High design.
The coffee shop Tokyo Smoke Found is sandwiched between two warehouses in Toronto’s West End. Built in a former loading dock, the 330-square-foot space—outfitted with custom steel shelving, exposed brick, a rough-hewn common table, and Tolix stools—is the face of a new lifestyle brand that aims to elevate weed.
Forget Hyperloop. This subway would take you from Manhattan to Tokyo with just a quick transfer in Paris.
Every subway system feels like its own self-contained world, but what if those worlds were linked? The World Metro Map takes the subway systems of 214 cities across five continents, and unifies them into a single map, so that taking the L-train is just as likely to drop you off in Tokyo or Mumbai as it is in Williamsburg.
A solar farm will pump seawater up the Andes mountains, so renewable power can be available day and night.
Stuck between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth. But the area’s weird geography means that it will soon be home to a massive hydropower plant—the first step in a new system that could theoretically provide all of South America with 100% renewable energy.
Why has so much packaging not changed in decades?
When shampoo manufacturers started switching from glass bottles to plastic in the 1960s, they weren’t thinking about how to make the new containers recyclable. And so the bottles that are now ubiquitous in drugstores, holding everything from lotion to mouthwash, have always been a pain for recyclers to handle.
Move seen as a boon to Chinese sellers
Amazon’s ongoing efforts to use drones to deliver packages have made headlines over the past year, but the company has also taken steps to move goods via much more traditional means: ocean freight shipping. As Flexport reports, Amazon’s Chinese arm, Amazon China, has been granted a license by the Federal Maritime Commission to become an ocean freight forwarder.
A California judge ruled that ride-hailing startup Uber failed to provide necessary information required of transportation companies.
Uber has agreed to pay the state of California $7.6 million for failing to share enough data about the trips users have taken using the service, reports the Wall Street Journal. In 2015, a California judge ruled that Uber violated state rules as a transportation network company by not providing data on the number of trips by zip code, information about accidents during trips, information about how many of its vehicles were wheelchair accessible, and information about how much riders paid.
Following a slew of outbreaks caused by food-borne illnesses, Chipotle is making food safety its priority.
After months of food poisoning reports and falling sales, Chipotle will hold a company-wide food safety meeting next month. On February 8, all stores nationwide will be closed for part of the day for training related to safe ingredient preparation.
Circus Peanuts are bad.
It’s Friday again, and joining us today is Elmo Keep, who has written about transhumanists and tech weirdos for The Verge, The Awl, Motherboard, and others. But also, she is Australian, so today she’s going to catch us up on lurking horrors, antipodean and otherwise.
It’s like Roomba on steroids.
The robot takeover is nigh—but first, let one of your future masters clean your home.
With Change Politics, civic action platform Change.org brings your friends’ recommendations to your ballot.
Buying books, records, and other products based on the recommendations of people in your social circle has long been standard. Now, the online petition service Change.org wants to adopt that approach to how you vote and pick your favored political candidates.
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