For centuries, human beings have dreamed of flying. All kinds of daredevils have built devices to fly of their own volition. Not all have worked... and not all their pilots survived. Once inventors figured out they needed a balance between…

Nancy Andreasen wrote a piece for The Atlantic this month called “Secrets of the Creative Brain.” It’s a must read for Stuff of Genius fans, as Andreasen recollects her years of research on the connections between mental illness and creativity.…

When Adam Harvey attended the Tabula Rasa conference, he was stunned by a prediction Dr. Anders Sandberg presented to the audience: by 2050 it will only cost a country .01% of their Gross Domestic Product to execute total surveillance on…

Imagine that you spend every day working from your beautiful home in California. In the backyard you have a shed laboratory where you develop psychedelic chemicals and meticulously test them on yourself, your wife and your best friends. And for…

In David N. Jahn’s documentary on H.R. Giger, the artist ruminates on how he can tell who the most influential families in Prague are by how large their gravestones are in the local cemeteries. If the same holds true for…

The Kickstarter video for the La Fenice coffee machine is like an SNL skit gone awry, with hosts Stefan and Fabio comically introducing their device, while a narrator waxes on about “perfection,” sounding like a cross between Ray Winstone and…

DIY, that means do it yourself. I don’t sit around waitin’ for someone’s help. I don’t sit back and say “Good enough.” I keep on striving, reinventing, keepin’ it off the cuff. – The Beastie Boys, “The Scoop.” When I…

I wonder what Peter Carl Goldmark would think if he were alive to know about a Record Store Day dedicated to celebrating the 33 ⅓ rpm long-playing phonograph record that he invented? It’s possible he wouldn’t be surprised, since former…

Let’s hope the words, “commence the orbital bombardment” don’t enter our vernacular in the near future. Imagine a bundle of metal telephone poles dropped from Earth’s orbit onto a target. They’d reach a speed of Mach 10 and have the…

Alexander Bogdanov was an intellectual who persistently attempted to change the world to a logical arrangement he thought would lead to the ideal society. He was also a risk-taker, and while he possessed many of the traits of a genius,…