A cute kitten spies a hamster ball and decides that’s where he wants to be. Which is perfect for a YouTube video. -via The Litter Box

Blogger Crabfu really likes Theo Jansen’s enormous kinetic sculptures and toyed around with small models of it powered by different energy sources. It occurred to him that with the right gearing, a hamster exercise sphere could provide locomotion for it. And he was right!

Princess is a tiny little thing, much smaller than what I had imagined and prepared for. I was afriad that her weight wouldn’t be enough to get the ball going. But luckily it all worked out great, and test pilot Princess had no problems getting the strandbeest up to speed.

Link via Make

NOVA has a fantastic feature about historic space suits by Susan K. Lewis, featuring space suits from Project Mercury, Gemini and Apollo as well as those that didn’t make it out of the prototype/design stages. This one above is probably the best one of the bunch:

Perhaps the oddest-looking proposal for lunar exploration was the "gerbil-in-a-ball" approach. Engineers at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Resources Laboratory demonstrated their Spherical Experiment #1 (SX-1) before NASA personnel in late 1964. The large, transparent sphere was designed to give astronauts the ultimate in mobility as they rambled on the lunar surface. The prototype even featured a mini airlock for transporting samples in and out of the sphere.

Link

Link – Thanks Christophe!