Windmills of tomorrow could be underwater
Cold and grey with not much sun, the United Kingdom is rarely thought of as a pioneering hub of renewable energy innovation. However, the UK has thousands of miles of coastline, and new developments in underwater turbine technology could bring in a new wave of ocean harnessing power. A test project Read More...
Mushrooms or plastic? An unlikely solution to pollution
Could poisonous plastic turn into a healthy food? A Dutch design studio has announced a prototyped incubator that grows oyster mushrooms—and other fungi—on plastic. The current design takes months to grow mushrooms and decompose plastic, but researchers believe that expediting the growth time Read More...
Ikea’s refugee shelters are unbeatable
Ikea’s flat-packed refugee shelters—tested in Ethiopia and Iraq—are, according to some design experts, one of the most significant developments in design in the last 10 years. The innovative shelters are made from insulated polymers, create a 17.5-square-metre enclosure, fit up to five Read More...
Researchers get closer to Alzheimer’s cure
Researchers at Stanford University have discovered what causes Alzheimer’s—potentially leading to a cure. The scientists noticed that disease sets in when a particular type of cell in the brain, called microglia, stops working. Microglia clean your brain, they keep out viruses and prevent Read More...
Cost of solar energy dropping in the US
The newest Gold Rush will have us mining for sunshine. The Deutsche Bank, a global banking and financial services company, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the nation’s primary laboratory for research on renewable energy development, have both Read More...
Laughing drives depression away
It might seem like a silly headline, but nitrous oxide—the same laughing gas used to ease pain and anxiety at the dentist—can be used to treat people with clinical depression. A new study had two groups of participants inhale gasses, one inhaled nitrous oxide, the other group inhaled a placebo. Read More...
Crowd-sourced seizure prediction breakthrough
A crowd-sourced online contest for data scientists has come up with a seizure-predicting model that accurately predicts seizures 82 percent of the time. Seizures impact about one percent of the population, and are described as electrical storms that take place in the brain. Earlier models did Read More...
Organic farming can feed the world
One of the main arguments against organic farming is the harvest numbers. It’s a widely held belief that without using chemicals to grow your food there’s no way of keeping bugs from eating at least a portion of your crop, so organic farms must have crop yields substantially lower than chemical Read More...
Amazon uses bike messengers to deliver within the hour in New York
The most daring of Amazon’s distribution dreams is, of course, the drone that flies to your home and drops a package before the front door. That’s still future—and perhaps less “distant” than we now think. In the mean time the online shopping giant tries to speed up her distribution in Read More...
Salt-water greenhouses could lead to desert farming
Sweet water is scarce and the agriculture to produce our food uses most of it. So this is a really helpful innovation: A greenhouse that uses salt water—without the need for desalination. The project is a greenhouse made out of a cardboard-like material that has thousands of tiny holes in it. Read More...