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Six to ten feet below the ground, 12-inch pipes carry natural gas all over America. They wind around electrical conduits and water mains. They bear the weight of daily commutes, delivery trucks, and city buses. And a lot of them are leaking. “Some of these pipes have been in the ground for over 100 years, and they’re only getting older,” says Alexander Duncan, a roboticist at GE Research. “Nobody really thought through how to service them. So it’s now a massive and costly problem for the national infrastructure.”

As an electrical engineering major at Howard University in the 1980s, Colin Parris received a tricky assignment: Build a small burglar alarm that would turn on a light when a switch was opened. He painstakingly assembled a board with 300 wires, reattaching them every time they got jiggled out of place in his locker. He estimates the project took 40 to 50 hours.

Then Parris was asked to use an 8-bit microprocessor to complete the same assignment. With 10 wires connected to LED lights and a small amount of programming, he built his second burglar alarm in about three hours.

On an average winter day in Ukraine, temperatures barely creep above freezing. Millions of residents, driven from their homes since war broke out nearly a year ago, huddle against the cold in makeshift shelters and bombed-out buildings. Millions more brace for the blackouts that have become routine since Russian forces began targeting power utilities in October.

Like most countries, the United Kingdom is making swift moves to try to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy security through wind, solar, and other renewables. And as in many other countries, nuclear energy is set to play a large role. The nation already gets about 15% of its electricity from nuclear, and aims to triple its capacity to 24 gigawatts (GW) by 2050, which would cover some 25% of its future electricity needs, all while retiring older gas-cooled nuclear plants.