Map Of The Humongous Fungus: The Largest Living Organism On Earth [1936x1310][OC] CLICK HERE FOR MORE

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for harnessing energy generated by very small bending motions, which could be capable of harvesting power from a broader range of natural human activities such as walking and exercising.

Yale Environment 360: New Device Harvests Energy From Walking and Exercising, Researchers Say

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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Project Monsoon  Clever colorful street art that only appears when it rains

After the Superhydrophobic Street Art, which uses a superhydrophobic coating to create designs which appear only in the rain, here is the Project Monsoon, which uses the same concept, this time with hydrochromic painting, which reveals its color only when wet. This amazing and clever project was designed by a Korean team of designers, in collaboration with Pantone, to provide color to the streets of Seoul during the rainy season, while paying tribute to the Korean culture. A brilliant idea! Source: ufunk 

We actually have pictures that great of Mars, a planet about 225 million kilometers (140 million miles) away from us. Image copyright: NASA

On a fossil-hunting trip with her family, five-year-old Daisy Morris found the remains of a previously undiscovered dinosaur, which is now named Vertidraco daisymorrisae. The new dino is not only a previously unknown species, but an unknown genus, making Daisy’s find a really big deal. It’s a pterosaur — a winged flying dino — about the size of a crow, which lived 115 million years ago. 

Forests For All Forever

From tissue and paper, to packaging, furniture and building materials, people consume and depend on forest products every day.

We often take our surroundings for granted. This is an excellent piece that outlines some of the problems and proposes a cool way to keep our forests going. 

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

UN to probe the UK's deadly disability cuts

UN investigators to determine if the government committed "grave violations" after disabled people ordered back to work.

The UK has become the first country in the world to be placed under investigation by the United Nations for violating the human rights of people with disabilities amid fears that thousands may have died as a consequence of controversial welfare reforms and austerity-driven cuts to benefits and care budgets.

UN inspectors are expected to arrive in the country within days to begin collecting evidence to determine whether the British government has committed “systematic and grave violations” of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

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

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In the Common Sense department: from the Where In Oslo website.