A young engineering student in China has created a really interesting drone that resembles a slim sword and simply hovers there in silence, responding to the sweep of your hand. There are videos all over the internet depicting it rising off a table, circling a room, and even flipping through the air before landing in a waiting palm.
Water cooling for desktop computers has been around for a long time, serving as a savior for high-end workstations prone to overheating during marathon gaming sessions or intensive use. Graphics cards, on the other hand, have always relied on air-based solutions, with fans and metal fins providing all of the cooling they require. That all changed when one tinkerer had the brilliant notion to remove a normal CPU cooler from a shelf and repurpose it for his GPU instead. Running frozen water directly through the heatpipes allowed him to not only cool the GPU but also significantly increase frame rates.
LimX Dynamics, based in Shenzhen, has finally made a significant breakthrough with their humanoid robot Oli. At 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighing 121 pounds, this machine has long promised to offer more than just sterile lab test results. And, based on the footage published thus far, Oli is capable of delivering. It’s been put through its paces on a simulated construction site, with loose sand attempting to suck it under, boards attempting to shift out from under it, rocks protruding as if waiting for some clumsy robot to come along and get trapped, and piles of debris searching for an opportunity to trip it up.
Hangzhou, home to a stunning 12 million people who are continuously speeding around town on motorcycles and in cars, has had one major issue: getting traffic to flow smoothly at crossings. However, a new high-tech traffic officer has recently appeared at the intersection of Binsheng Road and Changhe Road in the Binjiang area, and it has sparked much discussion among locals. They’ve named it Hangxing No. 1, and it’s a genuine oddity: a 1.8m-high traffic robot with arms sticking out at all directions.
Northrop Grumman unveiled Project Talon in the vast hangars of the Mojave Air and Space Port in the California desert. This unmanned aircraft is ready to team up with fighter jets, transforming solo missions into coordinated raids that protect pilots and provide them a competitive advantage. Northrop’s engineers and the magicians at Scaled Composites have been pounding this prototype into shape over the past 15 months, and in just nine months, it will make its first flight.
Apple has a talent for removing the annoyances from our everyday routines and replacing them with a refined sense of style. Consider earbuds: for years, you had to select whether you wanted them to be incredibly comfortable or super quiet. You choose open designs that allowed the world in, or sealed tips that kept you completely out of touch, even in a packed subway. With the AirPods 4, which have active noise cancellation, now available for $99 (was $179), all of that sounds like old history.
Toyota has recently revealed details about the GR GT, a two-seater that appears to be straight out of the company’s performance playbook. A front-engine supercar at a time when Toyota’s Gazoo racing squad has spent years fine-tuning cars like the Supra and GR Yaris, the GR GT takes it to the next level. It strikes a balance between being able to drive to the stores and having enough grip and speed to necessitate the presence of a nearby track.
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.
David Zaslav awoke this morning with the weight of Warner Bros. on his shoulders, a media giant woven together from the vestiges of a bygone era of cable television and the relentless tugging of streaming. By midday, he had inked a path forward that hands Warner Bros to Netflix, thus cutting ties with the old world of linear networks.
