The wobbly gear on Japanese Lego genius Akiyuky’s latest Great Ball Contraption might be the most hypnotic piece of engineering you’ve ever laid eyes on. It appears to be moving in seven different directions all at the same time, and although the machine doesn’t really do much, there’s still a plethora of moving parts…
As far as complicated clocks go, it’s going to be hard to top Felix Vorreiter’s FLUX 1440, which displays the time using a simple pulley system, and over 3,900 feet of white string covered in what looks like random marks. However, as layers of the string align inside the clock’s various pulleys, so do those random…
Occasionally you come across a video that’s so satisfying to watch that your brain never wants you to close the tab. That’s what Dutch puzzle designer Oskar van Deventer has managed to create with this complex web of 19 magic gears that are all somehow able to rotate against each other without completely locking up.
Samsung started the smartwatch push in earnest with its over-the-top Galaxy Gear just last year. Now, some six smartwatches later, Samsung is releasing one that can make its own calls. The Gear S is a tiny phone on your wrist. But is that really a good idea?
Samsung's Gear S—Samsung's first smartwatch that is literally also a phone with a SIM card and a phone number—is coming to the US this fall, and it's being supported by all four major carriers. Dick Tracy your day has come.
Fleksy has created a keyboard to work with the upcoming Samsung Gear S. Will it make typing on a tiny smartwatch screen anything other than completely awkward? It's too soon to say.
This machine by Arthur Ganson just blew my mind: its engine runs at 200 revolutions per minute but the last gear of its 12-gear mechanism is locked to a block of concrete. It looks still but, in reality, it is moving. You just can't see it because it completes one revolution every two trillion years. How the hell is…
Mitsubishi Corporation has developed a set of three interlocking gears that can move around in different movement patterns while spinning at full tilt — which in some cases can reach an astounding 6,000 rpm.
The natural world might be awe-inspiring, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t share similarities with the technological world that we inhabit. In fact, as biologists have come to look at creatures in closer detail, they've discovered that some of them have been using basics of engineering—that we now take for…
If you've ever shuddered at the sound of the gears grinding on your car's manual transmission, you might have a hard time watching this video. But don't dismay, as these three gears spinning at 4,500 RPM come in and out of sync with each other, at no point do they ever interfere or grind against each other.
When you think of the fastest accelerators in the animal kingdom, large, muscular mammals will probably be the first that come to mind. But steady among them is the inconspicuous adolescent issus, who can hit an acceleration of 400 gs in 2 milliseconds flat (humans lose consciousness over 5 gs)—all thanks to what…
3D printing has promised us a future where everything will be available on demand, not just media. But in the meantime the technology seems to have found a niche as a way to produce mind-boggling geared creations that appear to skirt the laws of physics and the universe.
Watching this cube slowly turn itself inside out as its internal gears mesh together is a mesmerizing and puzzling experience. It looks like it should never work, but it does.
History is littered with the corpses of failed products—from Edsels and DeLoreans to Zunes and everything on CBS's early season lineup. Google is no different. It's just announced that it's culling six services most people didn't know existed...because nobody actually used them.
There's something that's oddly hypnotic about watching this hand-cranked machine slice, drop and catch these small spherical rare earth magnets one at a time. The little 5mm ball magnets start out as a connected string, and are continuously fed through the contraption in a loop. As the video goes on, you get to see…
Square gears. Oval gears. Friggin goldfish and squid gears. My brain says none of these should work, but my eyes beg to differ. It feels like I'm breaking the rules.
How do those second hands keep ticking off the minutes, and minute hands the hours, and hours the days? The same way they have since long before this 1949 explanatory video was made: gears, springs, and so much more.
Sometimes, and only sometimes, a piece of geek jewelry can rise above being tacky and decidedly unwearable to become tacky and borderline unwearable. Steve Wozniak's nixie tube watch is one such example. This ring with working microgears might be another.
It was over two years ago when Google announced Gears, which promised to make Google services—and potentially lots more—available offline. Since then the project has moved at a creep, all but stalling entirely. Gears, it seems, has died.
According to Google, one of the most requested features for offline Gmail users was the ability to include attachments in emails. Well, that problem has been solved.
