Researchers Find a Way to Make Wood Translucent

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have developed a translucent wood paneling called Optically Transparent Wood (TW) that could transform the way we incorporate sunlight into architecture. It’s created by removing the chemical lignin from the wood veneer and then impregnating it with a transparent polymer. Lars Berglund, a professor at KTH, believes the new material could be used in anything from …

How Emoji is Obscuring the Way We Communicate

Emoticons were initially created to help illustrate hard-to-explain emotions in text, but as it turns out, they’re actually obscuring the way we communicate. A study from the University of Minnesota’s GroupLens laboratory reveals that when two people look at the same emoji, they often have differing opinions on what it depicts. This discrepancy is further exacerbated when viewing emoji from different platforms, as Apple, Google, …

New Mexico’s Otherworldly Art Environment

The 150-member strong artist collective Meow Wolf has opened the doors to “The House of Eternal Return”—the physical manifestation of its grand artistic vision. The massive, immersive installation sits inside an abandoned bowling alley in Santa Fe, New Mexico and allows visitors to roam through a neon-lit fantasy world—including a treehouse, a full-size two-story home, and other rooms that seem to bleed into another dimension. …