Journal

Babies don’t really need expensive leather shoes. But thanks to some strategic mom marketing, Freshly Picked’s adorbs $60 baby moccs are hot.

In 2009, Susan Petersen, a stay-at-home mom in Provo, Utah, had a lightning bolt of an idea. She’d been struggling to find shoes for Gus, her newborn son. The baby shoes she saw in stores tended to be made of cheap materials. They looked shabby and often didn’t stay on his fast-growing feet. One day, she dreamt up tiny moccasins that, similar to Robeez, would fit snuggly around her baby’s foot and expand to accommodate chubby baby ankles.

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A Harvard professor contrasts two different corporate experiments in fair pay.

Back in April, Seattle credit card processing company Gravity Payments announced it would raise the minimum wage for its 120-person staff to $70,000. For CEO Dan Price, the bump up from the average $48,000 salary was an attempt to ensure the happiness of his employees, based on a Princeton study that measured the dollar figure that triggered contentment among 450,000 U.S. residents.

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A New Zealander with 3,000 hours on his hands built this smartphone-controlled shelter in the sky. It comes with a gorgeous view.

If you never had a treehouse as a kid, then prepare yourself for a fit of jealousy. Jono Williams has built the best treehouse ever, only instead of wood it uses $50,000-worth of imported Chinese steel and other materials, and instead of a tree, it sits atop a 10-meter steel pole.

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If you enjoy watching people fall down, this is for you.

Tough Mudder created a new obstacle course, Urban Mudder, using some of the materials you find in urban areas. Is it easier than Tough Mudder? Well, we sent intrepid reporter Mark Wilson to test it out, and the results are hilarious.

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Updating the world’s most iconic transportation map … after dark.

The London Underground, or “the Tube” as it’s colloquially known, is the oldest metro system in the world. It began its life in January 1863 with a single underground line running between Paddington and Farringdon—about four miles—in central London. On its opening day it carried over 38,000 passengers via steam locomotives and wooden carriages illuminated by gas-light.

Jump forward 152 years and the single line London Underground has grown exponentially–-and organically-–trying to keep pace with the global metropolis London has become. Today the London Underground comprises 270 stations across 250 miles of track. Its annual number of passengers exceeds 1.2 billion per year, millions of those journeys made by tourists who would never consider visiting London without taking a ride on the Tube, that rickety central nervous system of the capital. Indeed, the Underground is now as synonymous with “London” as Big Ben or Buckingham Palace. It is also one of the most well-known and recognizable public transport systems in the world–even to those who have never stepped foot in the capital, thanks to one thing: the design of its map.

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Short answer: No.

File the Buddy—a souped-up dog collar—under egregiously excessive design. Chances are your dog doesn’t need an activity monitor, GPS tracker, temperature and light sensors, and OLED display around its neck. But if you want your pooch to “express its unique character through light,” as the designers tout, perhaps this Kickstarter is for you.

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What happened this week? Here’s our quiz for August 14, 2015.

Did you follow the news this week? Research says that one of the best ways to solidify new information is to be tested on it. Here’s a chance to bolster your knowledge of current events—and earn a special emoji badge.

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Barcelona-based Onionlab uses 3-D projection mapping to blow a building in Spain apart, and it’s incredible.

We’ve seen many, many, many times before how projection mapping can be used to create mind-blowing optical illusions. But what happens when you add 3-D glasses to the mix?

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It’s made of fiberglass. It’s designed to be mass-produced. It’s smartphone-enabled. And someday, there could be thousands of them.

I’m standing in a cavernous, hangar-like building in American Canyon, California, 40 miles north of San Francisco in the Napa Valley. Inside the 35,000-square-foot structure is another structure—a gleaming blue-and-white kiosk whose most striking feature is a 20-foot spire topped off by a light-up panel shaped like an upside-down teardrop. I’ve never seen quite anything like it. Nor has almost anyone else: It’s the only one in the world, and it was built in secrecy by a small team inside this facility.

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Still, its U.S. workforce is largely made up of white men.

A new snapshot of Apple’s diversity numbers makes clear that the global innovator still has work to do, despite improvements made to diversify its ranks since last summer’s report.

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