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When she was a little girl, every Friday for six years of her childhood in Columbus, Ohio, Devon Shepherd’s family would get in their minivan and drive to the airport to watch planes take off and land. Shepherd marveled at how amazing they were. What makes them fly? she often wondered.

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.

Despite Britain’s exit from the European Union two years ago, a unique piece of infrastructure forever links the country to the Continent: the Channel Tunnel. This hard connection beneath the English Channel has safely guided passenger and freight rail for nearly 30 years since its unveiling in 1994. Tourism and economic activity have expanded greatly over that time, and 25% of UK-EU trade is now dependent on “the Chunnel.”