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Maria Popova
Creator and Author, “Brain Pickings”
Maria Popova is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org), which is included in the Library of Congress archive of culturally valuable materials. She has also written for The New York Times, Wired UK, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Fellow. She is on Twitter @brainpicker.
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At the age of 14, amidst poverty and famine, a Malawian boy by the name of William Kamkwamba built a windmill from scrap to power his family’s home. Living on […]
It’s often said that children are the designers of humanity’s future. International research consultancy Latitude and ReadWriteWeb decided to take the adage literally, asking children to envision the future of […]
There’s hardly anything more symbolic of an outdoor party or picnic than the red disposable plastic cup. But neither the aesthetic appearance nor the environmental impact of such disposable tableware […]
The perils of plastic are nothing new to most of us. A lesser-known fact, however, is that plastic has a higher energy value than just about any other type of […]
Wind turbines are more likely to prompt an association with the Northern California hills, where wind farms grace the vast landscape with their unseemly efficiency, than with the hustle-and-bustle of […]
Apple carved its way as a formidable innovator in everything from UI design to the app economy. Now, they’re taking the lead on materials innovation. The company recently acquired an […]
Some time ago, we featured Denver’s B-Cycle bikesharing program. Today, we are looking at an innovative twist on the traditional bikesharing model. SoBi, The Social Bicycle System, is a minimalist […]
What makes your city the next big smart city? That’s exactly what Next American City, a nonprofit quarterly magazine advocating for urban sustainability, is asking in a new partnership with […]
Over the past couple of years, pop-up spaces have populated the entire spectrum of trendiness and utility, manifesting as anything from retail hotspots to smart emergency shelter. Their conceptual origin […]
Over the past few weeks, we’ve beenmentioning the James Dyson Award, effectively the world’s most prestigious student-design competition. Yesterday, the winner of the award’s U.S. round was announced: The Copenhagen […]
Who hasn’t suffered the frustrations of moving large boxes, ungrippable, awkward and back-bending? Move-It, a simple kit of self-adhesive cardboard parts by designer David Graham, offers a potent antidote by […]
It’s been a good year for Emily Pilloton, founder of social-good nonprofit Project H Design and author of the excellent Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People. A PopTech fellow […]
Design and innovation consultancy IDEO, credited with pioneering the concept of design thinking, has been at the forefront of pro-social design over the past decade. Now, they are entering the […]
Some time ago, we looked at EyeWriter – an innovative eyetracking device that allows paralyzed patients to write with their gaze. Today, we’re turning to another form of sensory input […]
Traffic perhaps the greatest environmental liability and biggest daily annoyance of urban epicenters. Between the number of cars in the streets, the tendency of ground-level public transportation vehicles to jam […]
What if you could manipulate abstract, digital information like it were a tangible, physical thing? A new development out of MIT Media Lab promises to do just that. Slurp is […]
In rural India, over half of all households don’t have electricity. To light households and power commercial equipment, villages use kerosene lanterns, which are both expensive and environmentally harmful. But […]
Trypanophobia – the extreme, irrational fear of needles – is said to affect 10% of American adults. And then there are the merely squeamish ones, for whom getting a shot […]
Whether or not there is a creativity crisis may be up for debate, but one thing is clear: Our current education system is failing to create an environment that truly fosters creativity . . . Now, a new application out of MIT Media Lab is aiming to address some of these issues.
The average person flushes more than 7,000 liters of water down the toilet every year. With more than half of the world’s population using flushable toilets, this amounts to trillions […]