Miscellaneous
Animal behavior and conservation class helps inmates develop compassion
Relating with nature helps people connect to what makes them human. Even when behind bars. Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, has been teaching "Animal Behavior and Conservation" to male prisoners for over a decade. In this Read More...
Renewable energy deployment creates twice as many jobs as fossil fuel development
Some 7.7 million people are now employed across the global renewable energy value chain, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). That’s up 18 percent from 6.5 million in 2014. In other words, renewable energy job creation continues to far outpace that for economies Read More...
Brewing beer from the Chilean desert’s fog
The Atrapaneblina (fog catcher) brewery is an irresistible case of the human inventive spirit thumbing its nose at adversity. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, its crew is able to retrieve enough water from the fog to produce 6,300 gallons of beer per year. The process starts with special nets designed Read More...
Limestone-producing bacteria is key to self-repairing living concrete
Cracked concrete is unsightly. It can also severely compromise structures if water is allowed to seep through it. After several years of development, a Dutch research team at Delft University of Technology has come up with a solution inspired by nature: a living concrete infused with the ability Read More...
Caterpillar is new weapon for war on drugs
Colombia, one of the world’s top producers of cocaine, plans to resort to an organic agriculture trick to destroy its most problematic crop — coca. The chemical herbicide glyphosate, which the government has been routinely using to spray the illegal plants, was recently declared carcinogen by Read More...
Aid programs for poor families yield sustainable positive outcome, study shows
The impact of programs designed to lift families out of extreme poverty has typically been guess work at best. This may be about to change thanks to the very first science-based study conducted for five years in six countries. In clinical-study fashion, it assessed and compared the evolution of Read More...
For children, happiness trumps regardless of life circumstances
There is no correlation between how much stuff children have and how happy they are, according to a new survey of 53,000 children across 15 countries. The brazen optimism of children regardless of their circumstances is very reassuring news. What if we could retain that virtue and strength Read More...
Google’s autonomous cars to hit California’s roads this summer
Driverless cars are about become a lot more real. Some of us who have grown familiar with the Google self-driving Lexuses cruising around the San Francisco Bay Are, can get ready to witness the next iteration of Google’s automobile project: tiny gumdrop-shaped cars that can’t exceed 25 mph and Read More...
Swedish food packaging design combines beauty and functionality of nature
Food packaging is typically made of landfill-bound materials like plastic, aluminum-lined paper or Styrofoam that outlive their content way longer than necessary. Tomorrow Machines has come up with alternative solutions whose materials, functionality and esthetics borrow from nature. We watched the Read More...
Moth’s eye and lotus leaf inspire more efficient, easier to maintain solar panels
Just as the cost of solar energy has been dropping precipitously, innovations sprout to accelerate the trend while improving the technology. In a recent example of biomimicry applied to solar, Oak Ridge National Lab was inspired by the moth’s eye to create an antireflective coating that increases Read More...