Jenny Zhang left New York for Shenzhen last year with a clear plan. She wanted to build a camera that fit right into daily routines without forcing anyone to hold a device or wear something on their face. The result sits in her hair like an ordinary barrette, chunky and white, ready to record whatever passes in front of it.
Years of sticky residue had turned a sleek Red Rabbit cotton candy vending machine into something far less reliable than its price tag suggested. Block from Block’s Retro Repairs took on the challenge after the unit stopped producing those fluffy strands customers expect. The first step was to thoroughly clean the spinning head where the magic happens, removing the crusty sugar buildup.
Aussie maker Turnah81 wanted to know whether an ordinary person could create a functional car airbag at home. He documented every step in a recent video and followed through with an actual crash test on a homemade rig. The results offer a clear window into both the ingenuity behind the build and the reasons professionals handle these systems.
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.
In 1891, Gabriel Lippmann made a breakthrough in color recording. Instead of relying on added chemicals or substances, he took advantage of light waves’ intrinsic behavior. It’s no wonder that this revolutionary achievement earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908. For years, scientists had been attempting to understand natural color photography, with typical methods including either tedious hand coloring or layering filters on images. Lippmann, on the other hand, was not having it, and came up with the brilliant concept of using interference to capture colors exactly as they were in the picture.
Gamers in the 1990s sat through plenty of marathon sessions on consoles like the Super Nintendo as well as SEGA Genesis, and their thumbs suffered as a result of continual pressure on rigid directional pads. Triax had a solution for the problem in the Turbo Touch 360. They abandoned the traditional movable plastic directional pad in favor of a flat octagonal plate with capacitive sensors underneath. So all you had to do was lightly lay your thumb on the surface, and it would register the direction you were attempting to go in.
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.
A recent segment from Arun Maini of MrWhoseTheBoss offers a behind-the-scenes look at how tech companies try to market their products to us, and Marques Brownlee joins in to provide some color to the topic. They’re talking about all the claims that sound wonderful on paper but are usually a letdown in real life. Companies have creativ ways of describing how “quick” or how much “battery life” you can get out of anything, by using phrases like “up to a multiple times faster” or similar. It allows them to highlight the fact that they were able to gain an advantage in ideal conditions or when compared to an old clunker.
Intelligence operatives have used some innovative techniques to snoop on information without ever having to step foot inside a target building. A simple approach that involves lasers has been around for eons, and transforms a standard window into a makeshift bug.
