Walmart Heirs' Net Worth Exceeds That Of Population Of A City The Size Of Phoenix #1yrago

What would be the effect of more women working in agriculture? 

“The women I met in agriculture showed a clear preference for working on organic and small farms, which are more likely than factory farms to reflect the values of animal welfare, human health and environmental sustainability." 

-Sonia Faruqi says on what she found when she spent time visiting farms in eight different countries. 

Agriculture needs more women (The Atlantic)

A Merry-Go-Round That Turns The Power Of Play Into Electricity - Vlad Vilenski posted in Green, Electricity and Non Profit

Empower Playgrounds is a nonprofit that has come up with an intriguing solution: Harnessing the power of play, it provides merry-go-rounds to schools in Ghana that generate and store electricity as they are spun around, even while teeming with laughing and smiling kids.

Continue to fastcodesign.com

“We have an opportunity to re-think how we regulate city activities for the public interest. I think the big opportunity is to harness the data streaming out of all of these activities and use it to enable a more permissive, but more accountable, “2.0” regulatory regime.”

- Nick Grossman

By focusing on peer-to-peer urbanism, we would be able to create more functional and enjoyable communities while using less resources through sharing — both on and offline. By working collaboratively, there’s an opportunity to create solutions for the masses at a lower cost for the government, and therefore for tax payers. It’s problem solving by community.

Check out the interesting examples of user-generated urbanism, agile urbanism, and today’s peer-to-peer urbanism movement in Nick’s post. 

(via loyalcx)

The Fracking Science Compendium by Physicians for Social Responsibility shows overwhelming harms. Learn more below: 

http://concernedhealthny.org/compendium/ http://www.psr.org/resources/fracking-compendium.html

AIDS-drug-gouging hedge-douche reneges on promise to cut prices for Daraprim

Martin Shkreli, the hedge-fund douche-bro who hiked the price of an off-patent drug used by AIDS and cancer patients from $13.50 to $750, then promised to lower the prices after becoming the Most Hated Man on the Internet did no such thing, because he is a liar.

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/25/aids-drug-gouging-hedge-douche.html

What would have once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy – women forming the majority of a parliament – is a reality in one country in the world, Rwanda.

In fact, women are making gains throughout all of Africa, but these achievements have been met with a loud silence from the western feminist movement. 

African women are blazing a feminist trail - why don’t we hear their voices? (The Guardian) 

Holy shit! The single reason Republicans have no right to exist is climate denial on behalf of energy companies.

Coating Makes Steel Tougher, Keeps Microbes From Sticking

More and more objects are getting superhydrophobic coatings that make liquids bounce right off. Surfaces with complex nanoscopic structures that prevent wetting will soon be deployed on wind turbine blades and aircraft wings to prevent ice from sticking, and even concrete is being doped with superhydrophobic compounds to help it last decades longer.

Much still needs to be done, though, to strengthen these coatings because any damage can remove the ability to repel liquids. Such an advance is hugely important since there are potentially life-saving healthcare applications if this hurdle could be overcome with a stable, nontoxic coating for steel. Just imagine if implants, scalpels and other tools used on patients had a surface impossible for infection-causing microbes to cling to.

Now, Joanna Aizenberg and her colleagues at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have demonstrated a possible solution. They’ve been able to coat stainless steel with nanoporous tungsten oxide, which repels all liquids. What’s more, the surface is extremely tough, maintaining superhydrophobicity even after being scratched with sharp steel objects and diamond.

Keep reading

Car accidents aren't accidents

The use of the term “accident” gives cops and courts the cover to excuse murder. In a brutal editorial, Hsi-Pei Liao talks about his daughter, who was killed by a driver when she was three. The driver got a ticket for failure to yeild and failure to use due care, and those tickets were eventually thrown out by a DMV judge who considered the case for 47 seconds.

I was nearly killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver when I was 21, who was caught and then given a $1,000 fine and a six month license suspension (when he hit me, he was already driving without a license, having had his license pulled for a previous DUI). The Ontario prosecutor didn’t give me notice of the hearing and I wasn’t allowed to testify or give a victim impact statement.

Big city cops, especially the NYPD and SFPD, are notorious for excusing people who kill with their cars, especially when the victims are cyclists. An activist group called Families for Safe Streets is campaigning to replace the term “accident” – which implies that the incident was a kind of unpredictable, unavoidable effect of the universe’s uncooperative inanimate objects – with “crash.”

In New York City, they campaigned for the Right of Way Law, which came into effect in June 2014, which allows “police to bring a misdemeanor charge if a driver kills or seriously injures someone who has the right of way in a crosswalk or a bike lane.” It’s pretty amazing that a new law was needed for this – but even more amazing was the city bus drivers’ campaign against the law, because they didn’t want to “criminalize accidents.”

Read the rest

An Urbanizing Planet

The video, entitled An Urbanizing Planet, takes viewers on a stunning satellite-viewed tour around our planet. By combining more than 10 datasets, and using GIS processing software and 3D graphic applications, the video shows not only where urbanization will be most extensive, but also how the majority of the expansion will occur in areas adjacent to biodiversity hotspots.

The video was produced to present the framework of a new book Global Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Ecosystems: Challenges and Opportunities — A Global Assessment. The scientific foundation of the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook project, the book presents the world’s first assessment of how global urbanization and urban growth impact biodiversity and ecosystems. It builds on contributions by more than 200 scientists worldwide.