In a world obsessed with aerial drones, this new system could fly in under the radar and revolutionize shipping, delivering goods automatically via unmanned vehicles using magnetic wave propulsion through subterranean tubes. We are used to transporting liquids in bulk below ground – including water, waste and fuel – at its simplest, this system proposes doing something similar with solids, but the effects could revolutionize supply chains locally and globally.

Like pneumatic tubes or underground trains of the digital age, the UK-based MOLE system is automated and secure from one end to the other, able to carry two pallets and tap into paths for existing underground transit and service infrastructure. Costs of this system are estimated to be as little as 10% of traditional above-ground shipping methods, and the pallet-based system makes the approach compatible with other intermodal systems including freight shipping containers.

The company boasts the potential of the system on green as well as efficiency fronts, including low energy usage and environmental impact as well as 24/7 unmanned operations, automatic loading and unloading. There are also subtler benefits, like reducing road congestion on the streets above.

MOLE has also already run a series of tests and is aiming to first deploy in the realm of industrial shipping, helping mines and factories connect raw and finished materials with target buyers and refiners. Eventually, the goal is to create smaller business-to-business connections on a commercial scale.

From from MOLE: “Mole Solutions is currently developing cost-effective, safe and environmentally friendly underground freight pipelines for solid cargoes. The system is designed to integrate with existing supply chains and transfer some of the high volume of products that travels by road into capsules running in pipelines laid beside or under existing and planned transport infrastructure.”

It is a familiar trope these days, but fun nonetheless: take a common object, tweak the scale and transform the materials, and you get a new item that has a recognizable shape but a distinct new function.

In this case, the Clip Bag by Peter Bristol manages to look both fresh and fashionable – the light (hollow aluminum) metal grip widens to fit the hand, and the felted bag manages to look a lot classier and more comfortable to carry than its plastic inspiration.

There is a curious psychological side-effect in play as well: suddenly, we are forced to rely a lot more on context to determine the size of the bag – it makes its tiny cousins look extra-small, and wood grain seem huge by comparison.

A play on memory and novelty, its scale becomes most obvious, in the end, when put to its intended use and held in human hands.

It sounds a little like the premise of some B-caliber science-fiction film: there are residents living in tunnels below the city, with a twist … they dwell under the waves rather than in ground-surrounded tunnels with breathable air.

With up to 36 million gallons of water leaking out of a key aquifer, a crew of willing workers is committed to finding and fixing the problem, meaning long shifts at 700 feet below the surface.

A team of a half-dozen brave repair people are in the middle of this messy adventure, each having to drop down seventy stories to their 24-foot tubular temporary home, complete with television, showers and Nerf basketball hoop.

(Seen above: the tunnel while it was being built, but before it was flooded). In the meantime, they are breathing mostly helium mixed with a bit of oxygen, and spicing up their bland food (apparently the atmosphere dulls taste buds) with lots of hot sauce, working in 12 hour shifts to move and replace thousands of pounds of tunnel copper. (via Wikipedia, Gizmodo & the New York Times)