Grist List
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New solar cell draws power from spinach
“Scientists figure out a way to get energy out of new non-coal thing” is getting to be a pretty common story, and so far none of it has revolutionized our power grid. But this one serves a dual purpose: It can make solar panels cheaper and more efficient, plus vegetable-pushing parents can point to it […]
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Injured bald eagle gets new 3-D printed beak
A team of scientists, engineers, and a dentist designed a nylon polymer beak that would perfectly replace the eagle's lost upper mandible.
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Watch a turtle roller-skate into a store to steal lettuce
This roller-skating turtle could kick the pants off some overrated hare, but instead he’s turned to a life of crime. It’s so sad when our young chelonians go astray.
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Kids compete to name kid-killing asteroid
Whether or not you spend much time worrying about 1999 RQ36, the asteroid that might hit Earth in a couple hundred years, surely everyone agrees: If a giant formation of rock and space detritus is going to smash us all to kingdom come, it would be nice to at least be properly introduced first. To this end, […]
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The Pope and his weird hat have a new electric car
Pope Benedict is considered the Green Pope. This does not mean that his weird hat is green, though that would be really cool. It means that he cares about the environment, so even though he is the Pope and also kind of scary-looking, he does cool, Norcal-y stuff like harness solar power for electricity and […]
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Firefighters rescue adorable bobcat kitten from wildfire
Firefighters working to contain a California wildfire found this baby bobcat walking alone in circles by the side of the road. There was no trace of a mother bobcat, plus she kept going to sleep on their shoes, so the crew took the baby back to their command post, where public information officers cooed over her […]
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Mesmerizing real-time map of the world’s planes makes air travel look like a fungal infection
Eugh, what’s that swarming all over the surface of the planet? It looks like an insect horde, or maybe some kind of crawling fungus, but no, it’s just us in our flying machines. It’s simultaneously kind of gross and super-fascinating. PlaneFinder tracks every flight in the air at any given moment, in as close to […]
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World’s oldest message in a bottle has been found in Scotland
In 1914, a Scottish scientist named Captain C. Hunter Brown dropped 1,890 bottles in the North Sea as part of a science experiment. So far 315 of these bottles have been found, the most recent one last week by a Scottish fisherman named Andrew Leaper. At 98 years old, it’s the world’s oldest message in a […]
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This new bike grows when your kid grows
In response to the pesky but unavoidable fact that children tend to grow over time, Spanish bike company Orbea has designed a child’s bicycle that grows with them.
