Tsinghua University

Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... a 20,000 cubic-meter power-generating airship, floating 6,560 ft (2,000 meters) above the ground. Introducing the S2000 stratospheric airborne wind energy system – or the S2000 SAWES.

China's Tsinghua University has scored a world first by demonstrating the inherent safety of the first operating commercial pebble-bed nuclear reactor by shutting off the power and letting the passive systems maintain control of the reactor core.

China claims to have brought the world's first Gen IV commercial nuclear reactor online. The Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant HTR-PM high-temperature gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor in Shidao Bay, Shandong Province, reportedly went into service this month.

While some assistance is available to individuals who lack the power of speech, verbally communicating with other people can still be challenging. A new face-worn strain sensor could help, as it's able to "read" the wearer's silently mouthed words.

Ordinarily, we associate mouthguards with sports such as boxing and football. An experimental new one, however, could allow people who lack the use of their hands to control electronic devices – and it would do so by tracking their bite patterns.

Discarded electronics can be a gold mine – literally. Researchers have developed an efficient new way to use graphene to recover gold from electronic waste, without needing any other chemicals or energy.

Wearing a big, heavy backpack can get pretty tiring. That's why scientists have developed a pack that's not only claimed to lighten the load on the wearer, but that also uses the motion of that load to generate electricity.

Sea anemones are essentially soft-bodied tubes, that are capable of capturing a wide variety of prey items simply by engulfing them. Chinese scientists have now copied this concept in the form of what may be a "better" robotic grasper.

​Although ceramics are known for being able to withstand high temperatures, they also have a reputation for being brittle. That's not the case, however, with a spongey new material made from ceramic nanofibers. It could find use in high-temperature insulation or water filtration.

Researchers in China are aiming to take the operating system (OS) to the cloud with TransOS, a cross-platform, cloud-based OS.