An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – it’s not the principle that most modern justice systems are founded upon, but it's the basic concept behind a new effort by residents of the St. Pauli nightlife district in Hamburg who are combatting public urination with walls that splash back. Community group IG St. Pauli is coating some of the area's...
Remember Ask Jeeves, the decade-old search engine with a butler mascot who offered to personally assist you with your query? Fast forward to 2015 and that metaphoric butler is taking on concrete forms in the guise of in-home robotic assistants. One potential heavy-hitter in this field will be Amazon Echo, one of the first widely-available...
Conceding to health trends that prioritize authentic, natural and organic ingredients, Diet Pepsi has decided to stop using the artificial sweetener aspartame in their drink products. The company’s CEO noted that Millennials’ perceptions of “healthy” make sugar less of the bogeyman it once was. Now it’s artificial and other lab-created...
Consumers increasingly want to know where the products they consume come from, how they are made, and the social and environmental impacts those products have on the people who make them and the places they come from. This trend is most obvious in the food and beverage sector, where consumers are increasingly demanding – and receiving –...
In this age of email, texts and posts, wouldn't it be nice to get an honest-to-goodness handwritten letter by hand-delivered mail? Real mail, not the "e" kind. Well, the trends says yes, but who's got time to write? Lately we've seen several services emerge that use technology to create old-fashioned looking mail that sets its senders apart and...
In 2015 the New York State Supreme Court granted two chimpanzees a writ of habeas corpus, essentially giving them rights that, until now, have only been accorded to humans. Similar rulings have happened in other places, including the Balearic Islands, an autonomous community of Spain, that granted legal personhood rights to all great apes;...
A confluence of unrelated events is resulting in a perfect storm that is funneling large numbers of South Korean grandparents to Europe. General increases in air travel worldwide, a drop in oil prices, shifts that have left the euro struggling and the won reveling in the new order, and a hugely popular TV show about elderly Korean backpackers...
Livestreaming is a trend that keeps getting more so, as it gives cheap and easy access to growing range of events from concerts and protests to news and weather reports. Now livestreaming is being embraced by funeral homes worldwide, becoming a normal part of our cultural last rites. Two companies, FuneralRecording and One Room are offering...
Peer-to-peer services like Couchsurfing and Airbnb are changing the way many people travel by facilitating connections between strangers to arrange short-term lodging and international friendships. While this new way of traveling and doing business is becoming wildly popular in Western countries, staying in the homes of strangers is finding far...
Revivals in downtown urban living, tighter budgetary constraints – especially for Millennials – and a growth in green thinking have all neatly led up to one quirky, funny, cute and, perhaps, sad trend: Microdwellings. This growing breed of tiny house or apartment is cleverly designed for a single person and includes things like toilets tucked...