Interesting Engineering

Google Japan's Gboard team has unveiled the Gboard Conveyor Belt Version, a DIY keyboard whose keys ride four looping belts, so your hand stays still while the letters roll past. It is the team's latest experimental keyboard, released on October 1, 2026, and it isn't for sale, but the full design, firmware and 3D-printable parts are open source on GitHub.

China's BEST fusion reactor in Hefei is more than halfway through assembly, and its research campus was handed over for use on 1 October 2026, according to state broadcaster CCTV. The machine is due to be finished by the end of 2027, and China wants it to get more energy out of its plasma than goes in and to demonstrate fusion electricity around 2030.

German engineering firm GICON has raised the world's tallest wind turbine to its full height of 365 metres (1,197 feet) in Schipkau, eastern Germany, for the federal innovation agency SPRIND. A hydraulic cable lift hauled its 3.8 MW turbine up a telescoping tower to a 300-metre hub height, where site measurements show stronger, steadier wind. It is due to start feeding the grid in November 2026, when it has to prove the extra output justifies a much higher build cost.

Houston-based Deployable Energy will test its 1 MWe Unity nuclear battery at full power inside DOME, Idaho National Laboratory's 100-foot-tall microreactor test bed, in 2027. DOME is built inside the old containment dome of the EBR-II reactor and can host fuelled experiments of up to 20 MW thermal, and Deployable Energy will be only the second company to test there, after Radiant.

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Rolls-Royce SMR has chosen Czech engineering firm Škoda JS to design and supply the control rod drive mechanisms for its 470 MW small modular reactor, the hardware that regulates reactor power and enables rapid shutdown. Škoda JS will build a prototype and prepare for mass production, with repeat orders worth more than a billion Czech crowns per reactor. The first units are planned for Wylfa in Wales, Sweden's west coast and Czechia.

San Francisco startup NetworkOcean has put OASIS-00 on the water in San Francisco Bay, a 20 kW floating solar array of sixteen floats that powers an Nvidia H100 GPU in a data center container aboard its support vessel. The Y Combinator-backed company, which pitched underwater data centers in 2024, plans a 1 MW array in 2027 and says it wants to be able to deploy a gigawatt of solar a week by 2030.

Stringman, from engineer Nathaniel Nifong's Neufangled Robotics, hangs a two-fingered gripper from four lines strung to the corners of a room's ceiling. Two motorised anchors reel those lines to steer it, while cameras and AI models find clutter and carry it to tagged bins.

China Zorrilla, Incat's Hull 096, has reached Uruguay on the back of a heavy-lift ship, because the world's largest battery-electric ferry is built to run for only about 90 minutes on a charge. We break down how a 130-metre, 2,100-passenger catamaran ordered to burn LNG ended up running on more than 40 MWh of batteries, from its four battery rooms to its eight waterjets and the chargers waiting at both ends of the Río de la Plata.