Source: Wikimedia Commons
On the front of an enormous number of backpacks there is a small diamond or rectangle of leather or synthetic material, stitched at its corners, with two parallel…
The mousetrap is the standard example used by patent offices and inventors' organisations when they want to explain that a better idea is not the same thing as a better…
The painted stripes across a pedestrian crossing are so familiar that they look like the obvious solution. They were not the first attempt.
The original crossings were marked by rows…
There is a wire coat hanger in almost every house, and nobody bought it. They arrive with dry cleaning, they accumulate, and they are the only household object most people…
Postal codes feel like infrastructure - something that was always there, like street names. They are not. Most of them arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, they were introduced against…
Take two golf balls of identical weight and size, one smooth and one dimpled, and hit them identically. The dimpled one will travel roughly twice as far.
That is the…