Toyota’s micro solar EV, the FT-Me, has moved a step closer to reality thanks to a grant from the UK government. The £15 million award, announced on October 15, will go through the Drive35 initiative and be overseen by a Toyota-led team to evaluate every component of this strange little vehicle. It was unveiled in Brussels in March, but now the hard work begins: transforming drawings into something you might see whizzing through Derby traffic.
Inventor James Bruton is known for his big builds and this one is a doozy: a miniature electric car steered by the movement of his face. He used the new Arduino UNO Q, a single board computer with a microprocessor, to create a vehicle that combines cutting edge tech and hands on engineering.
Watching a movie on a big screen TV is already a treat, but Govee’s Envisual TV LED Backlight T2 with Dual Cameras ($74.99 after automatically applied 25% off coupon at checkout) takes it to a whole new level.
Google just released Veo 3.1, the latest version of its AI video tool, and it’s evident that they focused on the elements that are most important to users who edit video for a living. It was released alongside Flow, a video editing application that has always been strong but now become sharper and more versatile. In the five months since Flow’s inception, users have created over 275 million recordings, prompting Google to address requests for improved sound handling and hands-on controls.
Realme has released the GT 8 Pro in China, a phone that gives control back to you in ways few others will. Five days before the official launch on October 21, the company flooded Weibo with teasers showing off the device in full. Simply put, Realme made something that makes you want to grab a screwdriver and mod, or at least the camera.
McDonald’s Japan never fails to surprise with its collaborations and this latest one brings in the Street Fighter series for the first time. From October 22, 2025, the fast food chain will be rolling out a limited time menu that pays homage to the classic characters of the game. Fans who grew up trading Hadokens in arcades or grinding matches in Street Fighter 2 have a reason to line up at the golden arches. The menu takes the familiar beefy staples and adds flavors inspired by characters like Ryu, Chun-Li and Ken.
Sharp’s latest creation, the meerkat-shaped robot Poketomo, turns daily conversations into something memorable. This little guy weighs 200g and is 12cm long so you can clip him onto your backpack or slide him into your pocket. He costs 39,600 yen ($270) but the real magic happens with a monthly plan that starts at 495 yen for 400 chats. Poketomo can even connect to cloud services via Wi-Fi thanks to a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 CPU, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
Photo credit: Bartłomiej Bargiel/Red Bull Content Pool
Red Bull athlete Andrzej Bargiel stood at the top of the world’s highest point, 8,849 meters (29,032 feet), where the air is appallingly thin. On September 22, 2025, he took to his skis from the top of Everest all the way down to base camp, depending on the mountain for every breath of air.
Robotic hands have been in labs for decades but never quite escaped the high cost barrier that keeps them out of everyday makers. TetherIA, a small team working on making robots do real tasks, just changed that with the Aero Hand Open. This is a kit you can assemble yourself for $314 or fully built for a bit more. It’s tendon driven with 15 degrees of freedom total (7 that you control) and open sourced, or at least the electronics as well as software.
