Google AI Making Realistic Phone Calls!!

She's Cut Paper with Tiny Blades Every Day for Two Years

Lake Chad Limnology Center by HKA Architects

HKA Architects has released plans which feature combining elements of environmental design, sustainable design, and brilliant architecture to produce a solar powered research center that will be tasked with reversing the drying up of Lake Chad. This amazing design doesn't just relate to the environment through employing sustainable methods of energy generation, but also plans to desalinate Atlantic Ocean water and deliver it to the lake in order to begin the process of halting the drying up of the lake in real time. The idea of enacting immediate action on the task at hand while also pioneering research to solve the problem in a more concrete method is truly inspiring and progressive, to say the least. Read more about the planned project here.

Being An Artist in Trying Times

(via Brain Pickings)

100 Resilient Cities: Global Migration Report

100 Resilient Cities is an organization focused on helping critical cities around the world build social, economic, and political resiliency as the 21st century pushes the human race towards increased urban residence. Cities will be ground zero for the technological advances, social movements, and political activism that will be witnessed in the coming decades; as more and more people move closer and closer together to be near their work and other opportunities cities have to offer. However, the impending problems—that will be caused due to the current level of infrastructure, sanitary systems, and social organization being inadequate to support the projected influx of people—could be detrimental to cities and cause civil unrest in the fast approaching future. It is critical that steps are taken now to ensure that this hard trend of movement from the countryside to urban centers is met with proper urban planning and adequate preparedness.  

"Today, over 60 million people worldwide are fleeing their homes; an additional 20 million people are being displaced by extreme weather events, and tens of millions more are migrating to find opportunity. While reasons for moving vary, most migrants settle in urban areas, creating different challenges for their new homes." 

"Mass migration is rapidly changing our world, and our cities need to embrace integration to successfully address these new challenges and seize the opportunities they bring for building urban resilience."

You can learn more about the work 100 Resilient Cities does or read their full recent report on Global Migration here.

Self-Healing Concrete

These scientists have developed a method that makes self-healing concrete by mixing limestone generating bacteria into the initial concrete mixture. This bacteria has a lifespan of nearly 200 years and can fix cracks in as short as 3 weeks. Along with that they've developed a spray version of the solution to utilize on older buildings. Truly amazing!

Maya Angelou on the Freedom of Information

"Information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open."

"Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else. There may be details that are different, but a human being is a human being."

-Maya Angelou