In our real-world cyberpunk dystopia, paper already feels a bit outmoded in a lot of life. It’s all screens, all the time. So it’s interesting to examine how sci-fi handles the classic writing surface. And in Star Trek, as it turns out, there’s a surprising amount of it.
Do you remember when everyone thought the arrival of the iPad heralded the demise of E Ink-based devices? Even yours truly far prefers the experience of reading books on the bright, full-color LCD display of the iPad Mini. Consequently I’ve spent a lot of time questioning the need for e-ink devices like Amazon Kindle…
As a rule, we rarely post news about printers here on Gizmodo because, as a rule, they’re mind-numbingly boring. But Casio’s new Mofrel system does something truly innovative: it can add 3D textures to your printouts, turning flat paper into faux leather, stone, wood, and even simulate embossed stitched fabrics.
You’ve probably never given much thought to the design of a pop-up birthday card after first opening it, but you will after watching this compilation of Peter Dahmen’s creations. He somehow manages to turn sheets of paper into intricately engineered architectural masterpieces.
How many times have you stumbled in the dark, trying to locate a flashlight, only to discover the batteries inside it are dead? It’s an inconvenience in the middle of the night, but a genuine problem in an emergency, which is why this roll-up paper flashlight from Nendo seems like a brilliant idea for when the power…
Artist Felix Semper’s latest work, a bust of Notorious B.I.G. he calls Big Poppa, looks like it was carved from a giant chunk of heavy stone. But it’s actually made from thousands of sheets of paper that have been all glued together— allowing the sculpture to be stretched and elongated, but still able to return to its…
Probably the suckiest thing about science is the fact that lots of the time you can’t read the research yourself. If it’s not open access and you’re interested, either you shell out 35 bucks for a pdf, email someone asking for it, or settle with listening to some dummy like me interpret the results peppered with…
A pipe organ can cost more than $200,000 and weigh thousands of pounds. Not this instrument. The paper organ built by master craftsman Aliaksei Zholner costs and weights only a fraction of that—and it works just like the real thing.
Mark this day in your calendars, because today is the day you start demanding more from your bulk copy paper than just a bright white finish.
Professor Kokichi Sugihara is a wizard, but he doesn’t cast spells or pull rabbits out of hands. His brand of sorcery involves creating simple paper objects that look like they’re bending the fabric of space. In reality they’re just incredibly clever optical illusions, but it doesn’t take much to break the human brain.
If you still believe that a hand-written letter carries more emotional weight than an auto-generated response to a text message, these star-filled envelopes will even let you send an entire galaxy to your friends and loved ones—if they peer inside.
Gold is so malleable that a single gram of it can be stretched into a strip nearly two miles long. A tiny little coin can be pressed into a 0.0001-millimeter-thin golden rectangular sheet the size of a tatami mat. So leave it to the talented artisans of Japan to transform a tiny bit of gold into shimmering gold leaf…
If you still keep a small paper notebook tucked away for jotting down quick notes, you might want to consider trading up to this blank deck of cards that’s useful for more than just remembering to buy milk.
Everyone knows that you can’t fold a piece of paper more than seven or eight times (even though the world record is 12). It’s just one of those silly things that stick from elementary school and become law. But what if you were folding aluminum foil? And what if you had the assistance of the almighty hydraulic press?…
After seeing these paper versions of classic video games, I kind of wish I could play them all. Mystery Guitar Man used stop-motion animation and paper cutouts of stock images to recreate games like Donkey Kong, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario Kart, and more. It’s fun to see the video games of our childhood done over in…
This is so cool: National Geographic has put together a neat video composed entirely of paper that gives you a brief primer of London’s history, starting 40,000 years ago.
A book is a very simple thing, right? It’s just a bunch of paper with some scribbles. But if you wanted to make a book from scratch, it’s basically an impossible task. Watch as Andy George from How to Make Everything chops wood, strips papyrus, makes glue from hide, carve out a pencil from a stick, make a brush from…
Despite what you may have learned in school behind your teacher’s back, paper airplanes don’t have to be completely featureless and boring. With the right materials, or these kits from Huntly’s Paper Warplanes, they can actually look like real-life aircraft and still be able to glide across a room.
The real thing can weigh upwards of 600 pounds, but the V8 engine Aliaksei Zholner built would barely register on a scale because it’s only slightly larger than a ping-pong ball and made from nothing but paper and glue.
