Planet-scale renewable energy.

A scale model of the history of the known universe, and humanity's place within it, plotted across a dry lakebed in the Mojave desert.

Christopher Butler on design:

The most innovative solutions often come from designers who are aware of conventions but not beholden to them. They know the rules well enough to break them purposefully. They understand context but aren’t limited by precedent. They’ve cultivated the discipline to look away from existing solutions when it matters most — during the critical phases of ideation and development when uniqueness of vision is most vulnerable to external influence.

When we constantly reference existing solutions, our work inevitably gravitates toward the mean. We solve for expectations rather than needs.

Great design requires both looking and looking away — studying and ignoring, learning and forgetting, absorbing and creating. The magic happens not just in what we choose to see, but in what we deliberately choose not to see.

Nora Atkinson, writing from the Museum of Craft & Design in San Francisco:

There’s something powerful in working with your hands, in the rhythm of making, in shaping the world through touch and attention. Craft has long offered a feeling of agency to those pushed to the margins, a feeling of continuity to those in chaos, a feeling of accomplishment to those who dedicate their attention. It reminds us that we’re still capable of creating something beautiful—even when things feel uncertain or broken.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

An impressively engineered and well-crafted variable-speed metronome. The Tempo Rubato was created by Gaku Okada, a recent graduate of Japan's Hiko Mizuno College of Jewellery and apprentice to both Hajime Asaoka and Jiro Katayama.

Having had numerous stakeholders over the years, Robert Greubel & Stephen Forsey have recently reconsolidated control of Greubel Forsey.

Fantastic news for this independent brand.

Brian Klaas on resilience over optimization. Drawing life lessons from nacre—the same iridescent material that imbues each mother-of-pearl watch dial with its unique luster.

Employing little more than a rusty, old tin of pipe tobacco and a handful of household items, Rob Morrison, in a clip from an old episode of Australia’s Curiosity Show, demonstrates how to create an isochronous curve.

Isochronism is an integral aspect of crafting a reliable timekeeper and you can see precisely why in the behavior of the balls that Morrison places along the curve.

Rain Noe, writing for Core77, breaks down several key differences between some of the more common 300 series and 400 series stainless steel alloys.

Daniel Valuch, of CERN, invents and evaluates the outcome of adding a “Chain Controlled Oscillator” (a.k.a. CCO) into a highly-precise Elektročas HH3 clock fitted with an Invar pendulum.

The CCO mechanism itself is tied into a cesium atomic clock, enabling the outfitted Elektročas HH3 to be regulated to stratum 1 levels of accuracy in near realtime.