This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine. There’s a reason fashion designers look to animal prints for inspiration. Creatures have evolved a dizzying array of patterns: stripes, spots, diamonds, chevrons, hexagons and even mazelike designs. Some, like peacocks, want to be seen, to attract a mate or scare off a rival or predator....

Take a moment to imagine what unheard sounds famed psychedelic rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix could have conjured to existence if he had an extra digit to work with. By that same measure, consider how much faster historic painters like Frida Kahlo or Vincent Van Gogh could have amassed their life’s work if they could have simply held their oil and brush...

My foster dog, Darla, a gastrointestinally challenged pit bull, twitches in her sleep. I assume she dreams of squirrels, which she chases mercilessly while awake. I may be right.   Research shows that dogs almost certainly dream. Any doubt comes from the fact that they can’t use language to communicate their experiences and confirm, yes, they...

Gmail is the go-to email client many of us rely on to manage the mountains of messages that pile up in our inbox—and it has a bunch of features to help, from automatic email prioritizing to label support. Here we’re going to focus on the features available in Gmail for Android and iOS. When you’re not at your computer, it’s even more important...

A team of physicists collaborating between the University of Amsterdam and Stanford University combined the lighthouse engineering theory and electrostatically bound “excitons” to build the world’s thinnest lens. At 0.6 nanometers thick and half a millimeter wide, the design uses just three atoms of a special material called tungsten disulphide (WS2),...

A team of physicists collaborating between the University of Amsterdam and Stanford University combined the lighthouse engineering theory and electrostatically bound “excitons” to build the world’s thinnest lens. At 0.6 nanometers thick and half a millimeter wide, the design uses just three atoms of a special material called tungsten disulphide (WS2),...