The Arc’tryx MO/GO Hiking Pants come with a built-in exoskeleton powered by powerful motors that can increase the wearer’s leg strength by 40 percent and make them feel 30 pounds lighter.

Motor-powered exoskeletons have been a reality for years, especially in the medical field, but not so much in the leisure department. That is about to change, as outdoor brand Arc’teryx and Google spinoff Skip recently teamed up to create the “world’s first powered pants”. Called MO/GO (short for ‘mountain goat’), the innovative garment is more than a piece of clothing; it comes with bespoke carbon fiber support structures that feed power from integrated AI-controlled motors at the knees to the wearer’s leg muscles during ascents and decreasing pressure on their knees during descents. Marketed as a mobility device, MO/GO pants are designed to make hiking more accessible to people who may not have the endurance for it.

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Measuring about 1 millimeter in size, the oribatid mite or armored mite is recognized as the strongest creature on Earth. It can lift over 1,000 times its own body weight.

For us humans, being able to lift even double our own body weight is an impressive athletic achievement, but that pales in comparison to the strength displayed by creatures hundreds of times smaller. The Asian weaver ant, for example, can lift 100 times its own body weight, while the dung beetle can lift up to 400 times its body weight. That’s like a human being able to lift tens of tonnes, you know, Superman stuff. But even these impressive insects don’t come close to the strongest creature on the face of the planet, the tiny oribatid mite, which, thanks to an extremely strong exoskeleton, can lift a whopping 1,180 times its own body weight.

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Known as the “Brooklyn Transformer”, Peter Kokis has become a very recognizable figure in New York, thanks to an arsenal of impressive robot exoskeletons made out of all sorts of everyday items.

A former military pilot, Peter Kokis started making his now-famous exoskeletons after joking around with an ex-girlfriend. At one point, during a conversations, she told him “you’re too stiff, you need to loosen up and do something weird,” and he decided she was right. Using his experience in aviation, he started piecing together things he had around the house into an impressive exoskeleton that became known as Squid Boy. But that was only the beginning, as over the years he made wearable costumes inspired by the likes of The Transformers, The Terminator or the Xenomorphs of Alien.

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Anton Maltsev, an ex-member of Russia’s Special Forces and a Kossovo War veteran, was recently pardoned for turning his Moscow apartment into a veritable forces chuck full of traps, firearms and even a DIY titanium exoskeleton he used to fight off debt collectors.

Maltsev’s unusual story first made news headlines in 2016, when military bomb disposal experts were called to break down his apartment door, after debt collectors failed and triggered a pepper-spray trap in their attempt. Inside the apartment, the experts found several tripwire traps, reinforced doors, an AK47, several semi-automatic firearms, numerous pistols, a grenade launched, and eight kilos of explosives. But the most startling discovery was a home-made exoskeleton made up of titanium plates, aluminum, and featuring a bullet-proof helmet and vest. It was this contraption that earned him the nickname “Russian Iron Man”.

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