Trident Is A Remote-controlled, Camera-equipped Underwater Drone – And It’s The Fastest Machine Yet

Migrant women hired to make $70 "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirts are paid $1/hour and sleep in dormitories with 16 women in a single room.

If it would take a woman worker in the factory two weeks of pay to buy one shirt, what’s feminist about that?

Is it important to know the real story behind our clothes? Read the full story here

#Chocoholic: We sure love our chocolate, but it'd be a lot sweeter if it wasn't coming from child labor.

WATCH the short video here.

+2 million children work in cocoa production in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. This year, Nestlé​, Mars Bar​, and HERSHEY'S​ were sued for knowingly partnering with suppliers that use child workers.

DEMAND that these chocolate companies become Made In A Free World here: madeinafreeworld.com/action!

How To Make Solar Cells Without Toxic Materials

Researchers find non-toxic way to make thin film solar cells…

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Image: “A surfactant template guides the self-assembly of functional polymer structures in an aqueous solution” by Youngkyu Han and Renee Manning, via Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a key building block for next-generation devices. It takes features from diamonds, one of the toughest materials in the world, and combines them with features of silicon, our ubiquitous semiconductor technology in electronics to make a very new kind of material for power electronics. SiC can more efficiently handle higher voltage and three times the amount of energy compared to silicon chips, allowing us to run everything from locomotives to planes and wind farms faster and more efficiently.

Brain, Bone and Blood Vessels Coming Hot Off the Press

Could the days of custom clavicles and bespoke bladders produced just in the knick of time for suffering patients be around the corner?

While keeping an eye on tissue engineering studies, we’ve been seeing some significant wins in the lab that are bringing the sci-fi future of on-demand 3-D printed organs, bone and blood vessels closer. 

Harvard and Brown bioengineers are taking their own routes to build complex tissues in customized 3-D printers. And just the other week, we reported on newly unveiled work at the University of Florida to print complex soft structures in baths that could one day birth replacement human parts along with soft robots.

Now, Carnegie Mellon engineers reported on Friday that they had successfully printed simplified proof-of-concept anatomical structures like mini femurs, blood vessels and brains suspended in soft gelatin. Learn more and see a video below.

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 This is just great.

Basic income is a tested social vaccine. It’s been found to increase equity and general welfare. It has been found to reduce hospitalizations by 8.5% in just a few years through reduced stress and work injuries. It’s been found to increase birth weights through increased maternal nutrition. It’s been found to decrease crime rates by 40% and reduce malnourishment by 30%. Intrinsic motivation is cultivated. Students do better in school. Bargaining positions increase. Economic activity increases. Entrepreneurs are born. With experiment after experiment, from smaller unconditional cash transfers to full-on basic incomes, the results point in positive directions across multiple measures when incomes are unconditionally increased.

Universal Basic Income as the Social Vaccine of the 21st Century (via letseyx)

It’s almost as if, as a species, we didn’t need to hurt ourselves in order for life to go on.

(via imathers)

Bicyclean, a senior thesis project by Rachel Field ‘12, helps recycle e-waste in developing nations by preventing exposure to toxic materials. The project recently won silver at the Acer Incredible Green Contest. Read how Rachel is designing a cleaner future.

A Tree of Life For 2.3 MILLION Species! 

This week, scientists released this massive tree of life showing the evolutionary relationships between 2.3 million different species, encompassing every scale of life from bacteria to blue whales. This massive undertaking combines more than 500 previous trees into one, the result being the largest and most complete tree of evolutionary relationships as we know them today. 

Like evolution itself, this diagram will continue to evolve as scientists fill in gaps and uncover more detailed information on the genetic relationships of Earth’s various species, but it’s not too shabby for a first draft. You can read more from Rachel Feltman at The Washington Post.

This type of wheel-like diagram is called a Hillis plot, one of my favorite ways of illustrating the tree of life. I’ve even found one drawn on an actual tree:

“I think” we’ve come a long way since Darwin’s original 1859 sketch in On The Origin of Species, don’t you?