Watch The World's Tiniest Rube Goldberg Machine Made Of Watch Parts
We love a good Rube Goldberg machine. They are amazing feats of creative engineering that serve the smallest, almost pointless purposes. Seiko have built one from tiny watch parts, which can fit onto a table rather than fill two suitcases.
British inventor builds a DIY Iron Man suit to stand inside a fireworks display
British inventor Colin Furze really likes superheroes, to the point where he's build a budget Iron Man suit to withstand a storm of fireworks.
Acoustic Barcodes Store Data In Sound Waves
A group of students at Carnegie Mellon University have created Acoustic Barcodes: a series of etched lines placed on almost any surface that is read by a system via the unique audible waveform given off when an object - like a fingernail or pen - is ran across the notches.
Valve Employee Invents Commodore 64 Bass Guitar/Keytar
Jeri Ellsworth, electrical engineer at Valve who is working in R&D on the company's foray into hardware, unveiled her latest invention: a Commodore 64 Keytar/Bass Guitar hybrid. Simply put, the most awesome looking invention you have ever laid your eyes upon.
Engineer Builds A Real-Life Portal Turret
If ever there was a perfect defensive weapon, it would be a turret with a voice so soothing and design so minimalistically innocent, you feel guilty about murderously destroying it. We have Portal to thank for that; but we are now one step closer to this being a reality, as a budding engineer has built a real-life version of this stationary weapon.
Meet Melvin: The Socially Connected Travelling Rube Goldberg Machine
We all love seeing a Rube Goldberg inventions, with a simple task being executed in the most unnecessarily complex of ways. While it's quite fair to say this form of entertainment is rather timeless, nobody has really brought the formula into the 21st Century.
The Descriptive Camera Turns Images Into A Text Description
We've seen camera innovations in the realm of increases in aperture, megapixel count, and improvements in the backside illuminated sensor. But Matt Richardson has taken this in a somewhat different approach, creating a device that outputs text describing the image it can see.
Researchers Create Universal Earphones That Can Tell Which Ear They Are In
Japanese researchers have developed a set of prototype headphones that use proximity sensors to detect the left and right ear, eliminating the need for user differentiation between earbuds, along with some other pretty nifty uses for the technology.
MIT student builds an electric self-balancing unicycle
A rather fantastic DIY project to end the year: MIT student Stephan Boyer has built his own self-balancing electrical unicycle to roll with speed around the campus.
Called the "Bullet", the custom steel body holds two 7Ah 12-volt batteries, a 450-watt electric motor and an ATmega328 chip. This gives the solowheel transport a range of 5 miles with a max speed of 15mph. At that speed, it's not going to replace your daily commute; but it makes for the perfect round-campus mode of transportation, as the students in the video demonstration.
High-tech spider created for hazardous missions
Apple have created a head crab. Researchers have developed a new form of first scout, replacing the keen-nosed rescue dog with a rather scary looking robot-spider.