Innovations and Science

• Inside the International Crime Rings Trafficking Sand and plundering the earth. Can they be stopped? Scientific American         Ranked Top Longread of the Week. French language edition here, Italian here, German here, and Polish here.

Related: The Business of Organized Crime Against the Environment, part 1 and part 2, in Discourse magazine

• Self-driving car technology that will help stick a landing in space: Astrobotic pioneers the use of Doppler lidar beyond Earth. In Inverse
• Graphic Novelist Offers Fresh Look at Environmental Crime:

  

  Ava Salzman shows the genre’s strength in conveying a complex true-crime story.  Washington Post
• The Man Who Remembers the Future: Rocketbelt flyer Bill Suitor took off although the futuristic jetpack did not. Featured in 99 Pecent Invisible’s Rocket Man episode. Washington Post
• West African Scientists are Leading the Science Behind a Malaria Vaccine: Researchers in Mali have paved the way for two new vaccines. Smithsonian magazine
• Solar-Powered Moon Rovers Will Help Scientists Seek Lunar Ice: Solar energy may fuel our space explorations, but only if the equipment doesn’t shatter, freeze or explode. Discover magazine
• Bridging the Divide: How Youth Junction is training rural youth in India for urban jobs. Stanford Social Innovation Review
• Climate-Change Lessons from an Unlikely Source: America’s Forgotten Cork Crisis. Discover magazine
• Tackling Climate Change and Malnutrition: Researchers look at local diets for clues for doing both. Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine
• Play It Louder: The Instrument that Ushered in Electronic Music, the Theremin. Smithsonian
• From the Family Station Wagon to the Apollo Lunar Rover: My father worked for NASA in the 1960s and brought his experience as a polio survivor to the task of creating the moon rover. Smithsonian
• Biodegradable Mardi Gras Beads from Microalgae: LSU biologist Naohiro Kato has a new venture for reducing the plastic waste from the New Orleans celebration. Can it succeed? Smithsonian
• Dawn of the Age of Plastic: In 1939, the future arrived at the World’s Fair in New York in “The World of Tomorrow.” The fairground attracted 44 million people and two contenders for the title of most modern industrial material: cork and plastic. Undark
• A Sharper Focus on a Killer: Aurora MRI gives a new way of attacking breast cancer with early detection, but is it right for all women? Forbes Asia
• Keeping A Log: A look at an Indonesian company as it turns around its dirty reputation, and the market forces pushing the forest industry to curb illegal logging.  Forbes Asia
• And an interview with Indonesia’s Twitter Ambassador Forbes Asia
• Certified Coffee: Does the Premium Pay Off? Environmental Health Perspectives – A look at whether Fair Trade and Organic eco-labels make a difference where the coffee grows.
• A Ginseng Maverick Takes on Hong Kong – Forbes Asia
• Growing Green Roofs, City by City – Environmental Health Perspectives – From the Pacific Northwest to Washington, DC, local policies are spurring green-roof projects. The cities have their own reasons, it turns out.
• Atlantic City and Its Animals – Eclectica