Howdy earth dwellers, it’s Adam 👋
This is my newsletter where I share cool stuff people do on the internet.
You might remember me from my CatGPT 🐈⬛ project. I created it in a single day to show that people can make fun stuff with AI, and millions of people loved it!! 😻
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I love bragging about how smart humans are 😁
Animals are pretty smart too.
So what if we borrowed some ideas from them?
This week, we’re bragging about some clever humans who looked at animals doing completely ordinary “animal things”… and borrowed their tricks to solve some very human problems 🐱🐢🐜
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Students who turned a cat’s tail into a balance hack for the elderly
Allen Guo-Lu and Luotong Shi, two Grade 12 students in Calgary, built a wearable robotic tail 🤯 after Allen saw how Parkinson’s could affect balance and independence while volunteering around seniors. 🐈It sounds sliiiiightly ridiculous at first…
A cat tail on humans??
But the reasoning behind it actually makes a lot of sense (and it’s surprisingly satisfying to watch too 😂)👇
Cats already use their tails as a natural counterweight, so the pair wondered whether humans could borrow the same idea for balance too!
Allen and Luotong’s prototype straps around the waist and uses sensors to detect instability, then shifts a counterweight to help compensate. They even built an app 📱 so the tail’s sensitivity can be adjusted for different users!
Nicely done guys!! 👏🐱
A teenager who spent 4,000 hours building a robotic turtle to spot plastic pollution
Evan Budz was camping with his family when he noticed how gracefully a snapping turtle moved through the water.4,000 hours later, Evan’s random camping-trip idea turned into an award-winning robotic turtle that spots tiny pieces of plastic pollution 🤯👇
The turtle’s job is detecting microplastics (that normally require lab testing) using onboard imaging and AI, so they can be identified directly in the water.
Even more impressive, Evan says his system is able to distinguish microplastics from other particles with 94% accuracy in his testing.
Go Evan!! 👏🤖🐢
The MIT team who stole a ridiculously smart survival trick... from fire ants!
Here’s a crazy fact:
When you drop fire ants in water, did you know they can literally link their bodies together to form a floating raft? 🚣🤝
Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia and a team at MIT to ask a much bigger (and highly practical) question:What if little robot boats could organize themselves the same way to create “on-demand” floating spaces whenever humans need them?
It’s pretty awesome to watch 🛟👇
Each boat is about the size of a dinner plate, with its own thrusters, sensors and magnetic latches (with only minimal central coordination!)
They find each other, snap into a platform, break apart, reassemble into a totally different shape, then sail off across the water as one thing.
Not bad for something inspired by a bug lol. 🫡🐜
🏆 Know a human worth bragging about?
If somebody you know is building something weird, useful, kind, or just ridiculously awesome, hit reply with their name + a link to what they’re doing.
Find something ordinary and ask one stupid-sounding question about it.
Why is it shaped like that?
Why does it move like that?
Why does it stick, float, fold, climb, or survive that way?
You might be surprised how many good ideas are hiding inside things you normally walk right past. 🧡
 Adam Bragg |
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 Bragging about cool stuff humans are doing on the internet. |