Grist List

These park benches have a cruel sense of humor

Jeppe Hein's benches are supposed to make you more socially engaged, but they mostly just make you feel like you're being laughed at.

Jess Zimmerman Cities

Omaha teenager starts a program to donate ungrateful kids’ fruit to the hungry

Schoolkids are now required to take a fruit or vegetable at lunch, but they're not required to eat it. This teen made her classmates donate that food instead of tossing it.

Jess Zimmerman Culture

This design turns New York’s parking lots into awesome prefab apartment buildings

Innovative green architects want to make neato affordable dwellings for elderly and homeless and so on -- but can't we have one just because we're kind of poor?

Sarah Miller Uncategorized

World’s fastest one-liter-engine vehicle runs on cheese

Utah State University's small, speedy drag racer runs on cheese-waste-based biofuel.

Jess Zimmerman Uncategorized

One square inch of glass will make your data live forever

It’s nigh-indestructible.

Sarah Laskow Technology

Soon we’ll be able to grow leather in a test tube

By the end of the year, scientists will have grown a piece of leather .787 inches by .787 inches in size, without killing an animal. That is the goal of a company called Modern Meadow, Fast Company reports, and its lab-grown leather could one day be even better than the dead-animal hides that we still […]

Sarah Laskow Technology

How to prepare yourself for the Baconpocalypse

An industry trade group says that "a world shortage of pork and bacon next year is now unavoidable” due to the summer’s crazy weather.

Sarah Laskow Food

360,000 bees are staying at the Waldorf Astoria

There are bees living at the Waldorf Astoria, which is really cute, in a way, since they make honey, and really gross when you think about how a bee farm is just a creepy way for a hotel to pretend it is anything but part of a huge, gross, corporation.