The Crisis Text Line is using AI to help prevent suicides
The Crisis Text Line, a text messaging-based crisis counseling hotline, can be completely overwhelmed when dreadful news breaks out like the 2015 Paris attacks. To help the human staff tend to the people who need help the most, data scientists are using machine learning, a type of artificial Read More...
Want to travel and work? This approach makes doing both possible
In this day and age, you don’t have to wait until you retire in order to travel. Thanks to the internet, intermixing travel and work is completely feasible. From remote jobs and freelance life to entrepreneurship, here’s how to take your job anywhere in the Read More...
A new study on the psychology of persistent regrets can teach you how to live now
Lingering regrets, the kind you hang onto for years, can be great company, returning daily to keep some part of you living an alternate version of your life and career. They’re the stuff of sublime tragic novels and films. They can even be functional if they propel you forward, determined not Read More...
Tokyo to build eco-friendly 'solar roads' ahead of 2020 Olympics
The Tokyo metropolitan government plans to introduce "solar roads" that collect energy from the sun via solar panels installed beneath the surface of the roads. The effort is aimed at promoting Tokyo as an eco-friendly city, both domestically and abroad, ahead of the 2020 Olympics and Read More...
Plastic pollution is a problem — These kids are working for a solution
Sometimes a couple of kids can help change the world. Siblings Carter and Olivia Ries founded their nonprofit One More Generation (OMG) in 2009, when they were just 8 and 7 years old, out of a desire to protect the world's endangered species. Their journey to heal the planet has taken them Read More...
Help us reach the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge!
I've been in the process of making our yard more pollinator friendly, and was delighted this year to see what I believe to be our first monarch butterfly in the garden. (It may have been a viceroy. I do get confused.) There's something immensely powerful about taking steps to beautify your own Read More...
How to take care of others without burning out
In our over-stressed world, many health care providers, social workers and caregivers are suffering from slow yet painful burnout. Many of the rest of us, working long hours and raising families, seem to be approaching burnout, too. Sometimes we may feel that we’re too exhausted to keep giving to Read More...
This fast-food chain claims it has the world’s first “climate positive” burger
Slowly, the food and restaurant industries are starting to move away from red meat. The plant-based Impossible Burger is cropping up on menus from gourmet restaurants like Manhattan’s Momofuku Nishi to White Castle. The burger chain Sonic debuted a blended option that’s half mushroom, half Read More...
A district of eco-friendly 3D printed homes are being built in the Netherlands
3D printers have been used to produce various things from vacuum cleaners to artificial ears, but never have they been used to construct a livable home. That’s set to change as Eindhoven in the Netherlands gets ready to become the first city in the world to have habitable homes made with a 3D Read More...
Placing data centers below the sea can save energy and money
Microsoft has drowned one of its data centers 100 ft below the surface of the North Sea. Why? To save energy. Oceans are uniformly cool below a certain depth, so keeping servers under the sea helps cut down the cooling costs that make up a large chunk of the operating budget of data centers. Plus, Read More...