Discoverology • Browse Less, Know More.

Browse less, know more.

The most interesting stories, videos and
products from around the web.

Inside X, Google's Top-Secret Moonshot Factory

Inside X, Google's Top-Secret Moonshot Factory

Innovation Long Reads Science Tech

Within Alphabet, Google’s parent company, it is grouped alongside Deepmind in “Other Bets”, although in that metaphor, X is more like the gambler. Its stated aim is to pursue what it calls “moonshots” – to try to solve humanity’s great problems by inventing radical new technologies.

The Failure Of The Forever 21 Empire

The Failure Of The Forever 21 Empire

Business

If Forever 21 survives, it will be with fewer stores, fewer employees, and more manageable ambitions. But that more modest future likely depends on the Changs giving up control. If they don’t, Forever 21 may not have much of a future at all.

'Station Of Being' Is An Interactive Arctic Bus Stop

'Station Of Being' Is An Interactive Arctic Bus Stop

Architecture Cities Nature

Architecture studio Rombout Frieling Lab and Research Institutes of Sweden have created the Station of Being as a prototype bus stop. The bus stop in Umeå, Sweden, was designed to improve the waiting conditions for passengers using public transport in cold weather conditions within the Arctic region.

Singapore Is Building A City In China

Singapore Is Building A City In China

Cities Videos World

It’s located in Southern China but it’s actually a partnership between China and Singapore. It’s called, Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City, or SSGKC. In the next 20 years, the countries project it will have a population of 500,000. A whopping figure considering the farmlands were formerly home to just 40,000 residents.

How I. M. Pei Shaped The Modern City

How I. M. Pei Shaped The Modern City

Architecture Cities

I. M. Pei died at the age of 102 after a long career as an architect of great renown. The China-born, U.S.-trained architect took on commissions that helped reshape cities around the world through the second half of the 20th century.

The Web We Have To Save

The Web We Have To Save

Long Reads Media Tech

In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?

Death On Demand: Has Euthanasia Gone Too Far?

Death On Demand: Has Euthanasia Gone Too Far?

Health Life Long Reads Politics

Countries around the world are making it easier to choose the time and manner of your death. As the world’s pioneer, the Netherlands has also discovered that although legalizing euthanasia might resolve one ethical conundrum, it opens a can of others – most importantly, where the limits of the practice should be drawn.

Virginia Mori

Inspiration
Virginia Mori
Big Tech Takes Aim At The Low-Profit Retail-Banking Industry

Big Tech Takes Aim At The Low-Profit Retail-Banking Industry

Business Economics Innovation Tech

After years of timidity Big Tech, with its billions of users and gigantic war chest, at last appears serious about crashing the fintech party. Amazon and Apple introduced a credit card. Facebook announced a new payments system and Google said it would start offering current (checking) accounts in America.

How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games

How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games

Apps Design Explainers

Fairness is the unspoken promise of most video games. Controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, a video game has the capacity to be ultimately just, and players expect that it will be so. And yet, when video games truly play by the rules, the player can feel cheated.

A Theory Of Style

A Theory Of Style

Design

We can analyse how fashion works by breaking it down into networks of style elements. What role, then, for human creativity? Does the cultural sphere have human agency on a leash?

The Strange & Curious Tale Of The Last True Hermit

The Strange & Curious Tale Of The Last True Hermit

Crime Long Reads

For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real.

Britain’s Secret War With Russia

Britain’s Secret War With Russia

Crime Long Reads Politics

From the attempted assassination of a double agent in a sleepy English city to the expulsion of scores of Russian diplomats from Western capitals, this fight would grow and morph, drawing in a chemical-weapons attack in Syria and rolling scandals about Russian sports doping.

The Soul-Expanding Value Of Difficulty

The Soul-Expanding Value Of Difficulty

Life Psychology

You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?

What Happens To Your Body After You Die?

What Happens To Your Body After You Die?

Explainers Science Videos

Whatever your beliefs, most people seem to agree that the body left behind when we depart this mortal coil is just a heap of bones and flesh. Assuming that nature is left to its own devices, our bodies undergo a fairly standard process of decomposition that can take anywhere from two weeks to two years.

Undercover Reporter Reveals Life In A Polish Troll Farm

Undercover Reporter Reveals Life In A Polish Troll Farm

Politics Tech

Undercover reporter, Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz, spent six months this year working at Cat@Net, which describes itself as an “ePR agency comprising specialists who build a positive image of companies, private individuals and public institutions – mostly in social media.”.

Iraq's Social Media Martyrs

Iraq's Social Media Martyrs

Crime Media Videos World

Huge nationwide protests against corruption have been making headlines, but these young millennials are taking on power in a different way, by celebrating beauty, fashion and rap. They’ve got millions of followers, but, as Unreported World finds out, fame can have deadly consequences.

How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood

How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood

Health Psychology

Years after being mistreated, people with adult post-bullying syndrome commonly struggle with trust and self-esteem, and develop psychiatric problems, professor Ellen Walser deLara’s research found. Some become people-pleasers, or rely on food, alcohol, or drugs to cope.

Matt Rota

Inspiration
Matt Rota
The Convert: Life With A Jihadist

The Convert: Life With A Jihadist

Long Reads

Tania Joya had been married to a jihadist from Texas for ten years, but she was tired of living like a nomad and unnerved by his increasingly extreme ideology. When he dragged their family to war-torn Syria, she knew it was time to get out.

3D Printed Housing For Those Who Need It Most

3D Printed Housing For Those Who Need It Most

Architecture Design Innovation Videos

New Story, ICON, and Échale have completed the first two printed homes in the world’s first 3D printed community in Mexico. The 3D printed homes feature two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bath. Co-designed with feedback from the families who will live in them, the homes have been created to meet the specific needs of the community.

Inside The Sale Of The Record-Obliterating $31 Million Patek Philippe Watch

Inside The Sale Of The Record-Obliterating $31 Million Patek Philippe Watch

Design

The motion made the Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime the most expensive watch ever sold by a wide margin. The Grandmaster Chime is a modern watch made specifically for the Only Watch auction, which donates 100 percent of its proceeds to Duchenne muscular dystrophy research.

The Real Reason The Sound Of Your Own Voice Makes You Cringe

The Real Reason The Sound Of Your Own Voice Makes You Cringe

Psychology Science

A common explanation is that because we normally hear our own voice while talking, we receive both sound transferred to our ears externally by air conduction and sound transferred internally through our bones. This bone conduction of sound delivers rich low frequencies that are not included in air-conducted vocal sound.

How A Long-lost Indian Disco Record Won Over Crate Diggers And Cracked The YouTube Algorithm

How A Long-lost Indian Disco Record Won Over Crate Diggers And Cracked The YouTube Algorithm

Media Tech

1982’s Disco Jazz has been reissued. “Aaj Shanibar,” one of its four tracks, has also started to spread through the strange rabbithole that is YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. With the benefit of time and technology, “lost” songs reach a new generation of listeners halfway around the world.

An Ode To Being Old

An Ode To Being Old

Business Health Life

Success in business, even in the fast-paced start-up world, isn’t just about age-related smarts. Wisdom, a deeper kind of knowing that can only be gained through experience, matters too. And apparently, it matters quite a bit.

Joseph Ford

Inspiration
Joseph Ford
Zaha Hadid Architects' Giant Starfish-Shaped Airport Opens In Beijing

Zaha Hadid Architects' Giant Starfish-Shaped Airport Opens In Beijing

Architecture Cities Videos

Zaha Hadid Architects has completed Beijing Daxing International Airport, a five-pronged building that is one of the largest passenger terminals in the world. Designed by the late Zaha Hadid and current studio principal Patrik Schumacher, the 700,000-square-metre airport to serve Beijing has been designed to be as compact as possible.

The Rise Of Nintendo

The Rise Of Nintendo

Business Tech Videos

Nintendo hasn’t always made video games. It was founded over a century ago and at one point sold ramen noodles and operated a taxi service. Today, Nintendo is part of a crowded video game market, up against companies like Sony, Microsoft, Apple and Google. When Nintendo first got into the home console business in the 80s, it dominated.

How Political Opinions Change

How Political Opinions Change

Explainers Politics Psychology Science

A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically like-minded networks.

How We’ll Forget John Lennon

How We’ll Forget John Lennon

Explainers History Media Psychology

The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years. They then pass into written and online records, where they experience a slower, longer decline.

The Golden Ratio: Design’s Biggest Myth

The Golden Ratio: Design’s Biggest Myth

Architecture Design

In the world of art, architecture, and design, the golden ratio has earned a tremendous reputation. The Parthenon, the Pyramids at Giza, the paintings of Michelangelo, the Mona Lisa, even the Apple logo are all said to incorporate it. The golden ratio’s aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn.

Why Waking Up Earlier Isn't Necessarily Better

Why Waking Up Earlier Isn't Necessarily Better

Health Psychology

The bias that people who rise early are morally superior to evening people doesn’t just loom large in scientific research. It’s at the very heart of the U.S.’s founding principles of industry and hard work.

Adobe Fresco Drawing And Painting App

Adobe Fresco Drawing And Painting App

Apps Design Innovation Tech

Adobe Fresco is a free drawing and painting app built especially for Apple Pencil and designed for artists who draw professionally or paint for passion. It brings together the world’s largest collection of vector and raster brushes, plus revolutionary new Live Brushes, to deliver a completely natural painting and drawing experience.

We use cookies on this website to analyse your use of our products and services, provide content from third parties and assist with our marketing efforts. Learn more about our use of cookies and available controls: cookie policy. Please be aware that your experience may be disrupted until you accept cookies.