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Innovation

The plate’s display resembles a Kindle, except that letters and numbers are made up of monochromatic “e-ink.”

Will Digital License Plates Drive Us Forward or Leave Us Fuming?

California-based Reviver Auto has rolled out an electronic license plate that could benefit drivers, as well as cities and states

The Patents Behind Christmas Lights

This Christmas, take a moment to appreciate the many innovations that make holiday light displays and the strand of bulbs on your tree possible

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Ingenious Minds

Studying Political Pessimism in the Past Actually Makes Historian Jon Grinspan Optimistic About the Future

Columnist David Brooks interviews the political historian about what we can learn from negative political engagement in our country’s history

"Let’s Get Lost" by linn meyers at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Museum Visitors Can Play This Wall Art Like an Instrument

An artist, musician, experience designer and app developer meet for coffee. This multi-sensory installation is the result

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Ingenious Minds

Cheech Marin Uses Humor to Find Common Ground

With the 14th Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the actor and comedian talks about how his life has been filled with music, art and laughter

Record companies released stereo demonstration albums that showcased how sound could move from left to right, creating a sense of movement.

How Savvy Advertising Helped Make Stereo Technology Mainstream

Stereo demonstrations and colorful ads sold customers on the two-channel sound technology when it was introduced 60 years ago

In June of 1878, just a few years after he was acquitted for murder, Eadweard Muybridge made history at a racetrack in Palo Alto, California.

How a 19th-Century Photographer Made the First ‘GIF’ of a Galloping Horse

Eadweard Muybridge photographed a horse in different stages of its gallop, a new Smithsonian podcast documents the groundbreaking feat

Clean and compelling, Spacewar! pitted two player-controlled ships against one another and rewarded superior strategists. The PDP-1 lacked the memory to accommodate AI opponents.

How the First Popular Video Game Kicked Off Generations of Virtual Adventure

A simple contest of sci-fi strategy, ‘Spacewar!’ ushered in what is now a 140 billion dollar industry

The card game Spot It! has become one of the most popular family games in the country, but the secret to how the game works has its roots in the logic puzzles of 19th century mathematicians.

Education During Coronavirus

The Mind-Bending Math Behind Spot It!, the Beloved Family Card Game

The simple matching game has some deceptively complex mathematics behind the scenes

The Ten Best Board Games of 2018

Go analog at your next party with one of these new classics

Google's new artificial intelligence program, AlphaZero, taught itself to play chess, shogi, and Go in a matter of hours, and outperforms the top-ranking AIs in the gameplay arena.

Google’s New AI Is a Master of Games, but How Does It Compare to the Human Mind?

After building AlphaGo to beat the world’s best Go players, Google DeepMind built AlphaZero to take on the world’s best machine players

The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2018

Our picks deliver feminist history, folklore reimagined and an adventurous romp through awe-inspiring destinations

An artist's rendering of the small rover that will be deployed on the far side of the Moon as part of the Chang'e-4 mission.

China Launches First Mission to Land on the Far Side of the Moon

Not glimpsed by humanity until 1959, the surface of the far side of the Moon has never been visited before

A delta wave, typical of deep sleep, as envisioned by interdisciplinary artist Julia Buntaine Hoel.

Art Meets Science

This Sculptor Imagines Brain Waves in 3-D

Julia Buntaine Hoel depicts the electrical activity of the brain in Wave(s), on display at Smithsonian’s “The Long Conversation”

Each year, nearly 700,000 ear-infection-prone kids in the U.S. are treated with surgically-implanted ear tubes.

Ear Tubes May Finally Get an Upgrade

Harvard researchers have invented a new device that might mean fewer visits to the surgeon for kids with chronic ear infections

CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene editing tool that has allowed scientists to alter the genomes of living organisms with unprecedented accuracy and ease.

What’s New, and What’s Not, in the Reported Birth of the CRISPR Babies

Editing human DNA, either in embryos or in cells that are reintroduced to the body, had come a long way before Lulu and Nana were born

In 1963, Herbert A. Gilbert filed a patent for “a safe and harmless means for and method of smoking.”

Plans for the First E-cigarette Went Up in Smoke 50 Years Ago

Herbert A. Gilbert invented his “Smokeless” in 1963, but he couldn’t convince any companies to bring the device to market

What the Popularity of ‘Fortnite’ Has in Common With the 20th Century Pinball Craze

Long before parents freaked over the ubiquitous video game, they flipped out over another newfangled fad

The breakthrough propeller, its blades shaped by hatchet and drawknife from two-ply spruce, was sheathed in linen and sealed with aluminum powder mixed into a heavy varnish.

Why Wilbur Wright Deserves the Bulk of the Credit for the First Flight

A new book advances a controversial theory about the singular contribution that went into the brothers’ pioneering achievement

Why Aren’t There Electric Airplanes Yet? It Comes Down to Batteries.

Batteries need to get lighter and more efficient before we use them to power energy-guzzling airplanes

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