There was a time when well-traveled luggage looked like the suitcase above: covered with travel stickers, trophies of every adventurous explorer. My father, who spent his youth traveling across Europe in the 60s and 70s kept his weary suitcase for a long time; as a child, I admired all those well-aged little pictures of remote hotels and places I'd never been to.
Think you like gadgets? You don't hold a candle to Canadian artist William Fiske who's spent the last decade painting impossibly realistic portraits of everything from vintage cameras to aging computer consoles.
Middle America's decorative water towers—not those nasty things in New York
Vortices are beautiful and mysterious, found at every imaginable scale—from soap bubbles to black holes. They're so ubiquitous, in fact, that we tend to overlook them. But new research shows that studying the simplest vortices could glean surprising scientific insights.
The Space Race between the USA and USSR was the most intensive scientific competition of the twentieth century, and its indirect effects were perceivable even in the toy industry.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has released a fresh collection of stunning satellite images to celebrate the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Thanks to them you can view most of the cities and countries that have hosted the Winter Olympics, through the eyes of NASA. Each one is more stunning than the last.
So, you think you know Manhattan and New York City, do you? Well, multimedia artist Peter Wegner is about to show you a completely unexpected side of your city. His series, Buildings Made Of Sky, turns you upside down to show you the hidden "skyscrapers" all around you.
As America's foremost ambassador to space, Carl Sagan has continued to inspire our fascination with exploring beyond Earth. The Library of Congress has digitized its Carl Sagan archives, and several items just collected online give us an amazing new look into the mind of the astronomer.
It's really hard to improve on a good thing. But every once in a while, a product you have known and loved for a very long time gets a redesign or a tweak that's genius in is simplicity. Here are seven examples of products that we took for granted, recently perfected by a tiny twist:
You might not expect the United States Patent and Trademark Office to be as excited about the Winter Olympics as it is. But this month, office is releasing historic patents that reveal how winter sports emerged. So, who invented the snowboard?
A cemetery in Sweden. A floating school in Nigeria. A cast-iron facade in the UK. The wildly divergent list of nominees for the Design Museum's annual awards make you wonder: How the hell do you pick a single building to represent such a broad profession?
This week, Gizmodo got a peek at some seriously awesome sculptures made entirely by 3D printer at the 3D Printshow. The exhibit, hosted by Adobe and Shapeways, shows how you can create stunning art with nothing more than Photoshop and a 3D printer
All buildings eventually die: Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But artist Calvin Seibert's work lasts no longer than a turn of the Earth. Seibert spends his free time sculpting incredible models on the beach—and they're unlike any sand castles I've ever seen.
The years between 1880 and 1920 changed American cities completely: From elevators to air conditioning to electricity, the monumental buildings born during this period seemed like living things, humming with life. But as quickly as they rose, many of them were torn down—victims of the same progress that pushed them up.
All good things end—architecture included. Yesterday, we showed you nine buildings
After several years of financial difficulties, the Amusement Park of Budapest, the largest amusement park in Hungary was closed on 30 September, 2013. Today I had a chance to take a walk among its remains.
Cross section, cutaway, or x-ray illustrations, call it whatever you want, but they're the best way to understand how things work. They are fascinating. In this new Sploid series we will present some of the best cutaway drawings from around the world. The first collection includes 32 awesome spacecrafts.
Humans can only see visible light—the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye. That's why so hard to study celestial objects hidden behind cosmic dust. But radio astronomy reveals those parts of the Universe that can't be seen in visible light—and the secrets of dust-shrouded galaxies like our lovely Milky Way.
Rocket hardware
We've probably all made a few pancakes in amusingly shaped blobs, but Nathan Shields takes pancake to a whole new level of art. The illustrator, former math teacher, and stay-at-home dad makes pancakes with his kids that range from Star Wars tributes to portraits of Isaac Newton to animals painted in stunning species-level detail.
