Rethinking Engagement in Cities: Ending the Professional vs. Citizen Divide

Cities are among humankind’s grandest and most complex creations. Even small urban communities represent the cumulative result of literally hundreds of thousands of public and private, individual and collective decisions over time. They are the playgrounds of spontaneity. Such an understanding of how cities come into being and evolve is hardly new. Nor are its…

Space Farming: The Final Frontier

NASA looks to grow fresh veggies, 230 miles above the Earth By Jesse Hirsch on September 10, 2013 Photographs by Stephen Allen Last year, an astronaut named Don Pettit began an unusual writing project on NASA’s website. Called “Diary of a Space Zucchini,” the blog took the perspective of an actual zucchini plant on the…

Strength Of Gravity Shifts, And This Time It’s Serious!

The resulting value for G is 240 parts per million bigger than the official one, set in 2010. James Faller of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who tested G in 2010, is holding out for an error: "Errors are like violets in the springtime: they can spring up in any group's experiment," he says.…

Cities Could Use Your Tweets To Build Better Infrastructure

These days, people are more likely to gripe about civic issues on Twitter than actually talk to city officials. But in some cases, that social media activity is all a city needs. This week, IBM unveiled the results of its Social Sentiment Index on traffic in India. The index, which looked at 168,330 comments on…

Tunnel Vision: Subterranean Park to Stay Sunny with Fiber-Optic Skylights

More than a decade ago a group of New York City residents launched an ambitious experiment to build a park atop an expanse of abandoned elevated freight train tracks. Today the High Line, which opened in 2009, provides locals, commuters and tourists with more than a kilometer of green space several meters above the urban…

Were Two Pyramids Just Discovered in Egypt Using Google Earth?

Here’s a good one for all those who got excited when it was rumored the lost continent of Atlantis was found on Google Earth: A researcher now thinks she’s found two undiscovered pyramids in Egypt on Google Earth. The two possible complexes are located about 90 miles apart from each other in Upper Egypt (the…

“Dramatic” New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar. Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about…

Malta is ‘safest place on earth’

If you want to avoid becoming a victim of a natural disaster or of climate change, you could do no better than to live in Malta or Qatar, according to a new United Nations study which says these two small countries are the safest in the world. The World Risk Report for 2011, conducted by…

UCLA creates transparent solar cell, dreams of current generating windows

Transparent photovoltaics have yet to grace the face of your smartphone, but don't give up hope -- UCLA researchers are working on a new see-through solar cell that's showing potential. Using a new type of polymer solar cell, the team has been able to build a device that converts infrared light into electrical current. Current…

Why Boston Is One Of The World’s Smartest Cities

It’s not just smart sensors, quality transit, and renewable energy leadership. The area’s educational opportunities attract smart citizens whose projects foster intense innovation. via Why Boston Is One Of The World's Smartest Cities | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation.