Wave

A team of Australian bodyboarding ratbags has managed to capture staggering footage of an extraordinary oceanic phenomenon: a place where four 12-ft (3.7-m) waves regularly converge into an oval dip, with explosive results.

Scientists have hacked the meaning of a "light meal," creating microlasers that use natural products to emit beams through food. They're also completely safe to eat. It's the first demonstration of laser emission from an entirely edible system.

Ireland's Safehaven Marine builds search and rescue craft, patrol boats and pilot boats designed to operate in "all weather" – up to and including Force 10 storms with waves up to 23 ft (7 m) high. The firm backs this up with some spectacular testing.

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.

Sweden's CorPower has announced "breakthrough" results from Atlantic ocean testing of its full-scale floating generators, which cleverly time their motions to amplify smaller waves while protecting themselves against dangerous storm conditions.

Irish company OceanEnergy has already tested its oscillating water column generators at significant scale in Hawaii, and it's just signed on to a four-year project to test, validate and commercialize its biggest unit yet off Orkney, in Scotland.

The UniWave sea platform is an artificial blowhole that harvests energy from ocean waves. Independent analysis now predicts it'll create some of the cheapest renewable energy on the market – and some of the most reliable and predictable, as well.

A new class of elastic energy converters is emerging, with the ability to capture energy from a variety of different motions. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is pushing to deploy them, first in a series of strange, bendy wave energy designs.

Sea Wave Energy Ltd has been working for more than a decade on an ultra-cheap floating wave energy device. With several prototypes tested, the company is promising capacities over 100 MW, with unheard-of energy cost figures under 1 cent per kWh. Hmm.

Wave Swell Energy's remarkable UniWave 200 is a sea platform that uses an artificial blowhole formation to create air pressure changes that drive a turbine and feed energy back to shore. After a year of testing, the company reports excellent results.

There are energy sources all over the place, if you know where to look. Researchers at CUHK have now designed new modular nanogenerators that can harvest energy from various different types of motion, such as ocean waves or a person's body movements.

In most surf parks, surfers ride artificially-generated waves down the length of an oblong pool. Unfortunately, such an arrangement limits the number of people who can rides the waves at once … which is where the 5 Waves system comes in.