Riley picked up an old Prusa MK3S+ 3D printer whose hot-end had already failed in an explosive blow-out. Most owners would scrap the machine or hunt for a replacement nozzle and heater block. He saw an opportunity to remove the entire filament path and install something else in its place. The motion system, frame, and stepper motors still worked. Only the part that melts plastic was gone, which left an open mounting point for a different kind of extruder.
Photo credit: 2026 EPFL LMTS CC BY SA 4.0
Engineers in Lausanne have built a motor easy to mistake for a length of heavy sewing thread. FiberMotor, from the Soft Transducers Laboratory at EPFL, measures only 1 to 3 millimeters across and turns electricity straight into a push or a pull. Herbert Shea, who leads the lab, calls it the first fiber-format sliding motor, and the description fits once the inner strand starts to move.
Amazon spent years selling Fire tablets as cheap doorways into Prime Video and Kindle. Yesterday, the company set that approach aside and introduced three devices that carry the Alexa name instead: an 8.7-inch model from $229.99, an 11-inch model from $329.99, and a 12-inch Pro from $499.99. Orders opened the same day. Shipments in the United States, Mexico, and Canada start October 14, with the United Kingdom and several European countries following on October 19.
On March 4, 2024, a radio array in South Africa caught a flash that lasted only a few milliseconds and then vanished. MeerKAT, working with the MeerTRAP search system, logged it at 00:50 UTC and gave it the name FRB 20240304B. The pulse arrived stretched and delayed by free electrons along the path, with a dispersion measure near 2,458, a peak of about half a jansky, and a scattering time of 5.6 milliseconds at 1 gigahertz. Those numbers already hinted that the source sat far beyond nearly every localized burst on record.
Most people treat a phone that looks like it lost an argument with traffic as scrap. LastComputer paid about forty dollars for one anyway. The listing came to 1,700 Ukrainian hryvnia, and a carrier lock kept the price down because nobody was going to drop a SIM in it again. This Samsung Galaxy S23 arrived bent in half, back cover smashed, battery squished, and still willing to boot.
A stuffed Pikachu in a custom white suit spent 67 days aboard the International Space Station this spring, riding a cargo ship up on April 11 and coming home on another cargo ship on June 17. In that stretch the plush completed about 1,040 loops around Earth, a full circuit every 90 minutes or so, the same pace the station keeps. ESA and The Pokémon Company International kept the flight quiet until September 19, then used the yellow visitor as the opening note for World Space Week.
Kevin Noki got tired of the same interruption that ruins a stretch of real work. His phone would light up, his hand would move, and the next half hour would vanish into a screen he never meant to open. His answer was a handset that can take a call while the phone that owns the number stays somewhere else.
NASA’s Curiosity rover took the frame on August 11, 2026, at 8:30 in the morning local time on Mars, about an hour after sunrise on sol 4,982. Six shots from the mast camera were stitched into one panorama after the files reached Earth. Mission staff left the usual white balance off, so the morning tint stayed in the file instead of being pushed toward the rusty palette most rover pictures carry.
Spending a full day inside a virtual world sounds simple until the hardware starts pressing on your face. Associate Professor Shogo Fukushima at Kyushu University heard that complaint from a student who wanted longer sessions and kept running into the weight of a headset on the head and neck. Fukushima already knew the feeling. Some days he spends more time in virtual scenes than outside them, and he has tried to sleep in one, only to find the goggles made rest nearly impossible. That friction led to a paper at SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies in 2026, titled Mountless Aerial HMDs, which moves the entire optical assembly off the face and onto a chair.
Four brick-shaped lithium iron phosphate cells, each rated 3.2 volts and 15 amp-hours, sit in a row and form the whole energy store of a homemade power station small enough to close a hand around. Wired end to end, they make a 12.8-volt pack that climbs to 14.6 volts when full and holds about 192 watt-hours. A 100-amp battery management board watches cell voltage, balances the four cells, and cuts the circuit on overcurrent or a short. Spot-welded nickel strips, stacked so the joints can carry the current, tie the pack together. Cells of this chemistry tolerate a 3C discharge, which on paper means up to 45 amps, and they are rated for more than 3,000 charge cycles with less fire risk than the lithium-ion packs common in phone banks.