Shipping

Most of us are familiar with the vest-clad beagle that hunts for illegal fruits and plants in the travelers' luggage at airports. Now, a species of giant pouched rat has been trained to fulfill a similar role in finding illegal wildlife products.

Volvo has long been a leader in the long-haul heavy-truck category with its FH series. Its 12 to 16-liter diesel "world engine" made excellent power output, lower emissions, and relatively low fuel consumption. Next year, it'll be powered by batteries.

The US Air Force has released video of a ship getting ripped in half, to demonstrate its new Quicksink weapon, which turns an inexpensive dumb bomb into a precision anti-ship missile – and lives up to its name in spectacular fashion.

Lloyd's Register and nuclear startup Core Power are joining forces with shipping company Maersk to study how to update regulations as part of an effort to introduce Gen IV nuclear reactors to power the next generation of zero-carbon-emission cargo ships.

Looking like a set of bridge supports that were accidentally installed on a cargo ship, a new wind-driven system by startup CoFlow Jet promises to reduce ship fuel costs by up to 90% using stationary cylinders with no moving parts.

In the Belgian North Sea, maintenance vessels are now able to tether to an automatic cable at a wind farm to get their batteries topped up. The innovative system is the first of its kind and a major step in helping reduce emissions from shipping.

Unpredictable monster waves at sea can severely damage ships and offshore platforms, putting the lives of those who work on them at risk. A new system out of the University of Maryland uses a neural network to provide valuable early-warning alerts.

A new propeller created by the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) coated with a skin mimicking that of a dolphin holds the promise of significantly reducing fuel consumption and emissions in large cargo ships.

That's without any modification to the ships themselves, too. The ambitious 'Blue Visby Solution' proposes enormous fuel and emissions savings for cargo ships worldwide, simply by being smarter about speed and timing and eliminating inefficiencies.

Earlier this month, we featured a Whale Design propeller that looked to nature for improved efficiency. Switzerland's ABB Marine has also been inspired by "the dynamic motions of a whale's tail" for its multi-blade Dynafin propulsion concept.

An age of greener, more efficient shipping may be in the offing as a specially modified 43,000-tonne bulk freighter completes a six-month sea trial using a combination of diesel engines and a set of high-tech automatic sails to catch the wind.

Transporting goods by inland waterways can be a dirty business, but an EU-backed project is looking to clean up its act – launching a container vessel powered by green hydrogen on a major cargo route between the Netherlands and Germany.