A closer look at cancer cells with extra chromosomes uncovered surprising traits linked to faster-growing, more dangerous tumors, pointing to potential new indicators of disease severity. Cancer cells are notorious for breaking the rules of biology. One of the most dramatic violations occurs when a cell suddenly doubles its entire genetic library, creating a chromosome-packed [...]
Wirtgen Group is actively developing automated road construction vehicles as stepping stones for full autonomy using some of the same technology stack as parent company John Deere.
During a recent demonstration of its roadbuilding machinery at the company’s North American headquarters in the US state of Tennessee, company executives outlined the benefits of its specialised heavy machinery for road building.
Demand for roads and infrastructure keeps rising while contractors juggle labour shortages, climbing material costs, tighter project timelines and shorter paving seasons.
In the US alone, the construction industry is expected to need nearly 700,000 additional workers by 2031 just to keep pace with demand.
About 40% of the four million miles of roadways across the US are currently rated in poor or mediocre condition.
“As we talked with our customers, we learned a few things about some of their business challenges, which is simply to do more with less,” said Craig Lamarque, VP and head of digital products at Wirtgen America. “Every day our customers are responsible to ensure the safety of every person on absolutely every job site”.
“And they have to do that with increasingly less skilled and less experienced personnel.”
Lamarque explained customers must complete a greater number of projects on tighter timelines to stay profitable while coping with issues with materials, sustainability pressures, labour shortages, and the need to stay on budget and on schedule.
Wirtgen Group responded by introducing digital tools to help address those challenges.
He said Wirtgen’s digital strategy centres on three pillars: connected support to maximize uptime, job site intelligence to expose inefficiencies and improve decision-making, and smart automation to boost machine performance.
Those capabilities are embedded across its road construction equipment lineup and are supported by hardware and software in collaboration with John Deere.
A legacy built on family names
The Wirtgen Group was a privately held German company before it was acquired by John Deere in 2017.
Earlier in its history, the Wirtgen Group bought asphalt paving company Vogele (in 1996) ahead of purchasing soil and asphalt compaction company Hamm three years later. Vogele was established in 1836, one year prior to John Deere.
Kleemann was acquired in 2006, which expanded Wirtgen’s reach into mineral processing with mobile crushing and screening plants.
The Wirtgen Group bought a 70% stake in Benninghoven in 2014, adding asphalt mixing plants to the ecosystem and enabling Wirtgen to offer the entire cycle of road construction equipment from mixing and paving to milling and recycling.
Wirtgen America was established in 1984 and now includes 300 employees across the Tennessee campus.
“Every one of those names of the brands is a family name, much the same as Deere,” said Wirtgen America president and CEO Jim McEvoy. “From that standpoint, we have a long legacy of being early in these markets, being leaders in these markets and being very innovative in these product spaces.”
Here’s a look at three of the roadbuilding machines and technologies showcased in Tennessee across asphalt milling, paving and compaction.
Wirtgen milling machine
The milling machine removes old asphalt or concrete surfaces while using automation and digital guidance technologies to improve precision, efficiency and performance tracking. It is designed for high-output work on freeways, highways, airports and other major infrastructure projects.
The W210XF is equipped with a 2.5 metre-wide cutter drum which removes asphalt and concrete prior to loading the material into a truck. It uses automation and digital guidance technologies across eight cameras to improve precision, efficiency and machine performance tracking.
“Simple diagnostics, intuitive instructions on the display and backup components built into the machine make it easy to keep going,” Lamarque said.
WPT Milling documents job and machine data for billing and emissions tracking. Smart Level Pro is a fully integrated differential milling system which scans the surface about to be milled.
The process begins with a high-speed survey scan of the existing road surface, either by the customer or a third-party surveyor, without closing the road. The resulting digital model is then georeferenced and logged using GNSS.
After scanning, the road profile is refined to meet specifications, then uploaded to the John Deere Operations Centre and Work Planner, where cutting depths can be checked in advance which saves time compared with milling first and verifying later.
Utilising two John Deere StarFire receivers connected by cellular service, Lamarque said the mill goes to work, “precisely milling the design depth and slope, leaving the best possible surface”.
StarFire GNSS Guidance is Deere’s satellite technology which helps machines maintain highly accurate positioning, alignment and paving guidance throughout the roadbuilding process.
Mill Assist is an automated system on the milling machine that uses real-time machine data to optimise performance, improve efficiency, and reduce fuel consumption and emissions.
Vogele asphalt paver
The asphalt pavers are packed with highly specialised automation, levelling and material handling technologies.
Smart Pave is an advanced digital control and automation system developed by Vogele for its asphalt road pavers. AutoTrac technology helps the paver hold its direction of travel and paving width with precision.
RoadScan is Vogele’s proprietary, non-contact thermal imaging and temperature measurement system mounted directly to the asphalt paver.
Hamm asphalt roller
The double-drum asphalt roller machine compacts fresh asphalt to the target density required for long term durability, using real-time density monitoring and intelligent compaction technology to hit the mark.
It focuses on preventing over-compaction, maximising operator efficiency and providing proof of compaction quality to contractors, state and federal authorities.
The roller uses a combination of vibration and oscillation to compact material to the desired density. Smart Compact Pro and Track Assist help road crews compact more efficiently, cost-effectively and safely while also meeting intelligent compaction specifications.
Intelligent compaction is data collection of the roller using GPS compact mapping, temperature sensors which map and report asphalt surface temperature and an accelerometer sensor that reports stiffness.
From automation to autonomy
Jason Ambroson, VP and managing director of Wirtgen International, explained running the same technologies, connectivity and data sensors across the various roadbuilding machines enables customers to be more productive using fewer employees and fewer resources.
“We are moving from automation to autonomy,” he said.
That trajectory of connecting machines, data and operators into a single intelligent system was what the Tennessee demonstration was ultimately built to show.
The post Feature: Wirtgen Group paves the way for autonomous road building appeared first on Mobile World Live.
New findings suggest cell size could sharpen cancer prognosis.
When it comes to rockets, bell-shaped engines are the norm. But they’re not the most efficient shape. Engineers have relied on this design only because it avoids a known overheating risk faced by a more efficient engine. Now, though, three 17-year-olds have redesigned the nozzle of the more efficient aerospike engine to better manage heat.
They’re hoping that one day their new tech might literally shoot for the stars.
Devin Wanchoo, Michael Obeng and Mazon Ben Chouikha attend Governor’s School at Innovation Park in Manassas, Va. Their new work began as a way to satisfy a class assignment. “We wanted to do something in aerospace. We wanted to do something involving biomimicry. And then we wanted to do something that no one has done before,” says Michael.
Those motivations led them to refine a better rocket system.
During their research, the young engineers learned that bell-shaped rocket engines become less powerful the higher they ascend. For decades, engineers have experimented with an alternative that would avoid this limitation: the aerospike engine.
Unfortunately, this design has its own big limitation: It shoots super-hot exhaust gases from the engine right up against its spike structure. Eventually, that heat can “cause the spike body to melt and crack under thermal stress,” Devin says.
Their work won these teens a spot here at the 2026 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF. The event is a program of the Society for Science (which also publishes this magazine). The young aerospike researchers were among 1,725 students — from 65 nations or territories — who competed at the 76th annual ISEF. These participants shared nearly $7 million in prizes.
Imagine a rocket launch. Flames burst downward from the engines and propel the rocket upward. Initially, the flames form a column.
If you were to fly alongside the rocket as it ascends, you’d eventually see the shape of that exhaust change. The column of gases would start to balloon outward.
During liftoff, high atmospheric pressure initially forces the gases into that column shape. But as the rocket climbs, the air pressure weakens — and so does control of the exhaust gases. Now they spread out, reducing lift.
The thrust must go down for the rocket to go up. But higher up, as the gases balloon out, bell-shaped engines “can lose up to 30 percent of their efficiency,” says Devin.
Engineers have been looking to overcome that. And the aerospike engine is one possible solution.
“Unlike a bell nozzle — which needs that giant encasing structure — the aerospike just has its central spike,” Devin explains. It will deliver a strong, reliable upward thrust as long as you have some way “to force gases [down] along the spike wall.”
Those gases flow along the spike’s surface. The spike acts as a guide to direct the gases down so they can’t spread out. But that guiding spike introduces its own problem.
Coming from the engine, exhaust gases “are extremely hot,” notes Michael. The spike’s tip takes a pummeling from those gases. Their heat is “essentially attacking it, attacking it, attacking it,” he says.
What’s more, those gases tend to recirculate along the spike. This helps counter the air pressure’s attempt to weaken the downward flow of the gases, Michael says. Unfortunately, he adds, it also increases the heat.
So what makes this engine so good at maintaining a strong downward flow of exhaust gases, Devin points out, “is the same thing that causes that very aggressive heating of the spike body.”
Typical cooling methods just haven’t been good enough to spare the spike.
Submit your question here, and we might answer it an upcoming issue of Science News Explores
To counter that, the trio looked for inspiration in nature. Living things have evolved different ways to cool themselves. The team considered plant veins, insect exoskeletons, shark tissues and more. Then the trio created ICARUS, a machine-learning algorithm, and used it to test bio-based cooling strategies.
ICARUS, says Devin, is “probably the most novel part” of their project. It’s a simpler, heat-driven version of tools used by the aerospace industry. And it does more than just test ideas. “We built it on a machine-learning layer that was able to suggest [spike shapes] to try,” Devin says.
The young engineers started with shapes suggested by nature. Then they used ICARUS to optimize those designs. For instance, says Mazon, his team might suggest a certain surface pattern or feature. Then ICARUS “might change the width of it [or] the depth of it” to optimize the spike’s heat resistance.
The approach worked. Heat flux refers to how fast heat moves through a material. “We were able to reduce temperatures and heat flux by up to 40 percent,” Devin says.
Human skin inspired their most successful design, Devin says. Pores in our skin release sweat. As it evaporates, it wicks away heat. Mimicking this trick helped “bleed propellant to fight back against that heat creep,” says Devin.
Using what they learned from ICARUS, the team members 3-D printed models of the six most promising designs. Then they put the models under a heat gun and measured how long each took to reach 90° and 110° Celsius (194° and 230° Fahrenheit), says Devin. They also tracked at what temps the models began to warp.
Then they built a copper prototype of their best-performing model. In the final stage of testing, Michael says, they became the first high school students to ever do a cold-flow test on such an engine. A cold-flow test, explains Devin, is “just testing that your engine can pressurize properly and that propellants are flowing.”
This test was “pretty cool,” he says. “We got to verify our ICARUS predictions.”
ICARUS can also offer design tips beyond rocketry, Mazon says. For instance, the surface patterns designed to manage heat could even be applied to homes. “If you were to put [these patterns] on wood and you built the house, then it’s very likely to be safer” in terms of withstanding wildfires, he says.
For their work, Devin, Michael and Mazon took home fourth place — and $600 — in ISEF’s Engineering Technology: Statics and Dynamics division.
Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. There's Microsoft Scout, an OpenClaw-based "Autopilot" agent that can hook into Microsoft 365 data to perform tasks for users; several new AI models; an expanded preview of "Codename MDASH," which is a "multi-model agentic scanning system" meant to detect and fix software vulnerabilities.
A few of those announcements stood out to us as particularly interesting, either for esoteric technical reasons or because they seem like they may have some utility for those who aren't spending their every waking moment using generative AI tools. (Microsoft's recent efforts to make its flagship operating system faster, more reliable, more useful, and less annoying didn't really come up, but there have been plenty of other announcements on that front lately.)
On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday's Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is "a compact developer PC" built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory.
© Microsoft
Microsoft has been deeply committed to the growth of generative AI technology in recent years through its now-fragmented partnership with OpenAI. At Build 2026, the company remains all-in on AI, and it's looking toward the future with a new software platform. The new Android-based OS is called Project Solara, and Microsoft says Solara is designed to run agents instead of apps.
Project Solara is not something you'll have to worry about killing your apps anytime soon. It's limited to a few pieces of concept hardware and software that are awaiting the magical agents of the future. The vision is for Solara to run on myriad specialized devices with interfaces generated on the spot, and it's all powered by the explosive intelligence of models that Microsoft and others insist will soon exist.
According to Microsoft, Solara is a chip-to-cloud platform intended to free agents from reliance on single interfaces. Much of Microsoft's messaging around AI is speculative and self-serving, but the company rightly points out that new computing form factors have always required specialization, and that process is complex and expensive. The shift to mobile computing, for example, tripped Microsoft up multiple times as it fell behind on app availability, security, and long-term support.
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