Cycling enthusiasts who spend their free time creating with LEGO bricks now have a model that replicates the sensation of a real road bike, down to the last detail. The new LEGO Icons Road Bike set (#11380) allows you to create a complete replica from 1,015 pieces. Standing at 24-inches long and 14.2-inches tall on its small pedestal, this item measures over two feet from end to end and is a 7.5-inches wide, making it just big enough to notice on a desk or shelf without taking over.
Back in 2015, Marcelo de Oliveira Souza was at his desk in Brazil, staring at a computer screen with some rather long numbers regarding near-Earth asteroids flashing by. He was making preliminary predictions of the courses these space objects would take, to help people determine whether they would pose a threat to our world. One in particular drew his attention, 2001 CA21, because the first calculations showed an orbit that virtually sliced straight through between Earth and Mars in a way nobody had picked up on before.
Lock Noob got his hands on the NPX-002 from Works by Design and wanted to put its security claims to the test to see how well they held up. The lock’s designers created this travelling key system, in which the key’s bow spins some internal gears and the actual key blade moves into place deep inside the cylinder. The key only fits perfectly in the exact position, at which point the keyway seals off, leaving no place for your standard picks or tension tools to reach the pins. To prevent the normal impressioning techniques, the brass ones had a plastic pin inserted.
Sixteen years after Apple discontinued production, a single 6th-generation iPod Nano currently stands in the center of a full workstation with three separate displays. The device, released in 2010 as the final iPod model Steve Jobs introduced, handles music playback, photo slideshows across every screen, and crystal-clear voice recordings all at once. A YouTube creator who runs the Will It Work? channel took on the challenge of stretching this tiny player into something far more capable.
Cars race down a nearly vacant stretch of highway. Two drivers grasp their phones tightly as a FaceTime video call continues between them. The speedometer reads 70 mph, but there are no cell bars in sight, nor do any familiar Wi-Fi networks appear. HaLow technology within each vehicle communicates with a handful of little boxes mounted on the dashboards. These units form a private wireless web that connects the vehicles, with each box essentially chatting to the one next to it, effortlessly passing data so the link never fails.
Players who swapped Game Boy Advance cartridges as kids will remember the thrill of returning to Hyrule for the final time in 2004. That was the year The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap was released, a game that many people overlooked but provided one of the series’ most original ideas to date. Fast forward to now: an unofficial native port allows you to run the game natively on Windows or Linux, without the need for an emulator or the hassle of an odd setup.
Researchers have found a way to mix bacteria into plastic so the material works normally but then disappears entirely when triggered, nicknamed ‘living plastics’. Engineers from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology started with polycaprolactone, a polymer already used in 3D printing and medical sutures. They added dormant spores from two specially modified strains of Bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacterium.
Apple discontinued sales of its cheapest Mac Mini model earlier this week, raising the starting price of its compact desktop to $800 for a basic computer with a little more storage. Many people who had their eye on that small PC are now faced with a different decision, one that requires them to reconsider what they truly need and can afford. For them, the 11-inch iPad Air M4, priced at $519.99 (was $599), provides a viable solution for keeping everyday computing simple, light, and affordable.
Zach King, also known as FinalCutKing, has been a fan of the Star Wars franchise since he was a child. The re-release of the original trilogy in 1999 got his attention, and now he’s turned his passion for Star Wars into something truly unique: a full-fledged recreation of the 1977 film constructed almost exclusively of cardboard and a few other basic materials.
Over the past two weeks, those of us who spent hours mulling over the Strogg combat from Quake 4 have been in for a treat, a 10-minute clip of the previously unfinished expansion. The Awakening has appeared on the internet. That’s right, Justin Marshall has now produced a clean version free of the obvious watermarks that were muddying up prior versions of the footage. Anyone viewing can now see a truly raw early prototype build straight from the creators, with all of the bells and whistles intact as they were when the team ceased working on it.