What’s the future of personal transportation? The car industry is betting heavily that it involves driverless vehicles and ride-sharing. Major carmakers are pouring billions of dollars into autonomous vehicle research and development ($60 billion this year, reports Investor’s Business Daily), with General Motors planning to roll out its autonomous vehicles next year and Ford by 2021.

Big players in the aerospace and technology sectors are now major investors in a radically new approach to launching small payloads into outer space: space catapult.

SpinLaunch Inc., a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2014, recently announced it had raised $40 million, in part from venture capital firms affiliated with Airbus and Google.

Autonomous farming robots that target weeds directly are poised to disrupt the current practice of mass spraying of herbicides.

Swiss company ecoRobotix is one of several newcomers in the emerging field of digital agriculture. Its solar-powered robot, which looks something like a pingpong table on wheels, can identify and spray weeds for 12 hours straight without an operator. Its developers believe it will use 20 times less herbicide than traditional methods that involve spraying entire fields.

Technology developers often don’t anticipate the creative ways people will use their inventions. Microsoft developed its HoloLens headset to combine digital and real-world images—a technology called “augmented reality” (AR)—but researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed an app for HoloLens that turns it into a device for helping people who are blind navigate buildings.

Trees planted along busy city streets can provide shade by day, but could they also provide light at night? Researchers in Denmark want to isolate the genes that cause ocean algae to glow and insert them into trees, creating natural streetlights.

“We could try to change some of that lighting from conventional, electricity-consuming lights to a more natural way of creating light,” Kristian Ejlsted, CEO of Allumen, a startup based near Copenhagen, told Fast Company.

Water-based pesticides have helped increase the world’s food supply, but farmers use a lot of them. The National Institutes of Health estimates 5.6 billion pounds of pesticides are used worldwide each year, with 1 billion pounds used in the United States alone. The problem is that very little of the applied pesticide stays on the plant. Much of it runs off and leaches into groundwater or is blown away by the wind, polluting the environment.

Cybersecurity researchers have identified a software vulnerability in the locking systems that secure millions of hotel room doors worldwide, a flaw that could allow an attacker to clone a master key card for an entire building.

International cybersecurity firm F-Secure uncovered the software design flaw for digital keys produced by VingCard, a manufacturer of hotel locking systems. The brand of locks, F-Secure reports, are used at more than 40,000 properties in 166 countries.