Roads, industry, and new tools built to last — and to include.
Materials science · Circular materialsAbout Indorama VenturesKH Editions
Indorama’s recycled polyester yarn on KH Editions’ New York looks shows circularity as industrial design culture — not a charity runway.
PressMaterials science · Circular materialsAbout Indorama VenturesKH Editions
Recycled PET yarn meets Thai streetwear on a New York runway — circularity as design craft, not charity staging.
Technology · BiologyAbout Carbiolice
Plant-based PLA plastic is often sold as compostable, yet in a garden heap it barely breaks down. Carbiolice, a subsidiary of the French enzyme company CARBIOS, hides a protected enzyme inside the plastic that stays dormant while the pack is in use and wakes up only in compost. With the EU's new packaging regulation in force since August 2026, the question is whether brands will choose compostable formats for the packs that cannot be recycled.
Technology · BiologyAbout MMC Holding International
Open a box holding a speaker, a lamp or a bottle of gin and you will probably find white polystyrene foam. A British company grows a replacement instead: fungal threads knit hemp waste into a moulded insert that protects the product and can then be crumbled into a garden compost heap. Six years after first production, it says it has reached price parity with polystyrene and expects to make about 10 million units in 2026.
Technology · Biology
A Finnish company feeds one naturally occurring bacterium with carbon dioxide and hydrogen and harvests a yellow, protein-rich powder. Solein is already on sale in the United States inside a sports protein powder, and Factory 02, forty times bigger than today's plant, is in final design. What it still lacks is approval in its home market: the EU novel food decision has now been pending for five years.
Technology · Biology
Methane leaks from landfills, farms and gas pipes and warms the planet far faster than CO2. A Bengaluru biotech firm feeds it to bacteria and harvests a protein ingredient for shrimp, fish, poultry, pig and pet diets. PRO-DG cleared a US safety milestone in 2024, and in September 2026 the Gates Foundation backed the same platform's crop products for smallholders in Asia and Africa.
Technology · Finance
Most "recycled" bank cards on the market used to contain around 85% recycled material.
Technology · Finance
The greenest card is often not the most exotic one, but the one a bank can roll out to every customer.
Technology · Finance
India has more than 115 crore debit and credit cards in circulation, and almost all are plastic.
Technology · Finance
Billions of bank cards are made every year, almost all from fossil-based PVC.
Technology · NuclearAbout Board of Radiation and Isotope Technology
Most nuclear medicine scans start with a small shielded box delivered to the hospital each week.
Technology · Nuclear
In September 2021 a nine-tonne magnet in a Massachusetts lab reached 20 tesla and changed the economics of fusion.
Technology · Nuclear
Some of the most promising cancer drugs of the decade are radioactive.
Technology · Nuclear
Fusion needs a magnetic cage strong enough to hold a plasma hotter than the core of the Sun.
Technology · Ocean
Waves carry enormous energy along Europe's Atlantic coast, yet decades of wave machines have been wrecked by the very storms that make the resource so rich.
Technology · Ocean
Tidal currents are as predictable as a calendar, but most of them are too slow for conventional turbines to pay off.
Technology · Ocean
Most of the infrastructure that holds back water, moors ships or carries oil sits below the surface, where it is hard and dangerous to inspect.
Technology · Space
When a river bursts its banks, the sky above is usually full of cloud, and the worst flooding often peaks at night.
Technology · Water
Bengaluru, India's tech capital, now depends heavily on borewells and private tankers, and in dry years both run short.
Energy · CleanTech
Factories that make sugar, food, chemicals and paper burn gas in boilers to raise steam, while warm wastewater and vapour go straight down the drain or up the chimney.
Energy · CleanTech
Refineries, fertiliser plants and steelworks use millions of tonnes of hydrogen made from natural gas, and that hydrogen carries a heavy carbon footprint.
Energy · Decarbonization
Cement is the glue of modern construction, and about 7% of global CO2 emissions, much of it released by the chemistry of limestone itself.
Energy · Decarbonization
Making new aluminium from bauxite takes huge amounts of electricity, and where that power comes from coal, each tonne can carry 15 tonnes of CO2 or more.
Energy · Decarbonization
Every window, glass facade and balcony panel starts in a furnace burning natural gas at around 1,500°C, melting sand, soda ash and limestone.
Energy · Decarbonization
Making a tonne of steel in a blast furnace releases around two tonnes of carbon dioxide, because coal is used to strip oxygen from iron ore.
Energy · Decarbonization
India is the world's second-largest aluminium producer, and almost all of its smelters run on captive coal power, giving its metal one of the highest carbon footprints anywhere.
Energy · Energy storage
In Indian cities, an auto-rickshaw or cargo three-wheeler earns money only while it is moving. Waiting four hours to recharge, or queuing at a battery swap station, eats directly into a driver's income.
Energy · Energy storage
Lithium-ion batteries have become the default way to shift solar power into the evening, but they wear out with heavy cycling and are usually built for two to four hours of output.
Energy · Energy storage
Europe is wasting a growing share of its renewable electricity because there is nowhere to put it when the wind blows hardest. Lithium-ion batteries empty in a few hours, which is not enough for a calm, grey week in winter.
Energy · Energy storage
Finland now has so much wind power that electricity is sometimes almost free, and sometimes very expensive. District heating networks still burn wood chips, gas and oil to keep homes warm through the winter.
Energy · Energy storage
Millions of European homes keep a large cylinder of hot water in a cupboard, slowly losing heat all day. Switching such homes to heat pumps often means fitting an even bigger tank, and many flats simply have no room.
Energy · Geothermal energy
Conventional geothermal power needs hot rock, natural water and permeable ground in the same place, which is why it is concentrated in volcanic regions such as Iceland, Kenya and Indonesia.
Energy · Geothermal energy
For decades, enhanced geothermal systems were the energy technology that was always ten years away: engineer a reservoir in hot, dry rock anywhere, and you could have clean power around the clock.
Energy · Geothermal energy
Turkey has become one of the world's fastest-growing geothermal markets in the past fifteen years, and most of its plants rely on equipment designed by a single company that started in a small workshop in Israel in 1965.
Energy · Geothermal energy
Most of the world's untapped geothermal heat is not hot enough to make steam. Below about 180°C, the water that comes out of a well cannot efficiently spin a conventional steam turbine.
Energy · Nuclear energy
Small modular reactors have been promised for two decades, but very few have moved from paper to concrete.
Energy · Nuclear energyAbout Nuclear Power Corporation of India
India has built heavy water reactors since the 1970s, but for decades its standard unit was a modest 220 MW.
Energy · Nuclear energy
Large nuclear projects in Europe have become famous for delays and overruns.
Energy · Nuclear energyAbout Teollisuuden Voima
Olkiluoto 3 was meant to open in 2009 and became a byword for nuclear delays and cost overruns.
Energy · Solar energy
Europe installs tens of gigawatts of solar every year but makes only a tiny share of the panels itself.
Energy · Solar energy
Almost every solar panel in the world is made from crystalline silicon, and most of that silicon supply chain runs through China.
Energy · Solar energy
Most of the surface area of our buildings cannot carry heavy glass solar panels: weak roofs, curved surfaces and tall concrete facades.
Energy · Solar energy
Silicon solar panels are close to their practical efficiency limit, so the industry is looking for a second layer that can harvest more of the sun's spectrum.
Energy · Solar energy
India wants to install hundreds of gigawatts of solar and to make the equipment itself rather than import it from China.
Energy · Wind energy
Warehouses and factories have huge flat roofs, and solar panels cover many of them, but solar goes quiet in the evenings and in winter.
Energy · Wind energy
Construction sites, farms and islands still burn diesel because the grid is full, far away or not there at all.
Energy · Wind energy
Wind turbines are mostly steel, copper and concrete that can already be recycled, but their giant composite blades have usually been cut up and buried or burned.
Energy · Wind energy
Much of India's remaining wind potential sits at sites with only moderate wind, where older turbines struggled to pay their way.
Energy · Wind energy
Offshore wind is Europe's biggest bet for clean, home-grown power, and fewer, larger turbines make it cheaper to build and run.
Materials science · Circular economy
India generated almost 14 lakh tonnes of e-waste in 2024 to 25, and its electric vehicle boom will soon add a wave of spent lithium-ion batteries.
Materials science · Circular economy
Every year millions of starters, alternators and steering systems are replaced in European workshops, and most of the metal in them is still perfectly good.
Materials science · Circular economy
Most smartphones are replaced after a few years, and the cobalt, gold and rare earths inside them are rarely recovered.
Materials science · Circular economy
Most laptops are replaced when one part ages: a slow processor, too little memory or a tired battery.
Materials science · Circular economyAbout SHIFT
Repairable phones have usually forced a trade-off: screws instead of glue meant little protection from water and dust.
Materials science · Circular materials
Nylon is in our carpets, swimwear, jackets and car seats, yet almost all of it is made from oil and ends up burned or landfilled.
Materials science · Circular materials
India's building boom produces mountains of construction debris and relies on kiln-fired bricks and tiles that add to the country's air pollution.
Materials science · Circular materials
Building materials such as aluminium, steel and cement are responsible for a large share of the world's emissions before a building is even used.
Materials science · Circular materials
Most "paper" takeaway boxes and cups hide a thin plastic lining that makes them hard to recycle and impossible to compost at home.
Materials science · Circular materials
Thin plastic films are everywhere in retail and e-commerce, yet very little of them is ever recycled.
Materials science · Low carbon industryAbout Carbon Clean Solutions
Conventional carbon capture plants are dominated by absorber and stripper columns that can tower dozens of metres high and take years to build.
Materials science · Low carbon industry
Most of heavy industry's emissions come from burning coal, gas and oil to make high-temperature heat, a job that ordinary electric heaters cannot do.
Materials science · Low carbon industry
Cement is responsible for around 8% of global CO2 emissions, mostly from making clinker in giant kilns.
Materials science · Low carbon industry
More than 100 million tonnes of methanol are made every year, almost all of it from natural gas and coal, and it ends up in plastics, paints, fuels and ships' tanks.
Materials science · Low carbon industry
Every tonne of ordinary cement releases several hundred kilograms of CO2, mostly from baking limestone into clinker.
Materials science · Recyclable products
Retort pouches, the foil-lined packs used for wet cat food, ready meals and microwave rice, are cooked inside the pack and keep food safe for months without a fridge.
Materials science · Recyclable products
Most of India's plastic recycling happens in small, informal units that turn used bottles into low-grade granules for buckets and pipes.
Materials science · Recyclable products
Crisp packets, coffee pouches and shampoo sachets are light and cheap, but most are glued-together layers of different plastics and foil that no recycler can separate.
Materials science · Recyclable products
Paper bottles have been "a year away" for most of a decade.
Materials science · Recyclable products
Long-life milk and juice cartons owe their shelf life to a layer of aluminium foil thinner than a human hair, and that foil is one reason cartons are hard to recycle.
Materials science · Reusable products
Most reuse systems ask customers to pay a deposit, which puts many people off. Cologne start-up Vytal lends its bowls and cups for free and uses a QR code on each one to know who has it.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
Sweden built the world's first commercial-scale plant to turn worn-out cotton clothes into pulp for new fibre, and then watched its owner go bankrupt.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
Dyeing fabric is one of the dirtiest steps in making clothes, using large amounts of water, energy and chemicals that often end up in rivers.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
Every year the clothing industry throws away huge amounts of cotton scraps and worn-out garments, while cutting down trees to make new fibre.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
India's garment factories throw away vast amounts of cotton cuttings, and its wardrobes produce even more waste.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
Most wood-based textile fibres, such as viscose and lyocell, are made by dissolving cellulose in chemicals and then regenerating it.
Materials science · Waste management
Most rubbish bags still go straight to landfill, even though they contain cans, bottles, card and food that could be recovered.
Materials science · Waste management
Recycling plants sort thousands of tonnes of mixed waste a day, yet most only check what they recover by hand-sampling a tiny share of it.
Materials science · Waste management
Construction and demolition waste is the heaviest waste stream in Europe, full of wood, metal, stone and plastics mixed together.
Green architecture · Green buildings
EcoCocon takes a waste product from wheat farms, compresses it into a timber frame and ships it as ready-made walls that meet Passive House standards.
Green architecture · Green buildings
Stora Enso helped turn cross-laminated timber from an Austrian niche into a mainstream way to build offices, schools and apartment blocks.
Green architecture · Green buildings
Every autumn, farmers in north India burn millions of tonnes of rice straw, and Delhi chokes. Strawcture Eco buys that straw and presses it into wall and ceiling boards.
Green architecture · Green buildings
VELUX has squeezed the insulation of a triple-glazed window into a pane less than half as thick, by replacing the gas between two sheets of glass with a vacuum.
Green architecture · Resource lifecycle
A normal clay brick is dug from a quarry and fired in a gas kiln at around 1,000 °C. The K-BRIQ is pressed from crushed old bricks, rubble, mortar and plasterboard, and cured without any firing.
Green architecture · Resource lifecycle
India's metal foundries throw away fine, dusty sand that is too small to reuse. Its towns are full of plastic too dirty or mixed to recycle. A Gujarat foundry machinery firm melts one into the other and presses the result into paver blocks.
Green architecture · Resource lifecycle
Most office strip-outs end in a skip. Rotor DC sends in its own team first, takes out the tiles, stone, timber, doors and lamps that still have value, cleans them and puts them on sale.
Green architecture · Resource lifecycle
Every flooring job leaves off-cuts, and every renovation rips out a floor that was once someone's new purchase. Tarkett's ReStart programme collects both and feeds them back into its own production lines.
Green architecture · Resource lifecycle
Most mass timber is glued, so at the end of a building's life it can only be shredded or burned. TRIQBRIQ builds load-bearing walls from small wooden blocks held together only by beech dowels.
Green architecture · Sustainable site planning
Indian cities flood in the monsoon and run dry by summer, often in the same neighbourhood. Much of the rain that could refill the ground hits concrete and runs off into drains.
Green architecture · Sustainable site planning
When a cloudburst hits a new housing estate, every roof, road and car park sends water into the sewer at once. Wavin's Q-Bic Plus crates build a hidden tank under the site that catches the peak and lets it go slowly or soak away.
Transportation and logistics · Biofuels
Lorries that run on liquefied natural gas are already common on German motorways. EnviTec makes the renewable version: biogas from farm residues, cleaned into biomethane and chilled to around minus 160 °C until it becomes a liquid that fills the same tanks.
Transportation and logistics · Biofuels
Most sustainable aviation fuel today is made from used cooking oil and animal fats, and there is not enough of either to fly the world. LanzaJet starts from ethanol instead, a liquid that can be made from crops, farm waste, municipal rubbish or even captured industrial gases.
Transportation and logistics · Biofuels
Old frying oil and slaughterhouse fat are not obvious truck fuels. Neste hydrotreats them into a diesel that is chemically almost the same as the fossil kind, so a bus, lorry or generator can switch over at the pump with no changes.
Transportation and logistics · Biofuels
Every October and November, farmers in Punjab and Haryana set fire to the stubble left after the rice harvest, and smoke drifts over Delhi. Praj Industries' enfinity process is meant to turn that straw into fuel ethanol instead.
Transportation and logistics · Biofuels
When pine and spruce are cooked into pulp, a dark, sticky oil separates out. For decades it was burned for heat or sold to chemical makers. At Lappeenranta in south-east Finland, UPM turns it into a diesel and a naphtha that drop straight into today's tanks and crackers.
Transportation and logistics · EVs
A fast-charging site is expensive, and most of the time its chargers are either idle or waiting for a car that can only take part of their power.
Transportation and logistics · EVs
For years Europe's electric car market was split between expensive premium models and cheap imports. Affordable, European-made small EVs were rare, which kept many city drivers in petrol hatchbacks.
Transportation and logistics · EVs
For India's e-rickshaw drivers and delivery riders, the battery is the most expensive part of an electric vehicle, and hours spent charging are hours without income.
Transportation and logistics · EVs
When the Nexon EV arrived in January 2020, electric cars in India were rare, expensive or impractical for long trips.
Transportation and logistics · EVs
Heavy trucks are a small share of vehicles but a large share of road emissions, and long-haul routes were long thought too far for batteries.
Transportation and logistics · Hydrogen aviation
Business aviation is the most carbon-intensive way to fly per passenger, and its customers are the ones most able to pay for something cleaner.
Transportation and logistics · Hydrogen aviation
Battery drones are useful for short jobs, but they rarely stay up for more than half an hour, which limits how far they can inspect a power line or carry medicine.
Transportation and logistics · Hydrogen aviation
Gaseous hydrogen tanks are heavy and bulky, which limits how far a hydrogen aircraft can fly. Liquid hydrogen, chilled to cryogenic temperatures, stores far more energy in a lighter tank, but nobody had flown a piloted fuel cell aircraft on it.
Transportation and logistics · Hydrogen aviation
Battery drones usually stay in the air for 20 to 30 minutes, which rules out long pipeline patrols, search and rescue over mountains or deliveries to islands.
Transportation and logistics · Hydrogen aviation
Small regional aircraft link islands, remote towns and cargo hubs, and almost all of them still burn kerosene or aviation gasoline. Batteries are too heavy for most of these routes.
Transportation and logistics · Logistics software
Europe's road freight still runs on phone calls, emails and paper waybills that travel in the cab with the driver, get lost and are retyped at the other end.
Transportation and logistics · Logistics software
The last mile, from depot to doorstep, is the most expensive and often the most polluting part of a delivery, full of failed drop-offs, half-empty vans and drivers circling for addresses.
Transportation and logistics · Logistics software
Every morning, thousands of delivery fleets have to decide which van takes which order, in what sequence and at what time. Done by hand, that puzzle wastes kilometres, fuel and drivers' hours.
Transportation and logistics · Logistics software
A late truck can stop a production line, leave a shop shelf empty or keep a dock crew waiting. Most shippers only find out when it is already late.
Transportation and logistics · Logistics software
Every day, thousands of European factories and retailers have to find a truck, agree a price, book a loading slot and later prove what the trip emitted. Much of that still happens by phone, email and spreadsheet.
Transportation and logistics · Supply chain
An electric car battery holds lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite that may have crossed several continents and changed hands a dozen times. Until recently, almost nobody could prove where those materials came from, or how much carbon they carried.
Transportation and logistics · Supply chain
Medicines that spoil in transit are usually thrown away, along with the energy, materials and money that went into making them. Often nobody knows a shipment went out of range until it arrives.
Transportation and logistics · Supply chain
Most temperature-sensitive medicines still fly in single-use insulated boxes, which keep the cargo cool for a few days and are then thrown away, often in another country.
Transportation and logistics · Supply chain
Every online order still tends to arrive in a new cardboard box, wrapped in tape and filler, that is used once and thrown away. For valuable goods, the box also gives thieves an easy target.
Eco-restoration · Climate resilience software
Most flood maps show rivers bursting their banks. But in cities, much of the damage now comes from sudden cloudbursts that overwhelm drains and send water down streets and into basements, often far from any river.
Eco-restoration · Climate resilience software
Every monsoon, roads in Indian cities vanish under water, trains stall and commutes stretch into hours. Usually the response starts only after the rain: pumping, rerouting and cleaning up.
Eco-restoration · Climate resilience software
Floods cause more damage than almost any other natural hazard, yet for much of the world nobody can say which streets, farms or factories will go under in a 1 in 100 year storm, let alone in a warmer climate.
Eco-restoration · Climate resilience software
When a bank lends against a warehouse in Houston or a hotel on the Spanish coast, it prices credit risk and market risk in great detail, but until recently it had little hard data on how floods, heat or wildfire might wipe out the value of the collateral.
Eco-restoration · Climate resilience software
A solar farm in Andalusia, a warehouse near Valencia and a hotel on a Greek island face very different futures as the climate warms, but most companies still judge their sites with weather records from the past.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
Harbour porpoises are small, shy and almost impossible to count from a boat, especially at night or in rough seas. Yet European law requires countries to know where they are and protect them.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
For years, ecologists who wanted to record bats, birds or frogs in the field needed recorders costing around a thousand dollars each, which limited most studies to a handful of sites.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
Before 2007, ecologists who wanted to leave a recorder in the forest had to build their own from parts, waterproof it and hope it worked.
Eco-restoration · Sustainable forestry
A Lund-made app that films trees as a forester walks through a stand, builds a 3D model on the phone and returns stem diameters, basal area and timber volume in minutes.
Eco-restoration · Sustainable forestry
An eight-wheeled timber harvester from Ostrobothnia that pairs a diesel engine with an electric motor and supercapacitors, so it can cut big trees with less fuel per cubic metre.
Eco-restoration · Sustainable forestry
A Cork-built platform that joins satellite images, harvester data and a field app, so forest managers can plan, watch and prove every harvest, now with an AI assistant called Crann.
Planetary engineering · Atmospheric frontiers
The world's largest direct air capture and storage plant pulls CO2 out of Icelandic air with geothermal power and sends it underground to turn into stone. After a slow start, its upgraded machines are finally hitting their design rate.
Planetary engineering · Atmospheric frontiers
Instead of chemical filters and giant fans, Heirloom bakes limestone, lets the resulting lime soak up CO2 from the air on stacked trays, and repeats the cycle. Its first plant opened in Tracy, California, in 2023.
Planetary engineering · Atmospheric frontiers
A space-station idea turned into a modular machine that captures CO2 on site, so Dutch growers can stop relying on fossil gas boilers and trucked-in industrial CO2.
Planetary engineering · Atmospheric frontiers
An 80-gram box of sensors that rides a balloon up through the atmosphere twice a day at stations around the world, feeding weather forecasts and the climate record. Its maker is now working to shrink the litter it leaves behind.
Planetary engineering · Geological interventionsAbout 44.01
Oman's mountains expose rock from the Earth's mantle that naturally reacts with CO2. 44.01 injects carbonated water into it and has shown most of the CO2 turns to stone within weeks. A cement plant pilot in the UAE was formally commissioned this month.
Planetary engineering · Geological interventions
Carbfix dissolves CO2 in water like a soda machine, pumps it into volcanic basalt and lets chemistry do the rest. More than 120,000 tonnes of CO2 have been locked into Icelandic rock this way.
Planetary engineering · Solar radiation management
A white, paint-like coating that reflects more than 95% of sunlight and sends heat out through the sky. Born in a City University of Hong Kong lab, it has been used on more than 500 projects in about 30 countries, from Hong Kong towers to grain silos and shipping containers.
Planetary engineering · Space frontiers
Telling satellites to de-orbit themselves only works if they still function. For the ones that fail, someone has to go up and fetch them. Astroscale flew ELSA-d to prove a servicer could find and grab a satellite in orbit, and its UK subsidiary is now building ELSA-M to remove a real, retired OneWeb satellite.
Planetary engineering · Space frontiers
A small spacecraft that rides a rocket, then carries customers' satellites to separate orbital slots, tests new hardware in space and, at the end of its life, empties its tanks and drifts down to burn up. D-Orbit has now flown 26 commercial ION missions.
Planetary engineering · Space frontiers
Most space debris is tracked from the ground, by radars and telescopes limited by weather, daylight and geography. Bengaluru start-up Digantara launched SCOT, a satellite that watches other objects from orbit, and now sells collision warnings to governments. It is also moving fast into missile tracking.
Planetary engineering · Space frontiers
Hall-effect thrusters used to be the size of a fridge and need kilowatts of power. Exotrail shrank the technology for small satellites, giving them the ability to change orbit, avoid collisions and de-orbit at the end of their lives. It first flew on an Indian rocket in 2020 and now sells to satellite makers in Europe and India.
Planetary engineering · Space frontiers
Only a small share of the planet has mobile coverage. Kinéis, based in Toulouse, put 25 nanosatellites into orbit in less than a year to collect tiny data messages from sensors anywhere on Earth. Its users include wildlife researchers, small-scale fisheries and firefighters watching remote forests.
Advanced technology · Deep space exploration
In April 2026, four astronauts flew farther from Earth than any humans before them. The capsule they rode in was American, but the module that pushed them to the Moon and supplied their air, water and power was built by Airbus in Bremen for the European Space Agency. It is Europe's biggest piece of flight hardware in human deep space exploration.
Advanced technology · Deep space exploration
In March 2025, a lander built by Texas company Firefly Aerospace settled gently onto the Moon and ran ten NASA experiments for two weeks, from drilling into the soil to tracking Europe's Galileo navigation signals from the lunar surface. Blue Ghost showed that a private company can deliver science to the Moon reliably. Firefly is now building landers for the far side and the Gruithuisen Domes.
Advanced technology · Deep space exploration
When Chandrayaan-3 lifted off for the Moon in July 2023, the engines in its rocket's core stage and the thrust chamber of its cryogenic upper stage had been made in a Mumbai suburb better known for locks and steel cupboards. Godrej Aerospace has supplied ISRO for decades and has now delivered the first human-rated engine for India's crewed Gaganyaan programme.
Advanced technology · Deep space exploration
In 2022, NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into a small asteroid moon to nudge its orbit. Europe's Hera, built by OHB in Bremen, has now travelled two years to the scene to measure exactly what happened. Its findings will help turn asteroid deflection into a reliable way to protect Earth.
Advanced technology · Deep space exploration
Only American spacecraft can currently bring cargo back from the International Space Station. The Exploration Company, a five-year-old European start-up, is building Nyx, a reusable capsule designed to carry three tonnes of cargo up and back. In September 2026 ESA backed it with a €760 million contract.
Advanced technology · Extreme environment engineering
Cleaning up old nuclear sites means sending people into rooms where nobody knows how radioactive things are. A small company in Cockermouth, Cumbria, builds a gamma camera that maps radiation hot spots in three dimensions from a safe distance. Sellafield calls it the only instrument that meets its needs, and versions of it have looked inside Fukushima's damaged reactors.
Advanced technology · Extreme environment engineering
In parts of refineries, offshore platforms and chemical plants, a single spark could ignite the air. A small company in Delft builds wheeled robots certified to work safely in those zones, patrolling twice a day, reading gauges and detecting gas leaks while people stay away. In June 2026 its ExR-2.5 became the first robot to earn UL's new hazardous location certification.
Advanced technology · Extreme environment engineering
Satellites can see Antarctic glaciers shrink, but not why they melt from below. A Norwegian-built autonomous submarine called Ran swam more than 1,000 km beneath an ice shelf and sent back the first detailed maps of its underside, before vanishing under the ice in 2024. Its replacement, Ran II, is due this winter.
Advanced technology · NanoTech
Nanofibres, hundreds of times thinner than a human hair, make excellent filters, battery separators and wound dressings. The problem has always been making enough of them. In Liberec, in the north of the Czech Republic, Elmarco turned a university invention into the first industrial machines that spin nanofibres without needles, in webs up to two metres wide. In 2026 its team was a finalist for the European Inventor Award.
Advanced technology · NanoTech
Almost every lithium-ion battery stores its lithium in graphite, and most of that graphite is processed in China. Sila, a Californian company founded in 2011, has spent more than a decade engineering a porous silicon material that holds far more lithium without breaking itself apart. In September 2025 it began operating an automotive-scale plant in Moses Lake, Washington, powered by hydropower.
Advanced technology · Neural interfaces
In 2023 a Dutch man paralysed in a cycling accident said he had regained the pleasure of sharing a beer standing at a bar with friends, after learning to walk again by thought. The brain half of that "digital bridge" was WIMAGINE, a wireless implant built by France's public research body CEA at its Clinatec centre in Grenoble. In June 2026 the same implant went into its first stroke patient, in a trial to see whether brain-driven therapy can restore arm movement.
Advanced technology · Neural interfaces
After a stroke, many people cannot move a hand or lift a foot, and conventional therapy often stalls. recoveriX, made by g.tec medical engineering in Austria, reads brain activity through an EEG cap. Only when the patient correctly imagines a movement does an avatar move on screen and an electrical stimulator move the real limb. It is one of the few brain-computer interfaces already used as therapy in ordinary clinics.
Advanced technology · Neural interfaces
Metal electrodes on the brain are stiff, bulky and blind to fine detail. INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, a spin-off from the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) and Spain's research council CSIC, replaces the metal with graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick. Its flexible implant is about 10 micrometres thick. In 2026 it completed the world's first clinical study of a graphene device in direct contact with the human nervous system.
Advanced technology · Neural interfaces
For people paralysed in the neck, getting back even a little hand strength can mean feeding themselves or holding a phone. ONWARD Medical, headquartered in Eindhoven with its engineering centre in Switzerland, makes ARC-EX, a stimulator that sends programmed pulses to the spinal cord through electrodes on the skin. It is the first such system cleared in the United States, and it now has a CE mark in Europe.
Advanced technology · Neural interfaces
Most brain implants need a hole in the skull. Synchron's Stentrode does not. Mounted on a tiny stent, it is threaded up through the jugular vein into a blood vessel beside the brain's motor cortex, where it picks up the signals of intended movement. People with severe paralysis have used it to click, text and control an iPad, Amazon Alexa and Apple Vision Pro.
