Treepedia Lets Cities See Where Trees are Needed
Treepedia is a new tool from MIT that uses Google street view to asses what the coverage of trees are in specific areas. It lets you know what your neighbourhood…
Adam Clare
Lower Your Risk of Cancer and Heart Disease by Cycling to Work
We all know that encouraging bicycles as daily transportation is good for cities, economies, and traffic flow. Cycling is really good for you too and the evidence that you should…
Basic Income Being Tested in Ontario
Basic income is a concept that is being tried in Finland and now in Canada. The idea is to give people just enough money to live off of regardless of…
Stopping Free Parking from Strangling Society
Urban planners spend the last hundred years modifying cities and policies to cater to the car – and that’s been harming us ever since. We’ve looked at how changing parking…
Get Water from Air by Using a Windtrap
In Frank Herbert’s book Dune the inhabitants of a desert planet collect water using giant “windtraps,” now we can do the same on earth. Researchers at MIT have built a…
Cancer Survival Rates Higher Thanks to Years of Progress
Science is awesome! Over the last few decades survival rates of leukemia have increased thanks to research into how cancer functions and how to stop it. Cancer is incredibly hard…
Coal Museum Powered by Solar Panels
If the end of coal wasn’t obviously upon us, it is now. The Kentucky Coal Museum has switched to solar power for energy and cost savings. Yes, in what might…
Millennials Don’t Want to Work for Jerks
Generational distinctions are mostly meaningless, although sometime there is a glimpse into cultural trends based on age. One generational difference that is a good one to see (among many) is…
Be Safe Online
The American government recently repealed laws set to protect your privacy online, clearly the government doesn’t care about private communication. This impacts people around the world because a lot of…
The Trump Forest
There’s a new forest growing and it’s spreading over the entire world – and you can help spread it. Trump Forest is more of an idea than a physical place,…
A Living Wage Makes for a Good Business Plan
Helmi Ansari started a successful business and understands what’s it like to worry about paying the bills – and knows that when you’re stressed about paying bills you’re not focussed…
Covert Strategies for Supporting Urbanism
One of the biggest challenges facing cities in the 21st century is how to make them more people friendly. Parts of many cities have been left to rot, or have…
Renewables Had a Record Year in 2016
Renewable energy production is growing more every year and 2016 was no exception to that growth. In 2016 capacity of renewables increased by 8.7% and for the first time solar…
Bicycles are the New Trucks
Trucks are loud, big, and clog the roads. Bicycles are quiet, small, and only need a fraction of the space larger vehicles need. Moving freight around a city is tough…
Get Rewarded for Supporting Civil Disobedience
If your idea to change the world is creative enough then you could get $250,000 from LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. Technically, it’ll be from MIT Media Lab with money from…
Local Greenbelts can Reduce Depression and Obesity
Living near green space will make your life better. New studies coming out of Europe point out that proximity to nature has an impact on levels of depression, as in…
What You Can do Now to Mitigate Climate Change
You probably feel overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite ways that climate change alters the planet and your life. Thankfully, you don’t need to sit ideally by and watch the world…
A Water Bottle to Help Others Drink
In too many places around the world potable water is hard to get, and a recent fundraising campaign is trying to change that. Brita teamed up with Me to We…
This River is a Person in New Zealand Law
The Whanganui River its the first river to have the same legal stats as a person. The New Zealand federal government recently passed a bill granting the river legal personhood.…
Building the WikiHouse of the Future
Affordable housing is a problem for every country and over the years there have been initiatives to lower the cost of being a home, today some of those are efforts…