Jude Robinson built Daisy as his final year mechatronics project at the University of Glasgow, finished with first class honors, and took the IET prize for the best manufacturing project on campus. Two upright gantries face each other across a short workspace. Each carries a four joint gripper whose V shaped fingers close on a daisy stem and center it whether the stem is thick or thin.
Japanese company Tamura Electric sold the Lumitime as a stylish desk or wall clock throughout the mid to late 1970s, giving buyers the futuristic look of digital numerals when affordable LED and LCD panels were still dim, tiny, or simply not ready for living rooms. Mark Furneaux opened one of these machines and found no counters, no decoder chips, and no real-time clock module. A synchronous motor tied directly to the 60 hertz household line supplies both power and timing, spinning at a fixed rate so the clock stays accurate as long as the grid stays stable.
Matty Benedetto of Unnecessary Inventions just found a new way to turn a quiet night with a cold can into something that stares back at you. Out of his Burlington, Vermont studio he just finished invention number 469, a little digital pet he calls the Buzz Buddy that perches on top of any standard beer can and matches you drink for drink. The unit is a compact, egg-shaped screen housing with a pixel character already seated at a tiny desk, waiting. Once you crack the tab the figure stays put until the first tilt.
NOT A HOTEL and Pokémon Sleep have set a glossy red and white sphere on a wooded lakeshore in Tomakomai, Hokkaido, about an hour south of Sapporo, and opened it for a short run of overnight stays. The guest room is a three meter sphere, close to ten feet across, formed from two molded acrylic hemispheres so the finished object reads as a life size Poké Ball sitting among trees with lake water just beyond the glass. Promotional nights run in brief windows from October 8 through 18, 2026, timed to the franchise’s 30th year and the third anniversary of the Pokémon Sleep app.
Former NASA engineer Mark Rober filled his CrunchLabs warehouse with blackjack, poker, craps, and a roulette wheel, then invited a room of makers and YouTube builders to play for $10,000 destined for charity. Cheating was allowed. Getting caught was not. If a device showed up on camera or in a pit boss’s hand, it left the floor and the owner had to play straight. Whoever held the most chips at the end of the night took the cash. He called the event Last Cheater Standing, and he staffed it like a real floor: Science Bob as pit boss, a security lead named Bam, and 62 cameras running computer vision over every table.
Super Valid Designs spent two months on a ski lift because mice had moved into the chicken coop and ordinary traps only opened a revolving door. Catch one batch and another arrives. Live relocation felt like a better bet than a pile of snap traps, so the plan became a pair of jobs in one machine: baited gondolas that work as traps, then a cable line that carries those cars 250 feet down a hill and dumps the passengers into brush without anyone walking the route every night.
A 2019 Ford EcoSport Titanium left Ford as a short compact crossover with four wheels, Titanium trim, and a naturally aspirated 2.0-liter Duratec four-cylinder rated at 166 horsepower and 149 pound-feet. Prior ownership later sliced the body open behind the rear doors, welded in an extra rear section plus an auxiliary subframe, and added a third axle so six matching 17-inch alloy wheels now sit on Firestone WeatherGrip tires. Black paint and thin white pinstripes cover the longer sides, filler panels close the gaps, and a roof-mounted wing sits over the stretch. A side-swinging rear gate still opens onto cargo space lined in gray deep-pile carpet.
Swedish furniture giant IKEA paid Kinggath Creations to build a free official Creation for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the finished work arrived on Bethesda’s Creations menu on September 9 for PC and Xbox. Players who pick it up get a new companion named Kallax Storageborn, a walking cube of shelves modeled on IKEA’s familiar Kallax bookcase, voiced in full by Matt Berry.
A black Volkswagen Jetta rolled through an Express Lane in Solano County with a blank bumper where a rear plate should have been. A California Highway Patrol cruiser in the next lane caught that empty space on dashcam, then saw the same car moments later with a full, readable California plate sitting in place. That change was the whole stop.
Storage still coughs up late-90s leftovers for Clint Basinger of LGR, and the latest one is a molded kitchen that sits on a PC keyboard and pretends to bake. Easy-Bake Kitchen, sold by Hasbro Interactive in fall 1999 for about $40, arrived as a CD-ROM plus a strap-on playset aimed at ages three and up. Box copy promised to turn a Windows 95 or 98 machine into a kitchen full of fun with no waiting and no mess. LGR found his copy years after a viewer named Ryan Kitty mailed it in, then pulled it back out after a hurricane soaked the downstairs collection room in what he calls storm juice. A scrub later, the plastic was ready for another shift.