.
Innovations
The cargo ships that remembered the wind
After eight years at sea, the spinning sails on one bulk carrier have saved over a thousand tonnes of fuel, and they are still turning.
Innovations
The satellites that smell smoke first
A new constellation is being built for one job only: finding wildfires while they are still small enough to stop.
Innovations
The Shanghai fuel made from thin air and water
A young company just broke ground on a factory whose ingredients are captured carbon dioxide and hydrogen split from water.
Innovations
Mako, the robot planting a meadow underwater
Hand planting seagrass manages about five hectares a year. This machine is built for five hectares a day.
Innovations
Crushed rock, young trees and 290 people with tape measures
On a Welsh hillside, volunteers walking rows of barcoded saplings have produced a genuine scientific first.
Innovations
A river opened up again, 160 miles of it
In northern Michigan a river has spent 15 years being handed back to itself, and the last piece is a rather clever gate.
Innovations
The machine that makes drinking water out of thin air
Two American neighbourhoods are about to drink water pulled straight out of the sky.