David Cope didn’t set out to make anyone mad. In 1980, the composer envisioned a tool to help cure his creative block: a machine that could keep track of all the sounds and loose threads running through his mind, find similarities, and produce an entire piece of music inspired by it. So he built it.

The finale of Star Trek: Discovery gave us a short glimpse at the most legendary ship in the entire Starfleet: the Enterprise, ten years before the original Star Trek television show. Befitting the different visual style of Discovery, the ship looks a little different than we remembered, but that apparently wasn’t…

Exploring the limits of type design, Tokyo-based designer Kosuke Takahashi has developed Braille Neue, an attempt to combine Braille with the English and Japanese alphabets.

In the early 18th century, German chemist Johann Jacob Diesbach was at work in a laboratory trying to make a red pigment out of cochineal insects, the tiny bugs whose extract dyes everything from food to lipstick. Diesbach hypothesized that he could combine the carmine extract with alum, iron sulfate, and potash to…

The plan to 3D-print a bridge in mid-air was always bonkers. How could a technology best known for creating flimsy prototypes and personalized action figures be used for permanent construction projects? Well, the team at MX3D in Amsterdam just answered all of the hard questions and revealed it: the world’s first…

AMSTERDAM—Walking into De Ceuvel feels a bit like walking into a post-apocalyptic utopia. A dozen or so houseboats litter the ground around a gathering place, where a rusted hull has been cut in half and converted into benches. Slanted solar panels pepper the rooftops of structures built out of recycled materials, all…

Just when you thought that the fidget spinner fad had gone the way of the dodo bird, hoverboards, and 3D TVs, a Japanese company, MinebeaMitsumi Inc., known for manufacturing electronic components, and Mitsubishi, used 50 engineers to design and build a near-flawless fidget spinner over a six-month period that…

There are no practical applications yet for AR—your mom isn’t using it to navigate a grocery store—but AR has become wildly popular in the tech community. Slap AR on a pitch and get some VC funding. Or, slap AR on the side of a product and bask in the AR buzz from tech publications. Bose, a company known for nice…

Just north of Amsterdam’s most famous canals, there’s an island of fat bobbing up and down in the sea by a wharf in a former shipyard. Right now it’s the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and weighs a metric ton, but its creators, Mike Thompson and Arne Hendriks, say it will be big enough to walk on one day. Thompson and…

When Essential debuted the first-ever notched display on the PH-1, it was a bold, divisive statement about smartphone design. Then Apple put one on the iPhone X, and while some people still didn’t get it, the sentiment around the notch shifted from confusion to curious appreciation, or even adoration. But now, after…

When you think of a superhero—not a specific character, just the idea of a superhero—chances are he or she is wearing a cape. Capes are one of, if not the, most iconic pieces of superhero iconography around. That is, unless you look at the glut of live-action superheroes we have on TV and film right now, where there…

There was a time when merely uttering “WWW.” caused investor eyeballs to blink dollar signs. Now, that excitement seems long gone. The digital space is near fully colonized. The .coms have been bought. Our grandparents are now on Facebook. If there’s a market to monetize, it’s been monetized.

Although clearly a clever artist in his own right, James Nolan Gandy shows that even the artistically-challenged can produce a masterpiece with some clever engineering. But just as impressive as Gandy’s drawing machines is this timelapse of one in action that makes it appear to draw faster than it actually moves.

As much as USB-C is a vast improvement over the USB connectors of yesteryear, we’re still bummed that it replaced the MagSafe connector on the recent generation of Apple’s MacBooks. We’re not getting any less clumsy, but these magnetic breakaway plug adapters look like they could ease the fear of tripping over our…

Human anatomy is something better learned by studying detailed models, or actual people. Mastering the ins and outs of the human body isn’t the easiest thing to learn from a textbook, although once you hit the last page of Taschen’s latest tome, you’ll have a pretty solid understanding of the human skeleton, having…

Steve Jobs was a notorious case-hater. He once looked at Wired’s Steven Levy with disgust when the journalist pulled out an iPod with a case on it. “I think stainless steel looks beautiful when it wears,” Jobs said. For my own reasons, I’ve never used a case on my iPhone. The glass on my $1,200 iPhone X, however, does…

If you’ve even set foot in a big city, it’s almost definitely happened to you. Your feet are aching and you want to take a seat for just five minutes—maybe check your phone or finish off your coffee. But the only thing around are window sills with huge spikes jutting out of them, or a “leaning” bench that doesn’t take…