Rachel Feltman

A neat, orderly workspace may encourage generosity and generally “good” behavior, but a messy desk will foster your creativity. While it’s no surprise that keeping your pens lined up will make you a more efficient worker, a new study may be the first research to show that disorder can also have a positive influence on workplace behavior. Don’t go knocking your pencil holder over for the heck of it, but it seems that a little chaos might be what workers need to get their creative juices flowing.

Working from home is on the rise, and once your couch becomes your office you never really have to leave the house. For anything.

Remember those halcyon days when there was only one TV in the household and the whole family had to gather and agree what to watch? (Actually, if you’re American and under 40, you probably don’t.) But it turns out that people still like sitting in front of the TV together—as long as they have a smartphone or tablet to distract them.

Max Levchin wants to talk to you about cervical mucus. The internet entrepreneur, who co-founded the now ubiquitous online payment service PayPal, has turned his focus to solving a problem he feels is more important than the hassle of entering credit card numbers: Infertility.

One of the biggest obstacles to at-home 3D printing is the difficulty of designing objects to print, but the days of struggling to learn CAD or trawling for templates online may be over. Fuel3D, Inc has just launched (and, in one day, successfully funded) a Kickstarter for a handheld, point-and-shoot, full color 3D scanner. That means you can now print anything you can take a picture of—for about $1,000.

BioBeats, the big data company that made it possible for you to dance along to music tuned to your heartbeat, announced today that it now hopes to venture into more serious health and wellness apps. With $650,000 in seed funding, its team wants to get people thinking about their health before (and after) they develop medical problems.

Most 3D printing is done with different types of plastic, but as we’ve said before, there’s more than one kind of machine that falls under the “3D printer” umbrella. Along with the devices that print organs and cars, there’s one that uses the last material you’d expect: printer paper.

If you go to a college with tougher grading standards than average, you’re less likely to get into graduate school, new research shows—and there’s a similar problem within the job market. Correspondence bias, a psychological phenomenon that makes us judge people based on their behavior (like GPA) while ignoring context (like the difficulty of the school attended), could be keeping you from getting the jobs you want.

Commercial Break, an app released today for the iPhone, seems like it serves a rapidly dying market. You tell the app which channel you’re watching on cable TV (right now it only covers a handful of US channels) and it tells you when commercial breaks start and end. A great idea, but surely a bit late for those of us who rely increasingly on DVR and give awards to shows that will never play on live TV?

The numbers: Great. Corning saw significant improvements, both year-over-year and compared with the previous month. This was the company’s third consecutive quarter of year-over-year earnings growth. Profits rose 35% this quarter, and sales climbed 3.9% to $1.98 billion with display technology sales up 21% from last year and the Life Sciences (read: test tubes) segment up by 35%. Earnings per share were $0.42, a 39% increase from last year’s $0.31.

As the technology for making silicon circuitry smaller, faster and less power-thirsty approaches the limits of physics, scientists have tried out many materials in the search for an alternative to silicon. New research by a team at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory may have put some other promising candidates into the race.

Online reservations are supposed to make snagging a table a breeze, but when it comes to in-demand restaurants, the process is going the way of stock trading and concerts on Ticketmaster: Pretty soon you’re going to get beaten by bots, big time.

The future of making neighborhoods safer might lie in simply making them look safer. That’s what researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Austrian Institute of Technology concluded from results gathered on this website, which allows visitors to rate pictures of urban areas like they’re Tinder headshots:

Chromecast, Google’s new video and music streaming product, is a sexy little number. The size of a thumb drive, it promises to deliver digital content to your TV with unprecedented ease. Here’s how Google’s long-awaited addition to the living room stacks up to other options on the market (spoiler alert, it’s going to blow them out of the water).

When Google launched a new inbox design last month, some speculated that it was about to make email-based advertising a lot harder. And it’s looking like those worries weren’t unfounded. The inbox, which automatically separates emails into four categories to keep the “primary” stream of mail clear from ads and social media alerts, seems to be steadily lowering open rates, or the count of how many advertising email recipients actually open them.

Concept art for Volvo’s new solar charger accessory, a highly aesthetic set of parabolic panels that can fold into the new hybrid’s trunk after use, has been doing the rounds this week. It turns out the device should be ready by September, but you’re not going to see it in anyone’s driveway for a long time—if ever.

Rumors that Apple is looking to produce a larger smartphone gained more credence with a new report by the Wall Street Journal. It’s about time, since the iPhone’s four-inch screen is now dwarfed by other, popular options on the market.

Several of the biggest brains in 3D printing joined Quartz for a discussion about the future of the technology at General Assembly in New York City on July 16. Here are the three most interesting things we learned.

If you haven’t heard of DJ Earworm, you’ve probably heard his mixes: His “United State of Pop,”a series of massive mash-ups that turn 12 months worth of top-40 hits into a single song, take over the internet once a year like clockwork. But even with over 100 million views on Youtube and a commission to make mashups for the London Olympics, DJ Earworm has never been able to sell his music legally. Now he’s the latest artist to join Legitmix, a website that uses unique software and a loophole in copyright law to pay remixers. But what makes Legitmix legal also makes Earworm’s songs cost more than most albums.

In March, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced that, after a year of searching, his team had dredged up several F-1 engines, remnants of the Apollo space program, from the ocean floor. With the parts highly damaged, Bezos wasn’t expecting to find the serial numbers that would identify which mission the engines were a part of. (After all, they’d dropped out of the sky at 5,000 MPH and sat underwater for a few decades.) Today, against all odds, he confirmed that one of the engines is just what he’d set out to find—one of those ejected from Apollo 11 as it took the first men to the moon.

HTC introduced the One Mini today, making them the latest smartphone producer to announce a low-cost model. The device, which The Verge reports will be “two price points below the HTC One” while delivering “exactly the same experience,” joins a cohort that includes Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Mini and the long-rumored cheaper iPhone model, which some think will appear in Apple’s lineup this fall.

Young people have always been pegged as rabble-rousers and revolutionaries. But researchers have long struggled to pinpoint why youth bulges—increases in the ratio of a country’s young people relative to its total population—and political unrest go hand in hand.

A Brazil nut is not a nut. It might not be from Brazil, either. In fact, there are a lot of products in your cupboard that come from surprising places. In recent years, several second- and third-tier exporters have surpassed former centers of production, resulting in a melting pot of food origins that’s constantly changing. Here’s where some of your food (and drugs) comes from these days, and why:

The latest trend in smartphone upgrades is kind of like renting to own your appliances. That is to say, it’s an expensive option that’s likely to squeeze lower-income customers.