‘Wired Microbes’ Act As Power Plants, Converting Sewage To Energy

Michelle Obama launches #62MillionGirls to fight for girls’ education

Michelle Obama has unveiled a new campaign focusing on the tens of millions of girls around the world who lack access to any kind of education. "Right now, 62 million girls are not in school,“ the first lady told the Global Citizens Festival. “And what’s important to know is that these are our girls. They deserve the same chances to get an education as my daughters and your daughters and all of our children.“ Celebrities, politicians and other Twitter users were quick to jump on the hashtag.

A good way to remember the human bones in the body. Dope pic

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700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative

Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who?

Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years—but researchers aren’t sure who made them.

The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino’s limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino’s ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.

But the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers’ best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. Read more.

Bladeless wind turbines generate electricity by shaking, not spinning

Scientists hope to hugely reduce the cost of wind energy by removing the blades from wind farms, instead taking advantage of a special phenomenon to cause the turbines to violently shake.

Vortex, a startup from Spain, has developed the tall sticks known as Bladeless — white poles jutting out of the ground, that are built so that they can oscillate. They do so as a result of the way that the wind is whipped up around them, using a phenomenon that architects avoid happening to buildings and encouraging it so that the sticks shake.

They do so using vortices, which is where the company gets its name from. The bladeless turbines use special magnets to ensure that the turbines are optimised to shake the most they can, whatever speed the wind is travelling at.

As the sticks vibrate, that movement is converted into electricity by an alternator.

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.

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It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the myriad of options in the haircare section of your local store, but it turns out that of all those products, the formula within most shampoo and conditioner doesn’t vary much across brands. 

A new Y Combinator company, Function of Beauty, is looking to change all that.

The company lets the user choose a scent and describe their own hair type, with options from straight to curly, dry to oily, and thin to coarse hair. From there, users can choose different hair goals, combining things like strengthening to heat protection to anti-frizz. 

Function of Beauty currently offers 450 million different combinations based on hair type and goals.

(via Function Of Beauty, Backed By Y Combinator, Offers Customized Shampoo And Conditioner | TechCrunch)

Watch: A haircut may not solve homelessness — but it can make all the difference for these women.

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Robot Guides Soybean Plant To Light

by Karin Heineman, Inside Science

What happens when you combine a soybean plant with a robot?

You get a soybot!

Developed by researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, they’re on-the-go micro gardens that help indoor plants seek out light.

“They’re equipped with two sensors that measure light conditions, they move continually in the direction of the brighter light,” said Shannon McMullen, a sociologist at Purdue. Learn more and see a video below.

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