James Bruton keeps building machines that walk and are capable of carrying a person. His latest one is a compact quadruped he calls the Mid-Walker, open-sourced on GitHub under XRobots. Diagonal legs are mechanically linked so they swing in pairs. That means only two feet stay planted at any moment. On flat ground the setup works, but on anything uneven, it tips.
Photo credit: Righto
In late 1972 Butler Lampson sat down at Xerox PARC and wrote a short internal memo titled “Why Alto?” He wanted a machine each researcher could claim as their own. Alan Kay had been dreaming of a portable Dynabook for years. Lampson and Chuck Thacker offered him an interim version that would fit under a desk instead. Bob Taylor gave the project its name, and work began that November. By April 1973 the first unit was running, with a Sesame Street Cookie Monster test pattern appearing on its tall portrait screen.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Rekimoto Lab built a backpack that turns ordinary jumps into something closer to a slow-motion bounce across the lunar surface. Called Lunavity, or Augmented Jump in the formal paper, the system straps a multi-rotor aircraft to your back and uses constant upward thrust to lighten your body so you can jump higher, stay airborne longer, and come down more gently.
Storage always fills up faster than expected. Games grow larger, video files push higher resolutions, and phones or handhelds run out of room just when you need them most. A regular microSD card keeps working in those situations, yet the time spent waiting for transfers and loads starts to add up. SanDisk’s 256GB microSD Express card, priced at $58.99 (was $74), changes that equation with speeds that feel closer to a basic portable SSD than a traditional memory card.
Nigel Braun, better known as NileRed, first got the idea back in 2019. Air holds water vapor and carbon dioxide. Those two compounds already contain the hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms that make up ethanol. No sugar or yeast, just the stuff floating around us every day. He set out to pull those pieces apart and put them back together as drinkable alcohol.