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I loved this article because it showed how the local food movement is working hard to be accessible to a lower income demographic.  

Americans may be turning away from the hard sciences at universities, but they are increasingly showing up at "science cafes" in local bars and restaurants to listen to scientific talks over a drink or a meal.

Clinical trials showed that the Argus II partially restores the sight of blind people after it is surgically implanted.

Look at #8. Business stepping up: From profit to purpose .....museums have always had a purpose beyond profit. We are uniquely poised to show the "purpose driven public" our motivations and how we benefit society.

I went to this great open house yesterday on campus, "Robot Block Party." Everything from the Nasa robotics team to amateur tinkerers frankensteining robots in their backyards. A couple people from the Exhibits team at the Cal Academy showed a kinect-powered robot they had been tinkering with as a side project, where - their idea - would be to put the robot (with a camera) on the roof, and you'd be able to "drive" it using the kinect inside the museum. And of course, there was the self-driving race car, complete with the ubiquitous Stanford parking sticker.

Gets to the human context at ~13:30 mins. Great illustration of how to make meaning from the seemingly meaningless, or at least from data that we don't usually connect to our daily experience.

medical school has art show in its lobby...what about the reverse? xrays, scans, lab results as art in a museum?

The clock is ticking... this infographic shows the year certain ecosystems and minerals will disappear if we continue at the same rates of destruction/consumption.  

Data showing that teenagers who came of age during the great recession have a greater sense of compassion.

With gigabytes of flash memory becoming steadily cheaper, a 1k nonvolatile memory unit has little practical use. But as a proof of concept, the chip shows it should be possible to surpass the limitations of flash memory in packing density, energy consumption per bit and switching speed.

I found this article an interesting take on the idea using futures thinking in a personal way to help potential customers/users/visitors think about all kinds of choices they make in terms of how those choices will affect them -- as individuals -- in the future.

This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in Brooklyn and the walking-shed community associated with it. Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API. In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.

a sliver of wood coated with tin that shows promise for becoming a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly energy source --  someday a way to power personal digital devices?

Background on how Muslims define home, work and a third space: One space in the domestic sphere (the family and the home); a second space is the sphere of civic engagement (including school, work and other forms of public participation); and a "Third Space" where individual, sometimes professional, and sometimes transgressive acts are played out: where people let their "real" selves show.

Third spaces can be developed anywhere as this parking lot that incorporates green facades and a rooftop playground shows us.

Mr Ho also co-leads Disney's Futures Thinking programme - planning for shows for 10 to 20 years down the road, and scanning trends in everything from technology and education to politics, to chart scenarios in which Disney could be operating.