Gearfuse Technology, Science, Culture & More

While most of us use one side of the brain to play chess, the minds of masters of the game solve moves by parallel processing.

Scientists using NASA's orbital Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope find gamma rays and antimatter streaming out of thunderstorms into Earth's upper atmosphere.

A documentary that helps us glimpse one of modernity's unlikeliest and most enticing of possible ends: the open-source cracking-open of industrial society.

Cat versus bear cub: sentimental romp, or nature red in tooth and claw? Watching the two tangle playfully in a Russian hunting camp, the line is hard to draw. Video after the jump.

Among the lunar-phase calendars usually found stacked in crystal shops and New-Age book stores, a radial version by designer and type founder Dimitre Lima stands out.

To reboot their product line, Polaroid have appealed to the highest authority: they've named Lady Gaga their creative director. Her photographic sunglasses may be a caprice; her new digital instant camera offers retronovation with technical flair.

Emeco's famously sturdy aluminum "Navy chairs" aren't cast�they're cut, pressed, rolled, and buffed�but their manufacture shows them to be part of a metal caste system, and players in a dance of fabrication. Video after the jump.

An Android-powered projector-in-a-lightbulb inspires images of a world in which every gadget wants a heart�or at least a brain.

In the business of getting to space, an access of sublime ephemerality. Video after the jump.

According to sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's how I feel about American pizza delivery. It's all about an obsession with convenience bordering on the quantum, and it's what makes America the best country in the world.