Hyperloop Technologies CEO Ahlborn claims his engineers have made serious progress on the transportation system. “We have solved all the technical issues,” he says. They know how to make pods levitate, maintain the necessary air pressure within the tube, and accelerate human beings to frightening speeds—and, more importantly—bring them to stop. None of this has been tested in public, but Ahlborn says he’ll have a prototype system under construction in California or Slovakia by the end of the year.
Philippe Braquienier is obsessed with all the ways humanity preserves information. Not just libraries and data centers, but weird stuff too, like Reyers Bridge in Belgium that housed its blueprints inside the bridge’s pillars and the Bahnhof company in Sweden that’s decorated like a space station. He’s spent the past four years traveling around Europe and beyond shooting the photos in Palimpsest, the ongoing series he calls the work of a lifetime.
Let others ponder the rich stores of knowledge within these places; Braquenier is fascinated by the spaces storing it.
There are few things in life as eerie as China’s neon-lit cityscape at night. The glow casts almost a magical hue on the city, transforming mundane things into almost ethereal experiences.
The future, it would seem, has actually arrived. Self-driving cars are on the road, driving themselves. Almost. Drones are blotting out the sky. Almost. Genetic engineering is producing the designer babies we’ve heard so much about. Almost. For our February issue, we identified the trends that will define the next twelve months and beyond. It’s not just what’s possible, it’s what’s coming, in the worlds of design, business, science, security and culture for the year ahead. It’s going to be quite a ride.
This frozen tower in the the Turkish village of Sarikoy stands at the edge of town, 65 feet tall and leaking constantly. Ordinarily, it isn’t much to look at. But when a winter storm sent temperatures plummeting below zero, that ugly infrastructure became a beautiful icicle.
The neighborhood of Hazaribagh runs along the bank of the Buriganga River as it flows through Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Its name means “a thousand gardens” in Urdu, but you won’t see much green. Instead, the streets are lined with mounds and mounds of leather. Hazaribagh is home to the country’s $1 billion tanning industry, a place where thousands work in the factories and chemicals makes the river slick and shiny.
