Unlike fleas, head lice do not jump, nor do they inhabit clothing; they can only be transferred from one head to another by physical contact. In former times this was quite rare, but today there is a trend among children that makes it a lot easier for head lice to proliferate: selfies. Young people might not be good at arithmetic, but handling a smartphone is second nature to them. And for them few things are as fun as putting their heads together while pulling funny faces in front of the camera. This gives the head lice just enough time to hop-on the next unwitting kid.

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Money is a concept that is constantly changing with time. It changes shape, meaning and systems. Tonight, June 23, in Amsterdam, Droog Foundation will host Money of the Future, an event with four international speakers that will explore new ideas and evolutions of money in the future.

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It’s one of the biggest social issues of today. It’s a key predictor of depression, chronic illness and premature death, and 26% of Americans say they relate themselves to it. We are talking about loneliness. A recent study found that only face-to-face interaction, not device mediated interaction, could help to prevent it.

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The Firefighter Drone is a very important figure for everyone’s safety. She flies around, covering search and rescue operations and, in case of fire, she will extinguish it. She also does a great job preserving the environment and natural resources, transmitting birds-eye video of a forest fire to incident commanders and mapping hard-hit areas after a natural disaster. With her nozzle-arms she saves the forest and its inhabitants from burning down!

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As a mostly urban civilization we are completely detached from wild nature. The little stretches of greenery in cities require constant maintenance. We want the grass to be this tall, the trees in this order and the flowers in this color. Untouched nature has become something for adventurous travelers. Yet to experience the freedom and primordial beauty of ‘raw’ nature, one has to spend half a day in a cramped airplane seat. And it’s precisely this eco-tourism that is also threatening the livelihood of ecosystems.

Read the entire Next Nature is… series.

Prolonged exposure to artificial light prevents urban trees from adjusting to seasonal variations. Notice how the leaves of this tree have fallen, except for those directly under the streetlight. Recent research demonstrated how high-intensity light sources have the greatest impact on delaying leaf senescence, throwing off a plant response to the change of seasons. Peculiar image of the week via Physics FAU.

“The question for us was: is a computer able to write a screenplay?” these are the words of Oscar Sharp, director of this short movie, written by an artificial intelligence system. The answer is clearly yes. Sunspring is the result of this attempt: a sci-fi short movie of nine minutes where the main actor is Thomas Middleditch, character of the cult series Silicon Valley.

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