Unusual

Sampling Chernobyl’s Elephant’s Foot Reveals AK-47s and Radioactive Dust

By Jackson Chung September 15, 2026

After a botched turbine test on the night of April 26, 1986, operators at Chernobyl’s Unit 4 disabled the remaining safeties and let the bottom of the RBMK core run free. A steam explosion flipped the reactor lid. Fuel, zirconium cladding, steel, graphite, sand, and concrete liquefied, burned through two meters of reinforced floor, and poured through steam vents and cable holes into corridor 217/2. There the flow froze into a wrinkled two-ton lump of black ceramic that crews later nicknamed the Elephant’s Foot.

Kosmic’s Vine Glitch Tears Versus Super Mario Bros. Apart After 40 Years

By Bill Smith September 12, 2026

Kosmic spent another long session mapping leftover oddities in Versus Super Mario Bros., the 1986 arcade cabinet that copies most of the original NES game while changing a few rules, timers, and memory habits. Growing a vine in the wrong place after a death still queues an extra plant for the next screen. Near the top of any vine Mario loses control and auto-climbs; that state leaves a flag set so the next transition (death works best) sprouts a second vine wherever the surviving player happens to stand.

First Look at Paraborgs, Cyborg Roaches That Crawl Into Rubble and Fire Lifesaving Needles

By Jackson Chung September 8, 2026

Photo credit: The University of Queensland
Australian researchers have fitted giant burrowing cockroaches with electrodes, cameras, and spring-loaded syringes so the insects can be steered like tiny remote vehicles and deliver medicine in places no human or ordinary robot can reach.

Gold Plastic Syndrome Is Crumbling Original Nintendo DS Consoles

By Bill Smith September 2, 2026

Original Nintendo DS handhelds from late 2004 keep showing up in repair piles with hinges that snap and shells that powder at the slightest pressure. Owners who stored one in a drawer for two decades often discover the damage only when they try to swap a dead screen or tighten a loose screw. Metallic paint Nintendo laid over the ABS plastic appears to be reacting with the case itself. Yellow or greenish stains leak out around edges, button wells, and hinge roots. Force the clamshell open and the plastic flakes instead of flexing.

Used Denso VS-050 Gets Transformed Into Badminton Robot That Serves Shuttlecocks for Practice

By Jackson Chung August 31, 2026

Denso VS-050 Badminton Robot
Badminton still needs two people, a net, and a pile of shuttlecocks that never last as long as the rally in your head. Travis Mitchell already played weekly. His kids had just gotten old enough to start learning. His wife once competed in women’s singles for Team USA and now runs a 15-court facility. A decade earlier he had already tried to build a launcher with a CR-10 printer and a cheap CNC router, then life got in the way. This time he wanted the machine itself to be more fun, so he bought a used Denso VS-050 industrial arm on eBay and spent about six months turning it into a court-side feeder.

AliExpress Air Project Involves Building a Working MacBook From Spare Parts Alone

By Jackson Chung August 29, 2026

Phone Repair Guru set out to answer a simple question that keeps coming up in repair circles: can you order every piece of a laptop from AliExpress, put them together on a bench, and end up with something that actually boots and works. He chose an M1 MacBook Air because the parts listings exist in volume and the board itself is compact. Packages started arriving in waves. Small bags held screws, antennas, a microphone, USB-C boards, speakers, and an audio board with its flex cable. Larger boxes contained the top case with keyboard, a trackpad, a battery, the bottom case, a display assembly, and the logic board that already carried 128 GB of storage plus a Touch ID module.

One Blueprint, Fivefold Growth, a Length-Scalable Fish Robot Built for Creeks and Lakes Alike

By Jackson Chung August 28, 2026

Most fish-inspired robots arrive locked to one length and one job. Scale them up for a lake or down for a creek and the whole machine usually has to be designed again from scratch. Engineers working between NYU Tandon and EPFL have shown a way around that limit with ScaFi, a compliant robot modeled on the tail-heavy swimming of fish such as cod and mackerel. Those species keep most of their body bend toward the rear, a style that works across a wide range of real animal sizes. ScaFi copies the same idea with a rigid motor-driven front and a flexible tail of fiberglass rods wrapped in red fabric. A single motor pulls two tendons that cross near the tail tip, forcing the familiar S-curve that pushes water backward.

A Finger-Thick Silk Rope Could Hold an Elephant, But a Man’s Palm Still Lost

By Bill Smith August 28, 2026

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.

Keep a Flame Lit and This Box Will Compute

By Jackson Chung August 27, 2026

Light a small spirit lamp of ethanol and heat finds one end of a sealed brass cylinder. Air inside expands, a piston moves, a flywheel gathers speed, and a cheap electric motor wired as a dynamo starts feeding current into a wooden box. An analog voltmeter on the front climbs. A 2.42-inch monochrome screen flickers to life. Sixteen hex keys wait for input. For as long as the flame holds, YouTuber PickentCode has a working computer.

Custom-Built Electromechanical GPS Clock Has Six Spinning Wheels, One Satellite Signal

By Jackson Chung August 25, 2026

James Clough set out to make a gift for a fellow YouTube machinist, but the end result looks like it belongs in a museum of unusual watches. He designed a clock with six massive numbered wheels for Toolroom Takeover 2026, an annual secret Santa exchange among artists who spend their days cutting metal. Stepper motors silently spin those wheels into place, while a GPS receiver automatically locks everything to the correct hour, minute, and second.