The Green Villa concept is a four-story tower covered in plants, with the goal of bringing the benefits of "forest therapy" to city residents. Forest bathing has been found to decrease cortisol levels, blood pressure and heart rate. According to a Japanese study carried out by Chiba University, spending time in forests, or “forest therapy,” decreases cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart...

Chinese consumers are now the engine of worldwide growth in luxury spending. The fast-expanding bulge of affluent citizens combined with a small but very wealthy coterie means there’s much more income to spend on luxury goods and services—from fashion, jewelry, and prestige cosmetics to artwork and high-end travel.It’s a burgeoning market and maybe the deepest pool of spending on high-end pr...

Millions of people communicate using sign language, but so far projects to capture its complex gestures and translate them to verbal speech have had limited success. A new advance in real-time hand tracking from Google’s AI labs, however, could be the breakthrough some have been waiting for.The new technique uses a few clever shortcuts and, of course, the increasing general efficiency of machi...

Kopi Kenangan and Fore prove a hit with Luckin Coffee's grab and go model.[Although a coffee at Fore is priced at $2.50, customers are given an array of discounts and rarely pay full price.]The world's fourth largest coffee producer is experiencing a java boom all its own. Premium cafes have popped up across the Indonesian archipelago, perhaps enticed into the market by the long lunchtime lines...

Starship Technologies invented the category of rolling autonomous sidewalk delivery robots, and to date, the company has made more than 100,000 commercial deliveries on behalf of customers. The milestone comes as Starship adds $40 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to $85 million. When it announced an additional $25 million in June 2018, Starship was also piloting its first...

In 2019 YTD, US banks have participated in 24 equity deals to fintech companies. This follows a record 2018, where US banks backed 45 equity deal to fintech startups — a 180% increase from 2017.Investor strategy trendsThe most active US bank investors in fintech (by number of portfolio companies) are Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase & Co. While all three have ramped up their f...

If mexico knows something, it is air pollution. from time to time, mexico city is paralyzed by smoke from cars, industries and even the nearby volcano the popocatepetl. to fight this, a group of engineers has a new proposal to reduce the problem. Created by BioMitech and dubbed BioUrban, the project sees a kind of artificial tree that, like its natural peers, absorbs pollution and returns clean...

Apartment dwellers can enjoy nearly 1.5 metres of indoor veggie patch using the Rotofarm by Bace, a countertop hydroponic garden where plants are rotated to grow more quickly.Like all hydroponic systems, the Bace Rotofarm works without soil, instead using mess-free nutrient and water reservoirs to feed its plants.With the addition of the rotary design, the plants turn in a full circle every hou...

Despite the growing hype around electric vehicles, conventional gas-powered vehicles are expected to be on the road well into the future. As a result, exhaust systems will continue to be a critical tool in reducing harmful air pollution.The Power of PalladiumToday’s infographic comes to us from North American Palladium, and it demonstrates the unique properties of the precious metal, and how i...