Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Innovation / Technology

A smartphone could help people fight depression.

How Mobile Technology Can Help Universities Combat Depression

Using sensors on smartphones and smartwatches can shed light on patients’ symptoms, even identifying ones they didn’t notice or share with counselors

LG exhibited a new levitating speaker.

The Innovative Spirit fy17

Seven Wild Gadgets Unveiled at CES 2017

From a levitating speaker to vibrating jeans that help you navigate city streets, these innovations offer an interesting glimpse of the future

The device that reinvented the phone

The Innovative Spirit fy17

Happy 10th Birthday, iPhone! So What’s Next?

Based on patent documents, here are eight innovations that could become part of the iPhone of the future

Ride-hailing services aren't just for millennials anymore.

Lyft and Uber Want To Give Old Folks a Ride

Older adults miss doctor’s appointments and risk social isolation because they lack transportation. Ride-hailing services are taking notice.

When Robots Take All of Our Jobs, Remember the Luddites

What a 19th-century rebellion against automation can teach us about the coming war in the job market

Holograms, even those not carrying secret messages, need to be preserved.

Why Holograms Will Probably Never Be as Cool as They Were in “Star Wars”

But those that do exist must be preserved and archived

Eight Innovators to Watch in 2017

Meet original thinkers who are breaking ground in medicine, art, drone design, fighting climate change and more

The DF-24 camera, invented in 1932, is one of several that were used by cinematographer Hal Rosson to film the  Wizard of Oz.

The Innovative Spirit fy17

Without This Camera, the Emerald City Would Have Been the Color of Mud

That dramatic Dorothy in Oz moment was brought to you in living color by the DF-24 Beam Splitter

A Farm From a Box is capable of feeding 150 people.

Smart Startup

A San Francisco Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

Brandi DeCarli, cofounder of Farm From a Box, wants to deploy farm kits to governments, NGOs, schools and individuals

Needle drop is one of the traits plant scientists at the Christmas Tree Research Center at Dalhousie University are hoping to improve.

Can Science Produce a Longer Lasting Christmas Tree?

LED Christmas lights make the needles hold on longer, and other discoveries from the world’s only Christmas tree research center

Andreas Velten and his lab at the University of Wisconsin use this setup, complete with a fog chamber, to test their camera.

The Innovative Spirit fy17

This Camera Can See Around Corners

How a superfast, supersensitive camera could shake up automotive and exploration industries, as well as photography as we know it

Mersiv is worn around a user’s neck, like a necklace, and features a silver dollar-sized pendant with an embedded camera and microphone.

The Innovative Spirit fy17

This Language-Teaching Device Constantly Whispers Lessons In Your Ear

A conceptual gadget called Mersiv immerses language-learners in their tongue of choice

A cow is milked by a robotic voluntary milking system.

Rise of the (Cow Milking) Robots

The largest robotic dairy farm in the United States will be up and running in Michigan next year

How Chemicals Left Behind on Your Phone Could Identify You

Mass spectrometry is finding a new role in forensic science

The Botswana Innovation Hub will be a new LEED-certified facility for technology research and development.

Step Inside a Virtual Building of the Future

Architects are embracing virtual reality and the complex designs they can create there

The technique is sort of a combination of light microscopy, which bounces light off of objects, and electron microscopy, which bounces electrons off of objects.

A New Technique Brings Color to Electron Microscope Images of Cells

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have found a way to attach artificial color to biological structures

The record for lights at a home, lawn included, is 601,736 bulbs.

Untangling the History of Christmas Lights

This bright idea was ahead of its time

LIGO's founding fathers, from left: Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish. Not pictured: Ronald Drever

American Ingenuity Awards

Meet the Team of Scientists Who Discovered Gravitational Waves

This year, the geniuses behind LIGO announced that they had finally found what Albert Einstein had predicted a century ago

Page 35 of 74