Google’s NotebookLM Gemini Agent combines NotebookLM and Gemini into a unified AI system designed to support complex tasks. NotebookLM acts as a knowledge manager, capable of handling up to 300 sources, such as PDFs, Google Docs and web pages, to create a centralized knowledge base. Gemini complements this by introducing “Gems,” which allow users to […]
Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro is poised to deliver a blend of innovation and refinement, offering meaningful updates that enhance the user experience while staying true to the company’s design philosophy. From hardware advancements to subtle design changes, the iPhone 18 series reflects Apple’s commitment to evolving its flagship lineup. Below is a detailed look at […]
Military forces figured out decades ago that you need two kinds of vision in the dark: one to detect, one to identify. Heat finds the target, detail confirms it. The problem has always been making both feeds available to a single operator without adding weight, bulk, or the friction of switching between devices. High-end tactical units solved this with helmet-mounted dual-tube systems that cost as much as a used car and require specialized training to operate. Consumer and prosumer markets have lived with the compromise, carrying separate thermals and NVGs or settling for low-refresh overlay systems that blur more than they clarify.
SpectraEyes brings the dual-feed architecture down to the enthusiast and professional level. Developed by a Denver-based team that spent 18 months testing sensor fusion algorithms in high-altitude terrain, the system pairs a 60Hz thermal core with a 4K digital night vision sensor in a synchronized side-by-side display. Each screen operates independently, so you can run thermal-only to conserve battery during long scouts, 4K-only for close-range work, or both feeds simultaneously when the situation demands total awareness. IP67 waterproofing, USB-C fast charging, and an operating range from negative 20 to positive 50 degrees Celsius mean this was engineered for field use, available now at $514 during the current campaign window.
The core innovation lives in what SpectraEyes calls the Real-Time Dual-Screen Synchronization System. Rather than attempting to merge thermal and night vision into a single confused image, the optics route each feed to its own dedicated 1280×720 LCD screen inside the binocular housing. The left screen receives data from a 12-micron thermal sensor running at 60Hz with sub-25mk NETD sensitivity, which translates to the ability to detect temperature differences smaller than 0.025 degrees Celsius. That level of thermal resolution separates a warm body from ambient foliage even when both are nearly the same temperature. The independence of the two displays means your brain processes depth, movement, and context from the night vision channel while simultaneously tracking heat signatures on the thermal side, creating a layered awareness that single-feed systems simply cannot replicate.
Two screens, two feeds, two individual purposes – one Thermal Vision, one Night Vision
The right screen displays output from an ultra-low-light CMOS sensor capable of rendering 4K UHD (3840×2160) footage down to 0.0001 lux, roughly ten times darker than what a human eye can process. In starlight conditions, the sensor delivers full-color imaging, which means you see the actual hues of terrain, clothing, and vegetation rather than the washed-out green associated with legacy analog night vision tubes. In total darkness, the built-in adjustable IR illuminator (850nm and 940nm settings) provides monochrome visibility out to 800 meters without the visible red glow that spooks wildlife or compromises stealth. The choice between 850nm and 940nm wavelengths allows you to optimize for either maximum throw or maximum stealth depending on whether you’re observing skittish animals or working in environments where human detection is a concern.
Most consumer thermal optics run at 9Hz or 30Hz, which produces noticeable lag when panning across a scene or tracking moving subjects. SpectraEyes spec’d a 60Hz thermal core specifically to eliminate that stutter. Whether you’re sweeping a tree line or following an animal through dense cover, the thermal feed stays fluid and responsive. The difference between 30Hz and 60Hz might sound academic until you’re trying to track a running target or assess whether movement in your peripheral vision is wind-blown brush or something warm-blooded, and the lag between what’s happening and what you’re seeing becomes the variable that determines whether you capture the moment or miss it entirely.
The 7.0mm focal length provides a 24.9-degree by 18.7-degree field of view on the thermal side, wide enough for situational scanning without losing the resolution needed to pick out distant signatures. Thermal detection range reaches 500 meters, digital night vision stretches to 800 meters. The system supports 1x to 10x continuous digital zoom on the night vision channel, useful for identifying details at range without physically closing distance. Zooming in doesn’t degrade the thermal feed, so you can magnify the night vision side to confirm a target’s identity while keeping the thermal side at native FOV to monitor the broader environment for additional heat sources.
The independent dual-control system means you can toggle each display on or off separately via dedicated buttons on the housing. Running only the thermal channel in scouting mode extends battery life considerably, pulling four to five hours of runtime from the dual replaceable lithium battery setup. Engaging both screens simultaneously in full fusion mode drops that to around two hours, which aligns with what you’d expect from a system pushing two high-refresh displays and processing two sensor feeds in real time. The batteries are external and hot-swappable, so you can carry spares and change them in the field without powering down the unit or losing your position in a critical observation window.
The USB Type-C charging port supports power bank input, so extended missions can be managed with external battery capacity. Storage runs via microSD card, supporting up to 512GB for 4K video recording at 30fps in MP4 or MOV format. Recording captures the night vision feed by default, but you can switch to thermal-only recording or choose to save both feeds as separate files for post-mission review. The ability to document what you observed with native 4K resolution means this doubles as a capture device for wildlife research, security documentation, or any scenario where you need verifiable footage of what happened in low-light or no-light conditions.
The IP67 rating means the housing can handle submersion up to one meter for 30 minutes and shrugs off dust intrusion entirely, appropriate for marine navigation, wet-weather SAR work, or any scenario where gear gets exposed to the elements without warning. The operating temperature range (negative 20 to positive 50 degrees Celsius) covers everything from winter mountain rescue to desert surveillance in summer heat. The form factor is binocular-style rather than monocular, which distributes weight across both hands and allows for more stable long-duration observation compared to single-eye devices that fatigue your grip and throw off your natural field of view balance.
SpectraEyes is currently available through its Kickstarter campaign at $514 as part of the Super Early Bird tier, down from an MSRP of $830. Units ship globally starting June 2026. This is gear built for search and rescue teams who need to spot heat and confirm identity without switching devices mid-operation, for wildlife researchers who track nocturnal behavior across hours of observation, for hunters who work pre-dawn and post-dusk windows where neither thermal alone nor night vision alone tells the full story, and for marine operators navigating in conditions where a buoy, a boat, and a person all look like dark shapes until you layer heat detection over visual context. If you’ve ever carried two optics into the field and spent the night juggling between them, SpectraEyes is the answer to a question the industry has been avoiding for two decades.
Islington houses tend to resist openness. The typical Victorian or Edwardian terrace was built for a world of separate rooms, each with its own function and its own door, and even postwar Neo Georgian rebuilds like this one on St Paul’s Road inherited that spatial logic. Hamish Vincent Design and Architecture for London treated that inheritance as a starting point rather than a constraint, keeping the facade exactly as it found it and reorganizing everything behind it around a different set of priorities.
The ground floor has been reworked into a single continuous environment where kitchen, dining, and living dissolve into each other with remarkable ease. A rear brick extension anchors the move, punched through with a full-height arched opening that frames the garden like a painting. Douglas fir beams overhead, a marble and fluted timber kitchen island, a bespoke helical staircase rising through three floors: every decision here is load-bearing, materially and spatially.
Designer: Hamish Vincent Design & Architecture for London
The extension is built in the same grey-green handmade brick as the original rear elevation, which is the kind of decision that sounds obvious but rarely gets made. Most rear extensions announce themselves, either in glass or in a conspicuously different material, as if embarrassed by the ambition. Here the new fabric reads as continuous with the old, and the arched opening cut through it does all the work of signaling that something has changed. That arch is timber-lined on the interior face, brick-voussoir on the exterior, and it frames the entire open-plan ground floor when viewed from the garden with the precision of a composed photograph.
The kitchen island features a top with a heavily veined white marble slab. The body is clad in vertical fluted timber. The end panel, the short face you see from the dining side, is a column of deep purple-toned quartzite with the kind of geological color that reads almost violet in certain light. Three materials, one object, zero apology. The surrounding cabinetry is flat-fronted oak with black hardware, deliberately quiet so the island can operate at full volume without the room feeling overwhelmed.
The dining zone sits between the island and the garden wall, anchored by a built-in banquette upholstered in a red and cream woven fabric against exposed brick. A timber dining table with rounded legs and a pendant light overhead completes the arrangement. Skylights cut into the roof above flood the entire zone with natural light, which matters because the extension sits behind the main house footprint and would otherwise feel basement-adjacent. The ceiling beams are exposed douglas fir, running parallel to the garden wall, and they give the space a warmth that keeps the brick from reading as cold or industrial.
The living room pulls back from the material intensity of the extension. Lime-plastered walls, a Noguchi coffee table in walnut and glass, a vintage rug, and a built-in arched shelving unit with backlit display niches. The arch appears again here, and its recurrence across the garden threshold, the shelving, the staircase handrail, and the original front door fanlight is what gives the project its internal coherence. A single borrowed form, deployed with enough variation that it reads as a theme rather than a tic.
The staircase got repositioned as part of the redesign, which is a significant structural intervention often undersold in project descriptions. Moving a stair in a terraced house means rethinking the entire circulation logic, and the payoff here is a three-story helical structure with douglas fir treads, a curved timber handrail, and slim black metal balusters. Viewed from above, the stair winds down toward the original fanlight above the front door, a Georgian semicircular window that now sits framed at the base of the void like a deliberate full stop.
The Canonbury Conservation Area will never know what hit it. From the street, number 65A reads exactly as it always has: handsome, reticent, correctly proportioned. The ochre door gives nothing away. Behind it, Hamish Vincent Design and Architecture for London have built a ground floor that operates on an entirely different register, one organized around material conviction and a single recurring geometric idea rather than the room-by-room compartmentalization the building was born into. The arch did all the heavy lifting, and the house let it.
The humble stool has barely changed in centuries. Four legs, a flat seat, done. It exists in every cafe, classroom, kitchen island, and co-working space on the planet, reliably doing its one job and nothing else. So when a designer comes along and asks what happens if you add just one more leg, the answer should probably be “nothing interesting.” And yet here we are, talking about SQOOL.
SQOOL is a 2025 personal project by Liam de la Bedoyere of Bored Eye Design, a UK-based independent studio that describes itself as creating work that’s anything but boring. At first glance, the stool reads almost like a creature. Six curved legs splayed outward with little rounded feet, a compact circular seat on top, and that one rogue arm reaching upward and curling into a hook. It looks like a cheerful yellow squid that decided to get into the furniture business, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. The photographs make it look alive. Depending on the angle, it shifts between dog, bug, and some friendly unnamed species you’d encounter in an animated film.
The concept is deceptively simple. Five legs provide complete stability, the same geometric logic you’d get from a traditional four-legged stool, just with an added sense of security and visual rhythm. The sixth leg is the interesting one. Freed from any load-bearing duty, it becomes something else entirely: a handle for carrying the stool, a hook for a bag or jacket, a rest for your coffee cup, a cradle for a book. The images show it doing all of these things casually, as if the stool has always known it could.
What makes SQOOL feel genuinely considered rather than just whimsical is how that extra function was thought through. The sixth arm doesn’t just stick out awkwardly. It curves deliberately, creating a shape that invites the hand to reach for it. People apparently do this instinctively, discovering its utility through touch rather than any printed instruction. That kind of design, where the object teaches you how to use it without saying a word, is harder to pull off than it looks.
The stacking detail is also worth noting. Getting six legs to nest cleanly on top of each other is a real engineering puzzle, and de la Bedoyere solved it by shaping each leg with enough taper and spacing to allow the stools to slide into each other gracefully. Seen stacked in a column, they look spectacular. Like a sculpture you’d walk past in a gallery and immediately photograph. Which means SQOOL is doing double duty even when no one is sitting on it.
The color choices lean fully into the stool’s playful register. The saturated yellow is hard to miss, and a soft lavender variant appears in some renders, equally confident. These aren’t accent tones chosen to recede politely into a neutral interior. They’re chosen to assert presence. SQOOL isn’t trying to disappear into a corner. It wants to be part of the room, part of the conversation, maybe even part of your grid. That’s not a criticism at all. Personality in furniture is genuinely underrated, and design objects that commit fully to their own character tend to age better than the ones trying to be neutral.
Bored Eye Design’s portfolio shows a consistent interest in objects that are curious and approachable, things that reward a second look and feel good to handle. SQOOL fits neatly into that sensibility. It’s playful without being infantile, practical without being dull, and memorable without leaning on novelty for novelty’s sake. The name alone, a blend of “stool” and something else entirely, already tells you what kind of designer de la Bedoyere is.
The question with any concept project is always whether it would survive production. I think SQOOL could. The logic holds up. The form has already been thought through with stackability in mind, which is usually where playful concepts fall apart. A stool this considered, this expressive, and this genuinely useful deserves more than a render portfolio. It deserves a production run.
Artemis II and its four-person crew have entered the Moon’s “sphere of influence,” meaning the spacecraft is more affected by lunar gravity than the Earth’s pull. The transition occurred at a distance of 39,000 miles from the Moon, four days, six hours and two minutes into the mission. The next and most important phase will happen tomorrow when the craft loops around the Moon’s far side, taking humans deeper into space than they’ve ever been before.
At their apogee, Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen will be 252,757 miles from Earth. That will break the previous record held by the Apollo 13 crew by just over 4,000 miles. They’re the first humans to cross the lunar threshold since 1972’s Apollo 17 moon landing mission.
The crew spent this weekend carrying out preparations for their lunar flyby. That included manual piloting demonstrations, reviewing their science objectives for the six-hour observation period and evaluating their space suits, which are there for life support in the event of an emergency and for their return home. But, they've had plenty of time to take in the views, too — and those views sure are spectacular. In the latest series of images shared by the space agency, the astronauts are seen gazing at Earth through the windows of the Orion spacecraft.
Orion will reach the moon's vicinity shortly after midnight on Monday, April 6. Later that day, the crew is expected to reach a point farther than any humans have traveled from Earth, surpassing the record of 248,655 miles from Earth set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.
Mission specialist Christina Koch takes in the view.
NASA
The lunar observation period will start at 2:45PM ET, and a few hours later, they'll be behind the moon and briefly drop out of communication. The spacecraft's closest approach to the moon is expected to occur at 7:02PM, when it will be 4,066 miles from the surface. "From that distance, the crew will see the entire disk of the Moon at once, including regions near the north and south poles," according to NASA. The crew will later get a chance to see a solar eclipse "as Orion, the Moon, and the Sun align in such a way that the astronauts will see our star disappear behind the Moon for about an hour." NASA will have coverage of the flyby starting at 1PM ET.
Update April 7 at 1:40 AM ET: The post has been updated with news that Artemis II has entered the Moon’s sphere of influence.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/artemis-ii-arrives-in-lunar-space-ahead-of-its-trip-around-the-moon-211919381.html?src=rss
NASA’s Artemis II lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026, carrying four astronauts on humanity’s first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen are currently aboard the Orion spacecraft, preparing for a lunar flyby that will take them farther from Earth than any humans have traveled since Apollo 13. Space exploration feels immediate again in a way it hasn’t in decades, and CircuitMess timed the NASA Artemis Watch 2.0 perfectly into that cultural moment. This is a $129 programmable smartwatch, fully assembled and ready to use out of the box, inspired by the very mission currently making headlines.
The hardware inside includes a dual-core ESP32 microcontroller, a full-color LCD screen, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a compass, and a temperature sensor. It pairs with iOS and Android devices over Bluetooth for activity tracking and notifications, and the firmware is entirely open-source, reprogrammable in Python, CircuitBlocks, or the Arduino IDE. You can design custom watch faces, build interactive apps, and modify sensor behavior as deep as you want to go. The age recommendation is 9 and up, which reflects the lower barrier to entry compared to CircuitMess’s Perseverance Rover kit we wrote about earlier. No assembly required, no soldering, just charge it and start exploring.
Most smartwatches aimed at kids treat programming as something that happens elsewhere, if it happens at all. You get a companion app with preset themes, maybe a handful of watch face options, and locked-down software that assumes the wearer has no interest in understanding what’s running underneath. The Artemis Watch 2.0 flips that entire model. CircuitMess ships it fully functional, but every layer of the software is accessible and modifiable. The visual block-based CircuitBlocks environment gives beginners a starting point, while Python and Arduino IDE support mean users can graduate to full code without hitting an artificial ceiling. The firmware lives on GitHub as an open-source repository, so there’s no proprietary lock-in and no feature wall you can’t get past.
The dual-core ESP32 processor does real work here. It handles Bluetooth pairing with smartphones, processes sensor data from the accelerometer and gyroscope in real time, and runs whatever custom apps you decide to build on top of the base system. The compass and temperature sensor add environmental awareness, which opens up coding projects beyond simple timekeeping. You could program the watch to log temperature changes throughout the day, trigger alerts based on compass heading, or build a step counter that uses the accelerometer to track movement patterns. The 1.77 x 0.5 x 2.76 inch form factor keeps it wearable for younger users, and the rechargeable Li-Po battery charges via USB-C.
CircuitMess sells the Artemis Watch 2.0 standalone at $129, but it also appears in a Mars Exploration Bundle alongside the Perseverance Rover for $399, a 23% discount over buying both separately. That bundle positions the watch as a companion device for tracking rover missions and staying connected during the 20-hour rover build. CircuitMess also offers a Collector’s Bundle that includes the watch and four official strap designs for $149. The company has sold over 300,000 kits worldwide, and the Artemis branding ties directly into the kind of sustained media coverage that makes space feel culturally relevant again.
The Artemis Watch 2.0 is available now at circuitmess.com. If you followed the actual Artemis II launch this week, if you care about wearable tech that doesn’t condescend to younger users, or if you want a smartwatch that teaches coding by letting you rebuild it from the inside out, this is one of the few products in this category worth the $129 ask.
John Cena’s spinning championship belt should not have worked. It was gaudy, it was hip-hop inflected, it belonged more to a music video than a wrestling ring, and it absolutely captured a generation of young fans who grew up treating it as the definitive image of what a championship looked like. That belt stayed on WWE television long after Cena’s character stopped spinning it, because WWE understood that the object itself had taken on a life independent of the man who introduced it.
That is the particular power that championship belts hold over wrestling. Mick Foley took three of the most brutal falls in WrestleMania history and walked away as champion, and the belt validated every bit of the punishment. Bray Wyatt’s Fiend character carried a Universal Championship with his own face grotesquely incorporated into the design, because for that character, the belt had to be an extension of the horror. These objects absorb the identity of whoever holds them, and they carry that identity forward long after the reign ends.
A Tradition Borrowed From Boxing
Championship belts predate professional wrestling entirely. The tradition traces back to 1810, when British boxer Tom Crib defeated American boxer Tom Molino in a grueling 35-round fight, and King George III presented Crib with what historians consider the first championship belt, reportedly constructed from lion skin decorated with silver claws. One popular theory holds that early boxers would bring colored cloths to tie around their waists before fights, and winners would take their opponents’ colors and wear them as a belt to signal victory. The symbolism was immediately legible and it stuck.
When professional wrestling emerged as a competitive sport in the late 19th century, it borrowed the championship belt wholesale from boxing. The first recognized wrestling championship arrived in 1905, with George Hackenschmidt becoming the inaugural World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion. Early WWE belts were plain objects, basic leather straps with small metal plates, and during Bruno Sammartino’s legendary seven-year reign in the 1960s, the design featured little more than the shape of the United States pressed into leather. The wrestling mattered more than the prop, and nobody pretended otherwise.
From Simple Leather to Cultural Artifact
The 1980s changed everything. As wrestling transformed from regional athletic competition into globally televised entertainment, the belts transformed with it. The winged eagle championship arrived during the Golden Era and was perfectly calibrated for the personalities carrying it, Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, the Ultimate Warrior, larger-than-life characters who needed a larger-than-life object to hold above their heads. Reggie Parks, a former wrestler turned belt maker, created that winged eagle design, and it remains the belt most commonly cited when fans argue about the greatest championship design in history.
The 1990s brought the Big Gold Belt, originally from NWA and WCW, featuring 24-karat gold, silver, diamonds, and rubies, a genuinely opulent object that looked like it belonged in a museum case. Then came the spinner, Cena’s spinner, which arrived in 2005 and did something no belt had done before: it became a product. Kids wanted replicas not because they idolized the championship lineage but because the belt itself was cool, in the same way a sneaker or a video game peripheral was cool. The customizable side plates introduced in 2013 pushed this further, allowing each new champion to stamp their own identity onto the physical object, making every title change feel like a genuine handover rather than just a storyline beat.
The People Who Actually Build Them
Creating a WWE Championship belt is not a factory operation. It is a craft practiced by a small number of artisans working out of workshops in the United States, and the knowledge passes between them the way apprenticeships work in watchmaking or leatherwork. Dave Millican is one of the primary belt makers working with WWE today, responsible for the WWE Championship, the World Heavyweight Championship, the Intercontinental Title, and the tag team titles among others. He learned his craft directly from Reggie Parks, the man who built the winged eagle, and credits Parks entirely for his credibility when he was starting out.
Millican works from a garage workshop, which tells you something important about the scale of this industry. There is no belt-making facility, no assembly line, no team of technicians running shifts. There is a craftsman, a set of specialized tools, and months of painstaking handwork. WWE contacts belt makers with a set of requirements, the two collaborate through sketches and revisions, and once a design is locked, the real work begins.
Clay, Tin, and Months of Handwork
The process starts with clay. The belt maker hand-sculpts a detailed three-dimensional model of each plate from soft clay, capturing every ridge, letter, and decorative element by hand. Once the clay dries and hardens, plaster is poured around it to create a negative mold. That plaster mold produces a soft metal model, typically aluminum, which the artist then spends considerable time refining, sharpening details, smoothing transitions, and preparing for the next stage. This refined metal model becomes the template for the final casting mold.
The actual plates are cast from molten tin. Liquid metal is poured into the mold, left to cool completely, and then pulled out in a state that is nowhere near finished. Freshly cast plates have rough edges, shallow details, and a surface that requires hours of hand-finishing using files, chisels, and specialized tools. Elements that cannot be achieved through casting alone, particularly sharp lettering and small sculptural details, are crafted as separate pieces and attached to the main plate, then refined by hand until they blend seamlessly with the surrounding surface.
Electroplating and the Gold Finish
Tin is structurally workable but visually unimpressive, so once the plates are refined, they go through electroplating. The plates are cleaned thoroughly to remove any residual metal shavings or surface contamination, then polished on a rotating buffing wheel until they shine. From there, they are submerged in an electrolyte solution while connected to an electrical circuit, and the current slowly deposits a layer of precious metal onto the surface. Most WWE belts receive a gold finish, though silver and rhodium are also used depending on the design requirements. For belts featuring multiple metal tones, different sections are masked during separate plating stages to create a two-tone effect.
After plating, three finishing techniques add the visual complexity that makes these objects so immediately striking. Etching applies a chemical to specific areas and then submerges the plate in an etching solution, creating textured patterns that contrast against the polished metal. Enamel painting involves applying thick enamel paint to designated sections and baking the plates to lock in a durable, colorful finish. Gemstone setting, the most labor-intensive of the three, has a jeweler attaching rubies, sapphires, diamonds, or crystals directly to molded cavities in the metal surface. The Crown Jewel Championships, the most expensive belts in WWE history, reportedly contain 50-karat diamonds and carry a value exceeding one million dollars. Champions are not permitted to take them home; they remain in Saudi Arabia, and winners receive rings instead.
Leather, Assembly, and the Finished Object
With the plates complete, attention moves to the leather strap that holds everything together. The belt maker hand-traces and cuts the strap from high-quality leather, dyes it to the required color (typically black, though the Universal Championship famously used red), then waxes and polishes it to a durable finish. An inner lining of spandex or felt is added for comfort against bare skin, all layers are stitched together, and the plates are secured using thick leather-working string or industrial-strength adhesive. A closing mechanism, either buckles or snap hooks depending on the design, is added, high-grade vinyl finishes the outer edges, and the inside is branded with both WWE’s logo and the belt maker’s own insignia before the whole thing is packed and shipped.
WWE maintains multiple copies of each belt design. HD belts are built specifically for television, engineered to catch light perfectly under arena conditions. Champions also receive separate travel belts for appearances, signings, and live events. According to Millican, when a new HD belt is produced or refurbished, the previous version gets demoted to road use, which explains the occasional moments when attentive fans spot a belt with slightly wrong plates or minor inconsistencies on broadcast. The pristine version simply did not make it to the venue in time.
WWE creates what it calls HD belts, versions built specifically to perform under television lighting and capture every engraved detail on camera, while champions carry separate travel belts to appearances and signings on the road. When a new HD belt is made, the previous one gets demoted to road duty, which explains the occasional glimpse of a belt with slightly wrong plates or an unfamiliar finish on a live broadcast. Even the logistics of managing these objects reflects how seriously WWE treats them as artifacts rather than accessories.
A replica belt sells at retail because fans understand instinctively that what they are buying is a piece of wrestling history in miniature, a connection to the moment their favorite wrestler finally hoisted the real thing overhead. That impulse makes complete sense when you understand what went into building the original: months of clay sculpting, metal casting, electroplating, gemstone setting, and leather work, all converging into an object that a 10-year-old sees on television and immediately understands means everything.
While the US and Anthropic are in the midst of a major dispute, the UK is trying to sway the San Francisco-based AI company to expand its presence on English soil. According to a report from The Financial Times, staffers at the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology have worked on proposals that include expanding Anthropic's office in London, along with a potential dual stock listing.
The UK's strategy follows a public fallout between Anthropic and the US Department of Defense earlier this year. After the AI company said it wouldn't budge on certain AI guardrails, the Department of Defense pulled its contract and eventually designated Anthropic a supply chain risk. While the designation is currently temporarily blocked by a court-ordered injunction, the feud is far from over. In the meantime, the UK's efforts to court Anthropic have ramped up in the recent weeks thanks to the company's disagreements with the US, according to FT's sources.
With no end in sight for the debacle with the Department of Defense, Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, is expected to visit the UK in May, according to FT. However, even in London, Anthropic will have to compete against OpenAI, which already committed to expanding its footprint in the English capital in February.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-uk-government-reportedly-wants-anthropic-to-expand-its-presence-in-london-174201049.html?src=rss
Cats knocking things off tables is old internet. It predates memes as a concept, predates YouTube, predates the entire visual language of digital humor. It is perhaps the most documented animal behavior in human history, captured billions of times, studied by actual ethologists, and still inexplicably funny every single time. Fabio Ferrari has taken this behavior and made it load-bearing, literally, designing a 3D-printed table lamp where a seated cat figure tilts the shade off-axis mid-push, and the resulting tension between lampshade and gravity is the entire point of the object.
Printed white in PLA, the classical turned column and drum shade read as a proper lamp, and the cat sits alongside it with one paw extended toward the column, head craned upward, frozen in that particular expression of focused feline mischief that every cat owner recognizes immediately. The layer lines on the print dissolve into surface texture at this scale, giving the whole thing an almost ceramic quality. It lands on a desk or nightstand and earns a second look from anyone who passes it.
Ferrari released the STL pack on Cults3D in late March 2026, priced at $4.04 after a 50% discount, and it pulled 102 downloads and 7,000 views within days, which for a single-designer listing on a platform with 3.2 million models is a genuinely strong signal. The pack ships five files covering two body variants sized for different bulb lengths, plus a supplementary shade that covers the bulb completely for a cleaner look.
The recommended material is white or marble PLA, though PETG and resin both work, and the print settings are straightforward: 15 to 20 percent infill for the shade, higher for the cat and base to keep the center of gravity honest. The shade is the only component that needs supports, and Ferrari is emphatic that the lamp column itself should print support-free since anything inside that channel will obstruct the wire routing.
The lamp works with standard E12, E14, or E27 bulb kits depending on how you scale it, and the warm ambient glow it throws makes it best suited on a nightstand or shelf light rather than serving task lighting. At roughly 250 to 294mm tall depending on the variant, it has enough physical presence to read across a room without overwhelming a surface.
The design sits in an interesting lineage. Seletti’s Monkey Lamp and the broader wave of anthropomorphic lighting that swept through the design-forward homeware market in the 2010s established that people would pay serious money for a lamp with a personality. What Ferrari has done is democratize that impulse entirely, collapsing the distance between a $300 design object and a $4 STL file and a weekend print. Just make sure you aim for 25% or higher infill or the balance goes awry. You wouldn’t want a lightweight cat actually knocking your lamp over, right?!