Hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of the wheel, some unlucky hominin stepped on a loose rock or unstable log and—just before they cracked their skull—discovered that a round object ...

Dean Kamen, the founder of FIRST and the inventor of the Segway personal transporter, got his first patent when he was 17 for an insulin pump. ""His mom had to sign the papers!"" Dudas said. One of ...

Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they're so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time — it was the Bronze Age — ...

Spinning methods. (a) Manual thigh-spinning [64]; (b) Spindle-and-whorl “supported spinning” [68]; (c) “drop spinning” [66]; (d) the experimental spindles and whorls, the 3D scans of the pebbles and ...