thisistheverge:

NASA rockets into social space, but lacks a clear mission

Aspiring to awe in the age of the selfie

whatshouldwecallsocialmedia:

WHEN A BRAND STARTS A FACEBOOK POST WITH “LIKE THIS STATUS IF…”

(via misskatiemo)

This is a pretty incredible product created through smart, thorough research that could potentially impact the world, not just vegetarians.

fastcodesign:

You Can’t Tell That This New, Cheap Egg Substitute Is Made From Plants

To keep a growing world population filled with nutrients, startups like Beyond Eggs are finding new ways of making protein that don’t involve the resource intensity of raising animals. Here comes the Protein Economy.

“…don’t imagine that just because we’re in trouble today means we’ll be in double-trouble tomorrow. Science will come to the rescue—and not in the shape of yet more antibiotics, and ever more industrial food-production processes. What these innovators are talking about are completely new ways of making food, and particularly protein: growing it in a laboratory or engineering it from plants, because it’s too harmful (and expensive) to produce the “natural way.”“

Sound disgusting? Maybe. But perhaps you haven’t seen the insides of a battery chicken shed recently, or imagined how much more antibiotics we’ll have to use as the world nears 9 billion. “Our food system is abysmally broken,” says Josh Tetrick, CEO of San Francisco-based Hampton Creek Foods, maker of the Beyond Eggs egg-substitute. “It’s not about the morality of eating animals or not. It’s about the conditions that a lot of these animals are raised in. These hens are kept inside a cage for two years, pumped full of feed and antibiotics, and it’s just cruel. We don’t all have to stop eating eggs. But we should ask if we want to participate in that.”

Tetrick’s team has deconstructed the egg, analyzed its 22 special functions, and replicated it with plant-stuffs like sunflower lecithin, canola, peas, and natural gums from tree sap. By all accounts, the substitute tastes just like the real thing—even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s sold as a gray-green powder that you need to hydrate before use.

Tetrick, who eats only plant-based food himself, insists he’s not on an anti-meat crusade. He applauds that companies like Chipotle are turning to sustainable sources of meat.

The main idea is to replace the eggs currently used to make things like mayonnaise, ranch dressing, and factory-made muffins or cookies (i.e. not your Sunday fry-up). That’s about a third of the 79 billion eggs laid in the U.S. every year.

At the moment, Hampton has two major Fortune 500 customers—one of which plans to market that its products are egg-free, and another that wants to keep the fact quiet for now. “We’re just removing the eggs that we have an issue with. We don’t care if they want to just save money. That’s fine,” he says. Beyond Eggs is 18% cheaper than battery-produced eggs.

Tetrick sees a smaller retail business selling to vegans, and the cholesterol-conscious. Beyond Eggs will be available online in the next two weeks, and probably from major retailers after that.

Beyond that, he wants to feed people who are likely to go hungry without interventions in the protein supply system. “I think the reason people like Bill Gates are interested in this is that the world population is expanding to 9 billion, and people are going to need good cheap sources of protein. Some of the economics of meat production, particularly around feed, aren’t good.”

Here’s the full story.

Here’s more on this topic:

The Meat Industry Now Consumes Four-Fifths Of All Antibiotics

The Case for Test-tube Steaks

Biz Stone Explains Why Twitter’s Co-Founders Are Betting Big On A Vegan Meat Startup

Dinner: Bill Gates Q&A with Vinad Khosla

(via fastcompany)

pewinternet:

UPDATED: Social networking site use by age group, over time. http://pewrsr.ch/H10jnl

fastcompany:

World Trade Center High Wire Artist Philippe Petit’s Colorful Advice For A Career On The Edge

On a summer day in 1974, a 24-year-old Frenchman stepped onto the world stage with one of the most astonishing performances in modern history—walking back and forth on a wire illegally rigged across the void between New York’s World Trade Center Towers, three quarters of a mile above spellbound onlookers.

Petit has gone on to perform many other spectacular wire walks, authored over half a dozen books, was the subject of the acclaimed documentary Man on Wire, and singlehandedly built a barn using eighteenth-century tools and design. Whether on the high wire or not, Petit’s philosophy is epitomized in his response to reporters shouting “Why?” after his dramatic Twin Towers crossing. Petit’s answer: “The beauty of it is, there is no ‘why.’”

When we spoke to Petit about how he walks the high wire, our conversation expanded to Petit’s philosophy of how he lives his life on the high wire. We found that his improvisatory, chaos-courting, risk-managing principles could be applied to anyone’s work or personal life.

Here they are in his own (colorful) words:

1. Let life be your teacher.

How can you achieve greatness if you haven’t experienced the hard lessons of life? To become a great theatrical director, a great actor or a Renaissance man, you have to do all the jobs most people don’t want to do, like washing dishes and shoveling horseshit.

2. Court disaster.

If you go where trouble is you will find a magnificent transformation. After all, if I had followed the rules, would I have traveled across the ocean to a foreign country and illegally snuck into and then wire-walked across a building a quarter mile above the ground?

3. Make your art a joyful adventure.

If I were to sit at a desk, write a list, make a schedule, and go and meet the building and then make a plan to do a high wire walk in the most safe and intelligent way, I would not have that sense of adventure and exploration. And, there would be no point in living.

4. Be a madman of detail.

Before I walked the Twin Towers, I gathered information with cunning and precision. This door in this place opens to the left this wide with this many steps of a certain thickness, the 450-pound cable must be brought up this way to avoid detection, and so on. There were at least a thousand other details to solve. When it comes to doing my homework, I’m obsessed. I want to live to be very old. A half a millimeter of mistake, a quarter second’s miscalculation, and you lose your life.

5. Improvise.

Improvisation is turning away from a well-polished plan within a millisecond because there’s no such thing in life as a well-polished plan.

 

Check out this great story here!

[Image: Flickr user Carolina Pastrana]

“Court disaster.”