Dyson has some kick-ass vacuum engineers, but even the most passionate vacuum designer needs a little break now and then. That’s why Dyson’s team took a break to work on something completely different for a change of pace: weird, hacked-together flying (and crashing!) machines.
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Forget Mother Nature: when it comes to all matters matter, the sheer ingenuity of the human mind can give rise to some of the most insane—and useful—new materials you’ve ever encountered. Here are five crazy new man-made materials whose uses could be practically limitless.
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You might think of pneumatic tubes as an arcane means of pushing letters around big buildings—but there’s a quiet revolution in the pipeline which could see them challenging digital communication, at least some of the time.
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The Intempo skyscraper in Benidorm, Spain—standing proud in this image—was designed to be a striking symbol of hope and prosperity, to signal to the rest of the world that the city was escaping the financial crisis. Sadly, the builders forgot to include a working elevator.
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The brain’s an incredibly rich and complex computational core that we don’t really fully understand—but that isn’t stopping IBM building a new form of computing architecture around what’s happening inside our heads.
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There’s never a shortage of new experimental forms of memory—but a company called Crossbar has now worked up something called resistive RAM which could wipe the floor with NAND.
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If you’ve ever wanted to master English by using the phrase "My hovercraft is full of eels," then it’s time you learned about the history of the strange vehicle known as the hovercraft. Here is a photographic history of this legendary piece of technology.
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There’s a reason Xbox One comes in that whopping great 1980s VCR style case, and it’s not because some one in authority at Microsoft went mad. It’s for cooling, to help keep it quiet and reliable—and so you can leave it switched on constantly for the next ten years.
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Mass dampers—the gigantic weights designed to counteract swaying in skyscrapers—are usually installed during the construction process. But today, a Japanese real estate company announced plans to install six of the devices atop a 39-year-old building in downtown Tokyo. If all goes well, they could pop up on tall buildings all over the world.
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Windows, our source of life-giving sunlight indoors, are a menace to your electrical bill. In the summer, windows bleed cold and in the winter they ooze heat. To save energy, researchers want to give window panes a circulatory system that could pump in cool, liquid relief when they get too hot.
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