Darkfin Gloves and Swimming Fingers differ in their aesthetics, but both serve the same purpose: to turn your hands into swimming machines, much like swim fins do for your feet. Each broader movement requires slightly more push, but gives you a lot of pull within the water.

The clear silicone variety are lightweight, translucent and simple to slip on or off, giving you frog-like traction when you pull yourself through the water. Great for surfers and divers.

The Darkfin Glove set is a bit more intensive (and expensive), but works on similar principles, letting you grab more water with each stroke and propel yourself even faster below the waves. They boast comfort and flexibility, as well as a 70% increase in swimming power.

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If you ever wanted to experience the pure effortless joy of a dolphin cruising through the ocean, the X2 Sport Underwater Jet Pack system will remake you into a sea-worthy mammal.

Six miles per hour may not sound like much, but it is twice the world record speed of an unenhanced human swimmer. The devices strap to your pack and arms, propelling you gracefully and without additional human power through the water.

Add scuba gear or other breathing accessories and you can dive deep and fast. A handheld mechanism lets you grip to go forward and speed up, aiming your arms where you want to travel, while your back carries the majority of the mechanism.

Hopefully some future iteration of this device will add foot-worn additions to the equation, potentially further bolstering speed and giving you more dynamic and omnidirectional control to boot. For now, the beta-tested version is being developed at a steep price tag of $1,400, so you may want to rent before you aim to own.

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So tiny it can fit on the tip of your finger, this remarkably agile and multifunctional little bot assembles not only assembles itself but also goes on to dive underwater, carry objects twice its weight, burrows into the ground and then degrades on demand, leaving only a magnet in its wake.

A just under two square centimeters, the Untethered Miniature Origami Robot is powered by a neodymium magnet and two pairs of electromagnetic coils that in turn create magnetic fields aiding the robot’s movements and transformations. Indeed, the magnet is not even dragging the robot around, but rather working with momentum and asymmetries to ‘walk’ the legs and create other actions from gravitational imbalances.

As such devices become ever smaller, as well as increasingly programmable and autonomous, there are many potential applications, including ultra-small medical devices that can target cancer cells or clean clogged arteries within the human body.

Via Spectrum: “From a flat sheet with a magnet on it, their robot folds itself up in just a few seconds, is immediately ready to zip around on land or water driven by magnetic fields, and then when you’ve run out of things to do with it, drive it into a tank of acetone and it’ll dissolve. This is the first time that a robot has been able to demonstrate a complete life cycle like this. The other advantages of using a folded robot instead of just a magnet include the ability to float, as well as the ability to more efficiently perform tasks like moving objects or digging. And this isn’t the only design that you can use, of course: you can optimize for whatever task you’re trying to accomplish. This particular one is more of a generalist.”

The post Self-Folding Origami Robot Runs, Swims, Digs & Dissolves first appeared on Gajitz.