Walt Disney Imagineering recently highlighted one of their most game-changing innovations: trackless ride systems. “Imagineer That!” delves further into Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, explaining how these vehicles move from zero to spin and groove with no visible tracks. The ride is incredibly effortless, despite the fact that below it is like a well tuned orchestra of perfection and unlimited potential waiting to be composed.
A team of researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai has developed a smart computer chip that has been inserted directly into a single fiber smaller than a human hair. These fiber integrated circuits (FICs) have managed to pack a lot of processing power into something as flexible and delicate as this, making them ideal for weaving into garments or even implanting into the body.
Firefighters race into blazing buildings, tunnels, and industrial sites, where they are all too familiar with the deadly heat, choking smoke, and hidden dangers that lurk around every corner, ready to strike. On top of the usual challenges, conventional drones simply can’t handle the extreme conditions of a fire, as they tend to fail or overheat almost immediately A team from Switzerland’s Empa research labs had a different idea…FireDrone.
Researchers at Robbyant, an Ant Group subsidiary, have just released an impressive new vision-language-action model after collecting 20,000 hours of real-world data from nine different twin arm robot setups. It’s arguably the most powerful general-purpose controller on the market, capable of handling a wide range of manipulation jobs on a variety of hardware without the need for frequent retooling.
Photo credit: Android Authority
A leak from an early build of Android 17 has surfaced, giving us a much better picture of what to expect from the impending major upgrade. Screenshots of the half-finished operating system are making the rounds, thanks to developers and fans who were able to obtain early internal builds. One of the first places these images appeared was on Telegram, courtesy of RKBDI, a well-known person in the Android community, posted them online, and they took off from there.
Smartphones and tablets still promise the world, but when the customary warning “not enough space” creeps up, the game is over…until now. High-end storage solutions can be expensive, but the gap between what you capture and what you can preserve on your device is only increasing. That’s where SanDisk comes in, with the Phone Drive, priced at $100 (was $13), a handy small USB Type-C flash drive that plugs directly into your phone, no adapters needed.
The Mercedes-Benz NextGenH2 Truck ushers in the future of long-haul trucking. Daimler Truck has made the big reveal, and production of 100 units will begin at their Wörth plant by the end of 2026. Customers will soon be able to get their hands on these trucks, and real-world testing has already been organized, placing this cutting-edge technology where it counts every day.
Samsung has recently unveiled a special Galaxy Z Flip7 Olympic Edition, just in time for the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. This limited handset is being distributed to almost 3800 athletes and Paralympians from 90 countries and will not be available in regular stores. They’ll begin handing out the phones on January 30th at Olympic Villages in six host towns, with Samsung staff on hand to set them up, transfer data, and answer any questions.
Arin Sarkisian came upon a pair of PineBuds Pro wireless earbuds and was drawn to them not just for their audio quality, but also because they are an open-source device from Pine64. These earbuds now have a BES 2300YP chip, which contains two dual-core Cortex-M4F chips, 992k of RAM (after some tinkering), and 4MB of flash memory.
