The tale of New Zealand's ultra-sustainable Earthship
The word "sustainable" in real estate is overused. However, when homeowners Gus Anning and Sarah Rowe began exploring how to build a home for themselves and their three children, they really dug deep — literally and figuratively — for a building type that was genuinely self-sufficient for Read More...
The Argentina government is showing its people how to embrace a plant-based diet
If you want your country to embrace a plant-based diet, where better to start than at the heart of the government? In Argentina, the country of meat-lovers, the general secretary of the government introduced vegan Mondays to the kitchen of government house. The move was met with outrage, which Read More...
Cheap grid-level power storage could be possible with molten salt batteries
While renewables are advancing faster than anyone could have imagined in terms of efficiency and price, we still don’t have the storage capabilities needed to transition entirely to clean energy. Lithium batteries are amazing for storing energy in electric cars, but they’re too expensive to be Read More...
Why GDP doesn’t provide an accurate depiction of the global economy
We measure the status of our society through the calculation of GDP. The problem is GDP is counted using a calculator that only adds. Costs and benefits are tallied without discriminating between productive and destructive activities, so if a county’s crime crime rate increases, its GDP rises Read More...
Research shows that retirement is not good for your brain and health
Retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. According to the latest research, quitting work entirely causes your brain capacity to plummet and can lead to other negative health effects. Still, this doesn’t mean you have to give up your dreams of a more relaxed life once you hit a certain age Read More...
This brand wants you to try charcoal-flavored toothpaste.
Want to freshen up your toothpaste selection? How about trying some new oral care products infused with unlikely health ingredients like superfood extracts, charcoal, magnolia bark, and tea tree oil? While embracing toothpaste flavors outside the realms of mint seems wildly unorthodox, this startup Read More...
A 1.5 percent tax on billionaires could educate all the world’s children
Just how rich are the very rich? UK-based charity Oxfam quantified the answer in an update today to its annual inequality report. Per the report, today’s global billionaires are seeing their wealth rise six times as fast as the incomes of ordinary workers, and are so wealthy, a 1.5% tax on their Read More...
This program is teaching immigrants how to make a living in agriculture
Thanks to the locavore movement, we’re used to food with origin stories: that venison tartare once ran free in a forest in Katonah. But what about the farmers? They started out somewhere, too. On a recent Saturday morning, eighteen fledgling farmers gathered in the East Village, armed with Read More...
How gourmet chocolate enriches the lives of smallholder farmers
Chocolate once reigned supreme in Central America: The Mayans considered it the food of the gods, and they used cocoa beans as a form of currency. But the birthplace of chocolate has benefitted little from the chocolate boom — despite that this is where most of the world’s purest and most Read More...
AI-powered robot finds common soap ingredient may combat malaria
Around half of the world's population is at risk of contracting malaria and it causes around half a million deaths each year. However, the parasites that cause malaria are becoming more resistant to the drugs we currently use to combat them, meaning the global malaria risk stands to increase Read More...