“Let’s be honest. The activities of our economic and social system are killing the planet.

In my presentation on how to get a start up featured on International media I said that the one of the first things to do is make sure that the product has at least one unique feature.

Cincinnati, Ohio’s Xavier University made history earlier this year with the announcement of a new maker center that will house 31 3D printers. And it appears the campus has been putting these printers to very good use.

3D printing has taken an interest to our rubbish bins! The Italian Francesco Pacelli, 26 year-old engineer and designer in materials, imagines lots of new materials from coffee grounds. Focus on his Hoop project that recycles food waste for 3D printing.

Climate change is an issue so big it can be paralysing. It doesn’t help with the paralysis that proposed solutions tend to be either hopelessly inadequate (change your lightbulbs! buy local!), or hopelessly ambitious (just replace capitalism with global eco-communes!).

A generation ago, getting a prosthetic limb fitted usually amounted to a having a heavy, nearly useless hunk of plastic and metal tacked onto your body. But bionic hands such as this one illustrate just how quickly that’s all changing.

If you are anything like me, you’re a freelance writer and the owner of chinchillas. But if that isn’t what connects us, it might be that sometimes you lay awake at 3 am wondering what kind of gun Brian Fantana might have brought to the epic fight scene in Anchorman 2.

This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw “vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor,” as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations.

With Raul Castro reforming the island’s government and Barack Obama beginning to normalize relations with the United States, Cuba is at the threshold of a new era.

The left will only renew itself, argues Roberto Mangabeira Unger, if it gives up on equality and champions instead the cause of ‘deep freedom’ and permanent institutional innovation.

Beetle Blocks is a graphical blocks-based programming environment for 3D design and fabrication. Use code to control a beetle that can place 3D shapes and extrude its path as a tube. Then make a 3D print!

“3-D Printing DNA: Hacking Life’s Code and Creating New Organisms” was originally released on Feb. 24, 2015. The original writeup is below.