telecommunications

One of the world's biggest underwater robots, the new UT-1 Ultra Trencher weighs 60 tons on land, stands 18 feet tall, and measures nearly 26 feet wide. The remote-controlled Ultra Trencher can also rumble along at 2 to 3 knots, but its main job is cutting trenches for oil pipelines or telecommunications cables.

European travelers may soon have a chance to chat away on their own phones while in flight. For the new system to work, planes would be outfitted with small mobile base stations known as pico cells. The cells would be switched off during take-off, and turned on once the planes reach a given altitude, which would be a minimum of 3,000 meters. Phone signals would be routed to the mobile base stations, which would in turn dispatch signals to ground-based networks through a satellite link.