
Swedish maker Mattias Krantz has spent years turning ordinary instruments into strange new ones. His latest project starts as a compact electric ukulele that fits in a backpack. One firm pull on the neck and the whole thing stretches, expands, and becomes a full-size guitar while the music is still going.

Apollo Automobil rolled its first finished production car onto the Goodwood Festival of Speed grounds in July 2026, and the machine looked ready to rewrite the rules of what a track hypercar can be. Named Caribbean Dragon, this is unit one of just ten Apollo EVOs that will ever leave the German workshop. Twenty years after the original Gumpert Apollo began deliveries, the brand has returned with something sharper, lighter, and more uncompromising than before.

Ordinary glass stops electricity cold. It lets light through and blocks current completely. That combination works fine for windows and phone screens, yet it leaves the material useless as any kind of switch. A thin coating of indium tin oxide changes the rules. The layer is only 10 to 300 nanometers thick, nearly invisible, and still conductive enough to carry current from one edge of a small pane to the other.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, finishing a film on DVD often meant one more step. People would slide that same disc into the DVD-ROM drive of their Windows PC, wait for the software to load, and suddenly find themselves staring at a whole different set of options. Wallpapers. Screensavers. Side-scrolling Flash games. Synchronized screenplays that played alongside the film. Interviews, photo galleries, and even live online events that used the disc itself as the connection point. This was the brief window when studios packed extra material onto the unused space of a movie disc and aimed it squarely at computers.
