Steve Jobs, Jan. 27, 2010

Thomas Jefferson, Steve Jobs, Estée Lauder, and Charles Lindbergh suffered from the same mental illness.

The man could not stand dirt. When he built his company’s first factory in Fremont, Calif., in 1984, he frequently got down on his hands and knees and looked for specks of dust on the floor as well as on all the equipment. For Steve Jobs, who was rolling out the Macintosh computer, these extreme measures were a necessity. “If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless,” the Apple co-founder later recalled, “then we weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.” This perfectionist also hated typos. As Pam Kerwin, the marketing director at Pixar during Jobs’ hiatus from Apple, told me, “He would carefully go over every document a million times and would pick up on

Why do we like to listen to tunes when we exercise? Psychologist Tom Stafford searches for answers within our brains, not the muscles we are exercising.

Perhaps you have a favourite playlist for going to the gym or the park. Even if you haven't, you're certain to have seen joggers running along with headphones in their ears. Lots of us love to exercise to music, feeling like it helps to reduce effort and increase endurance. As a psychologist, the interesting thing for me is not just whether music helps when exercising, but how it helps.

The GreenGT was due to become the first non-petrol-engine car to compete at the famous 24-hour race, but its designers say this technology is still the future.

As those familiar with the story of the hare and the tortoise know, the quickest starter does not always win the race. The developers of a hydrogen fuel cell car due to become the first vehicle without a petrol engine to compete in the Le Mans 24 hour race have insisted their decision to pull out is the right one.

Design touches all areas of life, from computer interfaces to the packaging of the goods in our shopping basket. As part of BBC Future’s Imagineering series, where designers reimagine everyday objects, we tracked down the young Hungarian designer who aims to update a century-old staple familiar to almost everyone around the world.

Google is working on a videogame console and smartwatch powered by Android software, according to reports.

The new hardware would allow Google to compete with rumoured products from its rival, Apple, including a next generation TV that will include a videogame console and an Apple smartwatch.

The internet search giant is planning to design and market the two devices and then release at least one of them this autumn, according to reports.

In Skyfall, the Japanese island of Hashima serves as the secret headquarters of Raoul Silva, the well-coiffed Bond villain played by Javier Bardem. In reality, it serves as a sobering reminder of the pitfalls of industrialization, and the human toll it can exact. Late last month, Messy Nessy Chic published a detailed history of the island, which, at the turn of the 20th century, was a bustling coal-mining town owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation.

Could tiny organisms help us understand the extraordinary complexity of the human brain, and how to keep our brains healthy as we get older? One person thinks so.

There’s now a great deal of effort and money devoted to understanding the extraordinary complexity of the human brain. But it’s also important to go back to basics, says Susan Lindquist, molecular biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her idea is to use the power of evolution to unlock secrets that could keep our minds healthy as we age.

To understand how to adapt to and shape our rapidly changing world, we have to study how children, not adults, respond to it, says a top designer.

American law student Cody Wilson has created the world's first working 3D-printable gun, though the US government has stopped his plans being shared for free on the internet

Printers that can create 3D objects have become one of the hottest topics in technology in recent months – ushering in a world of weird and wonderful possibilities that could be manufactured with the push of a button.

On June 21, 2013 Power9Pro is releasing a new service called "Magpie," which aims to help "Magic: The Gathering" players and and store owners with "the complexities and headaches associated with monitoring card prices."

The tech giant looks like it is ditching its fondness for apps and programs that look like real-world products. Is this a good thing?

Why do most smartphones make a clicking noise, like a camera shutter closing, when you take a picture with them? Why do the virtual pages of a book on a tablet appear to turn as you swipe across the screen?

A decade after its final flight, Jonathan Glancey pays tribute to that most glamorous of aircraft – and argues for it as an icon of the 20th Century.

Concorde flew for the last time ten years ago. This supremely elegant airliner has yet to be replaced and, in an age of ubiquitous flying buses, cheap flights and long-term recession, perhaps it never will be. Glamorous and exclusive, a technological marvel and a thing of daunting beauty, Concorde belonged to an era that has vanished in a cloud of burned kerosene.

While female artists rule the pop charts, many still conform to long-held music industry stereotypes. Miranda Sawyer asks if change is on its way.

This is an era where female performers dominate music as never before: I give you Beyoncé, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Jessie J, Adele, Florence and her Machine – not to mention poor, sad Britney and the never-ending saga that is Madonna. These are women whose music tops charts across the world,

A giant wooded ark built in Long Island, NY for Darren Aronofsky's epic, NOAH

With epic stories about Noah, Moses and Cain and Abel all due to hit our screens, is the Bible movie set to take over from the superhero film? Tom Brook examines the potential risks and rewards of the religious blockbuster.

It was an intriguing image and it caught Twitter users' imagination – a massive wooden replica of Noah's Ark under construction in suburban New York. "I dreamt about this since I was 13," tweeted Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, whose epic film of Noah’s life is set for release next March. "And now it's a reality."

At Carnegie Hall, gospel singer Wintley Phipps delivers perhaps the most powerful rendition of Amazing Grace ever recorded.

He says, "A lot of people don't realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano. Probably the most famous on this slave scale was written by John Newton, who

Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and founder member of the English rock band the Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone magazine said Richards had created "rock's greatest single body of riffs", ranking him 4th on its list of 100 best guitarists. Fourteen songs Richards wrote with the Rolling Stones' lead vocalist Mick Jagger are listed among Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time".

For guests at a landmark hotel in the Big Apple, ordering breakfast in bed that gets wheeled in on a silver platter will soon be a thing of the past.

New York Hilton Midtown in Times Square, the biggest hotel in New York City, with nearly 2,000 rooms, says it will eliminate room service starting this summer. This isn't the first Hilton property to get rid of room service: Hilton Hawaiian Village stopped offering it in the fall.

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Vegetarians enjoy lower death rates, according to research on more than 70,000 Seventh-day Adventists published today by Journal of the American Medical Association.

Based on questionnaire answers, participants were classified as non-vegetarian, semi-vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian (includes seafood), lacto-ovo-vegetarian (includes dairy and egg products) or vegan (excludes all animal products).

European astronomers not only discovered a new planet outside our solar system, but actually took a picture of it, a feat that is almost unheard of in astronomy today. The new planet, which its discoverers affiliated with the European Southern Observatory dubbed HD 95086 b—after its star, HD 95086—is a remarkably close one, at only 300 light-years away.

Don’t count on future space crews venturing out to colonize it, though. Astronomers calculate that it is a fiery-hot gas giant that is four to five times the size of Jupiter. Its atmosphere might have water vapor, but the intense pressure of the planet’s churning fathoms of gas and liquid would definitively rule out habitability. So would the surface temperatures, which the astronomers say run at almost 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Kidney disease is one of the costliest illnesses in the world and managing kidney disease is very expensive.

Each year, lots of people die of kidney disease all over the world, and the number of people suffering from chronic renal failure, and need dialysis or kidney transplantation to stay alive keep increasing.

Statistics have it that, worldwide, more than millions patients are waiting for kidney transplants, but only a few thousands will receive transplants because of shortage of suitable organ donors.