It’s not uncommon for a company to redesign its logo over the years (or decades) but for a startup like Spotify who hasn’t been around that long (compared to Microsoft, for instance), it was rather unusual to see the streaming music service ditch its quirky logo for something simpler last month. And with the new logo and icon rolling out to desktop users this week, we just had to find out the who/what/where/when/why. More »
It’s no secret that late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was keen on bringing the company’s technology to the automotive world. In fact, according to longtime Apple board member Mickey Drexler, “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.” Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Shiller, echoed those sentiments during the company’s copyright infringement trial against Samsung, saying there had been discussion of Apple making a vehicle. More »
It’s been 20 years (to the month) since Kowloon Walled City was demolished, but amazingly, it remains one of the most dense structures ever built. As many as 33,000 people crammed into the seven-acre plot, known in Cantonese as “the city of darkness,” before they were relocated in 1993. This diagram, from the South China Morning Post, is an eye-popping reminder of one of the most legendary structures in the world. More »
Financial institutions—and stock exchanges in particular—are usually designed to project an image of stability. Not so in Shenzhen, where OMA‘s new Stock Exchange is set to open in a few weeks. Unlike the staid Neoclassicism of Wall Street, Shenzhen is getting one of the most structurally daring buildings of the century: an 820-foot tower than anchors one of the largest architectural cantilevers ever built. More »
Graphene is touted as being the supermaterial to beat all supermaterials—but not so fast! Researchers have discovered a weakness that occurs in many sheets of graphene that renders it half as strong as we thought. More »
CISPA, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or “the worst privacy disaster our country has ever faced” has just passed through the House of Representatives with an astounding majority of 288 to 127. More »
Transformers. There’s maybe no more iconic toy, especially if you’re a child of the 80s and 90s. And while the memories of making them shapeshift are indelible, the process of actually building one from scratch is far more involved (or exactly as involved, if you spent your entire childhood dreaming of this) as you’d imagine. More »
The Amerithrax case of 2001, in which letters harboring Anthrax spores were delivered to media outlets and a pair of US Senators’ offices, killed five people and sickened another 17. In the wake of these attacks, the US Postal Service (USPS) installed a system of electronic noses in mail processing facilities around the country designed to sniff out the deadly bacteria before someone else does. More »
The celebrity-hawked Twitter Music app is finally here. And what’s good enough for Ryan Seacrest is good enough for us kind of. More »
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