A dozen robots, each smaller than a grain of sand, sit on your fingertip. These are smartlets, tiny marvels from Chemnitz University of Technology that pack a lot of tech into their millimeter sized bodies. Developed by a team led by Prof. Oliver G. Schmidt, these water robots move, sense and talk to each other in water, and could one day monitor lakes or swim through our bodies for medical diagnostics.
Gav and Dan from The Slow Mo Guys went deep into a Colorado mine to film their latest experiment. By sending 50,000 volts through a thin wire and recording at 5 million frames per second, they’ve created a visual feast.
Julian Brown, a 21-year-old inventor from Atlanta, has built a solar powered pyrolysis machine that turns scrap plastic into fuel. This is a rough, hands on build made with ingenuity and a desire for a cleaner planet. The system runs on sunlight and converts plastic garbage, like old water bottles and food containers, into natural gas and crude oil.
On August 19, 2025, shortly after 11:00pm in Western Japan, a bright flash lit up the night sky. Yoshihiko Hamahata was driving in Miyazaki when he saw a white light so bright the outlines of nearby houses became visible as if the sun had returned. However, this was no UFO, but rather a fireball.
Photo credit: Alex Parrish for Virginia Tech
A disk of ice sits on a metal plate, melting. Nothing happens. Water pools beneath, forms a thin puddle. Then, without warning, the ice stirs. It slides sideways, accelerates, and then shoots across the surface like a puck on an air hockey table. This is not a magic trick, just a discovery made by a Virginia Tech team lead by Associate Professor Jonathan Boreyko and Ph.D. student Jack Tapocik. They found a way to make ice move on its own, no external push required.
Lorde’s Virgin album on a clear disc is visually stunning, but it’s also causing headaches for CD players everywhere. Unlike traditional CDs which rely on a reflective metal layer to bounce laser light back to a player’s sensor, this one is nearly transparent.
Photo credit: University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster
Solar power has always felt like a broken promise—it has a lot of potential but never quite delivers. A team from the University of Rochester, led by optics expert Chunlei Guo, may have just changed that. They’ve created solar thermoelectric generators (STEGs) using black metal that are 15 times more powerful than previous generations.
Photo credit: Sreang Hok/Cornell University
Video used to be a window to reality, a reliable record of events. Now with deepfakes, that trust is crumbling. Anyone with a decent computer can create a video of world leaders saying things they never said or events that never happened. It’s getting worse and worse, but a team at Cornell has come up with a way to fight back. Their solution is called noise-coded illumination and it uses something as ordinary as light to watermark videos in a way that’s almost impossible to fake.
