This is especially applicable for areas where body weight is centralized when you’re lying down, particularly around the hips and shoulders. Pocketed coils are also meant to outperform traditional ones in the motion isolation arena, meaning that when you move around, the individual coil takes the heat motion-wise and stops the bed from reenacting a small earthquake. With the interconnectivity of traditional coils, it doesn’t take much for the feeling of movement to travel along the entire surface of the bed.

Fun fact: You do not need a box spring with a hybrid mattress. This is a recurring question I see, and pocketed coils in hybrids eliminate the need for one. Box springs were designed to give more support and elevate performance to traditional coil beds, which would align certain sections of coils to yield more support. Nowadays, you may actually void your warranty if you use a box spring with a hybrid mattress—be sure to check that fine print.

Courtesy of Helix Sleep

Helix Sleep

Midnight Luxe with ErgoAlign

Memory Foam

We actually have NASA to thank for this one. If you google images of those early space missions, it’s no wonder that something was needed to keep astronauts from being jostled around inside rockets; hence, memory foam was born. It’s evolved quite a bit from those initial iterations, especially when Tempur-Pedic came onto the scene in the ’80s with a vision for it to become the basis of sleep products. Today, memory foam stands in a league of its own when it comes to the unique, compressive feel.

Memory foam is more of an umbrella term for all the iterations mattress brands have come up with today, but let’s refer to the mattress manufacturing expert for this one.

“Memory foam is produced by combining liquid polyurethane with various chemicals, like polyols and isocyanates, to enhance its viscosity and density,” says Merwin. Without whipping out the periodic table of elements and giving you a science lesson in the chemical components of this material, here’s the need-to-know: These compounds form a malleable foam that holds teeny-tiny bubbles within it. How it works is, as you lie on it, your body imparts heat onto the surface, flowing into these air pockets, which in turn allows it to become softer to contour around your body.

But for the science enthusiasts reading this, Merwin’s got you covered: “The key ingredient is a polymer that creates an open-cell structure, which allows the material to respond to heat and pressure. This is what gives memory foam its signature contouring or ‘hugging’ feel. During the manufacturing process, the liquid foam mixture is poured onto a moving line, where it expands and solidifies into large foam blocks, which we call ‘buns.’ At a high level, it’s a blend of chemistry and precision that transforms raw materials into a high-quality product.”

To say it’s a natural fit for those who need pressure relief from their mattress may be a bit too on the nose, but it’s arguably the most standout feature of this material. It also lessens the feeling of movement for the most restless of sleepers, which also makes it an attractive option for couples. Arguably, the biggest issue that plagues memory foam is heat retention, since once the heat has entered into these air chambers, it turns into something akin to microscopic saunas that can make the overall mattress into a nightmare for those who sleep warm. This is where the various iterations of foam come into play, as some brands infuse elements like graphite, copper, gel, or more advanced cooling technology like phase-change materials into the foams that they use.

Photograph: Bear Mattress

Bear

Original Foam Mattress

Courtesy of Nectar

Nectar Sleep

Nectar Premier

Latex

The same stuff that goes into tires, balloons, and sports equipment can also be used for mattresses—and it’s the good stuff, too. Latex acts similarly to memory foam when it comes to pressure relief, but is far more reactive to you moving around. Think of a rubber band snapping back into shape when released; it’s pretty dang close to that. Many brands rely on organic rubber sap to create latex as we know it, and there are two categories of latex foam you’ll usually find with mattresses: Dunlop and Talalay. These names refer to the production process and resulting product, as liquid rubber is poured into molds, torched at high temperatures (called “vulcanization” and yes, I have to resist doing Spock’s “live long and prosper” hand signal every time), and flash-frozen to retain the feel. Dunlop is a firmer latex foam, and hence, firmer feel. Talalay yields a more plush feel. Latex is generally pretty even-keeled when it comes to temperature, too, keeping heat from accumulating within your mattress to maintain a nice, room-temperature feel.

WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson has applauded the organic latex construction of the Birch Luxe Natural, citing great support for the lower back region and good temperature regulation.

Courtesy of Birch

Birch

Luxe Natural Mattress

Smart Mattresses/Adjustable Beds

The mechanics behind smart or adjustable mattresses involve air chambers that can inflate or deflate on command, letting you adjust your firmness level via controller or remote control (depending on the model or brand).

Features can vary among brands, especially depending on whether you opt for the brand’s base as well. By itself, a smart mattress can go firmer or softer at the touch of a button, and some models may be composed exclusively of foam layers over an air-chamber core. In the case of the Sleep Number P6 mattress, which I happen to be testing at the moment, there are zoned mini air chambers beneath the cover that instantly respond to high-pressure areas and adjust support levels accordingly.

A research team led by Professor Wang Hongqiang from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a Global-Local Alignment Attention (GLAA) model based on an Asymmetric Siamese Transformer (AST), which markedly enhances the performance of Visible-X-ray cross-modality package re-identification tasks.

This study was published in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

Visible X-ray cross-modality package re-identification is a core technology in security inspection. The challenge lies in the significant pixel-level differences between the two modal images, making it difficult for traditional methods to extract robust cross-modality invariant features.

In this study, the researchers incorporated an asymmetric design concept into the Siamese Transformer architecture by proposing a Cross-Modality Asymmetric Siamese Transformer (CAST) structure. Embedding LayerNorm layers and modality-aware encoding in one branch effectively enhances the model‘s ability to extract cross-modality invariant features.

They also designed a Global-Local Cross-modality Alignment Attention module. By modeling the interaction between global and local features, it enhances fine-grained feature representation while addressing the spatial misalignment issues in cross-modality images.

Experimental results show that the key metrics of this model on a dedicated cross-modality package re-identification dataset show significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art methods, providing reliable technical support for the intelligentization of security inspection.

This work is the first to introduce the Transformer architecture into the cross-modality package re-identification task, breaking through the limitations of existing methods that rely on symmetric convolutional networks, according to the researchers.

I know you’ve seen it. The glowing eyes. The gangly frame that should not be able to stand, propped by rods unseen in the dark.

It is Skelly, the Home Depot skeleton—the most fashionable Home Depot product of probably the past decade. If you live in America, this skeleton presides over a yard near you. And newly this year, a smaller, 6.5-foot “Ultra Skelly” is outfitted with motion sensors and motors to make life truly weird—and also act as a strange alarm system against package thieves and hungry opossums.

Anyway, it’s usually well north of $200. But because Halloween is pretty much already happening, Skelly and its entire skeleton brood of giant cat and dog are all 75 percent off.

Which, finally, is a price I’m willing to pay. I have secretly coveted this skeleton and its kin, the comically grim watchmen of American October. But I, like my father before me and his father before him, am a cheapskate about all things but food and drink, and will talk myself out of anything that’s not a) edible b) potable or c) verifiably “a deal.”

Well, here I am, world. This is a deal. Ultra Skelly is $70. The sitting Skelly dog is $63, not $249. The 5-foot-long Skelly cat is a mere $50. Beware the Skelly cat, my friend! The eyes that light, the claws that do nothing in particular!

Availability is, let’s say, scarce. Skelly is already out of stock for delivery from The Home Depot, at least in my zip code: Just the dog and cat can speed their way through the night to join you before Halloween.