The 40 best gadgets of 2017
From smart-speakers and virtual bikes to robot vacuums and indestructible cables, here is the year’s most covetable technology
The Observer
Loving Blue Planet? Go one better and take a real submarine trip to the deep
The new must-have accessory for cruise liners and luxury yachts is a bubble-shaped submersible
Volvo XC60 review: ‘The safest car on the planet’
The new version of Volvo’s bestselling model ticks every conceivable box (and some you didn’t know you had)
Frida Kahlo: feminist, selfie queen, queer icon and style muse of 2017
It’s the artist’s attitude as much as her work that inspires today’s designers (not to mention Theresa May)
Is Richard Branson’s high-speed train in a pneumatic tube pie in the sky?
First airlines, then spaceships. Now the Virgin boss wants to build Hyperloop One – a high-speed, pneumatic maglev railway. But engineering experts doubt that it will ever leave the station
The eco guide to radical materials
Cotton has a disastrous foorprint, leather is destroying the Amazon, polyester threatens the ozone layer. Luckily there are some new fabrics on the way