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Imagine how cool it would be if buildings weren’t actually constructed above-ground; if instead we lived in a large-scale garden of growing structures where architecture emerged, fully-formed, from the earth. Landed, by Ian Strange, is a somewhat disconcerting sculptural installation outside the Art Gallery of South Australia, that gives the sense we caught a home…
This is story about a man who created—and wore—a fake, bleeding uterus made out of a bladder and goat’s blood. This is also a story about an inventor breaking profound taboos to revolutionize the lives of women. Either way, how a school dropout in India came to invent a cheaper way to make sanitary pads…
Did you know that corn kernels turn to liquid before becoming popcorn? When you heat a kernel, the sealed-in moisture liquifies its starch, the pressure builds, the kernel explodes and the liquid expands as it solidifies in a fraction of a second, resulting in the cell structure you can see above at 250x. SPLOID is…
Do you want to learn how to knit? Sure you do! And, hey, you’re in luck; making a scarf is not as tough as you might think. Here’s how to in a few easy steps. I don’t follow patterns, because I find the endless back-and-forth really meditative, and I don’t like worrying whether I’m going…
The Architizer A+ Awards are open for public voting, and it’s well worth the time to click through and choose your favorites. There are some really great projects—and a few duds—but certainly a wide range of spaces, materials, and building types for just about anyone, from strangely gorgeous parking garages to Romantic and fantastical towers…
Many decades before satellites even existed, a Japanese cartographer named Hatsusaburo Yoshida was drawing cities as though he was floating thousands of feet above them. His vivid, colorful drawings are almost 100 years old now—but they’re just as exciting as they were in 1914. Today would’ve been Yoshida’s 130th birthday. Born in 1884 in Kyoto,…
Data can be boring and confusing, but not when it’s visualized right. That’s why a company called FABMOB is gathering atmospheric information and turning it into real-life 3D printed objects. Here’s how the process works: A FABMOB machine is monitors the Earth, tracking time, location, ambient light, temperature, noise level, humidity, and carbon dioxide and…
In this week’s landscape reads, we rediscover the future of steampunk energy, we walk the radioactive shores of a manmade island in San Francisco, we climb to the top of California’s surreal palm tree economy, and we look back with both amusement and horror at pest control in communist China. The Radioactive Legacy of San…
As we passed from homeroom to homeroom during our formative educational years, it’s understandable that many of us wanted to ensure we left a legacy behind to be remembered by. And that legacy usually came in the form of carving our names and the year into our desks—an act that no longer results in detention…
The interaction of unexpected materials can really mess with your senses, whether through color or texture—or both. That’s definitely the case with photographer Kim Keever’s colorific photos of billowing pigment plumes. At first glance it may seem like you are gazing at some kind of candy-land nuclear blast, or volcanos erupting on an alien planet.…
I don’t know how the hell someone came up with the idea of racing a 2015 Subaru WRX STI against a Stick Bomb, but they should give her or him a medal.
Admit it: You’ve always wanted to ride in a private plane. Imagine stretching out your legs and listening to music without headphones. What luxury! Too bad, you probably can’t afford it. But, with Flytenow, you just might. Think of it as a Lyft for airplanes. Flytenow aims to connect pilots looking to rack up hours…
Andrew Emond, a Montreal-based photographer, amateur geographer, and DIY gonzo spelunker of the city’s sewers and lost rivers, has just re-launched his excellent website, Under Montreal. The revamped site now comes complete with a fascinating, interactive map of the city’s subterranean streams, documenting Montreal’s invisible rivers for all to see. “Beneath Montreal, Canada,” Emond’s site…
Scandinavians are great with languages, but Finn-Swede smoccahontas isn’t speaking any foreign tongue in this video, even while it sounds like it. She’s just making up most of the words and make it sound like she speaks them perfectly. Having travelled through almost all of these countries, I’ve to admit that she really nails it.…
In 1989 the director of Back to the Future II went on TV and declared that hoverboards were real. “They’ve been around for years, it’s just that parents’ groups have not let the toy manufacturers make them,” Robert Zemeckis insisted. “But we got our hands on some and we put them in the movie.” This,…
When you’re working with tiny nanoparticles, you need extremely delicate tools. Like, say, tweezers that can manipulate particles 1,000 times thinner than a human hair without physically touching them. That’s exactly what researchers at the Institute of Photonic Sciences have come up with: optical nanotweezers that use light to move tiny particles in three dimensions.…
Wearable technology is a pretty busy buzzword these days, but some of the coolest inventions take the idea well beyond some gadget that lets you read email on your wrist. Wearable technology can actually be life-changing for some people. Consider, for instance, what these shoes can do for the blind. The world’s first-ever smartshoe is…
The Second Avenue Subway is more than 80 years in the making. Some said it would never be done. Yet, deep underneath Manhattan this spring, the final framework is being laid for a system that will carry millions of commuters through the city—and it looks downright primordial. The MTA sent photographer Patrick Cashin into the…
This is Roku’s brand new streaming stick. It’s only $50 (half the price of the last version), and it’s ready to pop into your TV right out of the box. Available in April, the stick plugs right into your TV’s HDMI port and comes with a remote and access to more than 1,000 different channels.…
This is the winning project to expandone of the oldest youth hotels in Germany, located in central Munich. Looking at its interior, it now feels like a Star Trek space academy. According to the architects, its design promotes a communal experience and the “established traditions of simple traveling, youthful curiosity and the thirst for encounter.”…
