A team including researchers at McGill University developed '3D necroprinting,' which repurposes the proboscis of a female mosquito as a high-resolution 3D-printing nozzle, and the work received the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize in Technology. The proboscis has an inner diameter of roughly 20–30 µm, and the system produced printed lines about 20 µm wide.
The researchers compared several biological dispensing structures, including stingers and fangs, before choosing the mosquito proboscis for its narrow, straight geometry and ability to support continuous flow. Demonstrations included honeycomb structures, a maple leaf, and bioscaffolds containing cells.
Instead of machining a finer nozzle, the researchers looked at a mosquito and realized nature had already attached one. It even won a prize.
In a Vals AI experiment testing long-horizon game-playing ability, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra played Minecraft for 141 hours and 33 minutes. Over the run it built a base, farmed crops, tamed wolves, and reached the Nether while carrying goals across a very long session.
But after a Creeper explosion destroyed the chest holding its collected items and its bed, the model stopped making much progress and spent several hours doing almost nothing but farming potatoes. It also became more cautious about Creepers: when it spotted a tall green object, it explicitly checked that it was sugar cane rather than a Creeper.
After a Creeper blew up everything, the AI spent hours farming potatoes. It even checked that a tall green object was sugar cane rather than a Creeper, leaving a strangely specific behavioral trace from its 141-hour adventure.
Strange Inventions Lab's Fidget Spinner Synthesizer uses the rotation of a fidget spinner as a musical control. The maker describes it as turning motion into music, with the spinner physically moved as part of the performance.
Five signed units were made as a limited-edition instrument and offered through the maker's product page.
The toy for keeping idle fingers busy has become an instrument where spinning is now an actual responsibility. Fidgeting has acquired performance pressure.
Ayaka Yamashita's Binta Drums is an electronic instrument played by striking a character's cheeks from the left and right as if slapping its face. For Maker Faire Tokyo 2026, the work was rebuilt from scratch; the character now changes expression in response to the hits as well as lighting up its eyes.
A normal drum asks you to hit a drumhead. This one requires alternating slaps to a character's cheeks, so improved technique only makes the scene look more aggressive.
Peter's Homebrew 16 bit relay computer is a 16-bit CPU built from electromechanical relays. Running a program that calculates pi to two decimal places requires 1,377 instructions and a little over eight minutes. The creator calls it the 'slowest computer in the world.'
It has a 19-instruction set built around an accumulator, and in 2026 gained a 32×32 LED matrix connected as memory-mapped video output.
Three digits of pi take eight minutes, but at least every relay click provides an audible status update: yes, the computer is still computing.
Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab taught a robotic hand to use its five fingers as legs and locomote on its own. It moved untethered across 14 surfaces, recovered from falls, and supported its own weight while pressing keyboard arrow keys, scoring 29 correct presses out of 32.
The experiments used an off-the-shelf WUJI hand fitted with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, IMU and battery, with control policies trained in Isaac Lab and transferred to the physical system.
Give a robot hand mobility and suddenly the hand itself walks over and starts using the keyboard. It has become its own little creature.
XA10C4's Ruler Drive turns the familiar trick of twanging a ruler over the edge of a desk into a four-voice automated instrument. Stepper motors change each ruler's effective length to set its pitch, while solenoids strike the rulers; the machine is controlled over MIDI and the published demo performs the notoriously fast piece Rush E.
Built from an aluminum frame and 3D-printed parts, it mechanizes a very simple school-desk noisemaker into a programmable musical robot.
They've automated the classroom trick of twanging rulers—and multiplied it by four. Bring this to school and you might get scolded by four teachers at the same time.
Shivani Deshpande's Neon-Net is a mixed-reality game played by swinging a real aquarium fish net at AR jellyfish seen through Snap Spectacles. An Arduino UNO Q, IMU and vibration motor are mounted on the handle, where the system samples the net's motion and predicts the swing to decide whether a catch lands.
The jellyfish react to the player: approaching can make them flee, successful streaks can spook the shoal, and harder swings reach farther while disturbing more nearby creatures. Instead of leaving the interaction entirely in augmented reality, the project insists that virtual jelly-fishing should still involve holding an actual net.
AR could have made the whole game hand-tracked and prop-free, but jelly-fishing apparently still demands a real fish net. The digital world is doing the work to preserve the physical joke.
Casio's 1995 Loopy game console includes a built-in thermal sticker printer for printing images from games. Throaty Mumbo's LoopyDOOM port makes that unusual hardware feature available to DOOM too: an option in the menu prints the current game frame.
DOOM itself runs on the real 16 MHz SH-1 hardware with roughly 512 KB of RAM at around 8–15 fps. Running DOOM on odd hardware is already a familiar challenge; this port goes a step further and treats the console's printer as a feature DOOM ought to support too.
Getting DOOM running was already enough, but then the port noticed the console had a printer and decided DOOM needed screenshot printing too.
Petoi's mini robot dog Quaddle can keep walking even when flipped upside down. In the video, three Quaddles are also fixed together with blocks so they behave like one larger robot, then perform a backflip in unison.
A tiny quadruped walking around without seeming to care which side is up already gives it a peculiar creature-like quality. Combining three units turns them into something resembling one larger quadruped that rotates as a single body, making the demo increasingly unconcerned with both orientation and robot count.
First it keeps walking upside down as if nothing happened; then three of them combine for a backflip. This robot dog seems remarkably unconcerned with either up and down or how many bodies it has.
Kazuya Shibata's Fully Automatic Disposable Chopstick Splitter 2 is designed to split disposable wooden chopsticks cleanly and evenly. It feeds the chopsticks in, centers and pulls the two halves apart, then uses a circular saw to cut the remaining joint and a belt sander to smooth the ends.
The machine includes suspension to accommodate thickness variations and a self-centering gripping mechanism. Shibata spent about a year developing it, while processing one pair of chopsticks takes roughly four minutes. A task normally finished by hand in a moment has grown into a complete miniature production line.
All this machinery exists to avoid one bad chopstick split, and by the end a circular saw and belt sander have joined the process. The disposable chopsticks are receiving remarkably premium treatment.
Strange Inventions Lab turned an iPhone 13 Pro case into a miniature marble machine. The case contains a track and an Archimedes-screw lift, so tilting the phone sends a ball through the course and raises it for another lap.
The creator describes it as an experimental design that needs a fairly specific angle and can occasionally jam. It uses 19 screws and 12 ball bearings to add a complete mechanical toy to an object normally designed to stay thin and unobtrusive.
Phone cases are usually designed to disappear around the phone. This one adds a whole marble amusement park instead.
Instead of machining a finer nozzle, the researchers looked at a mosquito and realized nature had already attached one. It even won a prize.