Most of the time, life doesn't go as smoothly as we want it to. Life has nasty little surprises around the corner. But there are some things that will always work like clockwork: machines. There are no nasty surprises with machines. No getting caught in the rain without an umbrella. No parking fines on your windscreen. No dropping your toast on the floor face down. None of that. Mechanical things are dependable. Predictable. So here are ten mechanical GIFs of things working that will satisfy your innate desire for order.
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We all know that there's high comedic value in fails. Especially when the things that are failing are not meant to fail... like robots. Simone Gietrz makes robots that have potential but were never really meant to succeed, and watching Simone "use" them will make you laugh harder than anything else you have seen today. Promise. You should probably just watch all of her hilarious videos on her YouTube channel. If you like to watch things exploding, check out NASA's test megarocket fuel tank exploding with liquid nitrogen. It's pretty cool.
Apple has a habit of making products that look like everyday household items, but do not act like them. In the latest installment, Apple has released a new Mac Pro that nods to it's past designs, except for one very noticeable feature: it has a cheese grater on the front. So, like any sane person would, the peeps over at iFixit tried to grate cheese on the Mac Pro. The result? It isn't so great at grating. Surprisingly. Want to read more about technology? Have a look at this article about some new airplane seats that could revolutionize flying.
The word 'robot' generally has negative connotations attached to it, but MIT's mini cheetah robots are absolutely adorable. MITBiomimetic Robotics students recently took the dog-sized robots out for a play on the university lawn, and the result was way cuter than we expected. The robots aren't designed to just be cute and play soccer - they were built with the purpose to save lives with elderly care, deliveries and emergency response.
The mini cheetahs can run up to 5 miles per hour, flip themselves over if fallen, and they're relatively cheap to make and repair. Controlled with remotes, the agility of these robots has not been seen in robotics before. The next hurdle for the team is to build cameras onto the robots, enabling them to walk around without being remotely controlled by humans. But for now, they're delighful to watch.
Remember that big box of Lego you had as a child that was filled with hundreds of different styles of Lego and twenty Lego men and women from Darth Vader to scuba divers? Trying to sort those boxes would have been impossible. That's probably what Daniel West experienced before he built his Universal Lego Sorting Machine from Lego. It uses artificial intelligence to sort the Lego pieces and we all want one for our ahem nieces and nephews.
Want to read some more interesting articles? Have a look at this story about the very strange fish that washed up on a beach in California.
This article was originally reported by The Verge.
Do you ever see tiny things and wonder how on Earth they were made? What, did faries make them with tiny fairy hands? In the case of the Sigma fp, the world's smallest full frame camera, we have video evidence that it is not being made by fairies (although the video might just be a front... we will investigate more). The workers in these videos do have to seem nimble hands, though. If you're interested in seeing how a tiny camera is made, continue reading!
