Ever Wonder How Coal Formed?

New 3-D Printer Produces Delicate Soft Objects

A new method of depositing drops of soft materials in a gel could be a new way to print squishy three-dimensional products like living tissue, soft robots and flexible electronics.

In the technique created by University of Florida researchers, a computer-controlled hollow tip precisely embeds fluid droplets of silicone, hydrogel, colloids or living cells inside a granular medium bath the consistency of hand sanitizer. After using the method to make tiny complex soft structures like delicate jellyfish, a tubular knot and a gel version of the nested shapes called Russian dolls, the group says they might have created a new era for engineering. 

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 This is just great.

Poverty is a tax on cognition

In an outstanding lecture at the London School of Economics, Macarthur “genius award” recipient Sendhil Mullainathan explains his research on the psychology of scarcity, a subject that he’s also written an excellent book about.

Mullainathan begins by establishing the idea that your cognition is limited – you can only think about a limited number of things at one time, and when the number of things you have to pay attention to goes beyond a certain threshold, you start making errors. Then he explains how poor people have a lot more things they have to pay attention to. In the UK, we make fun of politicians for being so out of touch that they don’t know the price of a pint of milk – but poor people have to keep track of the price of everything they require. There’s no room for error. Spend too much on the milk and you can’t afford the bread.

That’s just one of the many taxes on the cognitive load of poor people. David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules details another: figuring out what rich people are thinking. Poor people who piss off rich people face reprisals far beyond those that rich people can expect from each other or from poor people.

This isn’t unique to cash-poverty. Mullainathan asks his audience to recall what life is like when they’re “time poor” – on a deadline or otherwise overburdened. This scarcity can focus your attention, yes: we’ve all had miraculous work-sprints to meet a deadline. But it does so at the expense of thoughtful attention to longer-term (but equally important) priorities: that’s why we stress-eat, skip the gym when our workload is spiking, and miss our kids’ sports’ games when the pressure is on at work.

The experimental literature shows startling parallels between the two conditions: time scarcity and cash scarcity. This leads to a series of policy proscriptions that are brilliant (for example, when we create means-tested benefits that require poor people to go through difficult bureaucratic processes, we’re taxing their scarcest and most precious resource). He also recounts how this parallel is useful in creating an empathic link between rich and powerful people like hedge fund managers and the poorest people alive.

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This Week in Social Entrepreneurship: Weh Yeoh tells us who sets the international development agenda (hint: it's you!)

Come out for the NY+Acumen Happy Hour and Jeopardy Night Wednesday night, October 16th. It will be an exciting evening at Galway Pub where all questions (errr…answers, rather) in the game will be based on a social entrepreneurship related case study. And, as always, there will be time for drinks and conversation.

On Tuesday, October 15th join Be Social Change and the Centre for Social Innovation for NY Social Good. This is a new event series featuring for- and non- profit ventures developing innovative approaches to tackling the toughest problems facing our generation.

Make a Wave is a start-up readiness program aiming to provide 250 women in UK foundational skills to think about social enterprise. They are searching for women based in UK, over 18, and committed to attending a business skills bootcamp, among other credentials. If you are interested, read more about this program and how to apply here.

Learn how, as a student, you can get involved with social enterprises during this live Q&A on Tuesday, October 8th with the Guardian Social Enterprise Network. Learn not only how you can get involved as a student, but also how you can benefit from social enterprise and even how you can start your very own!

Who sets the agenda when talking about international development? We, as ordinary citizens, have the power to collectively shift the government’s agenda. Check out this Huffington Post article written by Weh Yeoh, who is currently running a campaign on StartSomeGood to Bring Speech Therapy to Cambodia. 

Shawn D. Ross

I am a Northwest Native living in Washington State. A graduate of Washington State University and University of Phoenix with degrees in Architecture and Education I write about social, cultural, and personal improvement on the StartSomeGood Blog and SDRinspire. I am also a filmmaker and owner of Giraffe and Penguin Productions, a single daddy of two beautiful children, avid reader, writer, and hat wearer (Not in that picture but believe me, I wear ‘em). I am currently at work on my first feature length documentary. Follow me @shawndross and visit my websites: sdrinspire.tumblr.com and giraffeandpenguinproductions.tumblr.com.

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What good do you want to create? Visit our site to learn about how to start your own campaign.

Do you have a social entrepreneurship news story or an event you’d like to see on the StartSomeGood Blog? Email Nicole (Nicole @ StartSomeGood.com)

NASA is training space robots using virtual reality

 NASA and Sony have teamed up to use Playstation VR to train humanoids, or robot like humans, which would work in space. The project called Mighty Morphenaut sees a VR app allow a human to see through the eyes of the robot and control the robots movements using the Playstation VR system.

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‘Wired Microbes’ Act as Power Plants, Converting Sewage to Energy

Planetary Resources reveals first object 3D printed from alien metal Space and 3D Printing are connected… http://ift.tt/1Zf3uQr

UK Chancellor: I must cut tax benefits for working poor to help them

George Osborne, born to a titled millionaire, has explained that he is cutting the tax-credits that let the working poor survive, despite the Tory party’s election promise not to do any such thing – because it will reduce the deficit and therefore save them from the cuts that the country would have to pay in the future in order to pay down those debts.

Osborne did not moot the possibility of taxing the country’s billionaires, including the “non-doms” who get to pretend that they live in an offshore tax-haven and duck their taxes. He also neglected to mention that countries are not companies, and that having a national bank and your own mint means that national debts are completely unlike the debts taken on by firms or households.

Osborne also didn’t mention the possibility of taxing the companies that pretend that their profits are made in tax-havens and that all their UK income must be remitted to an offshore firm in nonsensical trademark licenses.

Finally, Osborne didn’t mention the situation in which people working full-time jobs (or piecing together a full-time living from zero-hours contracts) can’t afford to pay for rent and food for their families and require benefits to remain solvent enough to show up for work each day, meaning that the firms paying the sub-survival wages are getting a massive tax subsidy in the form of a fed and housed workforce that comes at tax-payers’ expense.

Instead, Osborne explained that he would make the poorest workers in the UK even poorer, for their own benefit.

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The Scripps CO2 measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the big island of Hawaii have shown that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climbed above the 400 parts per million (ppm). Because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, some scientists say for millennia, our global fever has reached the point that no one alive today, and those that follow us, will ever know a world below 400 ppm again.

This week will be the last time anyone alive experiences a CO2 level below 400 ppm. (Saturday Nov 21, 2015)

This terrifying eel-robot will perform maintenance on undersea equipment

Nope.