Climbing

At small climbing centers, regular visitors can quickly exhaust all the available runs. At a new facility in the US city of Austin, Texas, which is said to be the world's largest bouldering center, climbing sections are rotated twice a week to create new runs.

Wheelchair users have had to live with the fact that stairs, sharp curbs and doorsteps either required assistance to maneuver, or made access to some locations impossible. The tracked TopChair-S, however, is designed to change that.

​Although they aren't as common as flying drones, we are seeing an increasing number of wall-climbing robots. What isn't so common, however, are devices like the VertiGo, which both drives on the ground and climbs up walls.

A rock climbing bivy is a cot that a mountain climber fastens to a cliff face, where they proceed to spend the night. Although you might not want to push things quite that far, you can now get the same sort of thrill by staying in a Skylodge Adventure Suite.

Moving between the levels of a building is not something people tend to think of as anything other than perfunctory. We rarely think, for example, about whether our going upstairs or downstairs is adequately fun. A new installation at the OK Center for Contemporary Art however, does just that.

Four years ago, we heard about how Stanford scientists were developing a gecko-inspired system that would allow humans to climb up vertical surfaces. Now, DARPA has announced the first successful demonstration of that system, known as Z-Man.

Climbing gyms don't usually look anything like real mountains, but a German company has a plan to construct Berlin-area climbing "mountains" out of an artificial rock material that looks and feels more authentic.

Cultured arachnid fans are in for a treat with a new artwork from Vienna-based collective Numen. String is a 3D grid of ropes suspended within a huge inflated cube. Users can enter the exhibit and clamber their way around its intricate mesh in a blank and disorientating environment.

So, yep, a performance-monitoring device for yet another sport has been created. A University of Newcastle tech spin-off has announced a system known as ClimbAX – and as its name implies, it's designed for climbers.

Parkour is all about hurling yourself quickly and efficiently past whatever obstacles are in your path while maintaining as much momentum as possible. It's a challenge for humans, so how would robots fare?

A new robotic vehicle that moves on wheels is able to negotiate stairs.

The Honey Badger backpack is a durable composite pack that doubles as a bicycle pannier.