Awesome Videos

A company in Japan is showing off one of the most realistic animatronic animals we’ve ever seen. Created to promote the Japanese Race Association, the electronic equine looks like something straight out of Westworld, though it can’t gallop… at least not yet. This footage is from 2019, so we can only imagine how much the tech has evolved by now.

The fastest production NERF blasters fire around 15 darts per second. It’ll Probably Work set his sights a little higher when he built a spring-loaded NERF weapon that can blast out hundreds of projectiles at once. By switching from foam darts to balls, he packed in 6x as much ammo. Fully loaded, it’ll hold up to 288 balls and launch them all in about a second.

(PG-13: Language) Polyphonic elucidates what many music lovers have known deep down: genres are fading into a natural and inevitable death. With instant and affordable access to music from different cultures and eras, it doesn’t matter if you can’t define the music you like because you’ll most probably enjoy a little bit of everything.

Artist Herschel Shapiro creates eye-catching wall sculptures with intriguing geometric patterns. While most of his works are 3D printed in color, his 44.5″ wide Light Flower has 780 white “petals” that reflect RGB LED lights, which he installed into an aluminum composite backing panel. A limited edition of 12 of the works is available from Saatchi Art.

Photographer and world traveler Joerg Daiber takes us on a journey to the wondrous world of Madeira. Located off the West Coast of Africa, the lush, green island enjoys crystal-clear waters and incredible rock formations carved by the ocean currents. Through Joerg’s tilt-shift lens, every place looks even more enchanting.

An ordinary Rubik’s Cube has a 3×3 grid of squares on each side. Mark Bahner’s overpowered cube has 34×34 sides. This satisfying build video shows the 6939-piece, 3D-printed cube coming together throughout its three-month assembly period. Afterward, its maker shows off how it works. Mark also posted a time-lapse video focused up close on the cube.

Evan and Katelyn Heling have made some unusual keyboards and computers, so we’re not surprised by their latest build. This time, they spent nearly 100 hours fabricating a keyboard out of concrete. While the body of the keyboard wasn’t too difficult to cast, molding durable, thin-walled keycaps from concrete took a lot of time and experimentation.

The Slow Mo Guys were joined by Scott from Kentucky Ballistics to test how destructive a .577 Tyrannosaur rifle cartridge is by firing it at close range into thick blocks of ballistic gel. It’s amazing (and terrifying) to see how the bullets deform the gel and the destructive forces at work. No wonder they say these things can stop an elephant.

If you’ve seen BattleBots, you’ve probably seen the robot that spins the giant nut. Inventor Hknssn created a similar machine, but it looks way cooler and doesn’t use electricity. Fingerbirgit is a kinetic sculpture driven by a hand crank or a weight. The 1170-piece artwork uses a series of cam tracks to manipulate the globe balanced on its fingertips.

We’ve heard a zillion and one covers of Toto’s 1982 hit Africa, but we couldn’t resist posting this buzzworthy arrangement by musician Charles Berthoud. To create the looped and layered track, he performed various parts of the song using different acoustic bass-playing techniques, from thumping on its body to rapid-fire strumming to fingerstyle plucking.

You know that soothing, ambient music they play when you’re getting a massage? Musician Daniel “RootFlute” Hansen’s performance shows how meditative music like that gets made. His self-made instruments include custom flutes, a shell harp, a clarinet made from antlers, a mammoth tusk, and ten Tibetan bells he plays with foot pedals.

Sony shows off a prototype of its incredible Microsurgery Assistance Robot by performing surgery on a single kernel of corn. Its tiny robotic arms are controlled remotely by a surgeon, replicating their movements at 1/2 to 1/10 scale using the robot’s precision motors. The surgeon can observe the microscopic procedure via a stereoscopic OLED viewer.

Festo specializes in robots that utilize biomimicry, or otherwise machines that move like their animal counterparts. Their BionicBee is an ultralight flying robot that takes inspiration from bees and can fly in a swarm indoors or out. It flies by flapping its wings, which can pitch and roll. Where was this bee drone when Corridor made this video?

The Earth’s oceans are filled with harmful plastics. So, if you’re going to use a straw, make it biodegradable or reusable. All Process of World takes us inside a Korean factory to show us how they crank out millions of these eco-friendly straws every day by heating and extruding a biodegradable polymer. It’s basically one really long straw until they chop it up.

Artist Uri Tuchman had a wacky idea – to make a metal gear with teeth shaped like little pigeons. After cutting dozens of tiny birds using a pantograph for tracing, he cut a matching gear and assembled them with a pendulum and other parts to create an analog “clock” mechanism. It doesn’t accurately tell time, but it’s a cool piece of kinetic art.

Have you ever wondered what goes on inside your freezer’s ice machine when it’s making all those clacking noises? Instagrammer povsadventures used his Insta360 GO 3 camera to capture the mechanism in action as it detects when the door is closed, fills the tray with water, checks the temperature, and then dumps ice cubes into the bin.