Crowdfunding healthcare for 11,000 people in 24 countries
Silicon Valley’s largest tech accelerator is funding an experiment in crowdfunded healthcare. Watsi is a nonprofit that has brought healthcare to more than 11,000 people in 24 countries through nearly 22,000 online donations. It is estimated that 20-40 percent of all health spending gets wasted. Read More...
Politics 2.0: Fixing democracy with technology
Can technology help fix democracy and bring citizens closer to their governments? That’s an inspiring new challenge for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have recently opened up the sharing economy. “We tackle hard problems, we plow through walls, that’s what we do for a living,” says one Read More...
Plant-based protein works as well for building muscle strength as meat
Protein is a key element of our diet. It supports our muscle mass, bone density, and overall strength. Traditional wisdom says you need to get protein from meat. However, a new study shows that the source of protein doesn’t matter. People who get their protein from plants—vegetarians and Read More...
Europe's cleanest-living teens: Iceland knows how to prevent drug abuse
In 1998 the percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds in Iceland who had been drunk in the previous month stood at 42 percent. Today it is 5 percent. The percentage who have ever used cannabis was 17 percent; today it is 7 percent. And the percentage of those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 to Read More...
Letting go of negativity: A simple exercise
It’s easy to cast self-doubt or even blame yourself for things that go wrong. We all do that from time to time. Negative thinking is one of the easiest ways to disconnect from our true selves. But there are ways to challenge and release your negative thought patterns. Here is a 4 step mindfulness Read More...
The world's happiest and greenest countries
Costa Rica was the most environmentally advanced and happiest place on Earth last year, followed by Mexico, Colombia, Vanuatu and Vietnam. So concluded the World Economic Forum's Happy Planet Index, which recently released its 2016 ranking of "where in the world people are using ecological Read More...
Buildings that breathe: Italian architect’s ‘Vertical Forest’ to sprout in China
Italian architect Stefano Boeri has a penchant for designing living, breathing buildings. It began in Milan with the Bosco Verticale (Italian for “Vertical Forest”), two looming skyscrapers covered in thousands of trees, shrubs, and flowering plants. The environmental idea was simple: Read More...
Iran approves $3 billion worth of foreign renewable energy investments
Iran’s Energy Minister Hamid Chitchian said earlier this week that the Finance Ministry had approved foreign investments in the country’s renewable energy industry worth $3 billion. “Iran intends to launch a large-scale project to construct renewable energy power plants over the Read More...
This high-quality ink is made from air pollution harvested from vehicle tailpipes
What if the ugly, in this case air pollutants, could give birth to something beautiful? One of our most common industrial outputs, soot, has a harmful effect on human and environmental health, but thanks to some resourceful thinking and innovation in pollution capture technology, combined with the Read More...
Harnessing the power of nature to improve our cities
People feel happier, healthier, and more social when they engage with nature. Their cognitive abilities go up and stress levels go down. So why is nature so often thought to be found only “out there” in the wilderness, or perhaps suburbia? For Timothy Beatley, a professor at the Read More...