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Heat pump water heaters save money & energy
A new NRDC study shows that water heaters that use high efficiency heat pump technology — the same process that keeps your refrigerator cold — can cut the amount of electricity used to heat water by half or more, saving significant amounts of energy and money on your household Read More...
What it's like when your car drives itself
The first time your car drives itself, it’s terrifying. The second time, it’s thrilling. By the third time, it’s a little boring. Self-driving cars are on their way to our roads. And they’re probably not going to arrive with a bang, but with a quiet little beeping. In one Read More...
U.S. tech startup Comma.ai giving away self-driving car software
Comma.ai, the tech startup that recently pulled the plug on its device to give cars limited self-driving capabilities after being reprimanded by U.S. regulators, has opened up its software secrets to the masses. On Wednesday, Comma.ai announced on its website that it had open sourced the software Read More...
Could crowdsourcing expertise be the future of government?
We lack public institutions - a participatory bureaucracy and open parliamentary processes - that know how to tap into the collective intelligence of our communities, and draw power from the participation of the many, rather than the few. It is the absence of these open institutions, and the Read More...
In Silicon Valley, savvy founders are networking all around town by driving for Uber and Lyft
The first thing Jason Coleman did when he finally decided to start Yarden, the urban gardening business he had dreamt about, was to drive 40 hours per week for Lyft, shuttling passengers between Oakland, Berkley, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley. The connections just rolled in. Coleman says he met Read More...
Colombian Senate backs new Farc peace deal
Colombia's Senate has approved a revised peace accord with the country's largest rebel group, the Farc. The first agreement was narrowly rejected in a referendum last month. President Juan Manuel Santos says the new proposals are stronger and take into account the changes demanded by opponents of Read More...
Parkinson's disease may start in the gut and travel to the brain
We have been thinking about Parkinson’s disease all wrong. The condition may arise from damage to the gut, not the brain. If the idea is correct, it opens the door to new ways of treating the disease before symptoms occur. “That would be game-changing,” says David Burn at Read More...
U.S. cities and states lead on climate change
The wind turbines that rise out of the cornfields here reminded me on a recent drive of one postelection truth, even in the red state of Iowa. As President-elect Donald J. Trump considers whether to break the United States commitment to the Paris climate accord, the rise of clean energy across the Read More...
EU unveils power market reform to boost renewables
EU regulators set a path on Wednesday for renewables to power half of Europe by 2030, with plans to cut energy use, phase out subsidies for coal and enforce greater cross-border trade. The European Commission's the 1,000-page draft law seeks to meet goals on cutting emissions and adapt Europe's Read More...
Cuba’s agricultural revolution: Vanguard for global food system
The Cuban Revolution was forced to take on new challenges in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a turning point that sparked a radical overhaul of the island’s agricultural model that now stands as an example of the kind of food system transformation that is urgently Read More...