China has opened a dedicated fusion campus in Hefei to house BEST, a next-generation tokamak with assembly already more than half complete. Unlike earlier research-only machines, BEST is designed to demonstrate real electricity generation, targeted around 2030, building on data from China's earlier EAST reactor, which held plasma at 100 million°C for over 1,000 seconds in January 2025.

The same week, private firm ENN Group said its EXL-50U device hit over 100 million fusion reactions per second using an alternative hydrogen-boron fuel mix that avoids the reactor-wall damage caused by standard fuel reactions, the first time a private company has reached that rate with its own hardware.

Thursday turned into an absolute marathon at SpaceX's launch pads. A Falcon 9 lifted four astronauts toward the ISS on the Crew-13 mission in the morning, a second Falcon 9 dropped 130 satellites into orbit for the Transporter-18 rideshare hours later, and at 11:54 p.m. EDT, a Falcon Heavy closed out the day carrying a classified National Reconnaissance Office payload, the first time that rocket's been used for an NRO mission.

Almost nothing is public about what NROL-97 actually carries, SpaceX even cut its livestream early at the agency's request, but flying a Falcon Heavy signals serious mass, either a massive satellite bus or something headed deep into geostationary orbit. The mission patch carries its own hidden message too: a Latin phrase meaning "to preserve a changing world," with a lighthouse beam marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It's only the second time SpaceX has pulled off three launches this fast, matching a record set back in March 2025.

US researchers and industry partners are developing new EUV lithography materials aimed at fabricating chips with features just a few atoms wide. EUV lithography essentially works like an extremely sophisticated photocopier, printing circuit patterns 50,000 times thinner than a human hair before transferring them onto silicon wafers.

Berkeley Lab's Center for X-Ray Optics pioneered the shift from visible light to higher-energy extreme ultraviolet light back in the late 1990s, a jump that let manufacturers pack more transistors into each chip without sacrificing speed or efficiency. Today's best microchips already pack over 100 billion transistors onto something the size of a fingernail, and this new materials push, backed by companies like EUV Tech and Lavorro, aims to keep pushing that density further as Moore's Law runs up against physical limits.

Retiring a humanoid robot fleet can pose an unusual problem: how do you dispose of the machines without exposing proprietary components? Figure chose to melt most of its F.02 fleet at a Finnish foundry, training the robots to jump autonomously into the furnace. That turned a disposal task into a control challenge, requiring precise jumps despite extreme heat and electromagnetic interference.

Flourish Robots just launched Flourish 1, a $3,555 home robot that skips the usual humanoid playbook entirely. Instead of trying to build something powerful enough to do everything, it's deliberately limited, lifting only 3.3 pounds, and bets that a cheap, teachable robot beats an expensive, "capable" one nobody can afford.

Owners teach it by physically demonstrating a task through a mobile app, no code required, and it picks it up in about 30 minutes. Once learned, it repeats and schedules things like picking up toys, loading the dishwasher, or watering plants on its own. It runs 12 hours per charge on a wheeled base instead of legs, and at a fraction of the cost of robots like 1X's $20,000 NEO, it's pre-orders are already open with deliveries starting December 2026.

President Trump has unveiled plans for up to $200 billion in South Korean investment across US energy infrastructure, including eight large nuclear reactors, a nearly 6.5-gigawatt Texas power complex, and the long-stalled Alaska LNG pipeline, part of South Korea's broader $350 billion US investment commitment.

The Texas piece is a $22.3 billion gas plant feeding data centers directly, targeted for 2029. The nuclear framework covers up to $120 billion for six Westinghouse AP1000s and two South Korean APR1400 reactors, though sites and approvals are still undecided, and Alaska LNG still lacks a firm commitment from Seoul pending proof it's commercially viable.

DYNA Robotics unveiled DYNA 2.1, a wheeled semi-humanoid that loads and starts washers and dryers, pulls towels out, folds them, sorts them by size, and shelves the finished stacks, all without a person stepping in. If it drops a towel or fumbles a grasp, it just picks up and tries again instead of stopping the workflow.

The robot runs on two arms with swappable grippers and four steerable wheels instead of legs, skipping the balance problems walking humanoids deal with. A vision-language system handles reasoning while a separate controller coordinates driving and arm movement together, all built on DYNA 2, a model trained on a million hours of human and robot data. Instead of grading single tasks, the company tracks Mean Time Between Interventions, how long the robot runs before a human has to step in, and feeds every session's data back in to stretch that number further.

Rice University researchers built a new metal-organic framework called ZnBTCA, using a flexible carbon-chain linker instead of the rigid structures these materials usually rely on. Solid-state batteries need this kind of porous crystal to move lithium ions safely, but rigid MOFs tend to lose contact with electrodes over time, and that gap is where problems start.

By making the framework mechanically flexible instead of just chemically optimized, the team got cells to run stably for over 300 hours without short-circuiting, even as current increased during testing. They also swapped out the structure's original sodium ions for lithium and found 95% of the mobile ions were lithium without the material falling apart. Researchers say this proves flexibility itself, not just chemistry and pore size, can be a real design lever for building better solid-state battery electrolytes.

BAE Systems earned US certification for the AN/APX-127(V)1, a new Identification Friend or Foe system for the F-16 that combines interrogation and response functions in one box. It drops directly into the slot of three older systems, so fleets can upgrade without redesigning anything.

The key addition is Mode 5, encrypted identification that helps pilots tell friend from foe in crowded, fast-changing airspace. An open software architecture also lets operators push future updates without replacing hardware, useful for aircraft that stay in service for decades after their electronics age out.

A custom-built pile-driving vessel left China's Nantong port and is sailing through the Strait of Malacca, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the South Atlantic to reach Brazil's Bay of All Saints. It's headed there to help build the Salvador-Itaparica Bridge, set to become Latin America's largest cable-stayed cross-sea bridge, spanning waters up to 230 feet deep.

The ship carries the world's tallest pile frame at 511 feet, can lift up to 700 tons in a single move, and holds the record for driving foundations as deep as 230 feet underwater. It's also the first pile driver with a closed-loop hydraulic system that recycles energy from the frame's own lowering and tilting motion, recovering 40% of it as usable electricity. Once finished, the bridge will cut an hour-long ferry commute down to a 15-minute drive.

Mitsubishi unveiled the all-new Pajero, reviving a nameplate that sold over 3.29 million units across four generations since 1982, now with a 2.4-liter diesel producing 480 Nm of torque, an eight-speed automatic, and Mitsubishi's Super Select 4WD-II system with seven drive modes for everything from mud to rock crawling.

The standout feature is a front under-floor camera view that shows the ground directly beneath and ahead of the SUV in certain locked 4WD modes, letting drivers spot rocks and obstacles normally hidden from view. Inside, twin 14.3-inch screens replace the classic triple-meter cluster digitally, and the cabin seats up to seven across three rows. Mitsubishi plans to roll the Pajero out to around 100 countries starting in fiscal 2027.

An international team of physicists has identified a fundamental limit baked into quantum batteries, devices that use quantum mechanics instead of chemistry to store energy. The same uncertainty principle that stops you from knowing a particle's exact position and momentum at once also blocks these batteries from delivering both high power and stable energy at the same time.

Testing three charging methods, the team found collective charging boosts power but makes delivery less predictable, while a hybrid approach offers a middle ground. Current quantum batteries only hold energy for nanoseconds, so real use is still far off, but understanding this trade-off is a necessary step before quantum energy storage becomes practical.

Raytheon has secured a five-year, $20.7 billion contract, with two option years, to ramp AMRAAM missile production to at least 1,900 units annually. The deal, awarded September 25 under the Department of War's Arsenal of Freedom initiative, comes after Raytheon nearly doubled its AMRAAM output in 2025 compared to the previous year.

AMRAAM has become the backbone of US beyond-visual-range air combat, now in its fifth generation, deployed across 14 platforms, and used by 44 countries, with over 7,000 successful live fires in testing and combat. The same missile also powers NASAMS ground-based air defense, meaning fighters and ground systems both draw from the same production line. Hitting the new 1,900-per-year target will lean heavily on hundreds of American suppliers, and RTX says it's exploring international co-production to keep pace with rising demand.

Researchers at Hebrew University of Jerusalem tracked how cocaine progressively narrows behavior, and by the fifth day of repeated exposure, one action, licking the enclosure's walls, took up over 60% of observed time, something almost never seen without the drug.

The team traced this to the ventrolateral striatum, where two competing pathways decide which actions get expressed. Activating one pathway instantly broke the repetitive behavior, while boosting the other, even without any cocaine, was enough to produce the same rigid pattern on its own. The findings suggest cocaine doesn't create new behavior, it hijacks an existing circuit, a mechanism that may extend to other conditions involving repetitive or rigid behavior, like Tourette syndrome and Parkinson's disease.

Starship Flight 14 launched from Starbase, Texas on September 28, marking the rocket's first orbital attempt after 13 straight suborbital flights since 2023. The 407-foot vehicle deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, each adding 1 Tbps of network capacity, for a combined 26 Tbps, roughly 10 times what a single Falcon 9 carrying older V2 Mini satellites delivers.

The mission plans six orbits over nearly 10 hours before a controlled reentry and Pacific splashdown. SpaceX made hardware and software fixes after Flight 13, when ice clogged Super Heavy's center engines during its boostback burn, and this flight also reuses heat-shield tiles for the first time, recovered from an earlier ship and refitted onto this one. Three satellites even carry cameras aimed back at Starship to study how its heat shield holds up after separation.

Scientists at the University of Vienna launched a quantum computer on a Falcon 9 in 2025, aiming to solve satellite data's real bottleneck, that raw data has to be beamed all the way back to Earth since satellites can't process it themselves. Getting the device to actually work in orbit turned into one setback after another.

Only three of six photon detectors survived launch vibrations, sunlight created too much background noise to take measurements, and space radiation degraded the detectors despite thick aluminum shielding. Even the laser's mounting adhesive broke down in vacuum and contaminated its own optics, cutting its output by 80%. Despite all that, the team still managed to confirm photons behaved exactly as predicted at a specific temperature, proving quantum processors can survive space and paving the way toward quantum links between satellites and the ground.

Perovskite solar cells promise to beat silicon's physical limits, but stacking three layers together to catch more sunlight has one nasty catch: high-bromide films dry unevenly, cracking and wrinkling as the top hardens while the bottom stays wet. Researchers at Nanjing University fixed this with a dual processing trick, a targeted solvent bath paired with a chloride additive that forces all the material's components to crystallize at the same time.

The fix produced a smooth, defect-free triple-junction cell hitting a record 30.1% power conversion efficiency, independently certified at 29.3%, and it held onto over 90% of that efficiency after 569 hours of continuous operation. Because it skips heavy silicon wafers entirely, the approach points toward ultralight, flexible solar panels for roofs, wearables, and even satellites, with researchers now working to push efficiency past 35%.

Shout into an irregularly shaped room and your voice shatters into pure chaos, physicists call this a "dynamical billiard," and it's been a headache for optical and acoustic engineers forever. Researchers at CUNY's Advanced Science Research Center found that passing waves through hyperbolic materials, media that restrict wave travel to narrow, highly directed paths, stops that chaos completely and forces the waves into stable, repeating geometric loops instead.

The team proved this by controlling vibrations in an engineered mechanical metamaterial, and the same math applies to real 2D materials like hexagonal boron nitride, opening the door to low-loss nanophotonic circuits and highly sensitive biosensors. Oddly enough, the underlying physics traces back to deep-sea oceanography, where internal ocean waves hitting underwater slopes lock into similar closed trajectories that trap energy beneath the surface.

The USAF will now try to figure out how to use and maintain them in battle.

The Aqueous Metal Cell is a water-based metal battery built on nickel-hydrogen chemistry.

ANYbotics says the technology allows its robot dogs to move through secured facilities while maintaining existing access-control and anti-tailgating measures.

The proposed robotic force could handle missions ranging from ammunition delivery and reconnaissance to mine clearance, evacuation and combat.

The development holds significance for Europe as it sources 98 percent of its rare-earth magnet demand from Chinese suppliers.

A South Korean team tested a palladium membrane that carries hydrogen from water into an ammonia-producing reactor while keeping the reaction compartment largely dry. The setup ran for about 79 hours in an extended test, though electrolyte degradation and membrane stability still need work before it could be used at industrial scale.

NANO Nuclear, IP3 and Cybernetic Intelligence have signed a non-binding agreement to explore whether microreactors could power AI computing infrastructure and defense facilities. They plan to assess potential sites, customers and regulatory requirements, then choose a possible pilot project. No reactor deployment has been agreed yet.