World Records

Racing quadcopters are insanely light, quick and agile, but they're not typically known for their top-speed figures. Mechanical engineer and hobbyist Ryan Lademann builds his own frames to push the limits, and he's now bagged a Guinness World Record.

It seems Rimac has been beaten by its own mighty powertrain. The Rimac-powered Pininfarina Battista electric hypercar has just snatched the production car acceleration records from 0-60-120 mph (and 0-100-200 km/h), and it's set a braking record too.

Croatian electric hypercar manufacturer Rimac has laid claim to the outright EV top speed record, at a blistering 258 mph (412 km/h), putting a 91-mph (146-km/h) gap on the highest speed we can find verifiably recorded for a Tesla Model S Plaid.

Mercedes-AMG lost its Nürburgring production car record in 2021 when the Porsche 911 GT2 RS came roaring back to top the list. But it still had an ace in the hole: the 1,049-hp One hypercar, which has shot past the Porsche for Nürburgring supremacy.

In 2016, the Swiss Grimsel hyper-mini set the Guinness World Record for fastest 0-100 km/h electric car acceleration at 1.513 seconds. Now, GreenTeam from the University of Stuttgart brings the record back to Germany by breaking the 1.5-sec mark.

It goes without saying that the heavier a load an aircraft can carry, the more useful that aircraft becomes. Well, the RG-1-A Alpha has reportedly just broken a record, by "dead-lifting" more weight than any autonomous VTOL has previously managed.

A machine named Cassie has set a Guinness World Record for the 100-meter dash by a bipedal robot, and while it’s far from the blistering pace of the world’s best athletes, it is an impressive demonstration of robotics and engineering.

An electric boat built from the ground up for maximum power has blazed past the 100-mph (161-km/h) barrier at the Lake of the Ozarks, proving the potential of all-electric watercraft and posting a new world record in the process.

Scientists in China have set a new world record for the strongest steady magnetic field ever generated on Earth. The hybrid magnet managed to produce a field measuring 45.22 Tesla (T), which is over a million times stronger than the planet’s own.

Scientists have broken the efficiency record for tandem silicon-perovskite solar cells, surpassing the milestone of 30 percent for the first time. The new record takes the technology beyond the upper limits of silicon alone, using low-cost materials.

Vienna’s Leitz Photographica Auctions celebrated its 20th year in business this week when it sold the camera of the man who invented 35-mm photography for €14,400,000, smashing the previous world record of €2,400,000.

Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission – a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure.