Photo credit: China News Service
Wushan County residents in Chongqing, China can now easily enter and exit neighborhoods that used to require an hour of navigating steep slopes and tight roads. The Wushan Goddess Escalator finally opened its doors on February 17, 2026, just in the midst of Chinese New Year festivities.
JerryRigEverything disassembled one of LEGO’s newest products, the Smart Brick, to determine what makes it tick. From the exterior, this component appears to be a typical 2×4 LEGO brick, but it has some fairly complex electronics on the inside. Builders familiar with previous sets will smile because you still have your classic studs on top and tubes underneath, as well as your 80s brick compatibility. Putting the Smart Brick through its paces reveals that it works well with bricks made around 1985. The connecting system remains unchanged from what we have come to expect.
On January 5, a seemingly regular afternoon in Glendale, Arizona, became extremely stressful for the local cops. A Flock Safety camera at a local car wash saw a stolen GMC Sierra pickup truck traveling by and alerted the police, who were on the spot. That single alert prompted them to rush over to find the thief, John Graff, who was cleaning the truck’s interior as if he owned the place.
The Soundcore Q20i headphones, priced at $39.99 (was $70), give impressive performance at a reasonable price. This over-ear model from Anker’s Soundcore brand combines hybrid active noise cancellation, a long battery life, and configurable sound profiles into a product that constantly receives high praise for being one of the best value-for-money options available.
Half-Baked Research created a handheld tool that takes the concept of a 3D pen and supercharges it into a gadget designed to do more than simply slap some molten plastic in the air, resulting in a real plastic welder for the makers. Standard 3D pens just draw a line of melted filament, which is ideal for casual drawings or simple repairs.
Phone Repair Guru examines packages from AliExpress, each holding the components that will hopefully be utilized to make a seventh-generation iPad. Sounds like a simple challenge: build a fully functional iPad with these components, primarily acquired online, and evaluate how the final cost compares to a reconditioned tablet that costs roughly $200 Canadian. However, there is a catch: the screen is purchased from eBay because the AliExpress selections were inadequate, and the housing is a bit of a mess, having arrived broken but salvageable.
The Volcano-In Visitor Center and Hotel of Arrivals, both built by PLAT ASIA in Inner Mongolia’s Baiyinkulun Steppe, inspired the project’s name. The two comprise the first phase of a tourism resort set amidst an ancient volcanic terrain. This region of town contains an astonishing 108 volcanoes, many of which have long ago vanished but are still strewn around the steppe, sandy plains, lakes, and wetlands. It is located around 380 kilometers north of Beijing, inside a C-shaped crater that originated approximately 150,000 years ago.
Styropyro has established a name for himself by pushing seemingly ordinary technology to its limits, and in this experiment, he demonstrates some of the fundamental physics at work in its most obvious form. He simply takes car ignition coils, the typical transformers that ignite a spark in your engine, and directs their output to a large blank circuit board.
Gushi Cliff Coffee is located on a cliffside overlooking the surf pounding against the shore of Fuzhou, Fujian, in southern China. Crowds of people sit on small little platforms embedded straight into the side of the cliff, 70 meters above the thundering surf, with a view out over the water to the Taiwan Strait, where the islands of Matsu appear as a distant collection of small little lights in the night sky.
One modder has done something rather impressive with a PS5, transforming a device that was never supposed to be more than a Sony console into a fully-fledged Linux gaming system with a fairly intriguing twist: it runs PC titles via Steam. Andy Nguyen, known online as theflow0, is the modder in issue, as he is the one who got it operating and gave the console serious gaming credentials.