Grist List

First-graders protest Starbucks to save local coffee shop

Back in 2011, a tragedy of epic proportions struck the East Village: Starbucks moved in. And not only did it move in, it kicked a beloved local coffee shop, The Bean, out of its flagship location. Even non-coffee drinking elementary school students were outraged, as Majorie Ingall discovered: Here we have a piece of paper […]

Sarah Laskow Culture

Horseshoe crabs have weird, bright blue blood

Horseshoe crabs have bright blue blood. They are like aliens. (Does this one not look like a dead alien?) Nature, you are weird. Robert Krulwich explains why the crabs’ blood is so beautifully blue: Their blood kind of sloshes around in their bodies carrying oxygen to various organs, as our blood does. Our blood is […]

Sarah Laskow Science

Read a prophetic Ray Bradbury story about car culture

Indelibly important science fiction author and giant of my childhood Ray Bradbury, who died last night, would probably never have described himself as writing about environmentalism — “A lot of lousy novels come from people who want to do good,” he said in an interview. But he did write about the relationship between humans and […]

Jess Zimmerman Housing

GZA and Neil deGrasse Tyson team up on a hip-hop record about science

I do not know much about writing rap lyrics, but I’m guessing that most rappers do not meet with physicists and cosmologists from MIT and Cornell before sitting down to write. But that’s exactly what Wu-Tang Clan founding member GZA did during the creation of his new album, Dark Matter — a project the rapper […]

Sarah Laskow Culture

How to make a fold-out window garden

This garden design gives you three times as much growing space as a window box.

Jess Zimmerman Agriculture

A cell phone charger made out of viruses

Except for the whole “make you sick and can’t be killed” thing, viruses are basically the ultimate renewable resource. They’re natural. They’re numerous. They replicate themselves. And, after some tinkering by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, they can generate electricity. A project at the lab has incorporated genetically modified viruses into a piezoelectric system — […]

Sarah Laskow Technology

The coolest images and video of the transit of Venus

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured terrific footage of Venus' path across the sun.

Jess Zimmerman Culture

16-square-foot apartment is a vision of tiny housing taken too far

We love tiny housing — it’s less wasteful, and so adorable! But there’s a limit to how small a space you can live in and still not go insane. We butted up against it with the 78-square-foot apartment, but this video about a (fictional, but plausible) Hong Kong apartment called King’s Cube plunges past the […]