Miscellaneous
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...
Lawyers in public-service jobs rank highest in happiness than their higher-paid peers
Passing the bar and becoming a lawyer is not all that it is made to be. At least not on the happiness and well-being fronts. Research shows that lawyers have significantly higher incidence of mental health, depression and substance abuse. One group, however, stands out for being significantly Read More...
Indigenous crops to provide food security in the dry American Southwest
The plight of Native people losing their way of life, including their agricultural know-how, and adopting the cheap diet provided by the food industry, is a well-documented story. The debilitating diabetes epidemic that afflicts these communities compounds poverty and food insecurity. Rebuilding Read More...
Could part-time work be the key to happiness?
Work-related stress is an epidemic linked to degrading public health in America. Not so much in the Netherlands, ranked the third happiest country on earth in this year’s World Happiness Report. Indeed, one of its secrets seems to be the widespread practice of the reduced-hour week. Working Read More...
Ecuador to break tree-planting record this Saturday
Ecuador’s latest public campaign aims for results in the ground. Over 350,000 tree seeds will be sowed Saturday by some 35,000 Ecuadoreans, breaking a Guinness World Record. It is about government’s commitment to—and citizens’ positive action for—the environment, said the Environment Read More...