Do you ever watch your local TV weather report and find yourself overcome with excruciating jealousy due to the fact you don't have your own personal Doppler radar? Of course you do. It's a normal reaction. Why do they get all that neat radar gear while you remain utterly blind to the velocities at which clouds — let alone everyday objects — are speeding to or away from you?

In classic MIT fashion, researchers decided gently squeezing fruit to check its ripeness [insert crude sexual innuendo here] wasn't good enough, so they created a hand-held sensor that detects when fruit is ripening. Oh, and it's affordable too. Show-offs. At least it's more kind to the fruit than this gadget.

The folks at MIT's Media Lab are teaching a robotic arm to spin material into webs, just like a spider would. Why? It's either so robot armies could easily cocoon captured humans a few years from now, or maybe so robots could spin flexible structures that could be attached to existing buildings. Why would we want that? Keep reading.

By day the building is the MIT's Green Building; by night it turned into a giant game of Tetris. Like a normal game of Tetris, players could move, rotate and drop blocks only in this case the blocks being entire windows.