You've heard of professional cuddlers, you've heard of waifu pillows, now get ready for the Mannequin! This stunted (or is it dismembered?) humanoid cushion features extra-long arms, a plush torso, and what looks like a cauterized neck that somehow combine into a comforting presence for millennials caught in the spiral of urban loneliness. Designed by Aseptic Studios, the Mannequin's neck can be used to correct posture and its arms can guard against heat expelled by laptops. With those perks, why even bother going on Tinder?

Homes built to the Passive House standard have been gaining popularity in recent years, and with the UN's latest dire warning about climate change, that popularity may see a bona fide boom. For people looking to do their part for the planet, German company Lofts to Go offers a solution: the Coodo, a prefab structure that adheres to this rigorous environmental standard. The units can be used as both residential and commercial spaces, and developments are in place to take the Coodo completely off the grid. 

It’s full steam—er, electricity—ahead for autonomous vehicles. The hospitality industry expressed its excitement over this swiftly emerging tech at the 12th annual Radical Innovation Awards, selecting Steve Lee’s Autonomous Travel Suite as the grand prize winner. The Aprilli Design Studios's project won the jury and audience over with its sleek design, game-changing door-to-door service, and easy integration with future tech.

Leather has been the quintessential material of good taste and class for centuries, but its throne as status symbol is increasingly being usurped by high-tech consumer goods. In a bid to create the ultimate semiotic expression of the aspirational lifestyle, HP rolled out the Spectre Folio, a leather-bound convertible laptop. It remains to be seen how many people who don't resemble Patrick Bateman will actually purchase this $1,300 computer.

Ikea furniture may look innocuous, but it has a well-documented history of destroying new couples before they even leave the store. And when lovebirds do escape the commercial behemoth's clutches, they inevitably fall apart when it comes time to assemble the pieces. Two researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore may have finally given couples everywhere a solution to the latter problem with a robot that can (partially) put together Ikea products in under a half-hour. 

Countless birds have succumbed to ill-fated collisions with airplanes, but a recent study from Purdue University provides a possible solution to this tragic reality: LEDs. In their experiment, the team demonstrated that birds, specifically the brown-headed cowbird, consistently avoided flying through a hole in a board that was surrounded by red or blue-emitting LEDs. This provided some hope that in the future airplanes could be outfitted with LEDs to help birds steer clear while in the air.

Fashion and architecture don't often intermingle, which is strange considering that both fields make functional art for distinctly human use. So when Prada featured three handbags by female architects Cini Boeri, Elizabeth Diller, and Kazuyo Sejima at this year's Milan Fashion Week, the evidence that these two industries had more to offer each other only mounted. Each of the bags expertly riffed on Prada's iconic nylon bag, offering new possibilities for an accessory that set the precedent for a new idea in women's fashion: functionality can be luxurious, too.

People generally don't like how technology can track their location at all times—the profusion of articles about how to hide from Google and Facebook's panopticon-like power make that perfectly clear. Silicon Valley–based startup Lime, which deploys and operates dockless bicycles in over 88 American cities, may slightly improve that opinion. A few city planning departments have turned to Lime's data about user locations to understand how people are biking in their cities and how to accommodate those riders with new and improved bicycle infrastructure.

Rothy's, a footwear brand that makes shoes exclusively out of recycled plastic water bottles, has at last rolled a sneaker style. The shoes resemble classic Vans, but come with an added benefit of being sustainably sourced and completely recyclable. The asking price is $125, which runs a little less than Adidas's Parley shoes ($140). 

As Hurricane Florence barreled closer to North Carolina, warnings about the potential dangers came from the usual sources: meteorologists and doppler radar maps. In order to truly illustrate the danger this storm could bring to the region, the Weather Channel created a terrifying new animation that depicts how a three, six, or nine-foot storm surge would actually appear. The animation was produced using the Unreal Engine, the same system that makes countless video games look and feel lifelike. 

For California's high-speed rail line, eleven years late is better than never. The highly contested $100-billion project is finally underway, with 20 sites along the train's planned proof-of-concept route between Bakersfield and Madera having broken ground. The 119-mile stretch is slated to be complete by 2022. The final length of the high-speed rail will be 300 miles. 

First trains, then cars, and now yachts are getting the eco-friendly electric treatment. The Hinckley Company's Dasher is the world’s first fully-electric luxury yacht, earning the nickname "Tesla of the sea.” The stylish boat produces zero emissions, runs with whisper-quiet propulsion, and can be fully charged at the dock in half the time of its land-locked counterparts.

What do these three things have in common: cocaine, caffeine, and cannabis? For starters, they all start with "c" and they're all considered drugs by the United States government. They also share a relationship with the Coca-Cola company, who infused their beverages with trace amounts of cocaine until 1929 and continues to caffeinate many of their products today. The soda company purportedly is in talks with Canadian marijuana producer Aurora Cannabis to create a CBD-infused soft drink. 

If it seems WeWork couldn't possibly do more with the modern office, think again. The $20 billion company realizes that for some of its tenants who represent established companies, such as Microsoft or Facebook, the built-in culture that WeWork offers isn't what's needed. For that reason they created HQ by WeWork, a pared-down arrangement with less staff and minimal WeWork branding. 

As 3-D printing becomes more available, the potential to create unprecedented architectural feats has exploded. The latest iteration of this growing trend involves a research team at ETH Zurich and the super-slim concrete ceiling they made with a 3-D printed sand mold. The team made a total of 11 1,000-square-foot slabs, which will be installed in their ongoing DFAB House project. 

Who's the buffest of them all? Thanks to Naked Labs' newest product, a high-tech personal computer housed in a floor-length mirror, athletes and fitness enthusiasts will have an answer that's more than what meets the eye. The mirror comes with a scale that can produce a 360-degree 3-D model of the user, showing current and predictive weight loss, in just 15 seconds.

While the timing of Mars colonization remains a mystery, we now have a better idea of where the first homo sapiens on the red planet will live. Swamp Works, a small team at the Kennedy Space Center, have their sites set on regolith, plastic polymers, and 3-D printing as the key to future martian dwellings. Robots and a beefed-up version of Autodesk will ensure that the structures can withstand solar radiation, extreme weather, and micro-meteorites.

If the modern art museum is starting to lean a little too heavy on the installation side of things for you, blame Instagram and the profusion of pop-up museums the photo and video-sharing social media giant has spurred. Places like the Museum of Ice Cream or the wndr museum cater to the type of visitor who needs to document and share everything on "the 'gram," creating beautiful if slightly over-hyped exhibits in which to take the perfect selfie. The question remains: is this a bastardization of artistic traditions, a new chapter in the historiography of art, or just a fad?

Decades ago, nuclear power was at the forefront of clean, renewable energy. Today, however, it's plagued by all sorts of bad press and logistical nightmares. But nuclear energy looks like a promising alternative to fossil fuels once again with a bold new concept: floating power plants.

If less than 2% of the world's fresh water is usable and the earth's population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, then humanity needs to figure out water conservation, and fast. A team of NASA scientists hope to offset this crisis through weather and water-related research. They're surveying the Sierra Nevada mountain range to get a better idea of how climate change affects reliable access to water.

Nanobots may be teeny-tiny, but once they become commercially viable, their impact could be huge. A team of MIT scientists recently created an aerosol spray full of these microscopic, self-reproducing machines. The spray could be used to identify problems in systems in our built environment and eventually in our own bodies.

Moscow's Metro has been around since the 1930's, a time before the hegemony of any one style in public spaces came to be the accepted norm. Because of this, each station in the Russian capital treats urbanites to a vast array of architectural and artistic motifs that today would be extraordinary to imagine a government endorsing. Architectural historian Nikolai Vassiliev has been documenting the stations in hopes of preserving them.

Wheat, maize, rice, and soybeans dominate modern-day agriculture, providing two-thirds of the world’s food supply while simultaneously contributing nearly a third of global greenhouse gases and eroding biodiversity across the planet. But a group called Crops for the Future hopes to reverse these trends by posing equally delicious and nutritious alternatives—7,000 of them, in fact. As climate change ramps up, rediscovering the benefits of these "alternative crops" could mean life or death for the future of humanity. 

Public transit: it’s ubiquitous, divisive, and apparently meme-worthy. Numtots, or members of the Facebook group “New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens,” are an international group of millennials whose big ideas about improving city life all use the Internet’s favorite means of communication. Although seemingly niche, the group has over 100,000 active members.

For the first time in human history, it’s possible to stand in the middle of a nuclear blast and remain unscathed. Students at Fukuyama Technical High School produced a five-minute VR experience that shows what it was like immediately before, during, and after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The production took two full years to complete.

Sure, houseplants are good for our health and wellbeing from a holistic, biophilic point of view. But what if they could track our environment and alert us to dangers the way wearable tech monitors our internal workings? Scientists from the University of Tennessee think that with the possibility of genetic engineering we may be able to update the famous "canary in a coal mine" idiom for the 21st century. 

LEGO blocks continue to entertain budding and established architects, but now they're both fun and environmentally friendly. LEGO has launched their first sustainable building brick series, called Plants From Plants, made of sugarcane-derived plastic. This effort is part of a larger company-wide plan to manufacture most of its products in environmentally friendly ways or with recycled materials by 2030. 

High heels are both beautiful and colossally painful to wear, but not for much longer! Podiatrist Marion Parke has invented a new kind of heel that promises both luxury and comfort. Her eponymous startup's designs have made it past the drawing board and into production, thanks in part to funding by the owners of Minnetonka Moccasin shoe company and several high-end Italian leather manufacturers, who were eager to inject some innovation into a product that hasn't seen much change in centuries.