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Case modder Jeffrey Stephenson creates the type of extravagant PCs you want to construct a whole room around. His latest is the art deco-inspired SkyVue, which uses mahogany-like sapele wood and aluminum trim to mimic the look of a 1930s skyscraper (although that also means it looks a lot like Sony’s PS2). If you owned this mod you’d probably start off thinking it was just a good signature piece for your room, and then a week or so later you’d be scouring eBay for an art deco desk, chair, and hatstand to match, all while humming “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”

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The Division is an upcoming shooter that takes place in a near-future version of New York City that’s become overrun by chaos in the wake of a global pandemic. But even though the fictionalized version of the city is in complete disarray, more dangerous (and somehow dirtier) than the real thing, it still feels like New York — uncannily so for some residents. Much of what makes it seem like a real place comes down to the tiny details, like the graffiti on the walls and the advertisements on billboards.

They’re things you might not even notice while you’re dodging bullets, but the developers at Swedish studio Massive Entertainment put a surprising amount of work into them. The Division features 230 different fictional ads — covering…

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BMW is in the midst of celebrating its 100th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, it just rolled out the Vision Next 100 concept at its Munich headquarters. By all appearances, it’s one of the most insane concept cars BMW has ever conceived.

If you squint your eyes, you can still see a car that’s clearly a BMW here — it has the iconic “kidney” grille, for instance — but beyond that, the details are all visions of a distant future. The entire windshield is an augmented reality display, which takes the place of every single dashboard display. There are also 800 triangles embedded in the dash, which BMW calls Alive Geometry. These multicolor polygons apparently communicate “very directly with the driver through their movements, which are…

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On Thursday, March 4th, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in Lower Manhattan officially opened to the public. The hub replaces the PATH train station that was destroyed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which — if you’ll recall — was rather a long time ago. Indeed, over 12 years in the making, the new train station is symbol of both governmental waste and architectural excess. Its centerpiece is the Oculus, a mind-boggling glass-and-steel structure designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to look like a dove in flight, but it actually more closely resembles a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the sands of Lower Manhattan.

Critics have blasted the hub for its massive cost overruns ($4 billion in public money) and…

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“As soon as I could conceptualise being anything,” Christian Ward says, “I wanted to be a comic artist. I would draw comics at primary school that I’d photocopy and sell in the playground. It was having school teachers and tutors at uni who did all they could to steer me away from comics that introduced me to contemporary illustration and fine art. I’ve circled illustration and comic art ever since.”

Ward is a London-based artist and illustrator best known for his work in comics, most notably the epic ODY-C, a gender-swapped, sci-fi retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey” created in collaboration with writer Matt Fraction. He’s also contributed covers to series like Young Avengers and Iron Man, and recently started working on Marvel’s The…

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Along with his Apple colleague Jony Ive, Marc Newson is one of the most famous and influential industrial designers in the world. The Australian has put his name to everything from furniture to aircraft cabins, and his design signature is all over the Apple Watch.

But although Newson now spends “around 60 percent” of his time on mysterious projects at Apple, he hasn’t worked on a great deal of consumer electronics in the past. Just one mobile phone, for example.

This is it.

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Control Center was a welcome addition when it was added to iOS in 2013, but if Apple’s engineers are looking for some ideas, they may want to take a look at this extremely well-done concept from British designer Sam Beckett. The updated Control Center works with 3D Touch, naturally expanding the utility of the pop-up settings menu. For instance, a hard press on the Wi-Fi icon lets you quickly choose a network to join.

The concept also has some much-needed features, like the ability to rearrange settings icons and swap in entirely new shortcuts, like Low Power Mode and a toggle for cellular connectivity. In addition, AirDrop and AirPlay have been reduced to icons, the way it probably should be. Right now they both share an entire row…

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After more than a decade, an unfathomable amount of money, and hundreds of thinkpieces on the subject, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub — and the Oculus, the spiky, controversial sculpture that tops it — is set to make its debut to the public. The official word is that the Santiago Calatrava-designed project will open next week (when Curbed recently visited the site for a tour, a worker on the site said that March 3rd would be the day, but Port Authority wouldn’t confirm that), but it’ll do so without fanfare.

To some degree, the reluctance to celebrate what should be a huge, crowning achievement is understandable. Calatrava’s design for the Hub was first unveiled in 2004, and at the time, the Port Authority estimated that the…

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A gas leak outside of Los Angeles, in Aliso Canyon, last October forced more than 4,600 households into temporary housing and took 112 days to plug. Now, researchers say it may have been the worst methane leak in US history.

Overall, the Aliso Canyon gas leak released more than 100,000 tons of methane, according to a study published today in Science.That’s equivalent to the total annual emissions from 572,000 passenger cars. Air samples collected in the area also contained above-normal levels of benzene, a known carcinogen, and other potentially dangerous compounds. Given that methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas, more than 50 times more potent than carbon dioxide, leaks like the one at Aliso Canyon could end up having a significant…

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Birmingham, Alabama-born jazz musician Herman Sonny Blount stood out quite a bit from the other Southern, African-American musicians who immigrated to Chicago in the middle of the 20th century. Then again, any saxophonist claiming he was a robed mystic born on Saturn would probably draw a few second looks from the crowd.

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