Photo credit: 2025 CREATE Lab EPFL CC BY SA
In a small quiet lab tucked away in the Swiss countryside, a team of engineers has figured out a method to repurpose discarded langostino lobster shells into grippers that can pick up pens or tomatoes with amazing ease. These aren’t the conventional metal claws you see attached onto assembly lines; instead, they employ the leftovers from seafood dinners, combining biology’s trash with a few basic mechanical adjustments to make tools that bend and hold like something very much alive.
Mike Winkelmann enters the spotlight of Art Basel Miami Beach with a pack of metal mutts that combine the uncanny valley with a biting punch at contemporary power brokers. Regular Animals, a squad of eight robotic canines wandering a gated enclosure in the fair’s new Zero 10 digital art section, was launched this week by the digital artist from Charleston, South Carolina, known as Beeple. Each has a lifelike silicone head sculpted after a titan of industry or creativity, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and even two versions of Winkelmann himself.
Drake Anthony, the mastermind behind the wildly successful StyroPyro YouTube channel, has a reputation for turning household oddities into objects of raw, utterly unexpected power. In his most recent jaw-dropping project, he takes an ordinary incandescent bulb and transforms it into an electrical powerhouse that give even a small power station a run for its money. This 24,000-watt monster is one of the biggest bulbs you’d ever want to try to use in your home.
Mercedes-Benz has built empires on speed and elegance, but in 2009 they tried something completely different: the F-Cell Roadster Concept. Over 150 trainees at the Sindelfingen plant worked together to develop this one-of-a-kind vehicle, which highlighted the car’s rough origins. It was a bridge between ages; it hit the German roads not to establish records, but to follow in the footsteps of Bertha Benz, the lady who demonstrated that cars could go long distances.
On July 30, 1987, Bandai launched Karaoke Studio in Japan, making it the first of its kind and a genuine pioneer in the area of karaoke games. TOSE manufactured and published this Nintendo Famicom bundle, which included much more than just a cartridge. It came with an additional piece of hardware, a large device that slips directly into your Famicom’s cartridge bay, as well as a special grey microphone that plugs right in. Guinness World Records has even labeled it the first karaoke video game, and it’s easy to understand why, with its super-accurate voice detection system and very excellent song collection.
A YouTuber named smill just finished a playthrough of Minecraft using only a receipt paper for visuals. He turned off his monitor, took screenshots of the game one by one and fed them straight into the printer. Each frame came out on a strip of thermal paper, a long blurry record of his adventure. By the end he had defeated the Ender Dragon, so you can finish the game this way if you have the patience and a stack of paper rolls.
Hot dogs have always been about simplicity. Slap one on a bun, add some ketchup / mustard / relish, and you’re ready for a quick bite. But Joel Creates took that concept and wired it for actual electricity. His most recent creation transforms the basic frankfurter into its own heat source, all housed in a device tiny enough to fit in your jacket pocket.
Touchscreens today offer crisp pictures, but the experience of running your finger across glass is still a pretty dull affair. Northwestern University engineers have come up with something that might just change that…a wristband-like device that slips over your fingertip and simulates the feel of scratchy fabric or smooth metal on the same screen. They’ve called it VoxeLite, and it makes digital swiping feel a lot more like the real thing.
A single bed on a Bambu Lab 3D printer whirs away for hours, layer by layer, building up a strong PLA filament mat, strand by strand. When the platform has cooled down, the interlocking rings lift loose, revealing a flexible mat of plastic chainmail ready to be draped over a test dummy. The guys over at Screen Tested wanted to know if you could genuinely make decent armor on one of these fancy home 3D printers – could it resist real-world violence?
