A team of physicists and mathematicians at the Institute for Basic Science's Center for Soft and Living Matter, in South Korea, working with a colleague from the University of Geneva, has developed an algorithm that can be used to find the shape of an object to cause it to roll down a ramp following a desired path.
This is a very cool math application but at the same time you figure this out the first time you roll a cone block down a ramp as a kid (compared to a cylinder block), so these headlines seemingly surprised about scientists discovering these things always seem like “well duh, of course”