Read the best innovation articles from around the internet, or watch the most insightful innovation videos from platforms like Youtube, Vimeo or leading innovation publishers like Fast Company, Springwise, The Verge, Techcrunch and many more.
Taiwanese startup Space Apes has designed a solar-powered, reusable and sustainable water generator that extracts, purifies and condenses water from the air to make it ready to drink. The unit produces between 11 and 15 liters of water a day, covering the drinking water needs of six to eight adults.
Also known as “natural organic reduction,” composting burial is the brainchild of Katrina Spade, CEO of alternative burial company Recompose. The process involves decomposition of the corpse in soil—but not within a traditional cemetery.
A building on Zurich’s most exclusive shopping street has been converted into a blockchain-powered investment following its CHF130 million ($134 million) sale. It is the latest attempt to unlock the value of bricks and mortar using digitally-coded tokens.
Some varieties of wood, such as oak and maple, are renowned for their strength. But scientists say a simple and inexpensive new process can transform any type of wood into a material stronger than steel, and even some high-tech titanium alloys.
This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.
Mjøsa Tower (Mjøstårnet) by Trondheim-based Voll Arkitekter, the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper, is over 4.5 meters higher than planned. Now structurally topped out, the 18-story structure stands 85.4 meters tall and is officially the world’s tallest timber tower.
Commercial shipping – for many years resistant to the low carbon revolution sweeping other areas of transportation – is changing fast. Could a new generation of innovative propulsion technologies that harness the power of the wind help the shipping industry clean up its act?
Where do we go when we dream? This surreal territory has proved fertile ground for a new generation of contemporary artists working at the intersection of architecture, interior design, and technology. The dreamscapes of these creations offer an intriguing insight into a new movement in digital art.
A mobile-storytelling platform called Quibi has loomed on the content horizon, promising that, when its app launches this spring, it will be a home to a huge library of short-form shows made specifically for your phone. But Snapchat has been operating in that space for years. It’s harder than you’d think.
The world we live in is afraid of touch and interaction, so Playtronica decided to highlight it – turn human skin into a musical instrument. Now you can experience the future of human touch and do it with style.
MI·MU Gloves are the world’s most advanced wearable musical instrument, for expressive creation, composition and performance. Express yourself through gestures using wearable music technology, connect movement to sound in your own way and discover new forms of expression.
China has announced advancing plans for its nuclear fusion device known colloquially as an “artificial sun.” The extremely high temperatures of 360 million degrees Fahrenheit lead to the titular effect: literally, the nucleuses of two or more atoms are fused, and the process generates energy.
The Climate Tile is a pilot project designed to catch and redirect 30% of the projected extra rainwater coming due to climate change. Created by THIRD NATURE with IBF and ACO Nordic, the project will be inaugurated on a 50m pavement stretch at Nørrebro in Copenhagen.
Venture capitalists have all aligned on the best solution: kitchens that only serve delivery customers, known as “cloud”, “ghost” or “dark” kitchens, that use a combination of advanced food preparation, underused real estate and algorithm-driven optimisation to lower overheads and increase output.
A team of designers in Portland, Oregon, tasked their artificial intelligence system with building a new team sport for us humans. The result of that pet project, Speedgate, is being heralded as the first viable AI-created field game. It has since become an indie sports phenomenon, with proposed leagues in more than 50 countries worldwide.
The military wants future super-soldiers to control robots with their thoughts. The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we’re born with and beyond the ones we can organically attain.
To bring the spirit in-line with its contemporaries, Air Co. has applied a process that converts air-based carbons into pure ethanol using a proprietary, solar-based electrical procedure. The result? An 80-proof vodka that looks, tastes, and feels like the traditional spirit, but with a reduced environmental impact due to its specialized “distillation” process.
Wing, a subsidiary of Google, chose Christiansburg (population 22,500) as its first launching site for American commercial drone delivery operations — it’s also testing in Australia and Finland — not only because of the relatively flat terrain and low population density, but because of nearby Virginia Tech University.
Last month, Bastrop, Texas, adopted a new building code, known as Bastrop Building Block, which radically alters how the city will approach development. The new flexible system was designed to address three interrelated issues hitting municipalities across the county: population growth, aging infrastructure, and outdated development patterns.
Over the past decade, one of the best examples of where tech has flourished is the footwear industry. From self-lacing tech to cushioning systems made from tiny foam particles, brands like Nike, Adidas and others have gone all out trying to change what footwear design means.
Having customers do most of the work, feel great about it, and at the same time perceive they have attained value for their money is the Holy Grail in business. Ikea gets it–and so do many of today’s hottest startups.
More and more security holes are appearing in cryptocurrency and smart contract platforms, and some are fundamental to the way they were built.
BYD Co. is the No. 1 producer of plug-in vehicles globally, attracting a tiny fraction of the attention of Elon Musk’s company while powering, to a significant extent, a transition to electrified mobility that’s moving faster in China than in any other country.
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.
The grass is greener in a virtual world. That’s what Moscow region farmers were aiming for when they fitted their dairy cows with virtual-reality headsets to test their milk production. “Experts noted reduced anxiety and improved overall emotional mood in the herd” during the VR experiment, said the regional agriculture administration.
A deep learning model developed by NVIDIA Research turns rough doodles into highly realistic scenes using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Dubbed GauGAN, the tool is like a smart paintbrush, converting segmentation maps into lifelike images.
The Futurecraft.Loop project ushered in a running shoe that has been designed from scratch to be recycled. Adidas’ thinking is not to take pre-existing products and make them more sustainable, but rather to create sustainable products from square one.
Goodyear developed the first tubeless tyre around 65 years ago. Now, it is working to develop a tyre that replaces itself when it wears out. The reCharge tyre is designed for a future where driverless cars are the norm – a future that may be fast approaching.
Both started with ride-hailing and expanded into other logistics businesses, such as deliveries and food-ordering. The story of two South-East Asian “deca-unicorns”—fintechs valued above $10bn—is usually told in terms of their rivalry.
If you’ve ever purchased two articles of the same clothing because you couldn’t decide on a color, here’s a game-changer: color-changing ink. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a “reprogrammable ink” that lets you change the color of objects whenever you wish by exposing them to light of various wavelengths.
The world’s first handheld ultrasound device, Butterfly iQ, will give hope to 4.7 billion people who don’t have access to medical imaging, revolutionizing modern medicine. Butterfly Network founder Dr Jonathan Rothberg invented the tool, a battery-operated device the size of an electric shaver that diagnoses abnormalities within seconds.
Holograms have the power to resurrect the dead. Want to see Michael Jackson live in concert? Digital technology can bring him back to life. Within 10 years, DJs will be replaced by holograms, we’ll use them to speak to one another, and they might even take our jobs.
Given their size and wealth, both Google and IBM have a shot at becoming serious players in the quantum computing business. Companies will rent their machines to tackle problems the way they currently rent cloud-based data storage and processing power from Amazon, Google, IBM, or Microsoft.
Instead of the bits that today’s network uses, which can only express a value of either 0 or 1, the future quantum internet would utilize qubits of quantum information, which can take on an infinite number of values. A quibit is the unit of information for a quantum computer; it’s like a bit in an ordinary computer.
Over the past decade, prices for solar panels and wind farms have reached all-time lows. However, the price for lithium-ion batteries, the leading energy storage technology, has remained too high. So researchers are exploring other alternatives, including flow batteries, thermal batteries, and gravity-based systems.
As businesses and governments grapple with how to approach climate change, the field of architecture faces a monumental opportunity—and some might argue an immense responsibility—to make an impact.
Meet the virtual restaurant, or “ghost kitchen,” a business that distributes meals through apps, but has no sit-down, brick and mortar location. Delivery-only restaurants, run out of low-rent kitchens without a storefront, are shifting the landscape of ordering food online.
In early 2018, Google’s parent conglomerate Alphabet announced the birth of a new “independent” startup that was supposed to revolutionize cybersecurity. Chronicle, Google’s moonshot cybersecurity startup that was supposed to completely change the industry, is imploding.
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.
McLaren plans to produce a development car that runs on synthetic fuel to showcase the technology’s potential. The company says the fuel would require minimal tweaks to today’s internal combustion engine, and it’d still be much better for the environment from a CO2 standpoint.
