There’s an extremely common design trend that may have slipped by right under your nose, slowly taking over seemingly ever new car on the road, one by one. It’s only maybe a couple inches wide at most, and at all four corners of the car. It’s purpose a mystery, until now.

Thanks to the cult of Apple and other companies with slick products or presentation, it’s become stylish to talk about applying “design principles” to other disciplines. But according to designer Rie Nørregaard, the key design lesson we should all learn is one that many designers are still learning themselves: designing for more than the “default” user.

"It's very easy to get intimidated," says Hamayal Choudhry, the robotics engineer who co-created the smartARM, a robotic hand prosthetic that uses a camera to analyse and manipulate objects. "You have this idea for a project, then think, I don't know a thing about this." Here's how Choudhry and his partner Samin Khan, who programmed the smartARM's machine learning algorithm, used code libraries, college assignments, and sponsored hackathons to find and execute a meaningful project at age 20.

As soon as your car leaves the factory and is properly broken in, it's probably cranking out the most power it will ever make in stock form. That's because, over time, certain components wear down; here's how that happens.

In nature, blue is much rarer than you might think. Sure, the sky is blue when the weather's nice, and so is the ocean. But the vast majority of plants and animals are incapable of making blue pigment. Brilliantly-coloured peacocks appear blue not because their feathers are coloured that way, but because of how they reflect light. Less than 10 per cent of the world's 280,000 flowering plants produce blue flowers, which may be why they're often a symbol of the unattainable in folklore and literature.

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating our daily lives, with applications that curate your phone pics, manage your email, and translate text from any language into another. Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are all heavily researching how to integrate AI into their major services. Soon you'll likely interact with an AI (or its output) every time you pick up your phone. Should you trust it? Not always.

Even if you can correctly identify the main parts beneath your car bonnet, you probably don't know how all those complex systems work. Here are ten fantastic videos that explain the basics - made by the car manufacturers themselves. Want to know how drum brakes work? Clutch transmissions? Car suspension? 4WD? Rotary engines? You'll find all the answers here.

The rotary engine was patented in 1929 by German engineer Felix Wankel, and it could not be more different to the piston engines that exist in most of the cars on the road today. This neat video breaks down the essentials.

It may be hard to believe, but most mechanical engineers designing your cars have no clue how to fix them. That's because engineering and automotive repair are two very separate entities. Here's the difference.

According to my calendar, the Australian winter is almost over yet it's still cold as buggery. This morning, I had to scrape about an inch of frost off my windscreen and then warm up the engine like some hapless Melbournian. But wait. Do you really need to warm up a car before driving or is this just an old dad's tale? This video explains what you need to know.

In 2013, a meeting of academics specialising in teaching first year undergraduate mathematics (known as the FYiMaths network) identified that the broad removal of mathematics prerequisites for many undergraduate degrees had created the biggest challenge they faced in teaching.

A recent study has revealed that engineering graduates have a better chance of finding paid employment compared to their brethren in other fields of study. However, less then half of those graduates will end up in the engineering business and a large portion of them will end up in the IT industry.

Space exploration, whether it be through telescopes watching the skies or probes sent to far away planets, is the culmination of thousands of people's work, collaborating together to solve the innumerable problems that arise when you try to reach beyond what seems possible.

Apple is one of the most reputable tech companies in the world with some of the highest paid interns. Working there must therefore be a dream job, right? Wrong. Over on the career community site Glassdoor, there are plenty of complaints and horror stories from current and former Apple engineers, developers and project managers. Here are some of their chief bugbears that other businesses would do well to avoid.