Soldering tutorials have an occlusion problem. 3D capture can help
Thirteen soldering demonstrations use free-viewpoint Gaussian splats so the learner can move around the iron, tweezers and PCB after the gesture has been recorded.
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IRZ archive, page 29.
Thousands of screws must remember how this building comes apart
VUILD’s Tokyo project connects modular timber, thousands of digitally defined screw positions and 3D-printed guides to a simple requirement: the building should be able to come apart later.
A carefully sized hole can become a tiny engine
At EPFL, tuned cavities convert external sound into an air jet. The motor is not simply miniaturized: part of the machine is moved into its environment.
A 2.9MB song becomes eight QR codes and a paper cassette
Paper Tunes does not really put an MP3 into a QR code. It first compresses music into a neural representation, then turns that data into a physical cartridge and an offline radio payload.
The birth of a new Pantone?
Pantone turned color into a shared but proprietary language. The Experimental Paint Archive asks the inverse question: can we build a material standard that is open, reproducible and trustworthy?
No supplier would tool up for this C‑17 part. So the factory became the inventory
A nose panel no supplier wanted to tool up for could have grounded a C‑17 for years. The Air Force formed one without a dedicated die, pointing to a different model for keeping old machines alive.
How Bill Gates finds the one decision that moves a system
From Microsoft meeting rooms to global health, employee testimony, antitrust archives and academic research show how Bill Gates turns strategic positions into power over entire systems.
Two families, one volume, a game of Tetris: how a constraint became a plan
The Dutch municipality would only allow one building volume for two families. Woonpioniers answered by interlocking the two homes around each other “like a game of Tetris”, and the constraint became the plan.
What if your judgment could outlive you? The hard part is the tacit
An essay argues that AI finally makes it possible to extract a person’s judgment from their head — to “productize a person”. The interesting question is what survives the extraction, and what only travels hand to hand.
Select the words, cut the matching audio
Vocal Slice transcribes a voice recording on your machine, then lets you cut the audio by selecting text in the transcript. The waveform stops being the timeline; the words become it.