Russia’s Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) has announced the start of construction on a year-round fully autonomous, renewables and hydrogen-powered International Arctic Station (IAS) in the Land of Hope, in the foothills of the Polar Urals. The station will have a modular structure and rely on renewable energy sources and hydrogen fuel, without burning...Read More

The Brief  |  February 18, 2020 The Brief: Impact alpha in donor-advised funds, inclusive credit unions, greenhouses in India, flexible loans for founders of color, off-grid energy impact     ImpactAlpha Greetings, Agents of Impact! Featured: Impact Voices Impact drives alpha, and other lessons from ‘100% impact’ donor-advised funds. In the same way that some big foundations are beginning...Read More

THERE is a huge, untapped market opportunity in Asia, driven by under-served populations. Today, there are over one billion people in Asia who live in poverty. Yet, they are already spending over US$2 trillion annually on basic goods and services such as food, housing, clothing and telecommunications. And poverty levels across Asian countries have been...Read More

A new way of making bone-replacement materials that allows for cells to grow around and inside them has been developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham. The team adopted a novel approach called chemobrionics, in which chemical components are controllably driven to react together in specific ways, enabling the self-assembly of intricate bio-inspired structures....Read More

Land prices are booming in Sazlibosna. Over a tulip-shaped glass of tea in one of the village’s cafes, local governor Oktay Teke says that a few years ago, a square meter of land here in the farming community northwest of Istanbul sold for as little as 10 Turkish lira, about half the price of a...Read More

The world must use existing technologies rather than wait on new technological breakthroughs if 2050 net-zero emissions targets are to be met, says a new report by UK Fires, a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Nottingham, Bath and Imperial College London. The report outlined opportunities for future growth and changes to business models...Read More

Pharmaceutical companies have an abiding interest in enzymes. These proteins catalyze all kinds of biochemical interactions, often by targeting a single type of molecule with great precision. Harnessing the power of enzymes may help alleviate the major diseases of our time. Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact molecular structure of most enzymes. In principle, chemists...Read More

  Oxygen and metal from lunar regolith. Credit: Beth Lomax – University of Glasgow ESA’s technical heart has begun to produce oxygen out of simulated moondust. A prototype oxygen plant has been set up in the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of the European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, based in Noordwijk in the...Read More

It’s a buzzword that’s slowly starting to lose its flavour for many – disruption – yet this intersection between innovation, originality and necessity promises a revolution of the status-quo. As use of the term spread from places like Silicon Valley to innovations developed in garages in one-horse towns, the intensity and hype get turned to...Read More

In an earlier article, we looked at an inconvenient truth of supply-chain technology: the modern supply chain is still a fundamentally human endeavor. Smart algorithms may be able to generate faster, more accurate demand forecasts, for example, but executing against those forecasts requires the combined effort and alignment of hundreds of individuals across the organization,...Read More