The manufacturing plant in North Carolina was closed after testing found the bacteria in a self-standing cooling tower
Read More How To Take Advantage Of Your Brain’s Hidden Productivity Powers
Your mental lists are distracting you from other, more productive uses of your brain. Here’s how to do a weekly brain dump instead.
If you think keeping everything you need to know neatly packed away in your head is a smart way to run your life, you’re probably hurting your productivity and stifling your creativity.
The Death Of LOL: How Facebook Users Laugh
Whether you use “haha,” “hehe,” or “lol” has more to do with your age and where you live than anything else, the social network finds.
Conveying that you find something humorous in real life can be challenging enough. (“Is a smile enough here, or do I need to laugh?” or “Wait, they look hurt. Did I actually laugh, or just laugh in my head?”) But on the Internet, laughing can be serious business. Is that “LOL” coming across as sarcastic? Does “heh” mean a joke fell flat? And does a crying emoji indicate more laughter than an emoji sticking its tongue out?
This App Uses Kids’ Own Unintelligible Texts To Teach Them Grammar
iCorrect brings the grammar police to your teens’ phones, and they won’t be LOLing.
Children write more these days than ever before, thanks to texting, Facebook, Tumblr, and whatever else they’re using that we haven’t even heard of yet. iCorrect is an add-on for Apple’s iMessage app that uses this fact to teach them better spelling and grammar. It works by not letting kids send a message until they’ve got everything right: no LOLs allowed.
Watch Astronauts Harvest And Eat The First Microgravity Greens
One giant leap for lettuce.
Intrepid farmers are already growing veggies in surprising places, including rooftops, warehouses, and even on highway billboards. But now leafy greens have gone where no greens have gone before: outer space.
How An Analog Photo Company Can Thrive In An Instagram Age
Lomography’s story is one of Austrian art students, millennial hipsters, and, of course, Vladimir Putin.
At one point, they almost built their own mobile photography app. But instead, Matthias Fiegl and Sally Bibawy decided to stick to their company’s old-school roots. Lomography, a 23-year-old camera company headquartered in Austria, has remained loyal to the art of analog and experimental photography since the beginning, when it first discovered—and then helped popularize—the quirky Lomo LC-A film camera in a shop in Prague. After weathering the onslaught of both digital cameras and the smartphone explosion, Lomography has managed to carve out a durable—and profitable—niche doing things the old-school way: hashtag, no filter.
How A Toilet Franchise Business Is Cleaning Up Kenya’s Slums
When the government isn’t providing clean sanitation, Sanergy is showing that there’s an opportunity for local entrepreneurs to step in.
Sanergy is a social enterprise that’s building out a sanitation network in Nairobi, Kenya. It designs its own toilets, franchises them out to entrepreneurs (who charge people to use them), then converts the waste into fertilizer that it sells to farmers. Started by MIT graduates, Sanergy takes a business approach, based on the premise that people will pay to use toilets if you make them clean and sturdy enough.
StumbleUpon Fails To Secure New Funding, Lays Off “Dozens Of Employees”
The social media site is cutting its staff down to about 30 people.
StumbleUpon, the once-popular discovery engine that lets users “stumble” onto new web content, has hit another road bump. According to VentureBeat, the company is now downsizing even further following a number of layoffs issued in 2013.
This “Climate Portal” Lets You Experience Desert Heat And Arctic Winds
Want to get in the mood for your trip? Sample the weather at your destination inside these weather-simulating chambers at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport.
International airports aren’t known for their atmosphere, but in Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, you can experience the climates of far-away places just by walking into a room.
Rite Aid Will Now Support Apple Pay And Google Wallet
One of America’s largest drugstore chains is reversing its decision regarding Apple Pay starting this week.
Rite Aid, which incurred considerable customer wrath last year when it nixed support for Apple Pay at checkout, has backpedaled. The drugstore announced that, as of next Saturday, it will again accept Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Rite Aid’s decision is bad news for CurrentC, a clunky retailer-backed rival to Apple Pay and Google Wallet that has yet to launch.
