Miscellaneous
Protection of wild life stops child labor and slavery
Environmentalists often talk about the tragic loss of animal and plant life because of the destruction of nature. A new study of UC Berkeley ecologists, led by Justin Brashares and published in Science, shows that the damage even leads to human tragedy. The study discovered a direct link between Read More...
Revolutionary solar panels mimic moth eyes
Moth eyes are incredibly efficient—reflecting almost no light, so they don’t draw attention from predators. Researchers from Switzerland are taking the absorption properties found in moth eyes and applying them to solar panel design. The new solar design covers the panels in a thin layer of Read More...
Britain raises speed limit for trucks to save lives
The relationship between speed and traffic accidents is clearly established. So it’s counterintuitive that Britain is raising the speed limit for trucks in an attempt to reduce the number of fatal car accidents. You know the situation: you’re on a two-lane highway and get stuck behind a slow Read More...
How do you learn to visualize?
Think of something you would like. For this exercise choose something simple, something you can easily imagine receiving. It can be something you want to have, an experience you would like, a situation you’d like to find yourself in, or a circumstance in your life you’d like to improve. Get Read More...
The power of positive thinking
The power of positive thinking is a ubiquitous notion in the American mind, but that was not always so. While its antecedents date back to Hermeticism, an ancient Greco-Egyptian philosophy for achieving esoteric powers, in today’s parlance “The Secret” had to be rediscovered after centuries Read More...
Rainforests are best protected by local communities
All the bad things that have ever happened to a forest—wildfires, slashing and burning, deforestation, etc. have come from humans. Yet a new study—Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change—from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Resources and Rights Initiative (RRI) learned that the Read More...
Monks start brewing beer to support aging elders
Monks have been brewing beer for centuries, and a monastery in central Massachusetts is the not just the newest to take on this centuries old practice, but the only monastery outside of Europe that brews certified Trappist Ale. The clergy at St. Joseph's Abbey is growing old, the average age is 70, Read More...
Tech entrepreneurs pioneer urban farming
Farming is not exactly seen as a frontier of innovation. As more and more people around the world move away from the rural areas to live in cities, it’s mainly older people who stay behind at the farms. That’s a worrisome development as a growing world population needs more food every day. But Read More...
Sensors allow plants to talk
Do plants talk to us? The 1973 book by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, described many controversial experiments that seemed to proof plant sentience. A new initiative has found that plants communicate indeed. PLants Employed As SEnsing Devices (PLEASED) comprised of Read More...
A trend toward patient-driven health care
Ezekiel Emanuel, a medical doctor and former chief health policy advisor to President Obama, has a pretty good idea of what we can expect to see in health care over the next decade – things like the end of insurance companies as we know them, an increased focus on treating the chronically and Read More...