Ever since offices have existed, they’ve projected a certain image of the companies who build them. And in the tech space, this has usually meant a forward-looking aesthetic—Apple’s spaceship, Amazon’s geodesic domes, and Bell Labs’ mirrored complex. It’s a fitting, and often repeated, conceit for businesses that are designing the future. (Or want to be perceived as such.)  

This pattern is part of the reason why the new San Francisco headquarters of Notion, a productivity software company that pivoted to AI a few years ago, feels unexpected. Designed by IA Interior Architects, the 100,000-square-foot space located in a circa 1907 building expresses a more historic sensibility. To wit: Its lobby is furnished with a book-matched burl reception desk, antique Persian carpets, gauzy white curtains, and an authentic Gerrit Rietveld chair. Noticeably absent? Logos and screens. 

According to Michael McGinley, Notion’s global head of real estate, the brand and identity are reflected in the atmosphere, which is quite soothing, thanks to walls painted in Benjamin Moore Cream Froth and lighting set to 2700K—a color temperature designers typically use for hotels and homes. “It wants to celebrate the person who’s here,” says Kristoffer Tendall, design director of IA’s San Francisco studio. 

Notion’s relocation comes at an interesting time for San Francisco and the tech industry based there. In the past, companies flocked to areas like South Beach and Mission Bay, where new development is concentrated and available floor space is large enough to accommodate growth. But overall, the AI industry has preferred to move into older buildings in historic neighborhoods, such as Jackson Square. 

It’s a bit anachronistic: While companies like Notion, Anthropic, and Jony Ive’s Io are shaping how we interact with the world through AI and agents, they’re doing so from architecture that reads more like the pre-digital past. 

Working with history

For Notion, a headquarters in the downtown Monadnock Building made sense logistically and culturally. Market Street hollowed out during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing the real estate market to accommodate larger leases. Its proximity to public transportation—along with a nice parking garage next door—cuts down commute times by 20 minutes on average. (The company was previously based in the Mission District.) Such a landmark building also aligns with the founders’ values: CEO Ivan Zhao, who was closely involved with the vision for the HQ, is a history buff. 

“This isn’t a tech office; this is a Notion office,” McGinley says. “That’s always been Ivan’s philosophy and vision. He wants us to be a place that is dedicated to literature, to poetry, to architecture. That can still exist in an AI company, but it’s the story we tell about ourselves to ourselves, and what inspires us and what we want to think about day-to-day. And I think that is very unique to this space.”

IA and Notion highlighted as many of the building’s original features as they could, including painting the historic window frames a shade of orange that matches the Golden Gate Bridge, creating sight lines to ornamental wrought-iron railings in the emergency stairwells, and retaining building materials. McGinley even tracked down blueprints from the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. 

“It became this treasure map of how much of this building could we actually bring back to life if it’s already here?” he says.

When construction workers uncovered dark-gray veined marble floors during demolition, Tendall adjusted the design to keep them, even though they had been carved up a little. “A contractor sent us a message like, ‘Hey, you might want to take a look. Do you want us to do wood over this?’” he recalls. “You can’t even get it anymore. And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, we’ll keep that.’ A way to honor the history of the building is to show the bumps and things that aren’t perfect.”

Hospitality first

From the lobby, employees enter a communal area that resembles a Viennese café, complete with bistro tables and bentwood Thonet chairs, more hand-knotted antique rugs, and upholstered banquettes. Copies of vintage Fortune magazines are scattered around, as are plushies of Sesame Street characters like Elmo and the Cookie Monster for a dose of levity. 

“It was very clear from the beginning that the goals were timeless and classic, but not generic and antiseptic,” Tendall says of the office’s aesthetic. “So Fallingwater, not Severance.” He describes the well of inspiration the team pulled from as a “combo pizza” of periods ranging from the Craftsman era to mid-century modernism. “We wanted to honor history—but in a true way, not in an inauthentic way,” he adds.

A spiral staircase—inspired by one at the Claremont, a Berkeley, California, hotel built in 1915—connects the first level to an amenities floor. Books and ephemera on a ledge about halfway up give a nod to the Notion’s design heroes and the influences that helped shape its HQ: a Frank Lloyd Wright monograph, a framed pamphlet from an exhibition on Terence Conran, and a miniature Frank Gehry Easy Edges chair. There’s a full-size version in a hallway just around the corner from a library outfitted with study carrels and a collection of books selected from a list of the employees’ favorite titles. 

Long-term thinking

Including objects and design elements that have become part of the canon relays a message about longevity. Conference rooms on the workspace floors are named after objects like the AGA stove and Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “It’s to inspire and to look to the past as we go towards the future,” McGinley says, adding that the authentic artwork and antiques “help influence our employees every day to build a timeless tool that is Notion. We want them thinking long term. What is going to stand the test of time?”

But Notion didn’t want to create a museum. Everything is meant to be used and is in service of helping employees feel more productive. The conference rooms are all wired for virtual meetings and soundproofed so as not to disturb people at the workstations nearby. If someone prefers to do heads-down work in a lively space, they can head to the communal areas. If they want dead silence, there’s the library. 

“It should feel comfortable like you’re home, but also offer things you can’t get at home,” McGinley says. “These larger-scale spaces for meetings with your entire team, you probably can’t do at your house. And we want employees to come together to collaborate, to do their best work.” Additionally, amenities like a craft room and makerspace emphasize hands-on thinking and creativity. Notion recently held calligraphy and card-printing classes for employees. “We talk a lot about tools in craft,” McGinley says. “We also want employees to have that chance to literally be toolmakers.”

Many of the key principles that informed Notion’s office also reflect best practices across workspace design today, like offering an array of sensory experiences, giving employees a choice on where to work, and expressing culture. But its expression looks like no other. “It was all done with attention and purpose to Notion’s employees,” Tendall says. “I’m seeing a trend of people less interested in what everyone else is doing and more about what’s right for them. It’s not trying to be in the context of others.”

One morning in the middle of the summer, I woke up to an excruciating pain searing through my neck and left shoulder.

I immediately booked a deep-tissue massage, but the relief lasted a day before the ache returned. After a few weeks of persistent discomfort, I visited my doctor who referred me to a physical therapist. After doing several tests, the therapist identified the culprit: my pillow. Since I’m a side sleeper, my head was collapsing toward the mattress, throwing my spine out of alignment. I was shocked that something so basic could be the cause of such physical misery.

I am far from alone in this struggle. Neck pain is a widespread issue around the world, affecting roughly 30% to 50% of adults annually. Studies show that poor sleep posture and inadequate cranial support are linked to chronic pain. According to spinal specialists, the way to avert this pain is to maintain a neutral spinal alignment, where the neck, shoulders, and spine form a continuous, straight line parallel to the mattress. It’s easier for back sleepers to achieve this goal, but side sleepers struggle. When a pillow fails to bridge the negative space between the ear and the shoulder, muscle strain, nerve compression, and joint misalignment are almost inevitable over the course of an eight-hour night.

The good news is that bedding brands are on a quest to support your neck. Over the past few years, brands across the home goods industry have been mounting an effort to completely redesign the pillow. Incumbents like Tempur-Pedic were early pillow innovators, but a new generation of startups like Mellow, Parachute, Avocado, and Coyuchi are going back to the drawing board, rethinking the silhouette, construction, and materials of their pillows.

But crafting the perfect pillow is an extraordinarily difficult design challenge. No two bodies are the same when it comes to shoulder breadth, torso length, and head weight, and moreover, people have different preferences when it comes to their sleep posture. All this means there is no universal, one-size-fits-all solution to spinal alignment. But the wide range of options on the market mean that if you try enough pillows, you’re more likely than ever to find one that perfectly suits your body.

A brief history of the pillow

In the distant past, only the very privileged were fortunate enough to have something to rest their heads on. In ancient Egypt and Asia, pillows weren’t soft at all; the elite elevated their heads on carved wooden or stone headrests. In colder climates, people stuffed sacks with straw, cotton—or down feathers, for the wealthiest few—that were soft, but offered very little structural support. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that companies mass produced pillows that were affordable enough for the masses.

For centuries, the basic concept of the pillow remained unchanged. The first major innovation occurred with the development of memory foam, which was originally developed by NASA in the 1960s to improve aircraft cushioning and safety. But shortly thereafter, companies began incorporating the material into mattresses and pillows, realizing that it could be molded into precise shapes to support the head and neck more effectively than loose feathers or cotton. One of the most notable was Tempur-Pedic, which launched in the early 1990s. The company is now the major incumbent in the world of ergonomic pillows, generating $7.7 billion in 2025, with more than 2,800 stores around the world.

But over the last few years, a new wave of brands has been pushing past memory foam to rethink the fundamentals of pillow architecture. It makes sense that companies are trying to get in on the pillow sector, since it is lucrative. The U.S. market alone was roughly $5.2 billion in 2025, according to Grand View Research, and is forecast to reach $8.5 billion by 2033. While traditional fillers like feathers remain the largest segment, latex—a moldable material derived from rubber sap—is the fastest growing, pointing to the fact that companies trying to innovate.

The new era of pillows

Among the brands driving this wave, Mellow has emerged as a runaway phenomenon. It launched in 2025, and quickly went viral on TikTok, becoming the highest-selling pillow on the social platform. It generated more than $110 million in sales in just nine months.

It makes sense that Mellow’s products have taken off on TikTok, a visual platform. Mellow’s pillows break from the traditional rectangular shape entirely. It has a wide range of pillows in shapes that look like whimsical clouds and marshmallows. But behind the eye-catching design is a lot of engineering to address body mechanics.

“What we’ve learned through this whole experience is that bridging the gap between your shoulder and your neck in order to keep your neck straight actually fixes a lot of problems,” explains Chad Keller, co-founder of Mellow. “There were ergonomic pillows that solved problems, but they weren’t visually pleasing. Our goal is to solve that gap.”

To develop its pillows, Mellow worked closely with chiropractors and sleep doctors to understand common sources of pain and how to fix them. The brand’s designers used these conversations to identify the wide range of factors that affect how someone sleeps from differences in anatomy to their preferred sleep position. Then they began to think about how they could address these issues through design. What sets the brand apart is that they did not feel bound to the traditional pillow silhouette.

For instance, sleep specialists point out that to avoid neck pain, you need to cradle the neck. The issue is that back sleepers and side sleepers require support at different heights. And over the course of a night, someone might move from their side to their back. These insights led directly to the invention of the CloudAlign pillow, which does, in fact, look like a fluffy cloud with plump, rounded sections on each of the four corners. While it is visually interesting, each part is functional. Back sleepers can lie on the lower middle section, but side sleepers can lay their necks on the elevated corners. To make it even more versatile, the pillow is dual sided, with a high side and a low side, to accommodate different body sizes. “The Cloud pillow even considers the position of your arms, and can alleviate neck pain because your body is more relaxed when you sleep,” he says.

But the pillow that fixed my neck problem was the Halo Pillow, which is specifically engineered for people dealing with pain. This pillow is very dense and rectangular shaped, with different zones that have different levels of firmness. The extra firm zone is meant to stretch out your neck, allowing you to relax tense, compressed muscles. But you can flip over the pillow to a slightly less firm section that is slightly more comfortable if you’re not currently experiencing pain.

There are many other pillows in the lineup, including the Puff pillow which offers plush-cooling fabric for people who sleep hot—and is also interesting to look at, with quilted squares throughout that almost makes it look like a roll of bubble wrap. The fun aesthetic of Mellow’s pillows has made it particularly popular with Gen Z consumers, who treat them as accessories for their beds. But by combining functional chiropractic insights with striking visual designs, Mellow turned a utility item into a viral lifestyle product.

“As we sell these different products for side sleeper and back sleepers, and for people with neck and back pain, we can also begin to collect data and iterate on the design based on it,” Keller says. “Understanding why people are buying products from us is very important as we consider the design process.”

A more sustainable ergonomic pillow

Coyuchi, a brand built on sustainability, had to get creative about creating a pillow that would provide anatomical support without relying on petroleum-based foams. Margot Lyons, the brand’s head of sustainability and sourcing, turned to latex, an organic material that is tapped from the sap of the rubber tree. Like memory foam, this material is durable and holds its shape, but it will fully biodegrade at the end of its life cycle.

To think through the design of the pillow, the brand collaborated with the late sleep expert Roger Sramek, who spent his career studying biomechanics, posture, and ergonomics to reduce pain and improve sleep quality. Together they developed a pillow with an unusual design, with holes on the surface to relieve ear pressure and support proper head placement.

“There’s a hole where you’re supposed to put your head if you’re lying on your back, and a hole for your ear when you’re sleeping on your side,” Lyons says. “All of this ensures that your spine is fully straight no matter how you’re sleeping.”

Parachute, another brand focused on organic materials, set out to explore if it could create an ergonomic pillow using down feathers, which have long been prized for their softness and breathability. However, they tend to compress and collapse over the course of an eight-hour night.

Amy Hoban, Parachute’s chief creative officer, spent years studying how customers interacted with traditional down through the brand’s regular focus groups. “We heard consistent feedback from side sleepers who loved the initial plushness of down, but found themselves waking up at 3:00 a.m. to fluff and fold their pillow because it had flattened out,” Hoban explains.

Side sleepers needed sustained support to bridge the gap between their neck and shoulder, but traditional down simply couldn’t hold up under consistent pressure throughout the night. To solve this without resorting to synthetic foams, Parachute’s design team engineered the Down Side Sleeper Pillow. It features a pronounced 3.5-inch side gusset to maintain height around the perimeter of the pillow. But the real innovation is a dual-chamber interior.

Inside the pillow, there is a dense core packed with sturdy feathers that serves as the core. Around it, soft European white down cushions the top and bottom outer layers. “You still get that soft down feeling when your head lies on it, but that inner chamber holds you up for the night and can withstand more pressure,” she says.

The widespread innovation in the pillow industry hasn’t produced a single winning pillow, but a wide range of pillows. And in many ways, this seems to be the right answer to the problem of human variation. There’s a dense slab of a pillow for someone who is in pain, a perforated latex block for someone who wants to ensure their ergonomic pillow will biodegrade, and a gusseted chamber for someone who will not give up the softness of down.

The real issue now is figuring out which one will work for you. In my case, it took me months of trial and error. I sent back many pillows that didn’t work—sometimes even made my pain worse—before finding the one that solved all my neck problems. What I learned is that the next innovation in the pillow industry shouldn’t be just another shape—but a way to match each body to the right pillow.

On Friday, researchers announced the completion of a map of every neuron in the brain of a male fruit fly. The "connectome" provides a tool that can accelerate neurobiology research. But it also provides an opportunity to do some science on its own, as the connectome of a female Drosophila had been completed earlier this year. The work also provided the team behind it the opportunity to refine tools that are likely to be applied to ever-more complex nervous systems, including (potentially) those of vertebrates.

The new work involved a collaboration between biologists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and computer scientists at Google—both acknowledge that neither could have done the project without the other. Preparation of an entire brain for imaging at the necessary resolution requires a distinct set of skills, as does interpreting what those images indicate. But building a complete picture of the hundreds of millions of synapses in a brain as small as the fruit fly's is a task that can't be achieved by humans in a manageable amount of time.

The people behind the effort expect that in the long term, the effort will be worth it, as the connectome could give neurobiologists a valuable tool for understanding how the brain works.

Establishing a connectome

Our interactions with the world begin with sensory input—the neurons that register sound, light, touch, and more. From there, most brain activity involves neurons communicating with each other. This communication transforms the inputs into signals the rest of the brain can interpret, routes information to relevant processing centers, and often produces some kind of output, from forming a memory to moving a muscle.

All that processing is dictated by which neurons have connections to others. For example, the visual system does some basic recognition of its own before passing the results to the brain's visual processing centers. If those centers detect something like text, they can use connections to the language centers to interpret it, and so on.

To understand how a brain works, then, we need a catalog of the connections in the brain, since those dictate how information flows through its various systems. That catalog is a connectome.

In practical terms, a connectome is the list of every neuron in a brain, including its location in three-dimensional space, and the connections (termed synapses) it forms with other neurons. That's more complicated than it may sound. Each neuron can form multiple, branched processes called axons, allowing it to form hundreds of connections to other neurons. So while the nervous system of the fruit fly consists of only roughly 150,000 neurons, and the brain contains only a fraction of those, the new work discovered over 300 million synaptic connections in the fly brain.

So how do you go about mapping something like that? Gerry Rubin, a senior group leader at the Janelia Research Campus and one of the senior authors on the new paper, described how things have changed considerably based on the complexity of the system. "I was a graduate student at the [UK's Laboratory of Molecular Biology]... and when I got there in 71, they already bought this giant computer, and they had the idea that they were going to use machine vision and computers to assemble the C. elegans connectome," Rubin said.

C. elegans is a small, transparent worm with just over 300 neurons and would seem to be a tractable system. "It took them about two years to realize that the computers were nowhere near powerful enough," Rubin said, "and so they went with printing everything out on photographic prints and colored magic markers and circling neurons and tracing it by hand."

That level of attention would simply not work for something as complex as the fruit fly, which is also very much not transparent, making its nerves difficult to image. Fortunately, computers have advanced considerably, as have the algorithms we're able to run on them.

For the new work, the biologists took a dissected fruit fly brain (along with part of its ventral nerve cord) and cut it into a huge series of evenly spaced slices. By knowing the exact order of the slices, the researchers were able to maintain the three-dimensional architecture of the brain even while converting it into a series of roughly two-dimensional objects that could be imaged using electron microscopy, provided the resolution needed to identify small cellular structures. From there, computers become essential to processing the images.

Putting AI to work

Michal Januszewski, a staff scientist at Google Research, told Ars that the first step is to use a form of generative AI to ensure that the areas at the site of each slice are linked up properly. No matter how carefully you slice, there will be some distortions and a bit of material lost when you make a cut.

"When you take those blocks and you stitch them back together computationally, there's a little bit of a gap in between them so the tissue doesn't completely smoothen," Januszewski said. "We use [a generative] model to make the tissue look as if the seams were not there, and that then makes all the downstream processing easier because you can basically ignore the problem to a large degree."

A separate model acts by filling in the spaces defined by cellular membranes, allowing the system to track individual cells across 3D space. "It is different in a number of ways from what people commonly think when they talk about AI," Januszewski told Ars. "One is that it is actually a recurrent process, so it literally moves through space as it makes the outline of the neurons, and it is a visual model, so it converts voxels out of the images from the microscope, [converting them] into a 3D presentation of the neurons."

Still, other models are used to recognize synapses and classify the type of synapse once it's spotted. These models can be fine-tuned using different levels of sensitivity, or "greediness"—basically, adjusting the probability that they'll call something a synapse. And here, feedback from human proofreaders plays a major role.

"This has to be tuned by going back and forth between the proofreaders and Mikhail to say, 'Oh, give us a version where you were less greedy because it's harder to disassemble than it is to assemble,'" Rubin said. "So it's an iterative process between the humans giving feedback and the algorithms getting tuned."

All of this took roughly four years to go from an intact fly brain to the complete connectome. But Rubin said the techniques the team developed along the way, along with the growing sophistication of the software, will hopefully be critical as connectomics work moves up the complexity scale.

"Our view is we did Drosophila with a team of 50 people," Rubin said. "The hope is, by the time someone does a mouse, they'll also need a team of 50 people, even though there are a thousand times more neurons in there. The people will never go away, but the people will not need to scale with the number of neurons, which would be economically not feasible."

Managing this complexity is also what drew Google to the challenge. "The reason I think Google and we were interested in this is because this is this type of grand challenge that just cannot be done in any other way," Januszewski said. "We knew we need AI for this. This cannot be solved by having more humans or by any other technology. And it's important."

Sex on the brain

Due to the extensive history of research on Drosophila, we already knew a great deal about the fly nervous system, including the functional regions of the fly brain and an assortment of individual neurons that had been identified by a combination of function and/or gene activity. But it was at best a partial picture, one that we can use the connectome to fill out in more detail. Combined with the completion of the connectome of a female fly that was completed by university-based researchers earlier this year, we're able to understand a bit more about how sex determination feeds into specific brain differences.

This builds on an extensive genetic understanding of how sex determination works in flies (my thesis work provided a very tiny contribution here), which has identified two genes, doublesex (dsx) and fruitless (fru), as being factors in converting the number of X and Y chromosomes into overt differences in, among other things, behavior. So, one of the things the researchers were able to do is look at what neurons were different between males and females, and how many of those differences could be directly ascribed to the activity of these two genes.

And as with so many things in biology, the basic numbers look simple but the details are fairly complex. The researchers identified 289 male-specific neurons, 71 female-specific ones, and 138 that were present in both sexes but formed a different shape and connections in males and females. Their relationship to the genes mentioned above was not always direct. Ninety percent of the male-specific neurons were making dsx and fru, but that leaves 10 percent that weren't. Rubin suggested these had likely picked up a sex-specific identity by interactions with those that were.

That may also be true for the neurons that were present in both sexes but which had different shapes and connections. Nearly 40 percent of these neurons did not have active dsx or fru genes. And about 7 percent of the neurons that were identical in the two sexes did have dsx and fru activity, suggesting that they may have some other difference in neural activity despite forming a similar shape and connections.

There were also some oddities. For example, two neuron types that control the female's physical response to mating also showed up in males and had the same basic shape, even though the tissue that they indirectly control doesn't even exist in males. The neurons instead differed in the connections they made in males and females.

The research team also identified a general pattern in where these sex-specific neurons act in neural pathways: They tended to be removed from immediate sensory processing or motor control, instead acting in concert with neurons engaged in higher-level neural processing. There are a handful of exceptions, such as sensory neurons that register the presence of sex-specific pheromones. But for the most part, the neurons appear to act after basic sensory processing is complete, potentially bridging that processing with relevant behaviors.

In keeping with this, the sex-specific neurons tend to cluster together, suggesting that they may act together to enhance the intensity of the signals they convey. As the paper puts it, the location and connections of the sex-specific neurons "suggests a hierarchy in which sex differences primarily modify integrative and decision-making areas while sensory detection and the highly tuned motor interface remain more constant."

What's next?

In some ways, the completion of the male and female Drosophila connectomes will be a bit like the completion of the fly genome: It will accelerate a lot of work that was already underway. If a study identifies an interesting neuron, researchers can simply open a browser and determine which other neurons and brain structures it connects to. In difficult-to-quantify ways, that should lead to more informed hypotheses while saving researchers the work needed to understand the neural connections.

Rubin also suggested it's having a big impact on theoretical neuroscience. "Before this, most neuro theorists were very much like, 'How could a brain work?'" he said. "And they didn't have a constraint. Once they had the connectome, they could say, 'The brain does this and here's the wiring diagram. How can this wiring diagram allow this function?' So this has been a major. I'd say this is the biggest change in having the connectome."

Other work will depend on whether completing connectomes follows the trajectory seen in genomics, where the cost drops precipitously as techniques are refined and further automated. One of this work's most intriguing findings is that a specific neuron seen in the female connectome was absent from one of the two hemispheres of the male fly, presumably due to a developmental glitch. With only two connectomes complete, it's impossible to get a good sense of how common this sort of variability is. The same applies to subtler differences in the trajectories taken and connections made by individual neurons.

To say anything meaningful about this kind of variability with statistical confidence, we'll need dozens of examples. That means we'll also need to make the process much faster than the four years it took to go from dissecting a fly brain to the final connectome.

Cell, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.08.015 (About DOIs).

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