It's a tabletop version of London colour-coded for architects. In this view of the interactive model of the city, unveiled yesterday at The Building Centre in London, red and yellow sections represent sightlines – restricted areas where construction cannot take place to preserve views of famous landmarks such as St Paul's Cathedral. The 12.5-metre-long reconstruction, built by design company Pipers over five months, reproduces more than 85 square kilometres of the city. One-tenth of its 170,000 buildings were constructed recently enough to have existing digital versions that could be used to fabricate scaled-down copies with a 3D-printer. Older buildings, however, had to be laser-cut or fashioned by hand, at a cost of about £250,000, before the city's landscape was assembled with the help ofOrdnance Survey, the UK's mapping agency. The final model contains many elements that are accurate down to the nearest centimetre. (Image: NLA/Paul Raftery, Pic 2 Nils Jorgensen/REX ...

Mighty things come in small packages. The little robots in this video can haul things that weigh over 100 times more than themselves. The super-strong bots – built by mechanical engineers at Stanford University in California – will be presented next month at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Seattle, Washington. The secret is in the adhesives on the robots' feet. Their design is inspired by geckos, which have climbing skills that are legendary in the animal kingdom. The adhesives are covered in minute rubber spikes that grip firmly onto the wall as the robot climbs. When pressure is applied, the spikes bend, increasing their surface area and thus their stickiness. When the robot picks its foot back up, the spikes straighten out again and detach easily. The bots also move in a style that is borrowed from biology. Like an inchworm, one pad scooches the robot forward while the other stays in place to support the heavy load. This helps the robot avoid fall...

Electrodes attached to legs can guide people wherever you want them to go via an app. Welcome to the bizarre world of electro-stimulation For a few days last summer, a handful of students walked through a park behind the University of Hannover in Germany. Each walked solo, but followed the same route as the others: made the same turns, walked the same distance. This was odd, because none of them knew where they were going. Instead, their steps were steered from a phone 10 paces behind them, which sent signals via bluetooth to electrodes attached to their legs . These stimulated the students' muscles, guiding their steps without any conscious effort. Max Pfeiffer of the University of Hannover was the driver. His project directs electrical current  into the students' sartorius, the longest muscle in the human body, which runs from the inside of the knee to the top of the outer thigh. When it contracts, it pulls the leg out and away from the body. To steer his test subj...