Agostino Ramelli was a 16th-century Italian military engineer of some note who designed many machines and other contributions used in the go-go Renaissance period, including cranes, grain mills, and water pumps. But his most compelling apparatus was a real mindbender - a revolving wooden wheel with angled shelves that allowed users to read multiple books at one time.

VR Keeps Adults and Kids Focused on Learning During the Pandemic.

You have to admit, having an engine named after you is a singularly impressive achievement.

Clocks, Cars and Music on a Saturday Night.

uncertainty is still an everyday experience. Given the wealth of sometimes confusing and contradictory information we are spoon fed by Washington, we are left to our own devices to decipher announcements, e.g. — Do I wear a mask or not wear a mask? Do I still need to practice social distancing (a classic oxymoron: what is sociable about keeping distances between each other)? And so on.

"Fascinating, fun, and functional." That’s how Clayton Boyer describes the gears in the Brew Tipper, his wooden mechanism that pours a bottle of beer into a glass. He adds: "I love creating geared mechanisms and gadgets."

Architecture has always had a degree of global one-upmanship to it, but most of the time, you see it happening in the form of skyscrapers.

Photographer/filmmaker Ralph Steiner made poetry out of a simple short film on machine components in the 1930s

The Corpus Clock has a hundred and one little interesting factoids about everything from its design to its unveiling to its message — and it’s just hanging out on a street corner in Cambridge.

How do you fix a stone gear that has a chipped tooth and has surfaces roughened by acid erosion and covered in black grime? You bring in an art conservator.