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Malawi's solar power revolution starts by bringing schoolchildren out of the dark
Young Kennedy is astonished. His face lights up in the single room in the straw-thatched house. So does the book he is reading with his friend, Nellie. The two excited nine-year-olds from the village of Gumbi in western Malawi have just done what about 600 million others in sub-Saharan Africa have Read More...
Beyond Bitcoin: How The Blockchain Could Disrupt Our Financial System
If you haven’t been paying attention to Bitcoin because you don’t understand how a digital currency might be relevant to your business, you might want to reconsider. It’s unlikely that Bitcoin will replace the dollar, pound, Euro, or yen anytime soon (or ever). However, Read More...
A New Path for Social Enterprises Through the “Valley of Death”
Providing a tailored mix of different types of capital and reestablishing a more human-centered sense of accountability is helping social enterprises traverse the proverbial funding gap. People have been talking for years about the “valley of death” between seed money and growth Read More...
Report shows price of wind energy in US at all-time low, averaging under 2.5 cents/kWh
It's not so strange that large companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft recently turned to wind energy to power their enormous data centers. Rather, it's simple math: Wind energy is becoming surprisingly cheap. A new report released by the U.S. Department of Energy shows that the price of Read More...
Ikea will now only sell energy-saving LED lightbulbs
The European Union was expected to ban certain halogen bulbs from sale as of next year. But earlier this year the ban was delayed until 2018. So what's a company to do that recognizes that customers are ready for the super-efficient LED technology? Well, Ikea has taken the lead by declaring to stop Read More...
Lions are back in Rwanda for the first time after the country's genocide
After a trophy hunter killed Cecil, Zimbabwe's most popular lion, earlier this summer, good news about lions in Africa seems scarce these days. But we've got an upbeat story. While the population of wild lions on the continent is in drastic decline—from an estimated 200,000 a century ago to some Read More...
This is how mussels glue themselves to rocky shorelines, and yes, this is knowledge we can use
A few weeks ago, we reported on a new surgical glue inspired by mussels, which stops bleeding wounds in 60 seconds. Now, there's more mussel-news. Scientists never knew how exactly mussels protect themselves from the crashing waves and strong currents. But they recently discovered that Read More...
The school garden is the perfect classroom: It teaches kids about nutrition, health and science
Several nonprofits are currently working together with schools to create "learning gardens". According to REAL School Gardens—which has built nearly 100 gardens in the United States—these gardens don't just teach children how a tomato grows, but they also can be used for math lessons, like Read More...
8 things feminists are tired of explaining in 2015
Thanks in no small part to viral hashtags, celebrity advocates and dozens of other landmark pop culture moments, it seems that public opinion about feminism is finally changing. But while this decreased stigma is encouraging, it seems the dominant understanding of feminism — and the many Read More...
How the 'sharing economy' could upend capitalism
The gig economy. The “collaborative” model. Whatever cliché you want to use, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase suggests that large-scale sharing has just gotten started. “This has the potential to reshape our cities in a dramatically positive way,” she predicts. To Chase, “the sharing Read More...