Australian YouTuber TrashBench decided an old outdoor air conditioner unit sitting in the trash deserved a second life as the biggest radiator his test bench had ever seen. He took the outdoor half of a discarded Fujitsu split-system rated for four kilowatts of cooling, emptied the refrigerant, and kept only the parts that matter for water cooling: the large finned coil, its axial fan, and the pump.
AMC Theatres just revealed its next round of sandworm popcorn buckets for Dune: Part Three, and the designs pick up right where the last one left off. One version features two sandworm mouths rising from a sandy lid so two people can reach in at once. Another extends a single longer worm higher above the container and adds a small working thumper that moves up and down while the popcorn disappears. Both come filled with a large serving and will sit on counters at AMC locations across the United States plus Odeon theaters in Europe.
Maker Ivan Miranda is no stranger to turning ordinary glass marbles into reliable timekeepers. His latest machine abandons fixed digits entirely. Instead of showing hours and minutes, a massive circular wheel slowly rotates while black and white marbles form continuous scrolling text around its outer edge.
Launch week for Apple’s first foldable brought the usual ritual from TechRax, who has spent years sending new iPhones through increasingly harsh trials. This time he took two separate iPhone Duo units. One went down a spiral staircase from roughly 200 feet. The other spent an afternoon being released over and over on ordinary city surfaces.
Photo credit: Coolest Thing
A five-year-old boy stepped onto a Pan Am Boeing 747 bound for Europe to visit his grandparents and never quite left that cabin in his mind. Anthony Toth, raised near Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, began photographing interiors, collecting anything with the blue logo, and building wooden mockups in his parents’ basement by the time he turned twelve.
Researchers from ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab have shown that a standard four-legged inspection robot can fully solve a giant Rubik’s Cube on its own, relying entirely on its feet for every contact with the puzzle. The machine, an ANYmal-D, first walks around the freestanding cube and tips it onto different faces so its onboard depth camera can build a complete picture of the colors. Once it has that map, a planner turns a conventional cube solution into a short list of robot actions, and the machine carries them out without further help from people.
Hearing the name Storm of Crows might bring to mind fantasy games or dark forests, yet the real item comes from Chinese military records of long ago. Tod Cutler at Tod’s Workshop took the idea of a cup arrow, the romantic label for a bundle of smaller shafts, and set out to launch it from his Tzusun siege crossbow. That machine copies the Ox Bow design, a triple-bowed frame that once required oxen to draw and sent broomstick-sized bolts downrange with hundreds of joules of force. Single large arrows could punch through armor or men, but they left groups of infantry largely untouched unless the targets lined up neatly. Chinese engineers therefore developed a way to send many short arrows at once, creating a spread of hits that covered more ground.
Adam Savage sits down with Lorne Peterson, one of the original model makers hired at Industrial Light and Magic in 1975, and the conversation quickly turns to the practical choices that gave the ships their worn, functional look. Peterson shows off a rare Darth Vader service award he received after forty years with the company, then explains how he and a friend arrived for their interview carrying a dusty Kennedy toolbox instead of the cardboard boxes most freelancers used.
Decades after Toy Story 2, the multi-layered chest that appears when the cleaner restores Woody continues to pull makers who want those drawers and compartments to exist outside the animation. Chris Borge, a maker from South Australia focused on digital fabrication and 3D printing, took the idea on as a prototype for a mobile workshop. The project started during a trip to the Flinders Ranges while he worked on a camera build, when the need for a portable setup made the film’s design feel worth testing against real constraints.
