SEED-ing the Future of Sustainable Agriculture Over the last century, 94 percent of seed diversity has been lost! Sadder still, is that the modern world has lost touch with this heritage, a timeline of interaction, a centuries old love story between humans and plants. Two men and their colleagues are hoping to re-inspire the world... Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz are busy at work creating a film about seeds and man's interaction with them. SEED: The Untold Story, a feature-length documentary film, tells the harrowing and heartening story of humans’ 12,000-year relationship with seeds. As many irreplaceable seeds are nearing extinction, SEED unveils a David and Goliath battle for their future. "The beauty of the seed is out of one you can get millions. Vandana Shiva’s above quote inspired us to make SEED. Academy-Award Winning Actress Marisa Tomei, after seeing Queen of the Sun, was inspired to help and joined SEED as Executive Producer. From a kernel of corn to a grain of wheat, every seed carries within it the hope of the future.
Here's What Happens to Google Employees When They Die It’s no surprise that the employee benefits of Google (GOOG) are among the best in the land—free haircuts, gourmet food, on-site doctors and high-tech “cleansing” toilets are among the most talked-about—but in a rare interview with Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock I discovered that the latest perk for Googlers extends into the afterlife. “This might sound ridiculous,” Bock told me recently in a conversation on the ever-evolving benefits at Google, “But we’ve announced death benefits at Google.” We were scheduled for a talk on Google’s widening age-gap (the oldest Googler is currently 83); I wanted to know how child- and healthcare benefits have evolved as the company has scaled. [More from Forbes: How To Handle A Personal Crisis At Work] Instead, Bock, who joined the company in 2006 after a stint with General Electric, blew me away by disclosing a never-before-made-public-perk: Should a U.S. [More from Forbes: 11 Tips For Dealing With A Lazy Co-Worker] FinanceBusinessGoogle
Eat Much Fish? Coal Burning Probably Did This to Your Sushi Coal burning is most likely to blame for Mercury levels in yellowfin tuna rising 3.8 percent per year since 1998. With mercury concentrations in the upper layers of the oceans having tripled since the industrial revolution, it’s not surprising that certain kinds of fish are not recommended for pregnant women (and might not be so great for those of us who aren’t pregnant either). A new study gives further details on the scale of the problem and seems to disprove those who claimed that mercury concentrations in open-ocean fish weren’t going up. A team from the University of Michigan compiled and re-analyzed 3 previous studies on yellowfin tuna caught near Hawaii. (Wikimedia/CC BY 3.0) Where is all that mercury coming from? (Wikimedia/Public Domain) Yellowfin tuna, often marketed as ahi, is widely used in raw fish dishes—especially sashimi—or for grilling. You can find FDA recommendations on how to avoid ingesting too much mercury from fish here. (FDA/Public Domain)
What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? Lindsay Morris Above, a boy prepares for a fashion show at a camp for gender-variant children and their families. More Photos » When Alex was 4, he pronounced himself “a boy and a girl,” but in the two years since, he has been fairly clear that he is simply a boy who sometimes likes to dress and play in conventionally feminine ways. There have always been people who defy gender norms. Many parents and clinicians now reject corrective therapy, making this the first generation to allow boys to openly play and dress (to varying degrees) in ways previously restricted to girls — to exist in what one psychologist called “that middle space” between traditional boyhood and traditional girlhood. “It might make your world more tidy to have two neat and separate gender possibilities,” one North Carolina mother wrote last year on her blog, “but when you squish out the space between, you do not accurately represent lived reality.
What My Son's Disabilities Taught Me About 'Having It All' - National Because of her child's problems, the author will never have a tidy, peaceful life. But none of this keeps her from being happy -- as long as she asks herself the right questions. The author on a walk with her son (Photo by Karl H. As someone in her 40s, unequivocally in middle age, I find myself and my friends in that stage of life that seems to auger constant assessment -- am I happy? Evidenced by the number of times Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic piece "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" was posted on Facebook, it served as a cri de coeur of the collective unconscious of those of us swimming in the Gen X/Baby Boomer estuary, last stop before becoming truly elderly. Let me compare and contrast that with a typical incident that happened just last week in my own 40-something working mother life. While our friends worry about middle schools, we bring our son to the ER to get stitches after he puts his head through a window. I nodded. I nodded again. He waited, seemingly perplexed.
The Egg The Egg By: Andy Weir You were on your way home when you died. It was a car accident. And that’s when you met me. “What… what happened?” “You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. “There was a… a truck and it was skidding…” “Yup,” I said. “I… I died?” “Yup. You looked around. “More or less,” I said. “Are you god?” “Yup,” I replied. “My kids… my wife,” you said. “What about them?” “Will they be all right?” “That’s what I like to see,” I said. You looked at me with fascination. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Oh,” you said. “Neither,” I said. “Ah,” you said. “All religions are right in their own way,” I said. You followed along as we strode through the void. “Nowhere in particular,” I said. “So what’s the point, then?” “Not so!” I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. “How many times have I been reincarnated, then?” “Oh lots. “Wait, what?” “Well, I guess technically. “Sure.
The Debt-Free College Degree When she was six, Elaine Klaiklung emigrated from Thailand to the U.S. with her mother, a single parent who earns $20,000 a year working in a Charlotte grocery store. By graduating in the top 3 percent of her high school class, she met or surpassed the admission requirements for scores of U.S. universities, but she wished to remain in North Carolina. “I wanted to stay close to my mom,” she says. “My whole life, I’ve only had her and she’s only had me.” “When I got my acceptance letter and my tuition bill, it told us that everything was mostly paid for,” she recalls. Klaiklung, now a senior, is a member of what will be the third class at Davidson to graduate debt-free, and part of the school’s ongoing experiment in how to solve the student loan mess by eliminating it. All the same, Davidson stands out as an especially intriguing model. “We take it very seriously,” says Tianna Butler , a senior from Salisbury, Md. Even students are doing their part. And Klaiklung?
60 Highly Clever Minimal Logo Designs Depending on the flavor of your business, your logo may appear big and flashy, bold and colorful or just plain simple and clever. In this roundup, I’ve turned the spotlight towards the more simple and clever logo styles that leave a strong impression. As simplistic as they may appear, there is genius behind these 60 highly clever minimal logo designs. OneFund Filmaps Folder back Bipolar Backspace Stairs Fence v.2 Walk Unarmed Frankenstein Films Thinktank Pelican eveva Love Clip SewPerfect Wave Pendulum Sex Lovers City Direct FishLine Up Straight UP elefont Rocket Golf Illusion Circus of Magazines CodeFish Zip Mummy Foot Missing Helium Killed Productions Bird Giraffe minimum Catch 5 ascus HandsUp Pencil James Forbes Plumbing Wine Searcher Ed’s Electric LocKey Handmade Pictures upside down productions More Wine Kingdom brand Twins Horror Films Ross Poultry Half Crown Jump Atack Tulipart Have a Favorite? When putting a showcase of inspiration together, I often find myself picking a couple of favorites out of the bunch. Written by Shawn Ramsey
A New Marriage License and Each Other, and Little Else Tina Fineberg for The New York TimesDave Merritt and Tiana Polomaine in front of the mural of City Hall at the marriage bureau in Manhattan on Thursday. Tiana Polomaine was stretched out on a bench sleeping next to her fiancé, Dave Merritt, when their number came up just before noon on Thursday at the marriage bureau on Worth Street in downtown Manhattan. She and Mr. Merritt, both 22, picked up their soiled backpacks and shuffled over to a clerk’s window and filled out the forms for a marriage license. For their addresses, both wrote down ones in the Albany area where they grew up, even though neither had lived there in several years. For their vocations, Ms. “I wonder if they noticed,” Mr. These two had only each other and carried all their worldly possessions in their bags. They have been homeless and jobless for more than two years, and have been roaming the country, sleeping outside wherever they wind up, they said, and traveling by hitchhiking or inexpensive bus. “That’s O.K.,” Mr.
Xi Jinping Returns Amid Tumult in China On Saturday, the diplomatic tensions boiled over, with hundreds of demonstrators throwing rocks and eggs at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, while smaller protests erupted in up to 40 other Chinese cities. Unconfirmed reports said some of the protests turned violent, with protesters said to have burned down a Toyota dealership. Demonstrators were demanding that Japan give control of a small group of islands known as the Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan. Both countries claim them as part of their territory, but Japan exercises control over them. Because any public gatherings are tightly controlled in China, it seemed likely that at least one faction in the government approved of Saturday’s protests. The police limited the number of protesters on the street outside the embassy; some people ate lunch on the roadside while they waited for their turn to march. Some analysts see a relationship between the protests and the political tensions surrounding the disappearance of Mr. Mr.
The Economics of Solar Power for Your Home