What's better at being a wheel than ... a wheel?

That is not a rhetorical question or a Zen kōan or the start to an awesome joke (sorry). Inventor David Patrick, an avid skateboarder, stumbled (or, you know, skated) onto a way to reinvent the wheel as something that he claims is better than the tradition cylindrical model -- something faster, more stable, and more ground-gripping. Its inspiration, Patrick says, "came from a cube." He calls his creation the "SharkWheel," and he has patented the invention -- and is now raising money for its production on Kickstarter. (A week into the campaign, the modified wheel has taken in almost double the amount of its original $10,000 funding goal.)

So what is the SharkWheel, exactly? And how is it possible that a cube -- an object defined, after all, by its 90-degree angles -- would inspire an object whose whole point is its lack of points?

It comes down to the materials used to modify the wheel. Patrick took six modular tubes, connected into a circle, and then bent them in such a way that, in their contours, "they formed a perfect cube." (The bending, thus mitigating the sharp angles while maintaining fidelity to the cube-like shape, would be key here.) And then he dropped that object on the ground -- and discovered that it rolled. And: it kept rolling.