Grist List

These fruit-shaped bus shelters make public transit more delicious

Waiting for a bus is never the most fun part of a commute, but if you lived in Isahaya City, Japan, you could at least pretend you were some kind of magic bus-riding mouse in a fairy tale. Bus shelters in the city are sculpted and painted to look like giant fruit.

Jess Zimmerman Cities

Watch the moon landing live (with a 43-year delay)

In 2009, Jason Kottke built a site where you could watch the first moon landing as it happened, second by second, just 40 years late. Today, on the 43rd anniversary of the moon landing, you can still watch “live” coverage by Walter Cronkite, unfolding on YouTube just as it would have if you were clustered […]

Jess Zimmerman Uncategorized

Book lovers make mini public libraries out of trees

These hollow-log bookshelves were erected in Berlin a few years back to help encourage the reuse of books. The German team behind the project explains: The project adopts the idea of putting up a bookcase in a public space, in which people could release their used books to be picked up by others. This way […]

Sarah Laskow Cities

You can help make this bike-in movie theater a reality

[protected-iframe id=”56fa6e0fc78268992ddb7ec4c39f24da-5104299-30166106″ info=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manifold/bike-in-theater-nyc-sf/widget/video.html” width=”470″ height=”350″ frameborder=”0″] Coworkers Jason Anello and Anna Boyarsky set up a bike-in movie theater in Brooklyn last year, and now they want to do it again — but bigger, better, and bicoastal. They’re raising funds on Kickstarter for permits and licensing, because the show itself won’t make any money: The plan is […]

Jess Zimmerman Transportation

Baby gorillas have figured out how to dismantle hunting snares

In the forests of Rwanda, mountain gorillas sometimes get caught in snares that were intended for game like antelopes. Adult gorillas can often escape; younger ones aren’t always so lucky. But staff at the Karisoke Research Center recently observed young gorillas finding and dismantling the traps before anyone could get caught, reports National Geographic News: […]

Sarah Laskow Science

This kid is Grist’s new hero

This photo is from 2011, but we just saw it going around the internet, and we kind of want a poster to hang up in the office.

Jess Zimmerman Culture

Holy crap, iceberg tsunami!

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to almost get flattened by a collapsing glacier, now you can find out. This boat was right in the line of fire — er, ice — so this video is the next best thing to being there. Actually, it’s the first best thing, because being there looks like […]

Jess Zimmerman Climate & Energy

Here’s what lightning looks like in 3-D

From our vantage point on the ground, lightning usually looks like a forked line from the sky to the ground. But it's way more complicated and cool, as this model of lightning from the D.C. derecho shows.