The Horse Costume Problem
How the future is accidentally invented
inventions-innovation
The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen
In 1960, a team at the University of Illinois released the first version of their PLATO “computerized instruction system,” a network of what would eventually be thousands of computer terminals connected to large mainframe computers.
Nobody Redesigned the Allen Key for 115 Years. Here’s the Fix. - Yanko Design
Some of the most personal furniture purchases come with the least personal tool. You bring home a crib, spread the pieces across the floor, and end up pressing a skinny metal Allen key into your fingertips while trying to line up the next bolt. It slips. Your hand cramps. The…
The Graphene Age
Making the miracle from Manchester
Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age
Missing from the archaeological record, fiber innovations like string played a huge role in the daily lives of our ancestors. Researchers are working to weave together new insights from the traces they left behind.
The Bone-Marrow-Transplant Revolution
Finding a matched donor has always been the major challenge. A drug has solved that problem.
The kill switch for harmful genes - Works in Progress Magazine
What if instead of editing a gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?
The Company Riding the Thirteenth Channel
There is a hidden track baked into almost every blockbuster, a frozen eight-dollar toll, and a company the market still calls a shaky-chair vendor.
Cure all diseases
Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing.
The Horseshoe crab, vampirism and medical engineering
Biomimicry: Engineering inspired by nature
Reaction Engines vs. SpaceX
Re-entry & surviving it
Nuclear Space Propulsion 2: The scary stuff
Nuclear Thermal Rockets
How Carbon Fibre Conquered The World
Just weave and add resin!
Brain medicines
A Goat-Headed Robot With a Chainsaw Is Actually a Great Idea - Yanko Design
The first time I saw Threehalves, I did a double take. Seven feet tall, four-legged, with a horned goat head and glowing eyes, it looks less like a piece of modern engineering and more like something conjured from ancient mythology. It's the kind of design that makes you laugh…
Technology and the Rise of Great Powers
A novel theory of how technological revolutions affect the rise and fall of great powers
Kelly Slater’s Shock Wave
William Finnegan writes about the best surfer in history, who made a machine that creates perfect conditions on demand. Will his invention democratize surfing or despoil it?
Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
How should we think about Starship?
What started as the Mars Colonial Transporter risks becoming a humble space truck
A Chinese scientist built a sodium battery that charges in 4 minutes. It could break China’s 75% lithium dependence.
Lu Yaxiang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Physics, has spent a decade making sodium-ion batteries commercially viable. In April, he received China’s Youth May Fourth Medal, the country’s top honour for outstanding achievers under 35, for developing…
From pottery to hypersonic power
Weaving with stone: The super-ceramic revolution
The blood cancer that became solvable - Works in Progress Magazine
Multiple myeloma is brutal. We may finally have a cure, but American regulatory inertia means that it was discovered abroad.
The invention of buses - Works in Progress Magazine
Engineering the disposable diaper - Works in Progress Magazine
The Sigmoids Won't Save You
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Turbine Tuesday: The 60-Year Promise of Supercritical CO2
Why the 'world changing fluid' keeps ~almost~ working
Bizarre ‘compleximers’ break the rules of both glass and plastic
Scientists thought glassy substances had to be either moldable or impact-resistant—but compleximers are both
Scientists Are Finally Unlocking a Cancer Treatment’s Full Potential
CAR-T cell therapy, originally developed for cancer, is showing ever more promise as a treatment for autoimmune diseases.
Opinion | We Are on the Cusp of a Revolution in Rare Disease Treatment
We can’t let the most important medical achievement of a decade slip through our fingers.
The Joby Air Taxi Targets Long Range With Hydrogen
Powertrain chief Jon Wagner explains why integration beats invention
Living Heart Project Builds Virtual Twins for Medicine
Physics-based digital models of human organs can predict clinical outcomes and provide better guidance for lifesaving procedures.
Lumotive Debuts ‘World’s First 2D Photonic Beamforming Chip’
The startup's programmable chip uses a metasurface architecture to control light without moving parts.
A brief history of instant coffee - Works in Progress Magazine
The method works by warming the air around the coffee rather than the coffee itself.
Morgenthaler’s process involved passing hot water through multiple columns of ground coffee to create a coffee extract, which was then spray dried.
Microbubbles - Works in Progress Magazine
The Age of the Amplifier
As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.
This Self-Balancing Electric Bike Rolls on a Single Giant Ball and Moves in Any Direction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXzH9BSd5IU James Bruton’s latest creation stands out even among his many engineering oddities and builds on the kind of inventive spirit that we saw in his earlier two-ball omnidirectional bike. The British engineer turned full-time YouTuber has…
The Legibility Problem
What happens in a world where AIs make scientific discoveries that humans cannot understand?
My concern is not whether we can “see” inside these new models, but whether we will even understand — or be able to control — what comes out of them.
Scientific discoveries must eventually intersect with material reality to have any utility. They must be instantiated as therapies, materials, and public policies
The Machine That Made China Rich
Thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video! Download unlimited stock media at one set price with Storyblocks: https://storyblocks.com/PrimalSpaceDid you...
The wonder of modern drywall
How gypsum changed construction
What We Get Wrong About Technology
Blade Runner (1982) is a magnificent film, but there’s something odd about it. The heroine, Rachael, seems to be a beautiful young woman. In reality, she’s a piece of technology — an organic robot …
The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated.
barcode
The Rarest of All Diseases Are Becoming Treatable
This year, gene-editing technology was customized to fix mutations in a single patient’s genes for the first time.
Helion gives behind-the-scenes tour of secretive fusion prototype
In the city of Everett, inside a vault built with thick concrete blocks is Polaris, a machine that could change the world.
Meet the man building a starter kit for civilization
Marcin Jakubowski is compiling a DIY set of society’s essential machines and making it open-source.
How Common Is Accidental Invention?
One of the most important inventions of the 19th century was mauve dye, the first synthetic aniline dye.
Moving fast in hardware: how the iPod shipped in 6 months | Hunter Scott
it’s clear what laid at the heart of Apple’s engineering success: design re-use. Practically every part of the system was already de-risked.
The death rays that guard life
We disinfect water before we drink it. Why don’t we disinfect the air before we breathe it?