Overnight travel is freaking amazing. I've taken overnight trains and buses in the 'States, Europe and Asia and always loved it. To be unconscious during the boring parts of...
So OpenAI has unveiled GPT-4o, their latest flagship AI. The AI can not only speak—in a disturbingly lifelike way, complete with surprise, chuckles and the like—but can use...
A pickup truck isn't anything without tie-down gear, which all have their pain points. Ratchet straps are the go-to for hauling larger items, but they're overkill for smaller...
As infrastructure spread across America in the 20th century, we learned that bridges periodically need to be inspected. Having a look at the road surface was easy; just shut...
Years ago The New Yorker had a reader contest, asking you to add one letter to a word, to make a new word that made sense. The amusing entry I remember was "giraffiti," meant...
I started out wanting to make fun of this thing, but realize that's my climate-controlled-workplace privilege. I'm lucky I don't work in torching conditions anymore; years ago...
I've seen lots of craftspersons who can join wood to wood. But I haven't seen many who can join wood to stone, with this kind of precision: That's the Wabi-Sabi...
What can you do with tiny offcuts of wood? For Brooklyn-based furniture maker Richard Haining, the scraps of others are the raw materials for his STACKED series of...
This Wind bench, by Belgian designer Peter Donders, combines digital fabrication with hand craftsmanship. Made of birch plywood, the pieces were produced in slices on a CNC...
At Johns Hopkins University, a Mechanical Engineering class was given a difficult assignment: To silence an off-the-shelf leaf blower, without reducing its...
Years ago on a trip to Death Valley, I slept in a tiny one-man tent. The host had provided a cot inside to elevate the sleeping bag. Although the space was coffin-like,...
Monocab is a new form of transportation that makes use of existing infrastructure. Conceived of by German design engineer Thorsten Försterling, the idea is that rural areas of...
Canfield Scientific, a manufacturer of imaging systems for science and healthcare applications, wanted to refresh their Vectra H1 handheld system. They contacted industrial...
Here's what we looked at this week: A man was ordered by the city to build a visual screen to conceal his boat. He complied. This incredible mobile bridge, designed...
By Oregon Forest Research Institute, Nine years ago, OFRI installed timelapse cameras in a reforested area on private timberland in Oregon’s Coast Range to capture the growth...