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This entry is both sad and optimistic at the same time. It’s sad because there’s now a thing called The Great Pacific Garbage Patch made up of tiny, pea-sized bits of decomposing plastic. It’s a soupy, messy anomaly that’s about the size of Texas. The good news is that, while humans have caused the problem, we can also clean it up. Many people have started inventing robots that could do...

Everyone lives in a state of “before,” the place right before innovation changes their world. Before the light bulb, everyone lived in a world where the night was illuminated with candle fire. It had been that way for centuries, so why think about new options? The problem with “before” is that we can get used to it and fail to see the possibilities. Instead, start challenging yourself to...

Art evolves just like technology, so much so that it’s reached a point where people begin to question if an object or painting is even art. So it helps to understand the perspective. Art had followed a predictable arc of painters gradually increasing their skill and learning to paint with increasing precision. Then some artists questioned if there were other ways to express emotion with paint....

Google’s self-driving car has already racked up 1 million test miles without an accident. The technology is so impressive that some estimate there will be 10 million self-driving cars on the road by 2020. So, when you don’t need to drive, what do you do? Does your car now include a bed, or can the seats be rotated to create a mobile conference room? The future for car engineers, designers and...

Michelangelo used chisel and stone. Alexander Calder used a welding torch and steel. And sculptors of today are using code and 3D printing to create shapes that bend the imagination. Nervous System - Colony Dezeen.com - 3D-printed sculptures create optical illusions using the Fibonacci...

Nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. From those four simple elements we get the invigorating caffeine molecule. And it’s been helping great minds for a long time. Composer Ludwig Van Beethoven liked his coffee brewed with exactly 60 beans per cup. President Teddy Roosevelt is said to have gulped a gallon a day. While we don’t recommend drinking that much in one day, we do approve of downing...

What if you could always have custom shoes for your foot that’s slightly bigger than the other? What if you could scan your feet and create shoes that fit you as uniquely as your fingerprint? What if you could think of new, innovative shapes for shoes and try them on within a day? With 3D printing technology (additive manufacturing), it’s possible. Wired.com - 3D Printed Shoes: A Step in...

An Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886) George Seurat Every time you look at a computer screen or digitally printed image, your brain is merging tiny pixels or dots of color together to form a solid image. It’s the modern usage of a theory developed in the 1880s by two French painters, George Seurat and Paul Signac. Instead of using brushstrokes, they used tiny points of...

DEMO DAY: DOUBLE ROBOTS Come learn about and test the telepresence robots on wheels made famous by shows like "Big Bang Theory" and "Modern Family." People anywhere in the world can click a link and talk to others through a speaker on the robot, view the robot's environment via a webcam, and control the robot's movements all from their home computers MICROSOFT WORD CRASH COURSE Need to learn...