Teotihuacan, an ancient, abandoned city about an hour north of Mexico City, was once one of the largest cities in the world. It collapsed centuries ago (thanks either to an internal uprising or foreign invaders, depending on who you ask), but it’s never been completely deserted, since the ruins have always been a magnet for squatters, archeologists, and hordes of tourists. More »
Humans have been digging in the Earth since the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution, some 12,000 years ago. While the earliest agriculturalists had to make do with shovels crudely fashioned from animal bones—shoulder blades were a popular choice—later material advances (namely stone, wood, and metal) led to the development of modern shovel designs and their specialized heads are purpose-built, like spades for digging in solid soil and shovels for moving loose material like coal or grain. More »
Designing toys takes sketching and planning and imagining, sure. But what’s even more impressive is the actual making—still a much more industrial and craftsmanlike process than you’d imagine. It requires, essentially, a whole factory condensed into a few rooms of Hasbro’s headquarters outside of Providence, Rhode Island. More »
As a fashionable internet denizen, you do not use a homepage, probably. You open a new browser window or tab, and you’re met with your Chrome apps, or Safari favorites, or whatever the hell Firefox is doing now. And if you do have one, it’s probably a legacy media hub like MSN, AOL or Yahoo, or a search page like Google or Bing. But what if the web found a way for a landing page to be useful again? More »
The mechanical watch is one of the few remaining practical, day-to-day items that has remained unchanged in many ways since its inception hundreds of years ago. Of course, materials and production methods have come a long way since the seventeenth century, but if you crack open a modern mechanical watch, you’ll find something that looks a lot like what you’d find if you peered inside a watch built 150 years ago. And this is true whether you’re looking at an $80 Seiko or an $800,000 Patek Phillipe. More »
While we had previously seen the stunning thermal images that helped police confirm that Boston Marathon bombing suspect was indeed hiding in a boat, under a tarp, in Watertown, Massachusetts, now the raw video of the camera in action has been released. More »
How do you spend your lunch break? Taking a turn round the park? Checking Facebook? Catching up on the work you should’ve done in the morning? All of these options have their place, but here’s something else you can be doing: Making money. More »
There was no small amount of technology that went into the capture of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev, but perhaps none was more impressive than the helicopter-mounted, forward-looking infrared camera that confirmed once and for all that there was someone hiding in a boat in Watertown, Massachusetts. And that he was almost certainly Dzokhar Tsarnaev. More »
The second suspect in the brutal Boston Marathon bombings has been apprehended, after five days of uncertainty and fear. And while all credit for Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s capture goes to the men and women of the many, many agencies that spent the last week tracking him down, technology played as prominent a role as it ever has in a time of national crisis. More »
Gin just happens to be one of our favorite beverages. It’s a versatile spirit with tons of variation between brands. And we were fortunate enough to see how two of the great gin producers of the ages—Beefeater and Plymouth—create it from scratch. More »
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