B2U Project

We are Bystanders to Upstanders. An application that promotes volunteer work through innovation in social media and game design. Check us out on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter! :D

[kateoplis]

Sorry babes, but Britain has quit smoking.

From Monday, small UK shops will be forced to hide cigarettes. If shop owners breach the ban, they’ll face a “maximum fine of £5,000 in the magistrates’ court and up to six months in prison, two years if they ends up in the crown court.”

“Introduced for larger stores in 2012, the ban is the latest in a series of wins against big tobacco. This autumn will see the introduction of a ban on smoking in cars carrying children. From next year, cigarette companies will be forced to sell their products in unbranded packs.”

[think-progress]

More than 700 landmarks around the world will also switch off their lights, including Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, France’s Eiffel Tower and more than 30 Unesco World Heritage Sites.

[huffpost]

Egyptian Woman Dressed Like Man For More Than 40 Years To Provide For Family

For more than four decades, Egyptian mother Sisa Abu Daooh dressed as a man to provide for her family. Last week, she was awarded the “woman breadwinner” award by the authorities in her hometown of Luxor and was congratulated in person by the Egyptian president.

Abu Daooh, 65, was celebrated on Sunday in a ceremony at the Egyptian presidential palace, where she met President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi and received a prize of about $6,500, Agence France Presse reports. Wearing a traditional male robe and turban while receiving the award, Abu Daooh was praised by the president as “an exemplary working woman." Read on here.

[think-progress]

It’s a good question

[unconsumption]

To Save Our Cities, We May Need to Turn Them Into Power Plants

Interesting piece describes a recent solar-power study. The focus: Instead of “sprawling solar farms in wild places,” panels integrated into existing city spaces.

If solar power were installed on the rooftops and urban spaces in just the fraction of the state that’s already been developed, it could generate enough electricity to meet California’s energy needs, three to five times over.

"Integrating solar facilities into the urban and suburban environment causes the least amount of land-cover change and the lowest environmental impact," Hernandez wrote in the statement announcing the findings.

"Because of the value of locating solar power-generating operations near roads and existing transmission lines, our tool identifies potentially compatible sites that are not remote, showing that installations do not necessarily have to be located in deserts.

”In other words, we should bring the solar closer to the cities they power; onto rooftops, parking lots, and otherwise useless industrial waste sites.”

More at Motherboard.

[love-this-pic-dot-com]

Milk Jug to Shovel

[iwanttoberecycled]

I want to be spring cleaning with you. 

[kateoplis]

Writing Women Back into Science History | ScienceFriday

[wwf]

Great news for black rhinos!

The Black Rhino Range Expansion Project recently created its 10th black rhino population by relocating 19 rhinos to a new home in South Africa.

The project has now moved about 160 black rhino and more than 50 calves have been born on the project sites. Read more: http://wwf.is/KCow6 http://ift.tt/1IfBsrC

[huffpost]

Happy birthday Mr. Rogers!

[mothernaturenetwork]

Two California marine sanctuaries will double in size The waters are feeding areas for endangered whales, sharks, salmon and seabirds.

[thisiscitylab]

I think we can say it is more than a correlation.

A new study links growth in African American entrepreneurship to a decline in black youth violence between 1990 and 2000.

[txchnologist]

[nikolasfuturist]

New 3-D Printer Uses Light to Build Objects in Minutes

The next generation of desktop 3-D printers might do away with the excruciatingly slow process that current units use. Researchers have unveiled a printer that replaces the current extruder nozzle that squeezes out melted plastic one layer at a time with light and oxygen. 

The makers of the Carbon3D printer have demonstrated a technique they call continuous liquid interface production (CLIP), which grows 3-D printed parts out of a liquid resin bath. Ultraviolet light and oxygen work to build a stronger part in layers just tens of microns wide. Build times can be reduced from hours to minutes, they say.

Their work builds on the process called stereolithography, an additive manufacturing technique developed in the 1980s that builds parts layer by layer with liquid resin cured by light. 

“By rethinking the whole approach to 3-D printing, and the chemistry and physics behind the process, we have developed a new technology that can create parts radically faster than traditional technologies by essentially ‘growing’ them in a pool of liquid,” said University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill chemistry professor Joseph DeSimone, who coinvented the technique and is also Carbon3D’s CEO. See more images and learn more below.

Read More

[prostheticknowledge]

R x2

Kinetic sound installation by vtol features a circle of cylindrical drums which make noise whenever there are Earth tremors:

Computer algorithm collects from Internet the data on power and depth of shocks in planet’s crust and captures all the earthquakes above 0.1 (Richter magnitude scale). On an average day there are up to 200 of such shocks. This data is converted into signals that control the motors which are attached to Thunder Drum acoustic drums.

More Here

[springwiseintelligence]

Small businesses can get free energy audits from competing local students

Students often boast a perfect mix of enthusiasm, ambition and free time, and we have seen lots of initiatives aiming to give them the skills, tools and opportunities they need to put this to positive use. One such initiative is Green Impact Campaign, a non-profit based in Washington DC, which trains students to conduct free energy audits for local businesses in their area. GIC have just launched the Power to Save competition, which will see teams of students from five universities in DC state competing to see who can help more local, small businesses save on energy. READ MORE…

[8bitfuture]

Robotics gloves develop to give stroke patients therapy at home.

A team of European researchers have been developing robotic gloves aimed at helping stroke victims to receive advanced therapy at home. The SCRIPT project (Supervised Care and Rehabilitation Involving Personal Tele-robotics) has led to two prototypes that help develop hand and wrist movement while recording monitoring and recording the patient’s ability to perform a variety of tasks. The system is designed to allow patients to continue receiving therapy at home once in-clinic rehab sessions are over. The hope is that well targeted therapy in the comfort of the home will lead to meaningful improvements in patients that may otherwise plateau in their motor ability. Dr Farshid Amirabdollahian, a senior lecturer in adaptive systems at the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Computer Science who co-ordinated the project, said: “This project focused on therapies for stroke patients at home. Our goal was to make motivating therapies available to people to practise at home using this system, hoping that they have a vested interest to practise and will do so. We tried this system with 30 patients and found that patients indeed practised at home, on average around 100 minutes each week, and some showed clinical improvements in their hand and arm function.”

[micdotcom]

Watch: YouTube stars give their younger selves some brilliant dating advice

[thefashionbomb]