By Taylor Hinds Earlier this week it was announced that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared UPSIDE Foods’ cultured chicken safe to eat. …

By Bradd Libby Russell Marker was a man who was good at finding answers and, in late 1941, he found in the book of a botanist friend an answer he had been seeking for a long time. Dioscorea mexicana, or the Mexican yam, is found throughout Mexico and down to…

By Bradd Libby By all accounts the crowds were buzzing with excitement one day in late October 1945 at Gimbels department store, located in Manhattan near the Empire State Building, to see the shiny new “Reynolds Rocket”. With a silver-plated steel body and refillable chamber, an estimated five thousand people…

By Bradd Libby For most of human history, it was not routine for people to brush their teeth. But by the 1960s, majorities of most Western countries had a daily oral hygiene routine. Because oral hygiene is so central to wider health, the mainstreaming of dental care had a huge…

By Nafeez Ahmed Germany can shift its entire electricity system onto solar, wind and batteries by 2030 for less than 1% of its GDP. And the country’s entire energy system can go 100% clean energy by 2035 for less than what it spends on fossil fuels. …

By Adam Dorr In August of 2021, Elon Musk revealed the Tesla Bot at the company’s “AI Day” event. At the time the announcement was so unexpected that some journalists, pundits, and analysts believed it to be a joke. …

By Bradd Libby The basics of life — energy, minerals, water, food — are not evenly distributed around the world, so peace and prosperity depend strongly on the ability to move goods and people quickly and cheaply. …

By Nafeez Ahmed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is about to set in motion a chain of feedback effects leading to a sudden, rapid escalation of global political instability. Various UN agencies, and now the IMF, have warned of social unrest at a similar scale to the ‘Arab Spring’ events in…

By Bradd Libby A global food crisis is looming, with high natural gas prices driving up the cost of ammonia fertilizer and the war in Ukraine threatening this year’s crops from both there and Russia. The consequences of mishandling this crisis could be dire. Research by complexity theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam…