Grace Gourlay

Robotic surgery can give surgeons greater precision and consistency, but many of the most advanced systems remain concentrated in specialist centres. A new collaboration between engineers at Imperial College London and Smith+Nephew aims to widen access by accelerating the development of technologies for robotic musculoskeletal surgery.

A wheeled robot that can guide patients through routine cardiovascular health checks has been trialled at an NHS GP surgery in Dundee, offering a glimpse of how robotics could take some of the repetitive workload out of primary care.

Space telescopes have traditionally faced a trade-off. They can look deeply into a small patch of the universe, revealing distant galaxies in remarkable detail, but surveying enormous areas of sky at that resolution takes time. NASA’s newly launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been designed to change that equation.

For anyone considering a career in engineering, seeing how a design progresses from a computer screen to something that can actually be built and tested can make the subject considerably more tangible. That was the idea behind UCL Mechanical Engineering’s inaugural STEM Racing Workshop Day, held in partnership with STEM Racing UK.

Most attempts to reduce aviation’s climate impact focus on what powers an aircraft. A new UK-led trial is looking instead at where an aircraft flies, testing whether relatively small changes in altitude could prevent some of the condensation trails that contribute to global warming.

What if an electric bicycle’s frame was also its battery? Or an aircraft wing could store some of the electricity needed to power the aircraft? A new UK research programme is exploring a future in which batteries are no longer separate objects hidden inside products, but become part of the structures themselves.

Test your knowledge with the geography extremes quiz. Discover the highest peaks and deepest depths of our planet.

Quantum computers have an unusual problem: the more useful their qubits need to become, the easier it can be to disturb them. Qubits must hold quantum information for long enough to perform a calculation, but they also need to communicate with other parts of the computer quickly and reliably. Improving one of those abilities can come at the expense of the other.

Some of the biggest advances in artificial intelligence have emerged from industrial research labs with enormous computing resources, large multidisciplinary teams and the freedom to pursue ambitious ideas at speed. UK universities now want to see whether academia can compete by changing the way AI research itself is organised.

Keeping a fusion plasma under control requires decisions to be made extraordinarily quickly. Inside a tokamak, disturbances can develop within milliseconds, giving human operators little chance to react before an instability begins affecting the experiment.