In the 21st century, mechanical watchmaking has become almost exclusively a thing of luxury and curiosity. It has very few practical purposes that cannot be better served with electronic timekeepers of various kinds. But, scientists at the University Hospital of Bern have discovered a way to use the most basic of automatic watch winding technology – the swinging rotor – as a power source for pacemakers, reducing the need for battery changes and possible failures.

Earlier today, Roger Federer won the men's singles championship at the 2017 Australian Open after a five-set battle with Rafael Nadal. He maintained his record as the winningest man in tennis, despite having missed six months of competition earlier this year. And, as usual, he was rocking a pretty great watch when he hoisted the trophy over his head. Federer, a long-time Rolex ambassador, sported a Rolex GMT-Master II BLNR, a classic that perfectly suited the occasion (and the bright blue tennis courts of Melbourne Park).

Just this morning Miss Serena Williams set an Open era record for most grand slam titles by defeating her sister Venus to take the 2017 Australian Open. This marks her 23rd open title making her the winningest player in the Open era and the second-most successful player of all time, behind just Margaret Court, who won 13 of her 24 titles prior to 1968 when the Open era began. What's more? She did so while wearing a really fancy watch!

The Bathyscaphe design in a smaller 38mm case size.

A new crop of Offshores give the chrono collection new life.

Now that SIHH has passed, the new Baselworld novelties have started to roll in. Today we bring you two new watches from Bell & Ross, the BR03-92 Horograph and the limited edition Horolum. Both of these creations have the characteristic Bell & Ross square case with which we are all familiar but with some slight updates to the typical pilot-style look.

At over $200,000, this is one serious Heuer chronograph.

Yesterday we published a story in which our editors looked at the watches from the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) and discussed which watches we'd personally enjoy wearing as "everyday" watches. The picks provoked some comments in which a lot of interesting points were raised – what's an everyday watch anyway, why were the watches we picked so (relatively) expensive, and so on. After looking through them (and replying to one or two) I thought it might be useful to place the choices in a little context, which is where the watches we picked were seen. Let's talk about the SIHH.

To reinvent a core collection, Montblanc looked to racing history.

If you thought the relationship between cars and watches was just an old cliché, I invite you to go take a short detour via Petrolicious, where you might recognize a few "Talking Watches" guests talking about some of their bigger and louder toys. Another familiar face, Mr. Wilhelm Schmid, was recently interviewed by the magazine's founding editor, Ted Gushue.

Celestial complications are not everybody’s cup of tea, some finding them a little too old-school for their liking. Well, to them I say, check out De Bethune. The independent brand, founded in 2002, has a bit of a thing for the night sky. Instead of confining the blue and gold complication to a small section of the dial though, De Bethune typically uses the full width of the dial to bring us a little closer to the stars, such as with the DB25T. Now we get the DB25L Milky Way, De Bethune's latest model to offer a telescopic view of our galaxy.

It's been less than a week since the 2017 Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) closed its doors, but the dust is finally starting to settle. After six days of non-stop watch gazing in Geneva, the HODINKEE team returned home with full notebooks, thousands of photos, and more than a few opinions on the year's first big batch of new releases. To kick off a short series of stories sharing our editors' favorite picks from the hundreds of new watches, we asked each team member to pick the one all-purpose watch they'd want to wear day in and day out. It's a tough question, but we got some pretty great answers.

The next two stops on the HSNY's tour of the USA have been announced and tickets will go fast.

With every passing SIHH, I find myself increasingly disinterested with everything that isn’t a time only or an ultra complicated wristwatch. On one end of the spectrum, what you get is the purest expression of a company’s design philosophy, while the other often provides a perverse pleasure in trying to rack your brain around the technical challenges the company has had to overcome. Very few watches tend to be both of these things. But when they are, they’re something extra special. Here's one of them.

As you may know, last week we were busy at SIHH reporting on all the new releases, but this week we are back with some great vintage pieces for you. The timepieces range from simple two-hand dress watches to classic multi-scale chronographs, with brands like Rolex, Omega, and Jaeger-LeCoultre all represented. Read on to see the full selection.

SIHH was a mighty birthday celebration for the now-60-year-old Piaget Altiplano. Looking at the new releases from Piaget this year, almost all are are from the Altiplano collection, save a few limited edition PoloS models (more on those later). We have already shown you the two Altiplanos explicitly dedicated to the 60th anniversary, but these new references with automatic movements and date function further demonstrate that Piaget is doubling down on its history. Let's see why this is both great news and a bold move.

You'd be hard-pressed to think of two more influential men in the world of watches than Richemont's Franco Cologni and LVMH's Jean-Claude Biver. They are both bastions of the old guard – working their way up from the bottom in the 1970s to become true visionaries and decision-makers in this space today. Cologni began his career selling licensed Cartier-branded cigarette lighters and eventually became not only CEO of Cartier for some time, but also later chairman of Vacheron Constantin and Panerai, both of which he was instrumental in bringing into the Richemont group. A board member for some time, Cologni is responsible for a lot of what we see at Richemont. And Biver, well, you know his story. And so when one ribs the other, and publicly no less, you have to take note.

The Toric Collection, you might say, stands out amongst the other Parmigiani collections by not standing out; the cases are round and the lug shapes in general are more conventional than those in any of Parmigiani's other families of watches. This is not to say that they're simple though. As a matter of fact, of the 10 Toric models in the current PF catalog, five are minute repeaters, while four are variations on this new model, which is the simplest Toric by a considerable margin. The Toric Chronomètre is a COSC-certified chronometer wristwatch with date.