Miscellaneous
Brewing beer from the Chilean desert’s fog
The Atrapaneblina (fog catcher) brewery is an irresistible case of the human inventive spirit thumbing its nose at adversity. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, its crew is able to retrieve enough water from the fog to produce 6,300 gallons of beer per year. The process starts with special nets designed Read More...
Limestone-producing bacteria is key to self-repairing living concrete
Cracked concrete is unsightly. It can also severely compromise structures if water is allowed to seep through it. After several years of development, a Dutch research team at Delft University of Technology has come up with a solution inspired by nature: a living concrete infused with the ability Read More...
Caterpillar is new weapon for war on drugs
Colombia, one of the world’s top producers of cocaine, plans to resort to an organic agriculture trick to destroy its most problematic crop — coca. The chemical herbicide glyphosate, which the government has been routinely using to spray the illegal plants, was recently declared carcinogen by Read More...
Aid programs for poor families yield sustainable positive outcome, study shows
The impact of programs designed to lift families out of extreme poverty has typically been guess work at best. This may be about to change thanks to the very first science-based study conducted for five years in six countries. In clinical-study fashion, it assessed and compared the evolution of Read More...
For children, happiness trumps regardless of life circumstances
There is no correlation between how much stuff children have and how happy they are, according to a new survey of 53,000 children across 15 countries. The brazen optimism of children regardless of their circumstances is very reassuring news. What if we could retain that virtue and strength Read More...
Google’s autonomous cars to hit California’s roads this summer
Driverless cars are about become a lot more real. Some of us who have grown familiar with the Google self-driving Lexuses cruising around the San Francisco Bay Are, can get ready to witness the next iteration of Google’s automobile project: tiny gumdrop-shaped cars that can’t exceed 25 mph and Read More...
Swedish food packaging design combines beauty and functionality of nature
Food packaging is typically made of landfill-bound materials like plastic, aluminum-lined paper or Styrofoam that outlive their content way longer than necessary. Tomorrow Machines has come up with alternative solutions whose materials, functionality and esthetics borrow from nature. We watched the Read More...
Moth’s eye and lotus leaf inspire more efficient, easier to maintain solar panels
Just as the cost of solar energy has been dropping precipitously, innovations sprout to accelerate the trend while improving the technology. In a recent example of biomimicry applied to solar, Oak Ridge National Lab was inspired by the moth’s eye to create an antireflective coating that increases Read More...
Meet Charles Arntzen, creator of world’s most promising anti-Ebola drug from tobacco plants
Bioengineered plants meet vaccines. It actually is a lot more promising than it may sound. A pioneer in the field is Arizona State University Professor Charles Arntzen. He has been working on nothing less than the world’s most promising anti-Ebola drug. ZMapp is an injectable synthetic serum made Read More...
Global warming soundtrack sounds eerily beautiful
An astonishing experiment by a music student and his teacher at the University of Minnesota has yielded a piece for string quartet that is as hauntingly beautiful as it is moving. Their goal: giving global warming a sound representation, just as animated color maps from NASA provide a visual Read More...