A team of 30 students from Germany won the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition on Sunday, with their prototype pod reaching a speed of 324 kilometers per hour (201 miles per hour).

Elon Musk’s Boring Company has recommitted to building a network of high-speed transport tunnels, including a Hyperloop vacuum-tube supersonic transport system between New York and Washington DC, which it claims will whisk people from A to B at 600mph in a vacuum tube.

Elon Musk just casually announced on Twitter that he received “verbal government approval” for The Boring Company, his new tunnel boring startup, to build an underground Hyperloop system connecting New York city, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC. The system would be fast enough to travel “city center to city center” between New York City and Washington DC in just 29 minutes, according to Musk.

To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won't fall on your head. A large network of road tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels). The key to making this work is increasing tunneling speed and dropping costs by a factor of 10 or more – this is the goal of The Boring Company.

Hyperloop One is seriously considering building its high-speed transit system in several states in the United States. The Los Angeles-based startup held a two-day event in Washington DC this week to showcase its "Vision in America." The event served two purposes: one, to evaluate 11 US route proposals for the high-speed transit system, and two, to meet with federal regulators in Washington about getting the system up-and-running.

A new mass transit system that sounded like a crazy futuristic idea a few years ago was brought to three-dimensional life in Hawthorne on Sunday, as young engineering teams from around the world tested prototype pod-vehicles in the first Hyperloop competition. The technology, introduced to the world in a research paper written by SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk in 2013 that described the basic principles of thrusting a passenger pod through a vacuum-sealed tube at supersonic speeds, was re-imagined by teams who trekked to Hawthorne with their complex homemade vehicles in tow.

As Elon Musk struggles in acquiring land rights for testing his audacious Hyperloop project in the United States, India has emerged out of nowhere to offer him a helping hand. India is offering Musk's SpaceX a big chunk of land and permission to do the required testing in Pune, a city 118 kilometers away from Mumbai. The country's Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said he made the proposal to Hyperloop's parent company SpaceX during his recent visit to the United States.

Hyperloop One, the LA-based startup focused on futuristic, super-fast transportation, was supposed to be racing toward the future. But after Brogan BamBrogan, the co-founder and chief technology officer, filed an explosive new lawsuit today, the company appears headed toward implosion. In the complaint filed in court today, BamBrogan alleges that the company’s top executives engaged in financial misconduct, abuse, and physical threats, marginalizing many of the company’s employees and jeopardizing its future.

If the idea of super-fast trains did not seem exciting enough, one of the two startups working on Hyperloop says it would actually be possible to make the technology work underwater too. The Hyperloop system is a concept proposed by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, equipping trains to travel at supersonic speeds up to 800mph (1,300km/h) using reduced pressure tubes. Pressurised capsule pods (the train carriages) ride on an air cushion in steel tubes driven by linear induction motors and air compressors, which allows them to go faster than current trains.

There was a moment, an hour before an event last week, when 30 or so young fresh-faced people stood around their creation and posed for a group photo. They were in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. All around them, reminders of historic innovations that began with research at this legendary college. As the photographer clicked away, I wondered - what place in history would this photograph have? Will we look back at these 30 smiles and say, "That was the team that changed the world!"?

The first Hyperloop test was an awesome success. The demonstration was held by Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies), largely considered the frontrunner in the hyperloop field. Hyperloop One executives called the event a "Kitty Hawk" moment, referring to the Wright brothers' first successful airplane flight.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, one of several companies trying to build a futuristic transportation system that can hurtle people and cargo in pods at over 700 miles an hour, says it has licensed technology that is safer and cheaper than what conventional high-speed trains use. The announcement comes a day ahead of a planned May 10 event in Nevada by rival and similarly named Hyperloop Technologies.

Dirk Ahlborn, chief executive officer of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), announced on Thursday that HTT has reached an agreement with the Slovakian government to explore building a local Hyperloop system. A transport system capable of speeds of up to 760mph (1,223kph). According to Ahlborn, the next steps will include identifying a route that could connect Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital, with Vienna and Budapest.

Crews are already building the first Hyperloop tracks, but how about the vehicles to run on those tracks? Don't worry, they're coming soon: MIT has won a SpaceX competition that challenged students worldwide to design a pod for the ultra-fast tube transportation. The school's team gets to build a vehicle that will run on a yet-to-be-built test track near SpaceX's California headquarters. Not that some of its rivals will be left out, mind you.

The first successful Hyperloop run might occur in 2016. The first Hyperloop tubes have arrived in the Nevada desert for Hyperloop Technologies' eventual test track, CNN Money reports. The idea is to eventually use these unassuming looking tubes to propel people in pods at speeds that could top 700 miles per hour.

Two years after the Tesla CEO crowdsourced the idea for the Hyperloop, his dream of a ‘fifth mode’ of transportation is quickly and quietly becoming a reality, but what’s his endgame? By Alexander Chee.

A full-sized prototype of the system, which would see passengers propelled in capsules at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour through a network of tunnels, is due to be built in California. "It is the closest thing to teletransportation," Hyperloop's chief operating officer Bibop Gabriele Gresta told Dezeen during an event titled Transport to the Future in London last night.

Hyperloop is a project envisioned by engineer and inventor Elon Musk. In short, the goal is to build a high-speed transportation system using a low-pressure tube train, with a top speed of 800 miles per hour (1,300 km/h). Hyperloop Technologies and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies are both research companies looking to turn Musk’s vision into reality. The former company has undergone a seed round led by SherpaVentures, while the latter is crowdsourced.

A 1:24 scale hyperloop that fits in a classroom.