Toys

Scientists have converted a children's "drinking bird" toy into a tool that generates usable amounts of electricity. The generator could one day be utilized to power a wide variety of small electronic devices, both indoors and outside.

Chinese company Unitree has opened pre-orders on its second-gen robot dog companion. The Go2 can follow you around at jogging speeds, perform some wild gymnastic feats, and even talk to you through a GPT-enabled system that writes code on the fly.

The Little Car Company takes a break from shrinking real cars into kid-size creations to do the opposite. It grows the classic 1980s Tamiya Wild One R/C car into a real-life, street-legal electric buggy. The Wild One MAX goes on sale this week.

Bugatti blew the Pebble Beach crowd away this summer with the all-new 1,600-hp W16 Mistral. This month, it announces the Mistral's companion – a classically styled Bugatti Baby II Carbon Edition kid's car available exclusively to Mistral buyers.

Minnesota company Upper Story has sent us its Turing Tumble, a fascinating educational toy that quietly tricks kids into inventing binary logic computers using nothing more than tiny marbles dropping through a series of clicky-clacky plastic pieces.

The first project from Teenage Engineering was a 2007 art installation comprising 22 wooden dolls that formed a singing ensemble. The absolut choir has now inspired the creation of a smaller collection that can voice a bunch of classic songs.

Robot pets have been a sci-fi staple for decades, and in recent years we’ve seen a glut of them with varying success. The latest is Loona, a quite advanced-looking bot with a lot of tricks up its sleeves and a personality straight out of a Disney movie.

Many readers may fondly recall building rubber-band-powered balsa wood model airplanes. While the things were kinda cool, they didn't fly for long, nor could they be remotely controlled. Such is not the case, however, with the new Tornado Updraft 12.

When you played with action figures, you probably tried picturing yourself having the same adventures they were. Well, doing so is about to become easier, as Hasbro is offering to a put a 3D-printed miniature copy of your face on one of its figures.

Back in 2013, California-based startup Shark Wheel hit Kickstarter with a very odd-looking cube-shaped skateboard wheel. Now the company has supersized the design for a pair of funky electric cars for kids – the Shark SUV and the Shark UTV.

Ferrari plans to sell scale replicas of the fabled 1950s 250 Testa Rossa supercar, all built to exacting standards with hand-beaten aluminum bodywork, a sophisticated electric drivetrain, suspension modeled on the original ... and a $US109,000 price tag.

Lego has been taking steps toward more sustainable practices and has just revealed the first prototype of its classic brick element crafted from recycled plastic that meets the company's quality and safety requirements.