NTU researchers spent seven years building a magnetic robot just 4.4 millimeters long. The compact machine performs five surgical functions through external control alone. It travels across soft tissue, cuts when required, dispenses medicine, gathers samples, and creates localized heat. Work on the project took place in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering under Associate Professor Lum Guo Zhan.
Photo credit: Delft University of Technology | Micro Aerial Vehicles Lab
Researchers at Delft University of Technology have built a navigation method for small drones that copies one of nature’s most efficient routines. Honeybees fly long distances along twisting routes yet still head home with striking accuracy. The new system lets a drone do something similar after just one short practice flight near its base, all while using a learning program small enough to fit in the memory of a basic phone app icon.
Electricity has split water into hydrogen and oxygen for generations in classrooms and labs. Bubbles form at two electrodes, gases rise, and the show ends there for most observers. A closer look at what actually happens during the process, combined with one key addition, changes the outcome entirely.
Electric vehicles and grid batteries keep lifting lithium demand higher each year. Meeting that growth cleanly matters more than ever. Spodumene holds much of the lithium locked inside hard rock deposits spread across Australia, the United States, and Europe. Mines already pull the mineral out of the ground, yet turning it into battery-grade material has always demanded extreme heat and left large piles of leftover rock. A team at MIT changed the script. Materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang and colleagues mix crushed spodumene with a simple solution of water and ammonium fluoride. The first major step happens at ordinary room temperature.
Late on May 25, 2026, monitoring cameras caught an event that combined two dramatic forces in one frame. Mount Mayon volcano in Albay province on Luzon had already been sending streams of glowing lava down its slopes for months. Staff at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology kept watch through equipment positioned on Lignon Hill in Legazpi City, including a color camera that records activity around the clock.
Engineers at a Chinese materials group spent more than twenty years refining a notoriously difficult production process. Their work produced the first steady industrial supply of T1200-grade carbon fiber, a material long recognized for top-tier performance yet held back by limited output. Individual filaments measure only about six or seven micrometers wide. That size sits well below one-tenth the diameter of a human hair. When roughly 120,000 of those filaments form a single cable less than two millimeters thick, the bundle withstands extreme pulling loads.
Researchers have found a way to mix bacteria into plastic so the material works normally but then disappears entirely when triggered, nicknamed ‘living plastics’. Engineers from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology started with polycaprolactone, a polymer already used in 3D printing and medical sutures. They added dormant spores from two specially modified strains of Bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacterium.
Greenhill Forge runs a rural workshop focused on hands-on projects for smallholding life. Years spent building an axial flux permanent magnet generator gave him the perfect foundation for a new challenge. Cold water needed reliable heating off the grid, and fuel or grid power carried too many hassles. He turned those existing rotors into the heart of a device that creates heat through nothing more than motion and magnetic fields.
Musk stated that starting in 2026, Neuralink will commence mass production of brain implants, with a complete move to automated surgery for each implantation. People who have previously received the implant can already use it to control computers and robotic arms using only their thoughts.
Cai Nan runs a YouTube channel dedicated to weird food experiments that I’m sure most of us home cooks would be too afraid to attempt. His most recent effort takes a simple concept and turns it into something completely mind-blowing: a chicken wing that is so clear it looks like a glass sculpture while yet providing the texture and flavor of traditional fried chicken.