Chairs stay chairs. Tables stay tables. Anything that needs to become both usually grows hinges, motors, and a tangle of wires that quit the first time you twist the thing the wrong way. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab spent years looking for a quieter option, and they landed on Bifur-circuits: a kit of 3D-printed blocks that snap together, fold into new stable poses, and keep an electrical map of whatever form they just became.
Henry van Dyck of Veritasium wanted a number, not a slogan. Classroom posters and superhero movies have spent years saying silk spider webbing beats steel. In a video he co-wrote and co-hosted with Derek Muller, he took that claim into Professor Todd Blackledge’s spider lab at the University of Akron and put live threads on a tensile tester, without harming the animals that made them.
Soft silicone dots rise and fall across an eight-by-eight grid, forming shapes and simple patterns without a single glowing diode or liquid crystal. Soiboi Soft, the maker behind the project, built this entire display from air pressure differences, 3D-printed plastic, and thin membranes that act like valves and memory cells. Atmospheric pressure stands in for a binary zero. A vacuum stands in for a binary one. Once a pixel settles into place it stays there on its own, no continuous power required.
Gav Free of the Slow Mo Guys has spent years chasing moments too fast for ordinary eyes. Several years back a hammer strike on a single mirror left him staring at the footage in confusion. Right at the moment of impact a small ripple spread across the surface. He kept returning to those frames, wondering how something so rigid could flex like that. This time he arrived with a Phantom TMX 7510, a pile of spare mirrors, and the determination to settle the question for good.
Scientists just forced diamond to melt under forces greater than anything found at the centers of Neptune and Uranus. The work settles a twenty-year argument between lab results and computer models, and it may help fusion experiments produce far more energy from the same laser pulse.
Researchers at MIT have taken a common plant surface microbe and turned colonies of it into working switches. Those switches link up through chemical messages so the whole arrangement can carry out basic math and route information the way a simple circuit does. The work, published in Nature Chemical Biology, rests on just five engineered strains of Pantoea agglomerans. Two act as the transistors. Three serve as relays that pass the signal along. Arrange the same five pieces in different patterns on a slab of agar and the circuit does something new.
James Whomsley, better known as ProjectAir, has spent nearly a decade turning odd ideas into flying machines. His latest project takes one of the simplest shapes possible and asks whether it might outperform the wings we see every day. He built a giant radio-controlled plane whose main lifting surfaces form complete circles, then put the concept through the same cycle of prototypes, crashes, and rebuilds that defines so much of his work.
Nate Scovill decided the Red Bull slogan needed a proper test. He bought cans of the stuff, cleared space in his workshop, and set out to see whether an energy drink could actually launch something into the air. His recent video walks through three attempts, each more serious than the last, until one of them finally left the ground under its own power.
Engineer Shane Wighton set out to answer a simple question that industrial food processors have quietly solved for decades. What if you could force a potato or apple to shed its own skin without a blade ever touching it? His answer involved building a high-pressure steam system dangerous enough that he ran every test from behind a blast chamber, operating valves remotely so he would not be standing next to something holding the energy of several sticks of dynamite.
Nigel Braun, better known as NileRed, first got the idea back in 2019. Air holds water vapor and carbon dioxide. Those two compounds already contain the hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms that make up ethanol. No sugar or yeast, just the stuff floating around us every day. He set out to pull those pieces apart and put them back together as drinkable alcohol.