This Canadian doctor boosts people’s incomes to help boost their health outcomes
Gary Bloch became a doctor because he wanted to help people who were less privileged than him. For years, he tried his best to treat patients coping with poverty and homelessness.But no matter how many blood tests he ordered and prescriptions he wrote, many of his patients’ health problems Read More...
10 ways to become more comfortable with your body
Almost everyone struggles with body image. Regardless of your actual size or shape, odds are that there’s at least one area of your body that bothers you. Your relationship with your body is a complex (and political) topic, but there are plenty of practical, actionable ways you can start Read More...
Why it’s time to get rid of lawns, the No.1 irrigated “crop” in America
Is there a greater symbol of life in suburban America than the lawn? Probably, but the point is that lawns are incredibly common for households in the U.S. That’s a problem since lawns are awful for the planet. Our addiction to lawns means that grass is the single largest irrigated agricultural Read More...
Toms made the buy-one, give-one business model famous. Now it’s reinventing it
When Toms launched in 2006, it popularized the one-for-one business model by giving away a free pair of shoes for every pair sold. The model has been popular with consumers and inspired many other brands to adopt it, but critics have questioned how well it works, asking whether it could disrupt Read More...
Nanotech textile converts air humidity into clean drinking water
More than two billion people live in countries affected by a lack of clean drinking water. Soon, a Canadian innovation — inspired by a biological adaptation found in certain lizard species — will make it possible for people to pull a glass of water right out of the air. The company, called Read More...
Next-generation plastic can be recycled over and over again into new materials
Plastic is useful and ubiquitous – but that's not always a good combination. The vast majority of plastic waste can't be recycled, meaning it ends up in landfills at best or the ocean at worst. To help curb the problem, researchers at Berkeley Lab have designed a recyclable plastic – called Read More...
A positive from the protests in Sudan? Beautiful new murals across the capitol
Sudanese artist Rashid Drar used to work from home. Now the 44-year-old’s canvas is any empty piece of wall he can find nearby a month-long sit-in outside the Defense Ministry in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. Rashid is one of the many protesters who have embraced art as a form of revolutionary Read More...
Ma Jun is not your everyday environmental activist
There all kinds of ways to do environmental activism. One way, as we pointed out in yesterday’s Optimist Daily, is to take to the streets and be civilly disobedient in the name of climate action. Another more subtle way is to be like Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun. At the age of 50, Ma has Read More...
Paul Hawken has 100 solutions to climate change, complete with models
We need solutions to climate change and world renowned author Paul Hawken as some. A total of 100, in fact. Hawken is a legend in environmental circles. Since the early 1980s, he has been starting green businesses, writing books on ecological commerce (President Bill Clinton called Read More...
New York City passes new law to curb food waste and feed the hungry
Although we’ve placed this fact in stories before, it remains a shock every time we type it: in America, an estimated 40 percent of all food ends up in the waste bin on an annual basis, according to the National Resources Defense Council. In New York City, this statistic is particularly alarming Read More...