News
Two batteries built to sit in a shed for 25 years without fading just got hired where lithium fails: one stores charge in molecules dissolved in water on a Maldives island running on imported diesel, the other runs on zinc for a California tribe bracing for 18-hour wildfire blackouts — and neither one can catch fire
5+ hour, 11+ min ago (1046+ words) Say the words “grid battery” and most people picture the same thing: rows of lithium-ion cabinets baking in the sun. Lithium is cheap, it’s everywhere, and it nails the four-hour duty cycle the grid asks for most of the time....
An American drone boat just docked and recharged itself with no human aboard, the first step toward five ocean buoys that already pull their own power out of the water, one of them moored over 1,000 meters of seawater off San Diego
3+ day, 5+ hour ago (1284+ words) A company in Monroe Township, New Jersey, says it has now taken the humans out of that trip. Ocean Power Technologies announced on May 7 that its WAM-V maritime drone approached a dock on its own, secured itself, recharged, and went…...
An American drone glider the Royal Navy just ordered can stay underwater more than two years on a single load of batteries, running the whole time on 23 kilowatt-hours, roughly what a US home burns in a day, because it barely uses a propeller at all
3+ day, 11+ hour ago (865+ words) Teledyne Marine just quietly walked past the whole conversation. Its Slocum Sentinel glider is rated to stay underwater for more than two years on a single load of batteries. It manages that not by hauling a bigger battery around, but…...
Sweden just shipped the most powerful transformer of its kind ever built, a 446-ton machine the weight of a loaded 747, rolling it out of the factory on a 350-foot trailer with over 300 wheels at walking pace, bound for China to power 10 million homes
2+ week, 4+ day ago (757+ words) If you have ever been stuck behind an oversized load on the highway, hazards blinking and a pilot car crawling out front, you know the routine. It is wide, it is slow, and it is somebody else’s problem for the…...
China just put a 6-ton autonomous tiltrotor drone into full free-flight testing, a uncrewed aircraft that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like a fixed-wing plane
3+ week, 2+ day ago (206+ words) This isn’t the maiden flight. That happened on December 28, 2025, near Deyang in Sichuan province, the world’s first flight of a six-ton-class tiltrotor according to United Aircraft. What’s new is sustained, untethered flight with that transition envelope being worked in earnest, the…...
A U.S. Navy underwater drone just spent a week patrolling the Baltic seabed where the cables keep getting severed, mapping more than a dozen miles per charge and flagging anything that moved since yesterday
3+ week, 4+ day ago (65+ words) Agree or laugh out loud? Luis Reyes · Jun 7, 2026 Luis Reyes · May 29, 2026 Dave McQuilling · May 23, 2026 Olivia Richman · Jun 14, 2026 Olivia Richman · May 21, 2026 Olivia Richman · May 27, 2026 Luis Reyes · Jun 17, 2026 Olivia Richman · Jun 16, 2026 Dave McQuilling · Jun 16, 2026 Luis Reyes · Jun 16, 2026...
A Swedish drone just did a lumberjack's job with nobody at the controls: it flew to the tree, picked the right one, stripped its branches, cut it and carried the trunk away, the world's first autonomous tree harvest
1+ mon, 1+ hour ago (326+ words) Here is where precision matters, because the headline version flattens two separate achievements into one and the real story is more interesting than the compressed one. What it is not, yet, is a fleet of robot lumberjacks clearing your local…...
A Startup Built a Small Drone for the U.S. Military That Takes Off From the Water, Lands Itself in Two-Foot Seas, and Slips Under Radar — Basically a Stealth Delivery Van for Contested Waters
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (241+ words) Both craft run on the same trick. A wing-in-ground-effect vehicle flies just a few feet over the surface, riding the cushion of air trapped between its wing and the water, which makes it efficient and keeps it under line-of-sight radar....
Battery Drones Drop Out of the Sky After 30 Minutes. A Hydrogen One Can Watch a Border, a Coastline or a Pipeline for Most of a Day — and Investors Just Valued One Maker at a Billion Dollars
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (245+ words) If you’ve ever flown a camera drone, you know the routine. You get maybe half an hour in the air, the battery warning starts blinking, and you bring it back down to swap packs before it drops out of the…...
Everyone Trying to Make Hydrogen Fuel Cells Cheaper Has Been Chasing a New Catalyst. Korean Scientists Just Took the Key Reaction From 12% to 52% Without Replacing It
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (420+ words) Everyone trying to make hydrogen fuel cells and metal-air batteries cheaper keeps banging on the same door. You swap the central metal in your catalyst from iron to cobalt to nickel, or you redesign the molecular cage around it, hoping…...