Plasma balls have sat on desks for as long as we can remember, filled with low-pressure gas that lights up in thin, branching strands when a high-voltage electrode inside the glass gets going. Those strands look lively, yet they always end somewhere, either at the glass wall or at a second electrode. The Action Lab recently showed a different arrangement: a continuous ring of glowing plasma that floats inside a sealed xenon globe and never touches any solid conductor.
Decades after Toy Story 2, the multi-layered chest that appears when the cleaner restores Woody continues to pull makers who want those drawers and compartments to exist outside the animation. Chris Borge, a maker from South Australia focused on digital fabrication and 3D printing, took the idea on as a prototype for a mobile workshop. The project started during a trip to the Flinders Ranges while he worked on a camera build, when the need for a portable setup made the film’s design feel worth testing against real constraints.
Researchers at Texas A&M University have shaped a soft gel that keeps common hydrated salts from leaking so a building can soak up daytime warmth and let it out again after the sun sets. Salt hydrates already hold a large amount of heat for their size because they change from solid crystals to liquid and back again, absorbing energy during the melt and giving it back during the freeze.
Throaty Mumbo has spent the past year chasing projects that most people would dismiss before the first soldering iron heats up. This time the target was a standard Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the same gray box that once needed a cartridge and a CRT television. Instead of another emulator sitting on a modern computer, the goal was to keep the original console hardware in the loop and still end up with something that behaves like a desktop machine from the late 1990s.
Alef Aeronautics released video on Thursday of its electric flying car lifting off vertically and crossing above a Tesla Roadster, marking the California company’s 1,000th logged flight. The clip arrived the same day Tesla showed its redesigned Roadster performing a brief airborne hop with cold-gas thrusters at a SpaceX site in Texas. In the Alef footage the vehicle rises cleanly, maintains a level cabin, and glides over the Roadster along with a Cybertruck and other cars parked nearby.