The first automated grocery store in the United States appeared in 1937. At Keedoozle, each customer received a key bearing a roll of paper tape. At a series of display cases, she’d insert her key at each item she wanted and press a button, which would punch a pattern of holes in the tape. At the cashier, an electronic “translator” would total the price and release the requested items through chutes onto a conveyor belt. The customer would wait in a lounge until her packed items were delivered to her.

Founder Clarence Saunders claimed that the automated store required only seven employees, half as many as a traditional supermarket. This permitted a 7.5 percent profit on prices 10 percent lower than competing stores, he said.

The system wasn’t entirely automated — humans kept the stocks filled and bagged the orders — and it could handle only cans and cartons, not fresh meat or vegetables. And it tended to founder when the store got busy. But historians also say that the concept was too far ahead of its time — the American public just wasn’t ready for automated shopping. Only three stores were ever built, and the last closed in 1949.

(Thanks, Abi.)

In the 1980s, when Nicolae Ceauşescu set about razing central Bucharest, engineer Eugeniu Iordăchescu was despairing the threat to the area’s iconic churches when he saw a waiter carrying a tray of drinks. “I saw that the secret of the glasses not falling was the tray,” he said, “so I started trying to work out how to apply a tray to the building.”

He hit on a method of digging beneath the buildings to insert reinforced concrete supports, then rolling them to new locations using hydraulic levers and mechanical pulleys. Over a period of six years, his team saved more than a dozen churches and other buildings that the Communists had planned to destroy; the 800-ton Schitul Maicilor, above, was moved almost 270 yards from its 18th-century foundations.

The technique Iordăchescu pioneered is still in use today. “He was very proud of his achievements, and even in retirement he spent a lot of time improving and helping others to push the method further on,” his son Nicholas told the New York Times. “He will be remembered for a one-of-a-kind contribution to developing this technology.”

(Thanks, Jason.)

The Janken robot created in 2012 at the University of Tokyo’s Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory has a 100 percent win rate against human opponents in playing rock paper scissors.

How? Using a high-speed camera, it recognizes within a millisecond which shape its opponent’s hand is beginning to form and chooses the appropriate winning shape.

What’s the fastest shed in the world? One would think it’s a very broad tie, but in fact the record is held by Oxfordshire mechanic Kevin Nicks, who in 2015 mounted a steel frame and wooden bodywork on a broken-down Volkswagen Passat, hoping it might be used in marketing schemes. When the vehicle surpassed 80 mph in a speed trial, Nicks invested in a new suspension system and an Audi RS4 engine in a bid for greater speed, and he’s now broken his own record twice — most recently he reached 114.7 mph in 2018.