Possibility: Milk without the moo
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 Our parents knew milk comes from cows. Our children may think, as the joke goes, milk comes from the supermarket. Their grandchildren, however, may think it comes from breweries. A pair of young, vegan bio-engineers in the U.S. are producing milk in a radical Read More...
Possibility: Rebels with a job
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 “A new day begins. I am sure of who I am, although there are people who still don’t understand. To find solutions, war is not the way.” These are the first lines of the song “Pido Perdón” (“I Apologize”), made by a group called La Iguana and two Read More...
Possibility: The justice of the crowd
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 In recent years, crowdfunding has become a popular tool to fund projects and interests shared by groups of people. It is particularly common in arts and culture, leaving it up to the audience to determine what gets done and what they want to see. A British Read More...
Possibility: Keeping refugees afloat
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 A quarter of a million. That’s the number of immigrants and asylum seekers who have already tried to get to Europe in 2015 by crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It’s the highest number on record, according to the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees. Thousands Read More...
Possibility: Kale is dead. Long live watercress.
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 Marketing is an art, and more often than not it doesn’t produce the best results for the consumer. Take the case of kale. In recent years, this vegetable has become the darling of the health-conscious movement. There’s hardly any healthy-cuisine restaurant Read More...
Everybody’s friend, The onion is keeping it real
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 When you bring everyone who wants to work with you to tears, and you still make it into countless dishes all over the world every day, you must be pretty special. The culinary qualities of the onion are indeed extraordinary. You can coax almost any flavor out of Read More...
Salesforce offsets all its emissions 33 years ahead of schedule
In February 2015, a group of business leaders, including the CEO’s of Unilever and Salesforce and led by Richard Branson committed themselves to completely offset the harmful emissions of companies processed by 2050. A great goal that also seemed far away. Now Salesforce has shown that Read More...
Designing the next car battery with a 600-mile range
The average electric car can drive 100 miles on a charge. That’s the main stumbling block preventing the wide scale acceptance of these clean cars. Better, longer-lasting batteries are a critical component of the clean energy economy. Now, German engineers are working on improving battery design. Read More...
These cities are changing parking lots into parks and urban farms
The self-driving cars are coming and that means that, soon, cities can do with a lot less parking spaces. Some cities are already anticipating the trend and turning parking lots into parks or even urban farms. This is one more change the self-driving car will bring: Downtown is going to be a much Read More...
Solar success creates a new challenge: U.S. prepares for eclipse in August
In the ancient world a solar eclipse meant one thing: a disruption of the established order. And so it is today, again. The U.S. is using so much solar power that it will have to prepare for the solar eclipse that will hit the country in August. As the shadow of the moon passes over North America, Read More...