The Sadness is Nowhere Near Infinite

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Two things:

– a 500kg-ish pumpkin has passed its ability to stay spherical under its own weight. I imagine someone studies this kind of thing. Yes, they do.

– this is something that is dying to be shot in slow-motion

Get a Grip

Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper

Particulate materials have a so-called jamming transition, which turns their behavior from fluid-like to solid-like when the particles can no longer slide past each other.

This phenomenon is familiar to coffee drinkers familiar with vacuum-packed coffee, which is hard as a brick until the package is unsealed.

Pretty neat (other than the part where they talk about a vacuum sucking the air out — it’s the external pressure that forces the air movement.)

Recursion, Lego Style

MakerLegoBot is made of Lego, makes things out of Lego, is so meta it hurts

Building things out of Lego? Lots of fun. Building a thing out of Lego that itself builds other things out of Lego? That’s totally mindblowing, and that’s what Mindstorm master Will Gorman managed here with his MakerLegoBot masterpiece. The machine takes input from a PC running MLCAD, a sort of industrial design tool for blocknauts, and then churns out anything you like — so long as it is comprised of 1×2, 2×2, 3×2, 4×2, and 8×2 bricks.

All we need is a LEGO robot to play with the finished product, and we’re all set.