With more than 30,000 locations operating today, the United States Postal Service is still the largest retail network in the US. It's also an embattled institution that's struggling to stay afloat. That's why last year, it enlisted a small design studio to overhaul its look completely. Here's what they came up with.
Remember that fridge box you turned into a rocket ship as a kid, complete with crayon-drawn control panels and a fancy sparkle glue paint job? Yeah, that was an embarrassment to our nation compared to this NASA simulator that Jeff Highsmith designed and built for his sons.
The world's largest functioning triple-expansion steam engine is an unbelievably massive beast of a machine. For 77 years, the 62-foot-high engine—weighing in at 1,000 tons!—powered gigantic flywheels and crankshafts that pumped millions upon millions of gallons of water from west to north London. It was decommissioned in 1980, but brought back to fully-functioning life by a team of retired volunteers who care for the oversized apparatus like it's one of their own.
Inside each of our hard, calcified teeth is a small population of living stem cells that can differentiate into many types of tissue. The origin of those stem cells has long been unknown, but scientists may now have a completely surprising answer: Cells of the nervous system can migrate into the middle of a tooth and actually turn back into stem cells. If verified, this could be a possible new source for stem cells.
These days, almost everything you watch on TV and in theaters is shot digitally. But because Hollywood still needs film sometimes, the the biggest motion picture companies in the world are banding together to keep the lights on in Kodak's Rochester motion picture film plant.
20 million gallons of potable water later, the massive double "trunk line" break that's resulted in spectacular flooding in the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the UCLA campus has finally been sealed off and crews have this bulbous blockage to thank for it.
When we stepped out onto the roof, the wind whipped me sideways, and it took me a second to get my bearings. I was nine stories above Times Square, staring at the back of its biggest LED sign, and it was thrilling.
