Researchers at MIT created a high-tech pill that starts to vibrate once it makes contact with gastric fluid in the user’s stomach in order to stimulate receptors in the stomach and create the sensation of fullness.

VIBES, short for Vibrating Ingestible BioElectronic Stimulator, was only recently unveiled in a study published in the Science Journal, but it is already being touted by the media as the future of weight loss. Although it has yet to be tested on humans, trials on pigs have yielded very promising results. After about 30 minutes of VIBES activity, pigs consumed on average almost 40 percent less food in the next half hour than they did without the smart pill. Apparently, the revolutionary device works by activating stretch receptors in the stomach, simulating the presence of food. This in turn signals the hypothalamus to increase the levels of hormones that make us feel full.

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The Willtex ‘Willcook’ microwave bag looks like a stylish laptop bag but is actually made out of conductive fabric that allows the user to heat the inside all the way up to 250 degrees Celsius.

Say what you will, but there’s nothing more comforting than a nice hot meal on a cold winter day, especially when you’re out and about. But what if you have no way of heating your lunch or ordering a hot meal? That’s where the world’s first microwave bag comes into place. Made out of an innovative fabric developed by Japanese company Sanki Consys Co. Ltd., the Willtex ‘Willcook’ bag looks like your average laptop bag, but it can heat up whatever you have stored inside to a temperature of 80 degrees Celsius in just 5 minutes. The bag itself weighs just 160 grams, while the rechargeable battery pack powering it weighs an extra 120 grams.

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Safety Shot, a new blood alcohol detox drink set to launch later this year, promises to reduce blood alcohol content in less than an hour after consumption and make hangovers a thing of the past.

The global market for hangover cures is growing faster than ever, with experts predicting that it will exceed $6 billion by 2030. A fast-growing market usually means cutthroat competition, and that is certainly the case here, with hundreds of startups fighting to establish themselves as major players. One of the most promising companies in the field is Safety Shot (formerly Jupiter Wellness), whose upcoming product, set to launch in Q4 of 2023, has been described as “the biggest disruption in the drink market” to date and “the epitome of beverage innovation”. Its patented formula is said to be able to slash a person’s blood alcohol content in half in just 30 minutes, giving them a general feeling of well-being and reducing the risk of alcohol poisoning and even hangovers.

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A Japanese producer of milk and dairy products came up with an ingenious way of motivating kids to finish their milk bottles at lunch – decorating the bottles with manga comics.

Seki Milk, a milk producer and processor in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture, has been providing its products to local schools, but in recent years the company had seen consumption of milk drop significantly. According to its own research, the majority of school students (around 65% of them) were not finishing their milk bottles at lunch, which caused unnecessary food waste and also deprived them of calcium and other valuable nutrients. However, if you’re a parent, you probably already know that getting kids to eat things that are good for them isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Luckily, Seki Milk came up with an original and fun way to motivate children to finish their milk – manga bottles.

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Chinese scientists at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan have developed a new, ultra-slippery toilet bowl that almost nothing sticks to.

Porcelain has been the most common toilet bowl manufacturing material for quite a while now, and while it may be a while before a new material upsets it, we already have our eye on an intriguing new material. One of the most important qualities of a good toilet bowl is slipperiness, and while porcelain is ok, it’s definitely not the best. Excrements and other types of waste usually disposed of in the toilet tend to stick to it and require scrubbing and cleaning, which results in wasted water. But what if the waste just slipped down into the bowl with no or very little water? Scientists in China have unveiled an innovative toilet bowl made of an ultra-slippery material that almost nothing sticks to.

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A team of Volkswagen designers and engineers developed a high-tech office chair that you can drive at a top speed of 12mph (20km/h)

Most high-tech office chairs are either simply waterproof, or stainproof, or are designed at a higher standard in terms of ergonomics. But Volkswagen’s recent take on a high-tech office chair shows just how low the bar sits at the moment. The German car manufacturer designed and built an office chair with a built-in motor and controls, allowing the user to drive it at a respectable top speed of 12mph. And that’s just one of the crazy features built into this one-of-a-kind piece of office furniture.

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French champagne brand G.H. Mumm has poured a lot of time and resources into developing a futuristic champagne bottle that can be used in space.

The Mumm Cordon Rouge Stellar is the first champagne designed specifically for space travel. It comes in a half-glass bottle and features a specially-designed stainless steel opening-closing device that curves over the classic cork. The unique bottle apparently features a finger-controlled valve which, when engaged, releases a globule of champagne spheres. Astronauts or space tourists can then scoop the drink out of the air using special glasses that resemble tiny egg cups.

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Norwegian startup Desert Control claims that it can fight desertification efficiently by spraying sand with Liquid NanoClay (LNC) and turning it into soil in a matter of hours.

In the past, we’ve featured many ‘green heroes‘ who have been fighting desertification for decades, using all sorts of techniques, from draught-resistant shrubbery to tree barriers, but now a startup claims to obtain much better results in the same harsh conditions in just seven hours. Invented in the early 2000s by Norwegian scientist Kristian Olesen, Liquid NanoClay is the secret behind Desert Control’s amazing achievements. When sprayed onto sand, this amazing invention trickles down and percolates the sand, turning it into water-retaining soil where plants can germinate and thrive.

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An arts venue in Glasgow, Scotland features an innovative dance floor that creates renewable energy from the body heat of dancers.

SWG3 hosts some of Glasgow’s largest dance parties, with thousands of people getting together to dance the night away throughout the year. Starting this month, the dancers won’t just be burning energy by busting out moves but also help keep it warm or cool, depending on the season. That’s thanks to “Bodyheat” an aptly-named dance floor that harnesses the body heat of dancers and converts it into energy. The innovative system has been three years in the making and is a joint project of SWG3 and geothermal energy startup TownRock Energy.

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Speech2Face is an advanced neural network developed by MIT scientists and trained to recognize certain facial features and reconstruct people’s faces just by listening to the sound of their voices.

You’ve probably already heard about AI-powered cameras that can recognize people just by analyzing their facial features, but what if there was a way for artificial intelligence to figure out what you look like just by the sound of your voice and without comparing your voice to a database? That’s exactly what a team of scientists at MIT has been working on, and the results of their work are impressive, kind of. While their neural network, named Speech2Face, can’t yet figure out the exact facial features of a human just by their voice, it certainly gets plenty of details right.

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Creating meat literally out of thin air sounds like technology you’d only expect to see in sci-fi movies, but according to Air Protein, it’s very real and viable.

Air Protein, the startup behind the air-based meat project, was co-founded by Dr. Lisa Dyson, an award-winning research physicist and strategy consultant, with the goal of producing meat alternatives. Such plant-based meat alternatives like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat are all the rage these days and touted as the sustainable future of the meat industry, but Air Protein is taking sustainability to a whole new level with its air-sourced proteins. They are basically relying on a bunch of microbes capable of converting CO2 into amino-acids, with the final product being a protein-based flour that can be used to make a bunch of meatless products.

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Corvid Cleaning, a Swedish startup specializing in training crows to pick up litter in exchange for food, claims that its program could save communities a fortune in cleaning costs.

According to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, over a billion cigarette butts are left on Sweden’s streets every year which represents about 62 percent of all litter. Teaching humans not to throw cigarette butts on the street has so far proven impossible, but a Swedish startup claims it can teach crows to pick up after us and save local communities millions of krone in cleaning fees every year. Corvid Cleaning teaches wild crows to do our dirty work through a step-by-step learning process, that involves rewarding the birds with food for every cigarette butt they collect.

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A woman who had exhausted all other options of treating her depression claims her life has become infinitely better since having a matchbox-sized implanted into her skull.

Having holes drilled into your skull and electrical wires connected directly to your brain sounds like a daunting proposition for most people, but for Sarah, a 36-year-old woman who had been battling depression for years, it was a desperate attempt to get back to a normal life. For years, she had been battling severe depression, and all other treatments, including anti-depressants and electroconvulsive therapy, had failed. Anything was better than the darkness she had been experiencing, and getting a brain implant proved a winning bet, as she has now been depression-free for over a year.

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North Carolina-based start-up BIOMILQ recently announced that it has successfully created cell-cultured human milk from mammary cells, in a laboratory.

In the age of Impossible Burgers and 3D-printed meatless steaks, human breast milk made in the lab instead of inside a woman’s breast really doesn’t seem that strange, honestly. The breakthrough announced by BIOMILK earlier this month really has the potential to disrupt the infant and baby industry as well as impact the environment, as over 10 percent of dairy today goes towards making baby formula. How the world reacts to lab-make breastmilk, on the other hand, is another matter.

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Chinese Engineers have successfully moved an 85-year-old historical school building in Shanghai to a new location with the help of 198 robotic legs.

Moving older buildings to make room for new construction projects is nothing new in China, but what makes this particular case interesting is the method used to move the 7,600-tonne building. Usually, side rails or flatbeads are used to relocate structures, but the irregular shape of the Lagena Primary Schoool posed quite a challenge to engineers. After weighing their options, experts opted for an innovative “walking” system made up of 198 hydraulic legs that lifted the giant building and helped it “walk” a total of 62 meters over 18 days.

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