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Technology

The FORMAT festival will be held on 250 acres of open green land just a few miles outside of Bentonville, Arkansas.

Walmart Heirs Launch New Music Festival in Bid to Make Arkansas an Art Destination

FORMAT will bring big-name musicians, contemporary artists to Bentonville

As the climate changes, polar bears are increasingly coming into contact with people.

Researchers Develop a ‘Bear-Dar’ That Warns Humans of Approaching Polar Bears

The artificial intelligence-powered radar system is needed as climate change brings the animals closer to towns

View of the Space Needle and the Century 21 Exposition fairgrounds in Seattle in 1962

The Rise and Fall of World’s Fairs

Sixty years after Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, world’s fairs have largely fallen out of fashion in the U.S.

Steered by a computer to loop in the wind, this kite converts wind energy into electricity via a tether attached to a generator on the ground. Currently, such kites can generate enough electricity to power 60 average US households.

Planet Positive

Could High-Flying Kites Power Your Home?

Nearly a dozen companies are betting on computer-controlled, airborne wind energy to electrify the future

A soup bowl monster made of yarn, created by DALL-E 2.

Innovation for Good: Game Changers

What Do WALL-E and Salvador Dalí Have in Common? Meet DALL-E 2

This new and improved A.I. system can produce photorealistic images of anything on demand

Spot can reach speeds up to 3mph, has 360 degree vision that helps it avoid obstacles and is protected from dust and rain, per its creator, Boston Dynamics. 

Meet Spot, the Dog-Like Robot Roaming the Ruins of Pompeii

The bot, built by Boston Dynamics, can navigate difficult terrains that humans can’t access safely

A worker prepares a hot air balloon during a festival in Ba Vi National Park, west of Hanoi, Vietnam.

Good News

Good News

Uplifting stories to brighten your day

The Saguache Crescent’s masthead is cast from lead in a process that allows it to survive a year of printing.

This Small-Town Newspaper Is the Last of Its Kind

The “Saguache Crescent,” a weekly in a Colorado hamlet, still prints on the 19th-century technology known as linotype

High social media use may simply be a coping mechanism, rather than a cause, of adolescents' mental health challenges. 

The Future of Mental Health

Negative Effects of Social Media May Impact Adolescent Girls and Boys at Different Ages

A new study suggests certain ‘windows’ of development when youngsters appear most sensitive to technology

This illustration shows NASA's InSight spacecraft with its instruments deployed on the Martian surface.

This Important Geophysical Robot on Mars May Die Soon

The InSight observatory has a seismometer and a heat probe, which have enabled it to gather data on rock layers below the planet’s soil

MIT researchers wove a fiber designed from a piezoelectric material with traditional yarn to create a machine-washable fabric. 

Researchers Create a Fabric That Can ‘Hear’ Your Heartbeat

This fabric acts as both a speaker and microphone, detecting even faint noises and converting them into electrical signals

Many surviving ancient descriptions are fragmented and unable to be radiocarbon dated. Now researchers say a new artificial intelligence program may help fill in those gaps.

Innovation for Good: Game Changers

A New A.I. Can Help Historians Decipher Damaged Ancient Greek Texts

The developers announced that their program, called “Ithaca,” is able to reconstruct missing or damaged inscriptions

A Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-27 lifts off at a 2017 airshow in the U.K. The Su-27 is Ukraine’s long arm, an offensive fighter with great range and the capacity to carry nearly 10,000 pounds of bombs, rockets, and missiles.

The Russian Jet That Fights for Both Sides

What Ukrainian air force pilots had to say about their aging Su-27s.

To better understand how hypoxia—dangerously low oxygen levels—affects crabs, researchers and fishers are working together to find a way to adjust to changing conditions in the northeast Pacific Ocean.

A New Tool May Help Crab Fishers Sidestep Dead Zones

Low-cost sensors that fit into crab pots could provide real-time data on oxygen fluctuations in the ocean

Within a few years, NASA’s OSAM-1 mission will launch into space and use a robotic arm to refuel the Landsat 7 Earth-observation satellite, as shown in this animation.

Robots May Soon Fix and Fuel Satellites in Space

Orbiting machines that grip, grapple and maneuver could one day maintain the fleet of small spacecraft that encircle Earth

Scholars say that Afrocentric notions of invention have often emphasized serving the needs of the community, social justice and artistic self-expression, such as the unpatented innovations of DJ Grandmaster Flash, who reimagined turntables and mixers as musical instruments and developed techniques like “scratching” that defined rap and hip- hop music. .

Tearing Down the Barriers for Black Inventors Begins With Honoring Their Historic Breakthroughs

Smithsonian’s Eric S. Hintz, a historian of invention, details how scholars are envisioning a more inclusive ecosystem for the innovators of tomorrow

A new way of recycling has grabbed the attention of some of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, including L’Oréal, Nestlé, and PepsiCo, who collaborated with startup company Carbios to produce proof-of-concept bottles.

The Future of Recycling May Be in Microbes

An enzyme-based recycling technology is poised to go commercial, but questions about cost and scalability linger

Instllation view of "In Event of Moon Disaster," the centerpiece of an exhibition that explores the history of deepfakes on display at the Museum of the Moving Image. 

This Deepfake Exhibition Shows How Convincing the New Technology Can Be

The Museum of the Moving Image tests whether patrons can spot the difference between fabrication and reality

When medical equipment was scarce in spring of 2020, an engineering firm in Northern Italy posted 3-D printing files online that allowed hospitals to produce venturi valves that could be retrofitted to snorkel masks for use in assisted ventilation.

Innovation for Good

How Good Design Promotes Good Health

Cooper Hewitt dives into the surprisingly creative ways doctors, nurses, engineers, designers, artists and, even your neighbors, responded to the pandemic

It’s been 70 years of instant photography, thanks to Edwin Land, on the left.

Polaroid Inventor Edwin Land Gave Us More Than Just Instant Photos

Seventy-five years after the game-changing camera was unveiled to the public, a scientist calls attention to Land’s other technological breakthroughs

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