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.
Released in November 2008, Nintendo’s DSi arrived with a pair of cameras that no previous handheld in the line had offered, one facing outward and one facing the user. Those sensors recorded images at only 640 by 480 pixels, a resolution that already felt modest next to the improving phone cameras of the period. Accessory maker Nyko later decided the outer camera deserved an 8x optical magnification lens anyway, packaged with a hard-shell case that wrapped the original DSi body.
HTX Studio scanned a brand new iPhone Duo inner screen and found a peak-to-valley crease of just 48 microns, roughly half the thickness of ordinary paper, with a slope across the center under 0.1 degrees. That measurement placed the Duo ahead of two other fresh foldables labeled Model A and Model B, and far ahead of a five-year-old phone that showed a clear W-shaped groove at 350 microns. In person the fold stayed nearly invisible from most angles, whether the screen was on or off, which matches the reason Apple applied the nano-texture finish in the first place.