What's on Your Mind?

It looks like nothing more than a bedside fan. To program it, you hit the “on” button once. But what happens next could improve your memory by 226%. This is Memory Air, a new product born from decades of science charting the relationship between our nose and our brain. Each night, Memory Air cycles through 40 different, undisclosed scents, twice. As you sleep—even though you don’t consciously smell these scents—research suggests that it can measurably improve your memory within weeks. How is that possible? As the company’s founder—UC Davis professor emeritus Michael Leon—explains, “We are functionally odor deprived.” Whereas humans evolved in a scent-…

Camping. Why anyone would put themselves through an odyssey of gross insects and pooping in holes is beyond me, but you do you, Steve. I’ll do me. However, if I were forced to go sleep in the woods, I would like to use this new camping mattress by Chinese sleep startup Mazzu created in collaboration with London-based design studio Layer. It looks like the closest thing to a Four Seasons bed this side of the Rio Grande. Or any río (just don’t get me close to a river). The Mazzu Camping Mattress isn’t your typical inflatable pad that promises comfort on-the-go but delivers back pain for a week. It’s built around 72 precision-engineered elastic spring units—pre-c…

Have you ever wondered how the letter “A” got its shape? Or why some fonts instantly look “psychedelic”? Or where the word “text” even came from in the first place? Kelli Anderson, a graphic artist, author, and master of all things paper, has asked all of those questions—and she’s answering them with a massive new pop-up book called Alphabet in Motion. The book takes readers through an interactive journey about the history of typography from A to Z, starting in ancient Egypt and moving all the way into the digital age. But it’s no ordinary history tome. Anderson hand-designed 17 different pop-ups, including light projections to colorful sliders and mind-bending i…

The glory days of self-serve fountain drinks at McDonald’s are almost over, and people are not happy. Self-serve soda fountains have been a staple of fast food restaurants like McDonald’s for decades, allowing visiting customers to self-pour, refill, and even customize their order by mixing all available soda options. But as fast food chains look to optimize their operations, not all beloved features are making the cut, and fountains are quietly disappearing. In September 2023, McDonald’s announced it was eliminating the self-serve soda fountains, with a goal to remove them all by 2032, a decision made to drive consistency for staff and customers across its many o…

Influencers, how many late payments are you waiting on? Odds are, more than one. Influencer marketing is a booming $10 billion industry, but for creators, inconsistent cash flow remains a major pain point. Brand budgets shift, campaign timelines change, and payments can take months to land. For many influencers who rely on brand deals as their main source of income, financial instability is the norm. According to the Wall Street Journal, fewer than 13% of online influencers earned more than $100,000 last year—while nearly half made $15,000 or less. A fintech startup called Alchemy wants to change that. Founded by Isaac Wagschal, the company has launched a $100 mil…

Sunbridge appears to be a quintessential example of 21st century sprawl. A 27,000-acre residential mega-development taking shape outside of Orlando, Florida, it’s set to include more than 30,000 new homes in total when complete—a few neighborhoods, miles of trails, and a K–8 school have already been completed. It’s riding a growth boom in Central Florida; this fast-growing section of the Sun Belt has added more than 1,000 people every week in recent years. But within the different subdivisions being constructed at Sunbridge over the next 30 years, a landscape will emerge with each new home and green space that’s much more wild, native, and sustainable than the stereot…

Another day, another Ford Motor Co. recall. This time, the company is recalling 254,640 vehicles due to a potential issue with the rearview camera image. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the affected cars all have an Image Processing Module A (IPMA) that might reset unexpectedly. This reset can cause people to lose the rearview camera image and their advanced driver assistance features. The latter includes tools such as blind-spot monitoring, lane-keeping assist, and pre-collision assist. The NHTSA warns that a person might have a greater risk of crashing without these features. Ford has not learned of any related incident…

On weekdays, you could easily walk right past Knockdown Center, housed on an industrial stretch of road in Maspeth, Queens. The only thing that sets it apart from the neighboring auto body shops and wholesale warehouses is a rust-colored fence and a beat-up marquee that looks like it’s announcing a church rummage sale. But when Knockdown Center opens its gates at night and on summer weekends when its outdoor stage is set, the crowds of clubgoers streaming through its gate and pouring out of taxis, rideshares, and city buses is impossible to miss. The three-acre venue can accommodate up to 3,200 people inside and another 1,200 in its outdoor space, called the Ruins. …

Jared Kugel, founder and CEO of the e-commerce site Tire Agent, began his entrepreneurial journey with a bad idea. Kugel had been working for his family’s tire distribution business for more than a decade when, in 2017, he pitched a venture capitalist on creating a search engine for tire and wheel products. To his surprise, the VC liked it so much that the firm offered him $100,000 in seed funding and a spot at its New York City-based tech incubator, the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. Despite having no tech experience, Kugel accepted the offer and quickly adopted the industry’s “fail fast” mentality. Midway through the program, one of the firm’s partners as…

The top note in a new perfume called Miami Split comes from an unexpected place: a banana processing plant in Ecuador. The fragrance is extracted from banana-scented water, a byproduct of washing fruit, that was previously thrown away. It’s one of the unusual ingredients sourced by Abel Fragrance, a company that avoids using any fossil fuels in its products. Instead, it is looking to biotech to make natural fragrances. Right now, petrochemicals are the status quo in the industry. “Almost all fragrance molecules are synthesized from fossil fuels,” says Frances Shoemack, the brand’s founder. A typical fragrance is made from between a dozen and a few hundred fragrance molecu…

It’s spring, and nature is pulling me away from my computer as I write this. The sun is shining, the world is warming up, and the birds are chirping away. And that got me thinking: What if a smartphone app could translate all those chirps for us? No, I’m not talking about an app that will translate bird sounds to human speech (although that would be neat). Rather, the app we’re about to go over tells you what specific species is making any bird sound around you—kind of like Shazam, only for nature. All you have to do is hold up your phone and press one button. It’s an app I’ve personally used a bunch over the years and happily rediscovered this year. It’s espe…

Every now and then, you run into a tool that truly wows you. It’s rare—especially nowadays, when everyone and their cousin is coming out with overhyped AI-centric codswallop that’s almost always more impressive on paper than in practice. And that, if you ask me, makes it all the more satisfying when you track down a tool that really, truly impresses. My friend, today is one of those days. Prepare to have your mind blown. Be the first to find all sorts of little-known tech treasures with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. One useful new discovery in your inbox every Wednesday! Your instant audio enhancer Our tool for today comes fro…

When cities throw out single-family zoning rules—like Minneapolis did in 2018, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, voted to do this year—the first new multifamily construction projects on a block often come from developers, not homeowners converting existing dwellings. And no matter how desperately a city needs new housing units, change often happens slowly. In part, that’s because even if someone is interested in adding apartments to their own house for extra income, they might not know where to start. But in Toronto, which ditched single-family zoning in 2023, a tool kit makes it easier for “citizen developers” to understand their options and how much construction might cost. …

While I’m happy to extol the powers of the written word, sometimes you need a little something extra to get your point across. I’m not just referring to pictures, either, but also to annotations, flowcharts, and freeform drawings. These illustrative tools can be a powerful way to convey your message, whether by themselves or on top of an existing image. Allow me to (*ahem*) illustrate exactly what I mean, using a free tool that might end up being the image-editing, markup-magic-creating supplement you never knew you needed. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to di…

You know what I miss? Listening to the radio. I’ve always loved background music, which helps me focus. But modern music-streaming services can be distracting. Yes, I enjoy having instant access to millions of songs with services like Spotify. But I find myself constantly fiddling—searching for the next song, hitting the forward button, and choosing new playlists. Radio stations are a great alternative. You just hit the play button, and someone else makes the decisions. Now, of course, Spotify and other such services offer radio-station-like options of their own. But there’s always that “next track” button tempting you to skip around. Plus, these options s…

It sure is nice to have the web look the way you want—without all the usual awkward font choices and other assorted distractions—isn’t it? Over the past few weeks, we’ve explored a slew of interesting tools for taking total control of whatever you’re reading online: First, right here in these Cool Tools headquarters last week, my compadre and fellow Fast Company contributor Jared Newman showed you a series of simple sites for ​seeing minimalist, plain-text versions of sports, news, and weather​ online. Then, in my Android Intelligence newsletter soon after, I surfaced an awesome, out-of-sight feature in that arena for​ cleaning up and customizing the look of a…

AI image editing may be all the rage, but good old-fashioned image editors are still essential. There’s a problem, though: Windows PCs, Chromebooks, and Macs don’t include exceptional image editors that go beyond the most basic editing needs. Sure, you can pay for Photoshop or hunt down another image editor—but what if you just want to do something quick? Well, then you’re left searching the web—and maybe you come across a reasonably decent online image editor, but perhaps it forces you to sign into an account or pay for a subscription. Or maybe it just doesn’t do what it promises to do in any especially impressive way. Let’s skip all that. Today’s tool is an …

You may or may not have ever realized it, but for more than six decades, the CIA published an incredible resource called The World Factbook​. It was a free reference guide to all the countries on Earth, along with several non-state entities such as the European Union, and it was filled with all sorts of eye-opening info. You might’ve noticed I’m referring to it in the past tense. That’s because after having maintained this project since 1962—first as a printed book and then in more recent years online—the CIA unceremoniously discontinued and deleted The World Factbook earlier this year. But, as so often happens, the internet has come to the rescue. And now this on…

Sometimes, a simple summary is all you need. Me? I’m a man of many words. (Understatement of the century, I know.) I appreciate interesting writing, where language matters and a person’s personality shines through in the prose. But let’s be real: 99% of the articles you encounter on this musty ol’ web of ours aren’t exactly awe-inspiring. They’re a means to an end. The same is true for most videos, too. And in any such scenario, you aren’t in it for the pleasure of reading or viewing and being entertained. You just want to get the gist of what’s happening without wasting any time wading your way through unimaginative drivel. The next time you find yourself…