Social supermarkets have emerged in Britain in the past five years as a response to food poverty and food waste. These non-charitable initiatives sell food ?surplus? to people on low incomes at heavily discounted prices, and provide social support. Most social supermarkets can be found in the 10-20 per cent of most deprived neighbourhoods. They primarily stock food surplus, as well as some non-food goods. These are products originally intended for sale in the mainstream market which have become unsaleable. Food isn?t given away for free or handed out, as in food banks. Instead it?s offered in a retail-like environment at heavily discounted prices ? access is generally on a controlled basis to ?members?, selected by using certain socioeconomic or geographic criteria, to target those who are at risk of food poverty.  

Imagine this: You file a police report, but back at the station, they feed it into an algorithm?? and it accuses you of lying, as though it had somehow looked inside your brain. That might sound like science fiction, but Spain is currently rolling out a very similar program, called?VeriPol, in many of its police stations. VeriPol?s creators say that when it flags a report as false, it turns out to be correct more than four-fifths of the time. https://futurism.com/the-byte/lie-detector-false-police-reports

Hospitals are finding that the ability to distract patients with fully immersive, fun and relaxing sensory environments with virtual reality can have a significant impact on the anxiety and pain that they experience during minor procedures, dressing changes and other medical treatments. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/09/virtual-reality-alleviates-pain-anxiety-for-pediatric-patients.html

Students at the University of Cape Town have created the first ever bio-bricks made of human urine. They mixed last night?s liquids with sand and bacteria to unlock calcium carbonate (a bonding agent) in the urine. The mixture is placed in moulds and hardens (surprisingly) at room temperature. Creating useable bricks out of urine is clever, but doing it without the usual energy-intensive firing process is outstanding. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-26/cape-town-university-researchers-make-bricks-from-urine/10432766

We're now in Chobe National Park Botswana Africa and are pleased that the Chobe Game Lodge, where we're staying, uses electric boats for river cruising. They are powered by batteries overnight and use solar energy from panels on the roof as backup power. This means the boats are quieter and respect the surrounding wildlife and environment. They also use electric safari trucks for the same reason.

Broken bones are often mended with metal plates or screws, but metal was never designed to be part of the body. A groundbreaking 3D-printed ceramic alternative has now been developed. The material mimics the property of bone, acting as a scaffold on which the body can regenerate new bone, then gradually degrading. Trials have shown that it may actually kick-start new bone growth. Once the product becomes widely available, it could provide better treatment options for millions of people worldwide who suffer bone loss due to injury, infection, disease or abnormal skeletal development. https://www.australiaunlimited.com/science/hala-zreiqat