Everyones always talking about new tools, but some of the best tools are the classic onesincredibly useful things that have been around for ages. These are the tools that have stood the test of time and are just as handy today as they were 20 years ago.
They’re also the kinds of things you wont hear about from most people or publications. And it’s easy to see why: Theyre not the hot new thing. Theyre just quietly helpful for anyone in the know.
So today, lets take a look at one of those web-wide classics. It’s the ideal way to tell, in an instant, whether a website is actually down or not. Ive used it for nearly two decades, and I still rely on it regularly.
Psst: If you love these types of tools as much as I do, check out my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. You’ll be the first to find all sorts of simple tech treasures!
Is it down for everyoneor just for me?
Sometimes, no matter what you do, a website just won’t load. The question is obvious: Wait, is the website actually down for everyone? Or will it just not load for me for some reason?
Its an important question to ask. Sometimes, the problem may very well be with your computer, phone, or internet connection. Other times, the website may indeed be completely down for everyone. And these days? It can even be somewhere in between: A website might go down only for people in your region but be accessible elsewhere at the same time.
The way to get to the bottom of whatever’s going on is with a simple little site called Down for Everyone or Just Me. To use it, just pull up the site in your browser of choiceon your phone, computer, or any other web-connected contraption.
Then, plug in a website addressan address like fastcompany.com or theintelligence.com, a social media service, the name of an app, or anything else that doesnt appear to be working right.
Plug in any website’s address to answer the age-old question: Is it down for everyone, or just for me?
Youll learn whether the website appears to be down for everyoneor just for you. And its not only a one-way interaction, either: You can also report what youre seeing. And you can see what problems other people have reported recently, too.
It really is that simpleno accounts, no paid subscriptions, and nothing but a few ads on a single page. Itll help you troubleshoot website connection problems in a snap, exactly as it has since the internet’s early era.
You can access Down for Everyone or Just Me directly in your browser.
Its completely freethe website just has a few ads and accepts donations.
You dont have to provide any private information, and the privacy policy says the service wont sell your personal data.
Ready for more tech-enhancing treasures? Check out my free Cool Tools newsletter for an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in delightful waysand another off-the-beaten-path gem in your inbox every Wednesday!
Inside the historic Book Depository at Michigan Central, now home to Newlabs innovation campus, Brittanie Dabney is quietly building a different kind of startup. Her company, EcoSphere Organics, doesnt make apps or mobility tech. It makes biodegradable coasters out of banana peels.
Dabney and her team collect food scraps from local restaurants like Alchemy and Johnnys Speakeasycoffee grounds, citrus rinds, and eggshellsand process them into small-batch products like compostable packaging and plant-based leather alternatives.
Using dehydration and fermentation, Dabney aims to create materials that are both functional and regenerative. I want the vision of our process and manufacturing to be sustainable, Dabney says. No harsh chemicals, not water-intensive.
A coaster made from grapefruit peels at Ecosphere Organics in their NewLab workspace. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City]
EcoSphere is still in early development, operating with grant funding and limited access to production space. Once were able to get warehouse space, then well be able to take on more, she says.
The company is part of a growing movement in Michigan to look beyond composting. With 745,000 tons of food waste landfilled in Michigan every year, theyre exploring alternatives: upcycling, food rescue, apps, and decentralized infrastructure that can transform waste into something more useful.
EPA data identifies more than 10,000 food service establishments across Michigan generating significant amounts of food waste, with an estimated total of over 167,000 tons per day. These range from school cafeterias and restaurants to correctional facilities and healthcare institutions, each with unique waste patterns and constraints.
The most frequently listed facility type is full-service restaurants, which account for more than 5,000 sites in the data set. Other common sources include cafeterias, limited-service restaurants, and food service contractors.
Wayne County alone accounts for the most food waste, with more than 177,0000 pounds of average daily waste across facilities, followed by Genesee, Kent, Macomb, and Oakland counties.
This diversity underscores the need for flexible, localized strategiestechnologies and programs that can intervene at grocery stores, restaurants, institutions, and beyond. The innovations emerging in Michigan represent promising steps, but broader adoption and investment will be necessary to meaningfully reduce food waste statewide.
Flashfood app: Where retail tech meets waste reduction
While startups like EcoSphere are experimenting with banana peels and coffee grounds, larger players are tackling food waste at the point of sale. In Michigan, one of the most visible interventions comes from Flashfood, a mobile app that lets shoppers buy groceries nearing their sell-by date at a discountand from Meijer, the first U.S. retailer to partner with the platform.
Meijer was actually our first U.S. customer, says Esther Cohn, a spokesperson for Canada-based Flashfood. Michigan was a natural next step because we already had a strong user base and Meijers scale gave us a way to grow quickly.
The model is straightforward: store staff scan soon-to-expire itemsmeat, dairy, produceinto the app, offering them at steep discounts. Customers place orders on their phones and pick them up from coolers near the store entrance. The goal is to keep food out of landfills and into shopping carts.
From a grocers perspective, youre making money back on items you used to throw away, Cohn says. Youre reducing shrink and avoiding disposal costs. Shrink refers to inventory loss from damage and spoilage.
As of late 2023, Meijer customers had diverted more than 10 million pounds of food waste from landfills using the app, according to the companys corporate impact report. The program began in 2021. Meijer also became the first U.S. retailer to accept SNAP/EBT payments through Flashfood, expanding access to lower-cost groceries.
Flashfood users purchase items through the app and pick them up in the store. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City]
But the program requires infrastructure that many smaller grocers dont have: digital inventory systems, trained staff, and coordinated logistics. Even at Meijer, implementation takes planning.
Were looking at multiple tools to address food waste, says Erik Petrovskis, Meijers director of environmental compliance and sustainability. That includes reducing waste at the source, diverting what we can, and making sure as little as possible ends up in a landfill.
Volunteer-powered logistics: Food Rescue US in Michigan
In a parking lot outside a Whole Foods store in Midtown Detroit, Janet Damian loads trays of bread, cut-up sweet potatoes, some pies, and pineapple into the back of her Ford Flex. This isnt a city-run program. Its one of more than 500 monthly rescues coordinated by Food Rescue US-Detroit, a tech-enabled nonprofit that redirects surplus food from stores and restaurants to food pantries, shelters, and fridges across Southeast Michigan.
Elli Chivari, 22, and Jessica Awan, 19, bring carts with donated food from Food Rescue US to the WSU Food Pantry. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City]
We rescue any type of foodfresh, frozen, prepared, nonperishable, says Darraugh Collins, who runs the organizations Michigan operations. Sometimes its a whole carload. Sometimes its just a few bags.
The model relies on a lightweight infrastructure: a mobile app, a flexible network of 80 to 100 active volunteers, and over 144 food donor partners, including Target, Whole Foods, Plum Market, and LinkedIn. In 2024, the Detroit program alone rescued about 700,000 pounds of food, delivering it to more than 147 recipient agenciesmany of them in the city, even though most food comes from outside its limits.
One of those volunteers is Janet Damian, a retired medical administrator who lives in Dearborn and picks up food weekly from Whole Foods and other locations. Were reducing food waste by distributing it to people who need it, she says. Its satisfying because the need is realand the appreciation is real.
Her favorite moment? Delivering 30 birthday cakes from Whole Foods to the Wayne State student pantry. Their eyes lit up, she says. It was like a party. It doesnt matter what you bring, theyre just happy someones thinking about them.
That joy is familiar to Kenya Maxey, who oversees the Wayne State pantry, which also includes a thrift shop. Weve seen over 6,700 students in the last 12 weeks, she says. The numbers started climbing in January.
Maxey said the donations from Food Rescue US make their limited budget stretch further, and offer students a moment of normalcy. They get to shop like theyre in a grocery store, she says. And that helps them feel like themselves.
Despite its reach, the model has limits. Were at capacity with the volunteers we have, Collins says. We need more funding, more drivers and ideally some paid positions to help us coordinate. The need is only growing.
This story was originally published by nonprofit news organizations Planet Detroit and Next City through the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship, as part of a series investigating how Michigans food waste system contributes to climate change through landfill methane emissions.
About 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farms shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert.
The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel Ootham and Pee Posh tribesknown together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRICon their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the U.S. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the deserts unflinching sun and wind.
In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely-watched water users in the West in the process.
The Gila River Indian Community in Arizona lined 3,000 feet of canals with solar panels. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News]
The communitys investments come at a critical time for the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people across seven Western states, Mexico, and 30 tribes, including GRIC. Annual consumption from the river regularly exceeds its supply, and a decades-long drought, fueled in part by climate change, continues to leave water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead dangerously low.
Covering water with solar panels is not a new idea. But for some it represents an elegant mitigation of water shortages in the West. Doing so could reduce evaporation, generate more carbon-free electricity, and require dams to run less frequently to produce power.
But so far the technology has not been included in the ongoing Colorado River negotiations between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, tribes, and Mexico. All are expected to eventually agree on cuts to the systems water allocations to maintain the rivers ability to provide water and electricity for residents and farms, and keep its ecosystem alive.
People in the U.S. dont know about [floating solar] yet, said Scott Young, a former policy analyst in the Nevada state legislatures counsel bureau. Theyre not willing to look at it and try and factor it into the negotiations.
Several Western water managers Inside Climate News contacted for this story said they were open to learning more about floating solarColorado has even studied the technology through pilot projects. But, outside of GRICs project, none knew of any plans to deploy floating solar anywhere in the basin. Some listed costly and unusual construction methods and potentially modest water savings as the primary obstacles to floating solar maturing in the U.S.
A Tantalizing Technology With Tradeoffs
A winery in Napa County, California, deployed the first floating solar panels in the U.S. on an irrigation pond in 2007. The country was still years away from passing federal legislation to combat the climate crisis, and the technology matured here haltingly. As recently as 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis, most of the worlds 13 gigawatts of floating solar capacity had been built in Asia.
Unlike many Asian countries, the U.S. has an abundance of undeveloped land where solar could be constructed, said Prateek Joshi, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has studied floating solar, among other forms of energy. Even though [floating solar] may play a smaller role, I think its a critical role in just diversifying our energy mix and also reducing the burden of land use, he said.
[Image: Paul Horn/Inside Climate News]
This February, NREL published a study that found floating solar on the reservoirs behind federally owned dams could provide enough electricity to power 100 million U.S. homes annually, but only if all the developable space on each reservoir were used.
Lake Powell could host almost 15 gigawatts of floating solar using about 23% of its surface area, and Lake Mead could generate over 17 gigawatts of power on 28% of its surface. Such large-scale development is probably not going to be the case, Joshi said, but even if a project used only a fraction of the developable area, theres a lot of power you could get from a relatively small percentage of these Colorado Basin reservoirs.
The study did not measure how much water evaporation floating solar would prevent, but previous NREL research has shown that photovoltaic panelssometimes called floatovoltaics when they are deployed on reservoirscould also save water by changing the way hydropower is deployed.
Some of a dams energy could come from solar panels floating on its reservoir to prevent water from being released solely to generate electricity. As late as December, when a typical Western dam would be running low, lakes with floating solar could still have enough water to produce hydropower, reducing reliance on more expensive backup energy from gas-fired power plants.
Joshi has spoken with developers and water managers about floating solar before, and said there is an eagerness to get this [technology] going. The technology, however, is not flawless.
Solar arras can be around 20% more expensive to install on water than land, largely because of the added cost of buoys that keep the panels afloat, according to a 2021 NREL report. The waters cooling effect can boost panel efficiency, but floating solar panels may produce slightly less energy than a similarly sized array on land because they cant be tilted as directly toward the sun as land-based panels.
And while the panels likely reduce water loss from reservoirs, they may also increase a water bodys emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn warm the climate and increase evaporation. This January, researchers at Cornell University found that floating solar covering more than 70% of a ponds surface area increased the waters CO2 and methane emissions. These kinds of impacts should be considered not only for the waterbody in which [floating solar] is deployed but also in the broader context of trade-offs of shifting energy production from land to water, the studys authors wrote.
Any energy technology has its trade-offs, Joshi said, and in the case of floating solar, some of its benefitsreduced evaporation and land usemay not be easy to express in dollars and cents.
Silver Buckshot
There is perhaps no bigger champion for floating solar in the West than Scott Young. Before he retired in 2016, he spent much of his 18 years working for the Nevada Legislature researching the effects of proposed legislation, especially in the energy sector.
On an overcast, blustery May day in southwest Wyoming near his home, Young said that in the past two years he has promoted the technology to Colorado River negotiators, members of Congress, environmental groups, and other water managers from the seven basin states, all of whom he has implored to consider the virtues of floating solar arrays on Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Young grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, about 40 miles, he estimated, from the pioneering floating solar panels in Napa. He stressed that he does not have any ties to industry; he is just a concerned Westerner who wants to diversify the regions energy mix and save as much water as possible.
But so far, when he has been able to get someones attention, Young said his pitch has been met with tepid interest. Usually the response is: Eh, thats kind of interesting, said Young, dressed in a black jacket, a maroon button-down shirt and a matching ball cap that framed his round, open face. But theres no follow-up.
The Bureau of Reclamation has not received any formal proposals for floating solar on its reservoirs, said an agency spokesperson, who added that the bureau has been monitoring the technology.
In a 2021 paper published with NREL, Reclamation estimated that floating solar on its reservoirs could generate approximately 1.5 terawatts of electricity, enough to power about 100 million homes. But, in addition to potentially interfering with recreation, aquatic life, and water safety, floating solars effect on evaporation proved difficult to model broadly.
So many environmental factors determine how water is lost or consumed in a reservoirsolar intensity, wind, humidity, lake circulation, water depth, and temperaturethat the studys authors concluded Reclamation should be wary of contractors claims of evaporation savings without site-specific studies. Those same factors affect the panels efficiency, and in turn, how much hydropower would need to be generated from the reservoir they cover.
The report also showed the Colorado River was ripe with floating solar potentialmore than any other basin in the West. Thats particularly true in the Upper Basin, where Young has been heartened by Colorados approach to the technology.
In 2023, the state passed a law requiring several agencies to study the use of floating solar. Last December, the Colorado Water Conservation Board published its findings, and estimated that the state could save up to 407,000 acre-feet of water by deploying floating solar on certain reservoirs. An acre-foot covers one acre with a foot of water, or 325,851 gallons, just about three years worth of water for a family of four.
When Young saw the Colorado study quantifying savings from floating solar, he felt hopeful. 407,000 acre-feet from one state, he said. I was hoping that would catch peoples attention.
Saving that much water would require using more than 100,000 acres of surface water, said Cole Bedford, the Colorado Water Conservation Boards chief operating officer, in an email. On some of these reservoirs a [floating solar] system would diminish the recreational value such that it would not be appropriate, he said. On others, recreation, power generation, and water savings could be balanced.
Colorado is not planning to develop another project in the wake of this study, and Bedford said that the technology is not a silver bullet solution for Colorado River negotiations.
While floating solar is one tool in the tool kit for water conservation, the only true solution to the challenges facing the Colorado River Basin is a shift to supply-driven, sustainable uses and operations, he said.
Some of the Wests largest and driest cities, like Phoenix and Denver, ferry Colorado River water to residents hundreds of miles away from the basin using a web of infrastructure that must reliably operate in unforgiving terrain. Like their counterparts at the state level, water managers in these cities have heard floatovoltaics floated before, but they say the technology is currently too immature and costly to be deployed in the U.S.
Lake Pleasant, which holds some of the Central Arizona Projects Colorado River water, is also a popular recreation space, complicating its floating solar potential. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News]
In Arizona, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) delivers much of the Colorado River water used by Phoenix, Tucson, tribes, and other southern Arizona communities with a 336-mile canal running through the desert, and Lake Pleasant, the companys 811,784-acre-foot reservoir.
Though CAP is following GRICs deployment of solar over canals, it has no immediate plans to build solar over its canal, or Lake Pleasant, according to Darrin Francom, CAPs assistant general manager for operations, power, engineering, and maintenance, in part because the city of Peoria technically owns the surface water.
Covering the whole canal with solar to save the 4,000 acre-feet that evaporates from it cold be prohibitively expensive for CAP. The dollar cost per that acre-foot [saved] is going to be in the tens of, you know, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars, Francom said, mainly due to working with novel equipment and construction methods. Ultimately, he continued, those costs are going to be borne by our ratepayers, which gives CAP reason to pursue other lower-cost ways to save water, like conservation programs, or to seek new sources.
An intake tower moves water into and out of the dam at Lake Pleasant. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News]
The increased costs associated with building solar panels on water instead of on land has made such projects unpalatable to Denver Water, Colorados largest water utility, which moves water out of the Colorado River Basin and through the Rocky Mountains to customers on the Front Range. Floating solar doesnt pencil out for us for many reasons, said Todd Hartman, a company spokesperson. Were we to add more solar resourceswhich we are consideringwe have abundant land-based options.
GRIC spent about $5.6 million, financed with Inflation Reduction Act grants, to construct 3,000 feet of solar over a canal, according to David DeJong, project director for the communitys irrigation district.
Young is aware there is no single solution to the problems plaguing the Colorado River Basin, and he knows floating solar is not a perfect technology. Instead, he thinks of it as a silver buckshot, he said, borrowing a term from John Entsminger, general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authoritya technology that can be deployed alongside a constellation of behavioral changes to help keep the Colorado River alive.
Given the duration and intensity of the drought in the West and the growing demand for water and clean energy, Young believes the U.S. needs to act now to embed this technology into the fabric of Western water management going forward.
As drought in the West intensifies, I think more lawmakers are going to look at this, he said. If you can save water in two wayswhy not?
Were Not Going to Know Until We Try
If all goes according to plan, GRICs West Side Reservoir will be finished and ready to store Colorado River water by the end of July. The community wants to cover just under 60% of the lakes surface area with floating solar.
Do we know for a fact that this is going to be 100% effective and foolproof? No, said DeJong, GRICs project director for its irrigation district. But were not going to know until we try.
GRICs panels will have a few things going for them that projects on lakes Mead or Powell probably wouldnt. West Side Reservoir will not be open to recreation, limiting the panels impacts on people. And the community already has the fundsInflation Reduction Act grants and some of its own moneyto pay for the project.
But GRICs solar ambitions may be threatened by the hostile posture toward solar and wind energy from the White House and congressional Republicans, and the project is vulnerable to an increasingly volatile economy. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump, aided by billionaire Elon Musk, has made deep cuts in renewable energy grants at the Environmental Protection Agency. It is unclear whether or to what extent the Bureau of Reclamation has slashed its grant programs.
Under President Donald J. Trumps leadership, the department is working to cut bureaucratic waste and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently, said a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees Reclamation. This includes ensuring Bureau of Reclamation projects that use funds from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act align with administration priorities. Projects are being individually assessed by period of performance, criticality, and other criteria. Projects have been approved for obligation under this process so that critical work can continue.
And Trumps tariffs could cause costs to balloon beyond the communitys budget, which could either reduce the size of the array or cause delays in soliciting proposals, DeJong said.
While the community will study the panels over canals to understand the waters effects on solar panel efficiency, it wont do similar research on the panels on West Side Reservoir, though DeJong said they have been in touch with NREL about studying them. The enterprise will be part of the system that may one day offset all the electrical demand and carbon footprint of GRICs irrigation system.
The community, they love these types of innovative projects. I love these innovative projects, said GRIC Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, standing in front of the canals in April. Lewis had his dark hair pulled back in a long ponytail and wore a blue button down that matched the color of the sky.
I know for a fact this is inspiring a whole new generation of water protectorsthose that want to come back and they want to go into this cutting-edge technology, he said. I couldnt be more proud of our team for getting this done.
DeJong feels plenty of other water managers across the West could learn from what is happening at GRIC. In fact, the West Side Reservoir was intentionally constructed near Interstate 10 so that people driving by on the highway could one day see the floating solar the community intends to build there, DeJong said.
It could be a paradigm shift in the Western United States, he said. We recognize all of the projects were doing are pilot projects. None of them are large scale. But its the beginning.
By Jake Bolster, Inside Climate News
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.
After nearly a decade of planning and consultation, the San Francisco Unified School District has made its first venture into the unexpectedand increasingly relevantbusiness of affordable housing development. The district just opened Shirley Chisholm Village, a 135-unit housing complex in San Francisco’s oceanside Sunset District. Built on district-owned land, with affordable rents and preference given to SFUSD educators, it’s a model for the ways urban school districts can use their extensive land holdings to address the housing-affordability challenges faced by their own employees.
The $105 million project was developed by the nonprofit MidPen Housing with a design by San Francisco-based BAR Architects & Interiors, in coordination with the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. The units, set aside for residents who earn between 30% and 100% of the area’s median income, range from studios up to three-bedroom apartments. Other school districts have taken similar approaches, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, which began developing underutilized district-owned sites into housing back in 2009. SFUSD’s first foray into housing development stands out for both its design and the process behind it.
[Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors]
The design of the building and its range of amenities were influenced directly by the preferences of the district’s teachers. A panel of educators helped guide the decade-long planning process to bring about the project, participating in workshops to shape its amenities and social spaces.
“One of the main things that came out of those workshops was the desire to have a space to work when they came home, but not to work from their apartment,” says architect Patricia Centeno, a principal at BAR Architects & Interiors. The architects carved out a space on the five-story building’s top floor, facing the ocean, for a work-from-home lounge and gathering space.
[Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors]
Other input from educators guided the way the project interfaces with the surrounding community, which is primarily made up of modest single-family homes. Dropping a 135-unit building in the middle of the neighborhood could have been a shock, but the designers worked to ensure the building and its site were not an imposition.
[Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors]
It was a tricky balance to strike, because not long ago the site was a wide-open asphalt parking lot with a small, underutilized storage building, and the community had turned the parking lot into a makeshift neighborhood park. Nearly an acre and a half, it was used for basketball, skateboarding, and a range of other recreational activities. Replacing that with housingespecially housing that was at least a story or two taller than everything around itcould have been grounds for a vocal opposition campaign.
The architects focused on making sure the project’s footprint was as small as possible. “One of our goals was to try to find a way to incorporate a portion of [the community park],” says Centeno. “We knew we were never going to be able to create something as extensive as what they had, but we worked with our client to see if we could meet the goal for the total number of units, and also create some sort of common public space.”
[Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors]
What they came up with is a publicly accessible plaza, playground, and seating area placed in a carve-out along one of the project’s street-facing edges. “It’s a little bit of a return to the neighborhood,” says Chris Haegglund, president and CEO of BAR Architects & Interiors. A small one-story annex building that sits nearby is intended to be leased out to a local nonprofit.
These spaces, and several residents-only common areas, were made possible by creatively shaping the building into an elongate H as seen from above, filling in the voids with courtyards and green space.
[Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors]
From the street level, the building was designed to blend into the low-slung neighborhood as much as possible, despite rising to four and five stories in various places. Haegglund says the structure was stepped down at its edges to make a smoother transition to the smaller homes on either side. This nod to the context is also a geographical reference, evoking the sand dunes that once made up this section of San Francisco before development.
“We’re trying to create a building that feels contemporary,” says Centeno. “But we’re trying to fit into a neighborhood of homes that were largely built in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, which is kind of newer by San Francisco standards.”
[Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors]
To give the building that contemporary feel, the architects put an undulation into the roofline, having it mimic rolling dunes and referencing the roofs of the nearby houses. This undulation was also added to the facade of the building in a nod to the bay windows common in the region.
Though the project was not required to include parking under the city’s zoning code, the developers chose to include some underground spaces, partly to assuage neighborhood concerns about street parking and partly at the request of the educators who helped guide the design process. Despite ample public transportation in much of San Francisco, this neighborhood is on the fringes, and some were concerned about potentially long commutes to schools in other parts of town.
As a district-owned site, it does have the benefit of being embedded in its neighborhood, which makes its conversion to housingand the conversion of other district-owned sitesvery logical. And Shirley Chisholm Village is just the start. SFUSD has three other housing projects in the works.
2012. I walk out of a gastroenterologists office with a brochure titled Your Life With Ulcerative Colitis.
What the brochure doesnt say: A month later, I will wake up on the day of a critical midyear design presentation feeling too nauseous to leave my apartment, and will have to spend several weeks at my parents house, where I will miss several more midterms. A year later, Ill stand at a boarding gate and feel too sick to take a five-hour flight and meet with potential graduate school advisers. Ill soon learn that, for me, these wont be one-offs. Instead, Ill live a life of constant flux, impossible to plan for.
Desperate for some control as I push through academia, I turn to tech products. But technology cant help me. Digital tools excel at routines, but falter at exceptions. I can schedule weeks of meetings in a few clicks, but when Im unwell, Im copy-pasting the same cancellation message a dozen times. My personal-finance app keeps me on track, but only until an urgent-care bill throws things off. When my fitness tracker chastises me for not closing my rings during a particularly brutal flare-up, I shove it into my junk drawer. Technology is failing me when I need it the most.
Happy paths
2016. I join Big Tech, working as a user researcher in early-stage and AI technology. Two things become immediately clear.
First, my story is far from unique. Anecdotes from many hundreds of user interviews reflect lives riddled with chaos and disruption. Changeunplanned and plannedis the norm.
Second, consumer products are largely designed for happy paths. A clear-cut problem is solved by a superhero technology, resulting in a favorable outcome that is tied off with a neat bow. For the sake of clarity, efficiency, and technical ease, the zigzag realities of lives are often sanitized into an idealized arc. We trot out these squeaky clean stories as hero use cases for a product ideafirst to convince ourselves, then our executives, and, finally, our users.
Todays explosion of consumer-facing GenAI products are built with the same recipe. We get heartstring-tugging stories with just enough complexity to feel real, without any of the mess. A dad uses AI to prepare for a job interview while reminiscing on parenthood. A parent brings a childs imaginary creature to life in a custom picture book. Some brands try to incorporate more chaotic realities (a storm hits restaurant patio seating) only to portray absurd overdependence on AI (waiters leave their customers drenched because an AI agent doesnt reseat them indoors).
If youre like me, these ads make you want to scream: Youre standing in the middle of the kitchen. How are your kids not interrupting your conversation with AI 27 times? But in contrast to the hero use case, taking kid snack breaks and asking AI to repeat itself over the noise of toddler screams are often cordoned off as edge cases in product development. The implication: These occurrences are rare.
But they arent. Human journeys are not straight lines. They are dynamic, defined by change, interruptions, and curveballs. Some 60% of Americans reported experiencing an unexpected expense in the past year, though 42% dont have an emergency fund greater than $1,000. Households with two or more children have a viral infection in the household more than 50% of the time. And an estimated 28% of work time each year is lost to distractions.
When technology isnt resilient to this reality, it breakssometimes catastrophically. Like when a Florida teen dies by suicide after his lengthy conversations with a Character.ai chatbot turn darkly romantic. When AI-powered cameras mounted on public buses mistakenly ticket thousands of legally parked vehicles in New York because they fail to recognize alternate side zones. Or when AI weather models fail to predict the worst storms because extreme weather data doesnt exist in the training data.
These outcomes are extreme, but the pathways leading there are deeply ordinary, broken by nascent technology that isnt resilient to the gritty reality of human behavior. Sometimes, the catalyst stems from the tech itself, like security vulnerabilities. Other times, its agnostic of the technology, like mental health. But in all cases, the technology was not resilient to changes in context.
AI’s broken promise
Years ago, you could blame technology as the limiting factor. But AI should, ideally, thrive on this sort of complexityusing its superpowers of pattern recognition, synthesis, and triangulation of thousands of data points about users and their environment. GenAI has introduced a new frontier around deep reasoning and human interaction that should make the technology more tractable and transparent.
AI is uniquely positioned to help people anticipate and recover from change, the kind that they may not have seen coming. Yet the Character.ai system didnt raise the alarm when a conversation overtly turned dangerous, much less recognize patterns that may suggest that it was headed that way. On issuing its 7,000th ticket in one day, the MTAs system didnt flag that this is an unusually large number of violations on a route.
Its never easy to deal with the complex behavior of humans and societies. But when we keep designing to make already great lives 1% better, we are perpetuating a specific type of harmone that happens when the people designing the technology arent considering the real ways it might be used.
As UX practitioners, we are uniquely positioned to start the conversation about how to change this. To move toward an AI UX rooted in resilience, well need to shepherd at least three main shifts in the way our products are designed.
1. Shift the user stories we tellwhich directly map to the problems we choose to solve. UX must choose to foreground the hard, complex story. We all have one: a multigenerational household with life-stage changes, moves across the country, divorce, job loss, a chronic illness. Right now, a key barrier to centering these stories is that they extend ideation cycles, which is uncomfortable in an increasingly launch-first-or-perish climate. As a result, cleaner stories, like the product narratives described earlier, win out.
To break this cycle, UX can introduce complex user stories to product teams starting with ideation, through prototype and concept testingespecially ones that cut horizontally across product ecosystems. This requires creating a new canon: an accessible taxonomy of types of complexity, curveballs, and changes that we can easily pull from. Such a taxonomy might take the form of brainstorming prompts, user journey templates, or a card deck or visualization used in sprints. This cracking open will take time, but the more we tell these stories, the easier thy will roll off the tongue, and the more they can become normalized.
2. Shift how we leverage user data in AI-powered products. Today, user data collected by companieswhile wide-rangingisnt always curated or connected well. Most users, particularly younger generations, have resigned themselves to data collection and dont mind it, but also dont understand how the data is used or whether it benefits them. This is not an argument to collect more data. Rather, its a call to connect existing data for more meaningful, tangible user benefits, like helping navigate blind spots and complexity.
Consider a simple example: Anns AI agent has access to a calendar app where she has blocked off time for a post-work run, a weather app that shows unexpected evening rain showers, and a maps app that she frequently uses to navigate to a yoga studio. This agent can now surface a timely suggestion: help Ann move meetings to shift the run to earlier in the day, or help her find a class at the yoga studio at that time. In reflecting how people really use their technology, this sort of cross-product dialogue and synthesis has the opportunity to leverage AI and user data to unlock resilience in the face of change.
3. Shift away from traditional definitions of seamlessness and magic moments toward ones that gracefully embrace failure, meaningful friction, and deep, explicit user feedback. AI advancements tend to tempt product teams to remove all friction and present users with auto-magical solutions to needs they werent even aware of, from hyper-personalized AI-driven ads to smart nudges on food and shopping apps. Common success metrics used today reflect the value we place on frictionless experiences: fewer clicks, greater session length, engagement with automation features, fewer user-submitted comments. This can cause a misleading overreliance on implicit behavioral signals that dont always reflect real intent.
Take the example of an in-app pop-up: A user might spend a long time viewing it, even clicking on a linknot because they find it useful but because they cant find the exit. Even when users do provide explicit feedback, its often not in a form that can be interpreted meaningfully, leading to undesired outcomes. Think, for example, of how OpenAIs models grew sycophantic after a thumbs-up on a response was used as a signal to make the chatbot behave more in that direction.
Instead, how might we offer users more ways to provide granular feedback that can shed light not only on the what but also the why? This can be meaningful friction that can empower users to have their unique human context be better understood while harnessing the beyond-human capabilities of AI. One could argue that this, in fact, is the more magical experience.
Finally, the pursuit of seamless perfection risks underplaying the shortcomings of AI itselfmisunderstood accents, factual inaccuracies, biased imagery. These are a function of the technology, and are bound to happen. UX needs to treat these as predictable breaking points in the technology, build frameworks to classify them, and design intentionally with them as part of the user narrative.
Of course, its far simpler to sketch these solutions than implement them, but if AI is to work well for real-world problems, we need to tackle real-world complexity head-on. UX is in a powerful position to shift these mindsets. As it has done for domains like accessibility and product inclusion, UX can redefine the problems and narratives that emerging technology is built for, and reshape the UX to accommodate product and user realities to support resilience.
Are we brave enough to get into the messy weeds and do it?
Mining isnt known for innovation. For more than a century, weve extracted copper using the same process: dig, crush, grind, leach, repeat. Meanwhile, demand has exploded, fueled by EVs, AI infrastructure, and the energy transition. That mismatch has created a bottleneck. Were using yesterdays tools to power tomorrows economy.
The conductive highway
Copper is the metal that moves energy. Literally, electrons dont travel from solar panels to batteriesor from your laptop charger to the cloudwithout it. Copper is the conductive highway that keeps the worlds electrons flowing. Its in every EV, every wind turbine, and every data center.
Its also in short supply. Weve mined the easy stuff. Now were left with lower-quality ores, deeper deposits, and rising costsjust as demand hits historic highs. And when the global economy is built on electrons, copper is no longer just a commodity. Its a strategic resource, central to national security, electrification, and economic stability.
Global copper demand is projected to reach 50 million metric tonnes annually by 2035double todays levels. According to BloombergNEF, the world needs over $2 trillion in mining investment by 2050 to meet electrification targets. Meanwhile, ore grades have declined more than 40% since 1990. Investors are watching this gap, and innovation must step in.
Innovative microbes
But something big is happening underground. And I mean that literallywhere the cool rocks are and things get interesting.
As a scientist, I spent years working on astrobiology, cloud platforms, and energy systems. Ive seen how cross-disciplinary thinking can unlock entire industries. Today, I lead a team using engineered microbes to recover copper from ore that conventional mining leaves behind. It sounds unusual, and it is. But thats the point. Innovation in mining doesn’t come from fitting init comes from standing out.
Mining is a deeply conservative industry, and for good reason. Even small changes carry massive financial and operational risks when your tools move millions of tons of earth. But thats also what makes this moment so powerful: When something new works, it really matters, especially when it can be plugged into existing infrastructure without requiring entirely new capital build-outs.
Juice from a rock
At Endolith, we recently completed testing with BHP, one of the worlds largest mining companies, through their Think & Act Differently (TAD) BioMetals innovation program. Our microbes were tested under simulated field conditions on a low-grade primary sulfide orea material so complex most operators consider it uneconomic to process. In one study, microbes shaped through adaptive laboratory evolution and guided by AI recovered up to 80% more copper from this material. Thats like squeezing juice from a rockand getting nearly twice as much.
And this wasnt just a lab trick. These microbes work in real mining environments. They dont need clean rooms or perfect conditions. They need oxygen, acidity, and timeconditions already present in heap leach operations worldwide. We didnt reimagine the entire mine. We made the part most people had written off valuable again, making it cheaper, cleaner, and easier to operate.
By using microbes that require no expensive reagents or intensive energy inputs, were cutting both capital expenditures and operating expenses, making recovery from low-grade ore economically viable again.
Leapfrog technologies
Heres why that matters.
Ore grades are falling. Permitting timelines stretch for decades. Investors and regulators demand lower impact, higher performance, and real ESG outcomes. Mining companies know the status quo is unsustainable, but risk makes experimentation difficult. Most “sustainable mining” efforts rely on incremental gains: better water management, slightly lower emissions, and somewhat faster recovery. Important? Yes. Transformative? Not even close.
We need leapfrog technologiesnew tools that unlock value, speed, and sustainability together. Biology is one of those tools, and right now, its underused. Biology belongs in the core toolkit of modern extraction.
CRISPR for rocks
Industrial biotechnology has already transformed medicine and agriculture, unlocking precision, efficiency, and resilience at scale. Its time for mining to catch up. Think of this as CRISPR for rocks. Instead of blasting ore with chemicals, we let microbes do the work. They break down rock, extract metals, and leave far less waste behind. With help from cloud-based systems, we can tune that process in real time, adjusting to changes in temperature, pH, or ore composition.
Similar biological platforms could be applied to rare earths, lithium, and other minerals critical to the clean energy economy. The opportunity here is massivenot just for Endolith but for a new generation of industrial innovators focused on extraction rather than consumption. As governments prioritize mineral independence and ESG compliance, scalable bio-based solutions are becoming essential to securing the future of energy, technology, and defense.
Scaling this kind of innovation takes more than strong results. It takes strong partnerships between startups and majors, scientists and operators, and regulators and entrepreneurs. We found that with BHP and the TAD team. They gave us a shot. We delivered. And now were working with others to bring this to production.
But scaling also requires trust in the science, in the process, and in the promise of doing things differently.
It means rethinking how we define innovation in mining and giving ourselves permission to imagine something beyond the current constraints.
A systems problem
People tend to talk about clean tech and hard tech as if theyre separate. EVs go in one box, mining goes in another. But thats a false split. There is no clean energy without minerals, no electrification without copper, and no scalable, sustainable supply without reimagining how we recover it.
This is a systems problem, and it requires systems thinking.
That reimagining wont come from status quo thinking. Itll come from radical collaborationand from being brave enough to try something different underground. Itll come from leaders willing to back bold science and turn pilot results into platform change.
Heres the thing: I used to study how life evolved on Earth billions of years ago. The most extraordinary life forms Ive worked with? Theyre here on Earth today. Deep in the rocks, quietly solving problems we’ve struggled with for decades.
So, if you want to power the future, start by listening to the ground and the weird, wonderful microbes doing the heavy lifting. In a world racing toward electrification, these tiny organisms just might be our biggest asset.
Three years after its launch, Perplexity is still struggling to break through. A major hardware deal could change that.
On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that Samsung is in talks to integrate Perplexitys search technology into its devices. The deal would not only preload the Perplexity app onto Samsung phones, but also embed its search features directly into Samsungs web browser and virtual assistant, Bixby.
Back in 2023, Perplexity looked like a frontrunner in AI searchbeating OpenAI and Google to the punch in crawling the live web. But the tech giants have since caught up, with ChatGPT and Gemini now offering similar capabilities. Could a high-profile partnership with Samsung be the boost Perplexity needs to reclaim its edge?
Can Perplexity find a home?
In its current form, Perplexity exists in a functional silo. The answer engine is primarily accessed through its stand-alone website or app, with no natural integration into users daily workflows. In other words, people have to seek it out. Now that its web-crawling technology is being replicated across competing chatbots, some users may no longer see a reason to choose Perplexity on its own. Its main value proposition under the Pro subscription is access to other companies LLMs, like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5. (Perplexity declined to comment for this story.)
Integrating a chatbot into the users workflow is key to driving engagement. Google has embedded Gemini across nearly all of its products, from search to email. As a result, the Gemini app now boasts 400 million-plus monthly active users. Meta has taken an even more aggressive approach, integrating its AI into social apps and placing Meta AI above search. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta AI now has more than 1 billion monthly active users.
Other AI companies are embedding their models more subtly. While Apples Siri can now access ChatGPT, OpenAIs greatest reach comes from LLM licensing. Users dont just interact with GPT through ChatGPT, theyre engaging with it across dozens of third-party apps built on its technology. The same is true for Anthropic, which also licenses its models.
Perplexity, by contrast, has limited back-end integrations via its API, and for the average user, encounters with its tech are still rare. Thats why a deal with Samsung would be a major step forward. A hardware integration would give Perplexity a critical new point of access.
Meanwhile, Samsung has invested heavily in its Galaxy AI suite. Gemini is currently the default AI assistant for Samsung’s 1 billion-plus smartphone usersraising questions of whether Perplexity will displace or work alongside Google’s chatbot. (Samsung did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.)
Perplexitys position in the AI race
Perplexity is still growing. While the company doesnt disclose revenue or user numbers, it claims users now generate more than 650 million queries per monthup from 400 million less than a year ago. Although some reports suggest that Perplexitys growth has come at a high cost, the company disputes those figures.
Still, Perplexity has a lot to prove. It reached unicorn status in 2024 after raising $62.7 million at a $1.04 billion valuation. That valuation has reportedly ballooned to $14 billion in its current fundraising round. Meanwhile, the company is said to be generating less than $100 million in annual recurring revenue, according to CNBC.
To stay competitive against imitators, Perplexity needs a more direct path to users. A deal with Samsung could provide exactly that.
One of the most striking patterns in the aftermath of many urban fires is how much unburned green vegetation remains amid the wreckage of burned neighborhoods.
In some cases, a row of shrubs may be all that separates a surviving house from one that burned just a few feet away.
As scientists who study how vegetation ignites and burns, we recognize that well-maintained plants and trees can actually help protect homes from wind-blown embers and slow the spread of fire in some cases. So, we are concerned about new wildfire protection regulations being developed by the state of California that would prohibit almost all plants and other combustible material within 5 feet of homes, an area known as Zone 0.
Photos before and after the 2025 Palisades Fire show thick green vegetation between two closely spaced homes. The arrow shows the direction of the fires spread. [Image: Max Moritz; CAL FIRE Damage Inspection photos, CC BY]
Wildfire safety guidelines have long encouraged homeowners to avoid having flammable materials next to their homes. But the states plan for an ember-resistant zone, being expedited under an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom, goes further by also prohibiting grass, shrubs, and many trees in that area.
If that prohibition remains in the final regulation, its likely to be met with public resistance. Getting these rules right also matters beyond California, because regulations that originate in California often ripple outward to other fire-prone regions.
Lessons from the devastation
Research into how vegetation can reduce fire risk is a relatively new area of study. However, the findings from plant flammability studies and examination of patterns of where vegetation and homes survive large urban fires highlight its importance.
When surviving plants do appear scorched after these fires, it is often on the side of the plant facing a nearby structure that burned. That suggests that wind-blown embers ignited houses first: The houses were then the fuel as the fire spread through the neighborhood.
We saw this repeatedly in the Los Angeles area after wildfires destroyed thousands of homes in January 2025. The pattern suggests a need to focus on the many factors that can influence home losses.
Shrubs in Zone 0 of a home did not ignite during the Eaton Fire, despite the home burning. [Photo: Max Moritz]
Several guides are available that explain steps homeowners can take to help protect houses, particularly from wind-blown embers, known as home hardening.
For example, installing rain gutter covers to keep dead leaves from accumulating, avoiding flammable siding, and ensuring that vents have screens to prevent embers from getting into the attic or crawl space can lower the risk of the home catching fire.
However, guidance related to landscaping plants varies greatly and can even be incorrect.
For example, some fire-safe plant lists contain species that are drought tolerant but not necessarily fire resistant. What matters more for keeping plants from becoming fuel for fires is how well theyre maintained and whether theyre properly watered.
How a plant bursts into flames
When living plant material is heated by a nearby energy source, such as a fire, the moisture inside it must be driven off before it can ignite. That evaporation cools the surrounding area and lowers the plants flammability.
In many cases, high moisture can actually keep a plant from igniting. Weve seen this in some of our experimental work and in other studies that test the flammability of ornamental landscaping.
With enough heat, dried leaves and stems can break down and volatilize into gases. And, at that point, a nearby spark or flame can ignite these gases and set the plant on fire.
Plant flammability testing shows how quickly twigs, grasses, plants, and leaves will burn at different moisture levels. The images on the right are from an experiment at the University of Californias South Coast Research and Extension Center to test flammability of a living but overly dry plant. [Image: Max Moritz (left); Luca Carmignani (right)]
Even when the plant does burn, however, its moisture content can limit other aspects of flammability, such as how hot it burns.
Up to the point that they actually burn, green, well-maintained plants can slow the spread of a fire by serving as heat sinks, absorbing energy and even blocking embers. This apparent protective role has been observed in both Australia and California studies of home losses.
How often vegetation buffers homes from igniting during urban conflagrations is still unclear, but this capability has implications for regulations.
Californias “Zone 0” regulations
The Zone 0 regulations Californias State Board of Forestry is developing are part of broader efforts to reduce fire risk around homes and communities. They would apply in regions considered at high risk of wildfires or defended by Cal Fire, the states firefighting agency.
Many of the latest Zone 0 recommendations, such as prohibiting mulch and attached fences made of materials that can burn, stem from large-scale tests conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. These features can be systematically analyzed.
But vegetation is far harder to model. The states proposed Zone 0 regulations oversimplify complex conditions in real neighborhoods and go beyond what is currently known from scientific research regarding plant flammability.
A mature, well-pruned shrub or tree with a high crown may pose little risk of burning and can even reduce exposure to fires by blocking wind and heat and intercepting embers. Aspen trees, for example, have been recommended to reduce fire risk near structures or other high-value assets.
In contrast, dry, unmanaged plants under windows or near fences may ignite rapidly and make it more likely that the house itself will catch fire.
As California and other states develop new wildfire regulations, they need to recognize the protective role that well-managed plants can play, along with many other benefits of urban vegetation.
We believe the California proposals current emphasis on highly prescriptive vegetation removal, instead of on maintenance, is overly simplistic. Without complementary requirements for hardening the homes themselves, widespread clearing of landscaping immediately around homes could do little to reduce risk and have unintended consequences.
Max Moritz is a wildfire specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension and an adjunct professor at the Bren School at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Luca Carmignani is an assistant professor of engineering at San Diego State University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
We often think of serendipity as lucka fortunate coincidence or a happy accident. But what if its something more intentional? What if serendipity is less about chance and more about conditions?
Whether its a hallway conversation that sparks a billion-dollar idea or a side project that becomes your next calling, many of the most transformational moments in life and work are unplanned, but not uninvited. These moments happen when we build environments, both mental and physical, that are open to the unexpected. The question isnt whether serendipity exists. Its whether youre making space for it.
The Case for Intentional Serendipity
Take Steve Jobs. He famously credited a college calligraphy classan elective he took purely out of curiositywith inspiring the design of Apples iconic typography. At the time, the class had nothing to do with his career. But it ended up shaping the aesthetic identity of one of the most influential companies in history.
Or consider the origin story of CRISPR. The revolutionary gene-editing tool began with a casual conference conversation between two scientists from different disciplines. Their impromptu exchange sparked a collaboration that led to one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century.
These werent just lucky accidents. They were the result of environments primed for discoveryspaces where curiosity, diversity, and ambiguity could coexist. Serendipity isnt magic; it is emergence, and you can design for it.
In my work with senior leadership teams, Ive seen this firsthand. I once hosted an off-site where a brief side conversation during a break, completely off-agenda, led two leaders to uncover a shared experience that reshaped how they collaborated. What followed was a strategic pivot that the team had been struggling to make for months. It reminded me that the real breakthroughs often dont happen during scheduled agenda items; they happen between them. The key is creating the conditions where these moments can arise.
A Framework for Creating Serendipity
Orchestrating serendipity means increasing your exposure to diverse inputs, unexpected ideas, and interdisciplinary collisions. Heres how to make it happen:
1. Create Surface Area
You cant bump into new ideas if youre stuck in the same lanes. Professionally, that might mean attending events outside your industry, joining cross-functional projects, or working from a new space, whether a coworking hub, a public library, or your favorite off-route coffee shop. Personally, try picking up a new hobby, joining a different kind of community, or reaching out to someone who sees the world differently than you do.
Try this: Connect with someone whose work is completely unrelated to yours. Ask what theyre obsessed with and why.
2. Lead with Curiosity
Serendipity doesnt reward certainty; it rewards openness. In organizations, that means creating cultures where good questions matter more than fast answers. Replace Why are we doing this? with What else might be possible? Encourage exploration, tangents, and thoughtful wandering.
Individually, follow your fascinations. Read outside your domain. Ask better questions at dinner parties. Let your interests lead you, even if you dont yet know where theyre going. Start a curiosity stack, a running list of topics, people, and ideas that fascinate you. Just follow the breadcrumbs and see where they lead you.
3. Engineer Cross-Pollination
Innovation loves unlikely collisions. Inside companies, dont wait for an annual retreat to mix disciplines. Create micro-moments of exchange like shared meals, rotating pair sessions, or jam sessions across departments. Outside of work, host a gathering where not everyone knows each other. Invite people across industries, cultures, and generations. Try organizing a 5-5-5 Dinner: five people, five perspectives, and five curated prompts. See what emerges when diverse minds meet around a shared table.
In an era of accelerating complexity, innovation doesnt come from working harder; it comes from thinking differently, which requires exposure to new perspectives. A Harvard Business School study found that teams with greater cognitive diversity solve problems faster than more homogeneous ones. Similarly, the World Economic Forum identifies curiosity, creativity, and cross-domain collaboration as top future-of-work skills.
Put simply, the ability to generate new value depends on your ability to connect unexpected dots, and serendipity is the connector.
Build Your Serendipity Habit
The most extraordinary breakthroughs often begin in ordinary momentsbut only if youve built a system that invites those moments in. This week, try one of these:
Reconnect with someone in a different field youve been meaning to reach out to.
Sign up for a class or event that has nothing to do with your job.
Start a conversation with a colleague about something unrelated to work and follow where it leads.
Serendipity isnt a fluke; its something you can design. When you embrace curiosity, invite collisions, and stay open to the unknown, you increase the odds that something meaningful and unexpected will find its way to you. The next big thing in your work or life may already be comingyou just need to be ready to meet it.
If you are frequently getting the ick from potential romantic partners, it might not be them. The problem might be you.
A new study has found that if you possess certain personality traits, you might be more susceptible to the dreaded ick than others. Researchers Brian Collisson, Eliana Saunders, and Chloe Yin from Azusa Pacific University in Southern California found that those who are prone to disgust, hold others to high standards, or score higher in narcissism are most at risk.
Even if youre unsure what were talking about, youve likely experienced it. A now ubiquitous term in dating, the ick is used to describe the feeling of disgust that arises toward a love interest. They stumble on the side of the curb? Ick. There are remnants of red sauce around their mouth? Instant ick.
Although the concept itself is not new (the ick was first coined in the 1990s TV show Ally McBeal), the term has more recently found a new lease on life online, with more than 120 million related posts on TikTok. Personally, I became interested in learning more about the ick when I heard that a friend of mine kept a running list on her phone notes app of every ick shed ever experienced from a guy (it was several pages long), Saunders, a graduate student at Azusa Pacific and the studys lead author, told Psypost.
For the study, researchers asked 74 men and 51 women, ranging in age from 24 to 72, if they knew what getting the ick meant and whether they had ever experienced it. The study then measured the likelihood of participants experiencing the ick in response to specific behaviors. Participants also completed personality tests and answered questions about their dating lives.
The findings are clear: Certain personality traits make participants more vulnerable to the ick. These include higher disgust sensitivity, which increases the intensity of reactions to triggers rather than the frequency of the ick occurring. Narcissism is also linked to the likelihood, though not the frequency, of experiencing the ick. Those who tend to place high expectations on others are triggered by a wider range of behaviors.
Women are more likely than men to recognize the ick, though both men and women experience a similar average number of ick moments. For women, misogynistic behavior or annoying speech are immediate turnoffs. For men, its vanity or overly trendy behavior.
While the ick often acts as a bucket of ice-cold water on a blossoming romance (about a quarter of participants reported ending a relationship immediately upon experiencing the ick), Saunders said people should look inward before making any hasty decisions.
Before dumping a partner because their feet dangle when they sit in a chair, we should think critically about why were feeling icked out, Saunders told Psypost. Ask yourself: Is this something I truly cant deal with, or am I being overly critical? Is this ick their fault, or is it mine?
