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Forget Echo: Alexa Is Built Right Into This Lamp
The voice interfaces of the future may be embedded in the products and appliances all around us.One of the central problems facing designers of any voice-controlled smart hub, from Amazon Echo to...
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MIT's Inflatables Are The Bubble Wrap Of The Future
Aeromorphs, a new way to design inflatable materials, could also change the way we build furniture and design fashion.Robotics aren't the only way to design objects that transform: Just look at a...
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A Digital Exploration Of Nature's Beautiful, Melancholy Sounds
The Great Animal Orchestra is the second best thing to marching into a National Forest with a blindfold on.When we think of the slow death of the natural world, we usually think of it in purely visual...
View ArticleThe Fundamentals Of Computer Science, Explained Through Sand
Once you understand what this machine is doing, you'll understand many of modern computer science's fundamentals.Scattering grains of sand across a stone is one of the oldest and most primitive...
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A Map Of The United Megaregions Of America
New research shows the country isn't divided into states as much as it is divided into megalopolises.The 2016 Elections made many Americans feel, at least philosophically, that the distances that...
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The Google Earth Of Radio Lets You Listen To Any Station In The World
Browse the world's radio stations, just by spinning a globe.Ever since the first commercial station—Pittsburgh's KDKA—began broadcasting on November 2, 1920, radio has functioned as a powerful...
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These Robot Race Cars Make Machine Logic Fun
Sam Labs' DIY Hot Wheels are the perfect foot in the door for the neonate coder.Products that teach kids to code abound. From videogames to board games to robots to throwable smartballs, pretty much...
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What Peter Thiel And Elon Musk Deserve For Christmas (According To An AI)
An AI bot called Gifted recommends presents based upon pictures of the recipient. Its suggestions can be a little hit or miss, though.Finding a last minute Christmas gift can be hard, even if you know...
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Experience The Trippy Life Of An Ancient Redwood
Hug this tree in virtual reality, and you'll be sucked into an experience that can only be described as mind-altering.How do you tell a first-person story about a tree? How do you give its wordless...
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5 Alternatives To American Ballot Design (And Why They Suck, Too)
Could redesigning the ballot system strengthen our democracy? It's complicated.The 2016 presidential election has raised all sorts of questions about the implementation of our election system. How can...
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Why Is The Home Automation Industry So Obsessed With Voice Control?
Companies have anointed voice the OS of home automation. But as Mark Zuckerberg found out designing his own AI butler, voice doesn't always cut it.Some of us have husbands, or wives. Some of us have...
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A New Google Experiment Translates Your Doodles Into Satellite Imagery
Land Lines will match any squiggle you draw to a real place on the planet.The planet is a gloriously varied place, where almost every pattern you can think of can be spotted from the sky—even, say, the...
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Mehmood Khan
For stimulating the world’s taste buds. Website Pepsi makes some of the world’s most familiar-tasting products. Mehmood Khan’s job is to figure out how to develop new, unfamiliar ones. As head of...
View ArticleWhy Converse Decided To Mess With Success
The company just released a major redesign of its iconic Chuck Taylor sneaker. Can it succeed without alienating fans of the original?
View ArticleThis Record-Playing Robot Lets You Spin Vinyl Anywhere
Designed by an Apple alum, the RokBlok is like a Roomba for record lovers. In an ever more mobile world, vinyl–the least mobile audio format this side of a symphonic orchestra–is making a surprise...
View ArticleThe Jony Ive Computer Apple Didn’t Include In Its Monograph
Steve Jobs hated it, but Ive’s Twentieth Anniversary Mac set the stage for everything to come. Perhaps you heard. A few weeks ago, Apple released a book called Designed by Apple in California: a $300...
View Article6 Gifts For Serious Travelers
Because if you can’t give the gift of travel this Christmas, at least you can give the gift of traveling well. Americans make over 405 million business trips per year–and that number is steadily...
View ArticleThere’s No Checkout At Amazon’s AI Grocery Because It Already...
Good luck shoplifting! Amazon created its empire by making online shopping easy. Now, it’s trying to do the same thing in the real world. It has just opened a grocery store in Seattle with no checkout...
View ArticleThe World’s Least Efficient Type Machine Takes 30 Minutes To Write A...
The machine is designer Sooji Lee’s attempt to bring craftsmanship back to the age of digital reproduction. Press down a letter on your keyboard, and your computer will fill your screen with it, in any...
View ArticleA Jigsaw Puzzle As Infinite As The Cosmos
The Infinite Galaxy Map can be added to forever, or at least until you run out of table space. The universe is infinite, at least on a human scale. Comparatively, most jigsaw puzzles only feel...
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