Hexbugs start as tiny plastic toys that scurry around floors on the strength of a single vibrating motor and a few angled bristles. One maker took that basic idea and scaled it up until a person could climb aboard. The result, shown in a recent video, looks more like a moving plywood platform than a finished robot, yet it does travel under its own power once someone sits down.
Launch week for Apple’s first foldable brought the usual ritual from TechRax, who has spent years sending new iPhones through increasingly harsh trials. This time he took two separate iPhone Duo units. One went down a spiral staircase from roughly 200 feet. The other spent an afternoon being released over and over on ordinary city surfaces.
Marine invertebrates called feather stars drift and turn by coordinating clusters of flexible arms, rising, sinking, or hovering with almost no visible effort. Researchers at North Carolina State University copied that coordination in a soft underwater robot that manages the same range of motion with only two actuators.
Photo credit: Coolest Thing
A five-year-old boy stepped onto a Pan Am Boeing 747 bound for Europe to visit his grandparents and never quite left that cabin in his mind. Anthony Toth, raised near Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, began photographing interiors, collecting anything with the blue logo, and building wooden mockups in his parents’ basement by the time he turned twelve.
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory placed thirteen independent copies of an AI agent named Eko on a small simulated desert island and left them there for thirty hours apiece with no assigned task, no score to chase, and no reward waiting at the end. Each Eko ran on Claude Opus 4.7 inside a coding environment that let it issue commands to move, jump, pick up, place, and throw objects while receiving only text descriptions of positions and shapes rather than any visual view of the scene. The island itself, sometimes called Mesa World, held raised platforms, a tall thin column known as the Spire, a dozen cubes, one larger rock, and a single yellow ring, all governed by ordinary rigid-body physics that reset every hour while the agents’ written memory files stayed intact.