Awesome Awesome

After seeing an illustration of a mime wielding an invisible sword, maker Mike Shake was inspired to build one in real life. While his see-through katana isn’t completely invisible, it’s still an incredibly cool and effective weapon. Mike’s opponents will never see what hit them. After considering using a glass blade, he went with a clear and strong polycarbonate.

Scott Sloan builds 1:6-scale digital pinball machines that are fully playable. The 3D-printed systems can play many games using Visual Pinball X and are powered by a GMK 5105 mini-computer. They have a 7″ playfield and a 5″ backglass display. Want one? Contact Scott on Facebook. Glen’s Retro Show has a demo video here. Images courtesy of Scott Sloan.

For many years, prosthetics have been primitive, static objects. Thanks to modern biotechnology, people facing lost limbs can look forward to devices like this brain-controlled robotic arm from Esper Bionics. It has independently-moving fingers, a swiveling wrist, and the ability to perform fine-grained actions like picking up a knife and cutting with it.

Research Fellow and Imagineer Lanny Smoot is only the second Disney cast member to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The first was Walt Disney. In this video, Lanny shows off a few of his incredible creations, including an amazing interactive “Holotile” floor that moves beneath your feet.

Iron Man had armor that was able to fix itself after a fight. JLaservideo took a stab at making real-world armor pieces that heal themselves after being heated, thanks to Nitinol – a nickel-titanium alloy with the ability to return to a programmed shape after being bent. The material is expensive and hard to work with, but Tony Stark could afford it.

Kenta Gomazaki loves to spend his time outdoors. To enhance his experience, he outfits metal gear boxes with equipment for making coffee, cooking, and serving food. His Instagram channel is filled with his wonderful creations, each is packed with unique Japanese gear for enjoying outdoor living. Kenta’s setup videos are fun and inspiring, too.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket can land back on Earth after lifting payloads into space. Project Horizon has now replicated this impressive engineering feat on a much smaller scale. It’s hard enough to keep a model rocket balanced as it launches, let alone being capable of a controlled descent like this. It took 32 test flights to get it right. Onboard footage here.

After losing his left eye to cancer as a child, Brian Stanley started wearing prosthetic eyeballs. More recently, he turned lemons into lemonade by fabricating a series of light-up eyeballs, including one that’s bright enough to be used as a flashlight. He’s also made a titanium cyborg eye that makes him look like a Terminator.

Musician Carolina Eyck is one of the best theremin players of all time. Her nuanced arrangement of Ennio Morricone’s The Ecstacy of Gold is a thing of beauty, a musical Cowboys & Aliens, if you will. Only Carolyn’s performance is significantly more entertaining than that movie.

For the art installation, Colapso in Bilbao, Spain, SpY created this simple yet effective display. Sitting inside a cube, a 10-meter balloon gradually inflated over four days. When the balloon burst, it revealed it was filled with colored smoke. The cloud lingered for only a few seconds but produced the perfect red sphere captured in this slow-motion video.

At first, we thought these color-coordinated LEGO habitats had been slathered with paint. But artist Dana Knudson built each entirely from same-color LEGO bricks. He had to remove some printing, otherwise, it’s 100% LEGO plastic. Beyond the Brick stopped by Dana’s display at Atlanta Brick Con for an up-close look at every scene.

Mad scientist Mike Ando aka RIUM+ created a unique display inspired by the holographic imagers in the adventure game Riven: The Sequel to Myst. His patent-pending Andotrope has a cylindrical display that spins with the turn of a crank, and displays an image that appears to follow you no matter what angle you view it from. Works great for Princess Leia, too.

This is the stuff that kid dreams are made of. DreamTrack Builder headed to the top of an abandoned water slide and raced a bunch of Hot Wheels cars down its chute. A chase car sat at the back of the pack towing a GoPro camera. He also did a nighttime race and one with 50 cars.

This performer shows off a traditional Middle Eastern dance that incorporates fire. But the dancer isn’t juggling or carrying flames; she’s wearing them along the hemline of her dress, creating a terrifying ring of fire as she spins. We sure hope the upper part of the dress is fireproof. There’s a similar fire dancing tradition in India.

Artist Duane Perera is a master at his craft. He makes playful miniature scenes inspired by pop culture. Each diorama features characters enjoying everyday life, like playing video games, listening to CDs, or record shopping. His making of video for his Scarface plays NES diorama is priceless. Duane sells prints of his work on Redbubble, and we want all of them.

Emoji Supply’s Emoji Kitchen lets you cook up new emojis by combining two existing emoji into one. Want a monkey eating a hot dog? Sure! An angry guy with a monocle? No problem! Not every permutation is available, but there are lots to choose from. The combinations are also available in the Android keyboard Gboard.

We love watching giant R/C airplanes take to the skies. In this video from Ramy RC, we get to see the full build process. He created this 11.8-foot-long model of an Airbus A380-800 by 3D printing forms and lining them with carbon fiber and resin. He made the underlying structure from laser-cut wood and plastic. Maiden flight at 17:45.

Grandpa Amu has spent decades of his life crafting objects from wood. In this video, you’ll see him turn a block of safflower pear wood into a detailed fire truck. What makes this gift for his grandson even more remarkable is that all of the pieces connect using wood joints, requiring no glue or nails to hold them together.

This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve heard Black Sabbath’s music turned into jazz. But Jazz Sabbath created an entire album of Ozzy and company’s metal reworked into a concert-worthy jazz performance. Seriously, this is some really great music, so consider making a purchase from their Bandcamp page.

Once you knock dominoes over, you generally have to set them back up by hand. But in the case of this LEGO Technic machine by Grant Davis, the dominoes stand themselves back upright. Running in an infinite loop of 10 dominoes at a time, it can knock down and stand up dominoes at a rate of 120,000 per day.

After seeing the Mercedes Vision AVTR concept car in 2020, ND Woodworking was wowed by its curvaceous body and futuristic design. He then got to work, spending more than 100 days sculpting a scale replica of the car out of wood. The kid-sized version sits atop a metal frame with a working electric drivetrain.

1980s kids, Johnny 5 is alive! Adam Savage got to geek out over one of the original screen-used models of the friendly and inquisitive robot from Short Circuit. This particular Johnny 5 was never functional but it still looks amazing. It’s one of the many amazing props and artifacts headed to Prop Store’s 2022 London auction.

We’re not sure if we should be amazed by or terrified by Advanced.Farm’s wheeled robot that autonomously harvests apple crops. Its six mechanical arms are fitted with custom-built stereoscopic cameras to identify ready-to-pick apples, then pluck them off with their grippers. The machine can pick roughly 30 apples per minute.