Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Cheap chemical pesticides are expert at wiping out millions of insects with a few hundreds dollars worth of chemicals. Yet as the health and environmental costs of pesticides mounts, and resistance against pesticides is on the rise after decades of chemical warfare in the fields, the equation is looking a little different.

Hence renewed interest in biopesticides. Harnessing the armory nature has given to bacteria, fungi, and even other plants allows researchers to redirect the sophisticated strategies species have evolved over millions of years to protect crops in the field.

An estimated 80% of the treated insects died within one to three weeks.

Fungi, in particular, have proven to be agricultural mercenaries. Applied at the right time, with the right treatment, fungal spores can cut down armies of insects–such as the application of “Green Muscle” over 10,000 hectares in Tanzania in 2009. Trillions of specialized fugal cells called “conidia” from the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae, were sprayed in solution of mineral oil to weaken the locusts devouring crops in East and Southern Africa. An estimated 80% of the treated insects died within one to three weeks. Other animals were unharmed. And the biopesticide (developed through a public-private partnership among governments and aid donors) continued working: the fungus infected new locusts until the population crashed (compared to the repeated applications required by chemical pesticides).

Still, the problem is one of costs. Biopesticides may be cheaper overall, but the cost the farmer sees is the price on the bottle. There, chemicals have an edge: the Green Muscle application cost $17 per hectare compared to $12 for conventional chemicals. Much of the cost was in the production of the fungal spores themselves.

Now researchers have discovered a technique to radically change that equation. A new approach developed by U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists brews the biopesticide with “liquid culture fermentation,” versus conventional methods using expensive nitrogen source (typically derived from agricultural commodities like milk casein at $6 pound). The fermentation can use less expensive sources such as soybean flour or cottonseed meal at 30 to 50 cents a pound to produce the fungus.

The next step is commercialization. In the case of the Green Muscle, “most of the project’s impact is still to be felt,” reports the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. More than 10 years after developing a useful product, the project will likely take another decade or more to become widely adopted. “This is because the eventual level of sales of Green Muscle depends on the correction of the market failure whereby the human and environmental health costs of spraying chemical pesticides are not charged to the purchaser,” says the report. Or perhaps just a cheaper product.

Facebook launched Developers Live Wednesday, a new way for developers to stay on top of everything Facebook.

An extension of Facebook’s existing developer’s site, Facebook says the new live portion of the site will be a “central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to product manager and engineers who created them.”

The curated video channel will include live as well as recorded broadcasts, often with an interactive element for developers to get questions answered by Facebook staff. Videos on growing your mobile app and Graph Search have already been added to the site’s video library.

The first live event, What Developers Need to Know in 2013, will be held Feb. 19 at 10:30 a.m. PST/1:30 p.m. EST. Hosted by Doug Purdy, Facebook’s director of platform product, mobile, web, and gaming developers will hear first hand what the social network believes they should be thinking about this year. He will also answer developer’s questions.

Developers can RSVP for the event on Facebook.

Photo by Mashable, Emily Price

Remember the old nuclear bomb projections? The Soviet Union nuked the US. The US nuked the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet Union saw the US nukes coming their way, so they, for some odd reason, just nuked the whole world. Then the US nuked the world back.

Those were always unsettling, but at least they were theoretical. This Mapping Arms Data visualization, created by Google using information from the UN Statistics Division’s Commodity Trade Statistics Database (CoMtraDe), is entirely real. It depicts the personal arms (from pistols to machine guns) that every country in the world has imported and exported over nearly the last 20 years. And the US looks to lead the pack, with nearly $1 billion in imports and $600 million in exports snaking their glowing, pulsating tendrils into every spot on the globe.

The effect is only exacerbated by the fully explorable, 3-D interface. China is a global export hub–sending $50 million in weaponry around the globe, but they don’t hold a candle to Italy, which exported more than six times that amount in 2010. Indeed, however small a country may be on the globe, their large, laser-like arcs of light expelled by weaponry balance out any possible misconceptions. The glowing visual may be eye-burning overkill, but it’s also darned effective at calling out small land masses that would sneak by if all we did was paint them in a different color.

Of course, there are huge shortcomings with the reporting. The project admits that some military trades will circumvent gun checkpoints, some countries don’t account for all weapons coming over their borders and, in the cases of China, Iran and North Korea, especially, the reporting is far short of reliable (PFD). You could buy a midrange car for more than North Korea said they imported in weapons last year. Then again, the country is known for throwing bad military photoshops and parades full of fake missile launchers–and also doing plenty of covert trade in weapons and luxury items for the ruling regime.

But before the mass amounts we spend on personal weaponry get you too upset, do try to put it all into perspective. The US imported a billion dollars in guns in 2010, sure, but that’s less than the price of half a dozen F-22 jets.

Wait a second…actually have no idea if that makes me feel better or worse.

Dallas Lawrence writes about emerging media trends, online reputation management, and digital issue advocacy. Follow him @dallaslawrence.

What a difference a week makes. Some seven days ago, media outlets from around the world were stumbling over themselves covering “the most anticipated IPO in history.” Even Facebook and its investment bankers drank their Kool-Aid, upping both the number of available shares and the price in the final hours before the world had a chance to own a piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room brainchild.

One week later with a botched NASDAQ IPO and a tanking stock price, the knives have come out. During one 24-hour period on Wednesday, Google tracked more than 40,000 online news stories about the fumbled IPO. And never one to miss a media opportunity, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro announced a review of the “issues” that led to the chaotic initial public offering.

In times of increased scrutiny and potential crisis, when it rains, it usually pours. And for Silicon Valley’s golden child, a tsunami of criticism has suddenly washed ashore. The good news for Zuckerberg and Co. is that despite the current coverage and deflated stock price, the future still looks very bright. Here’s why Facebook’s impending demise has been greatly exaggerated.

• Size Matters: Facebook recently crossed the 900 million user mark. While an impressive number, it is the tip of the global iceberg. According to a recent Times of India piece, in just the past six months, new Facebook users have grown 20% in India, 65% in Japan, and 56% in South Korea. This number will continue to grow and Facebook will have no trouble doubling in size in the next few years.
• Data is King: If Facebook unplugged tomorrow they would still own the most powerful repository of global human data ever collected. Age, race, sex, marital status, kids, employer, and education history are all table stakes for Facebook. They also know what we like, who we like, what we don’t like, and what we read, listen to, and watch. It’s all cataloged and tagged. The best part is that Facebook doesn’t have to use creepy data-scrapping technology to gather this information. More than 900 million people voluntarily provide and update it every day. If data is the new currency, Facebook will be printing money plentifully well into the future.
• Humans are Social:Facebook’s in-house cultural anthropologist (they actually have one) often speaks about how, since the beginning of organized civilization, we have gathered together in groups of several hundred. No more, and not much less. When the number gets too large for the kind of social interaction we crave (interestingly a number eerily close to the average number of friends a typical facebooker engages with), the village breaks off to form a new conclave and a new “social network.” This social connectivity is what sets us apart as a species, and Facebook knows how to leverage that.And while every digital platform has their “gee wiz” engagement numbers, Facebook continues to stand out on the metrics that really count. More than half a billion unique users log into Facebook each day sharing three billion likes and uploading 300 million photos. Of their 900 million current users, 398 million visit the site six out of every seven days. These numbers relay far more than just engagement. They showcase social interaction at the deepest levels.

  Think about it. When was the last time you printed a photo to share with friends or family? Why would you when they can see it on Facebook? When was the last time you used an event-planning website to organize a social gathering or even attended a high school reunion? Why would you? All of your friends are on Facebook. Humans are instinctively social and Facebook is providing the organizing conceptual framework we crave as social creatures.

The challenge for Facebook now is to move past their reluctance to forcefully engage in the communications marketplace and remind investors, users, advertisers, and developers of what is working at Facebook. GM may have cut advertising, but thousands of businesses large and small are seeing huge successes in targeted social advertising and will continue to.  Facebook needs to share these stories every day.

And while mobile has been piled on as another touchy point for the company, it’s worth noting that there were still half a billion mobile Facebook users in April 2012. That’s more than twice the number of every iPhone ever sold. And with mobile projected to explode in emerging and developing markets in the next two years, Facebook will be positioned to further leverage its growing revenue potential into areas such as payments, social gaming, and shopping.

To be sure, Facebook’s current flood waters of criticism must be addressed first and directly by the company. It’s completely in their power to stabilize and grow, in spite of what’s happened. What they don’t want is to let their critics –and there are plenty–define them. That could leave the company with decidedly fewer “friends” and “likes.”

Thumbnail image courtesy of Katrina.Tuliao and Crunchies2009 via Flickr

Call it vocational Darwinism: Seeing similarities between the Galapagos Islands and our recession-era ecosystem, Nacie Carson wrote The Finch Effect to help you be more like those titular birds–which adapted their beaks to environmental changes within a single generation–and less like the species that have perished around them.

Fast Company spoke with the author about the evolutionary benefits of owning your career, the intersecting axes of personal branding, and why natural selection is not survival of the strongest.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

FAST COMPANY: The Finch Effect is all about adaptation. What is it that we need to adapt to?

NACIE CARSON: What we need to adapt to as modern professionals is the rapid changes that we’re seeing in the job market. The start of the recession caught people so off balance. People were standing around, thinking “What are we supposed to do, what’s going to happen, how are we supposed to deal with this?”

The truth is that because of different factors like outsourcing and how fast communication happens, the pace at which changes in the job market happen is not going to slow down.

It’s really important for individual professionals to be aware that the price of poker is going up and to really take responsibility for our own careers into our own hands–instead of placing them into structures that might not be able to adapt as well as an individual could.

How do you take that responsibility? 

I spent several years freelance writing, and one of the really great things about that experience is that the onus is completely on you for making yourself financially stable, but also directing your own career. The question of what’s next? is not the question that you ask the corporate structure that you’re trying to climb the ladder in; it’s a question you ask yourself.

There are things we can do on our own to go out and get new experience, to diversify our incomes sources, and to help us be more buoyant as things might change in the job market.

So how do we add to our buoyancy?

The first piece is really the shifting of this perspective. Once you’ve done that, I think understanding the professional brand that we’re sharing with the world and taking the lead in terms of that is key. All of us are emitting a brand at all times whether we are aware of that or not, and if we understand that, we can have greater control of the message that we’re sending to other people.

Additionally, take responsibility for our own professional development when possible. It’s important for professionals to be comfortable and willing to hold up their hand to get more skill development, to improve the skills they’re already great at, and not wait for a company to do that for them, to really take ownership of their own skill development.

Think of yourself as someone who can collect different opportunities. That might mean in your company thinking strategically but acting like an employee. Thinking like an entrepreneur, acting like an employee, it might mean seeking additional opportunities for yourself outside of your full-time job, some tangential gig opportunities to develop your skill set and your resume, or it might mean entertaining the concept of actually stepping out and becoming a full-time freelancer or entrepreneur.

What are some first steps toward taking control of that personal brand?

The really important first step is understanding that you have one whether or not you’re purposefully trying to send one out. People are going to be attaching adjectives and descriptors to you all day, every day, and it’s your responsbility to grab onto that and potentially shift those adjectives, if necessary.

Additionally, you want to think about who your target audience is for your professional brand. For some people it might be their boss and their organization. “My target audience is impressing the people I work with because I’d like to stay here and get more opportunities.” For some people it might be new business opportunities, it might be “Hey, I’m just out of school, and I need to find work, so my target audience for my professional brand is going to be recruiters.”

Like all brands, it’s important that you’re speaking to your market about what your brand offers in a language and context that they’ll most hear.

So what are the axes of branding?

There is a huge online component. Your Facebook and your Twitter and your LinkedIn, and all of your social media profiles, and your blog if you have one–they all reflect your professional brand.

I think really leveraging Twitter as an individual is a powerful social media way to brand yourself. I think you can do that by sharing articles that reflect something that speaks to your brand’s mission statement, or providing a service of some kind, sharing a tip for other people, or engaging in conversations, or reaching out to experts, or even job recruiters who are active in the brand space you’re working in.

There’s also the in-person axis. We forget that there’s also a need to ensure that we’re transmitting the right message in terms of our physical presentation, the way we articulate ourselves, the ability to make eye contact with people.

It seems the antecedent to this personal branding is knowing one’s own strengths and weaknesses and interests. How does one go about obtaining that knowledge of self?

For me, the strategies that I’ve found valuable to get to the heart of these things is really being able to ask yourself the right questions and give yourself an unvarnished answer.

What are some of those questions?

One of the questions I really love is, “How am I seen by other people, or how do I think I’m seen by other people, and how do I want to be seen by other people professionally?” And then the next question is, “What am I doing to project how I want to be seen? How am I supporting that vision, and how might I not be supporting that vision?” One of the great things that you can do is ask the people who you’re close to.

With your parents, with your siblings, your friends, or a good coworker you can have an honest conversation, saying: “I’m really putting some thought into this: What are a couple words you might use to describe me as a professional, and how am I supporting that description?”

The Finch Effect is about professional evolution. How does one become a member of the fittest, if it’s the fittest that will survive?

The way that one becomes a member of the fittest is by learning to be adaptable–in this case that adaptability is empowering yourself to make decisions and drive your own career.

It’s funny because when you say “survival of the fittest,” people are like, “oh yeah, dog-eat-dog, only the strong will survive,” like it’s some sort of a WWE match.

It’s not going to do anybody any good to be the strongest, or the biggest, or the meanest kid on the playground if they can’t change with the times. There is such a powerful lesson in that core message that you don’t need to be the best or the strongest or the brightest–you just need to be able to change and to grow, and that’s going to take you a long way to being successful.

Image: Flickr user Jo Christian Oterhals

Super-syncing smart watches are so hot right now, but Bradley Price is banking on the appeal of an entirely different kind of timepiece. The industrial designer (and avid auto enthusiast) launched Autodromo last November, and the company’s growing collection of driving watches is meant to evoke cloudless days hugging curves on Italian roadways with the wind blowing in your hair. No, they won’t remind you to pick up milk at the grocery store–but that’s also kind of the point.

“They’re emotional touchstones that remind you of driving, even when you are doing something mundane, like sitting in a meeting,” Price tells Co.Design. “The same can be said of aviation or diving watches. Most people are not pilots or deep-sea divers, yet they wear these watches because it speaks to their inner fantasies. For some of us, spirited motoring is just as potent a thrill as either of those more exotic pursuits.”

The only thing dying is the watch as commodity item. The watch as talisman object is thriving.

Price, who has previously worked on the award-winning HomeHero Fire Extinguisher and Skiff Reader, named the latest series Vallelunga after a particularly tough road circuit in Italy, and actually creating the chronographs came along with its own set of challenges. “The subdials and calendar wheel are in fixed locations, so you have to design the rest of the dial around those constraints and make the proportions work,” Price explains. While most mass-produced watches are made with an aesthetic eye to the face alone, Price approached his pieces with equal attention to all sides. “Our proprietary stainless steel case is a smooth, pebble-like form with flush caseback: no sharp edges that can dig into you, and no crevices where lint and stuff can collect. I think it looks just as good from the back as from the front,” he says. As an added bonus for easy upkeep, a small screwdriver can change the battery without the need for a specialized watchmaker tool.

Not quite sure if the look will suit? Print out the clever to-scale PDF on Autodromo’s Try One On page, cut out your favorite, and wrap it around your wrist. “You can even see how the watch will look under the cuff of your favorite shirts,” Price notes. And while chances are slim–sadly–that after you close up your laptop today you’ll pull on some leather gloves, slip into the front seat of a sweet roadster, and speed off for a super-stylish commute home, that needn’t stop you from making a fashion statement. “The ubiquity of technology in our lives has freed the wristwatch from its basic functional purpose, so it’s become a vessel for personal expression,” Price says. “Even very sophisticated watches, at the end of the day, are collected and worn for emotional reasons. People talk about the death of the wristwatch, but I’d say it’s alive and well. The only thing dying is the watch as commodity item. The watch as talisman object is thriving.”

According to a leaked memo acquired by The Verge, retailer Target is instructing its staff to remove Amazon own-branded hardware from its shelves. That means the Kindle suite.

Target’s memo says simply that it’s reviewed its product lineup and decided not to carry any further Amazon hardware. Stock will be replenished through May 13th, Mother’s Day, and the memo notes that the Kindle Touch will be in an ad campaign for the week of May 6th. Staff are instructed to follow best practices to “remerchandise” remaining stock, and to explain to customers who ask that it’s all just part of the normal flow of business, continually evaluating products they stock and so on.

A swift and decisive halt, then, carried out even as the store tries to maximize customer interest and, of course, its revenues by popping the Touch on an ad promotion just before Mother’s Day. The Internet has a pretty clear idea of why Target is doing this, and it comes from Target’s own words: The move is due to a “conflict of interest.” That conflict is Apple.

Target and Apple got all chummy with each other recently to launch some of those in-store “mini” Apple stores–also seen in other U.S. retailers and big-box vendors elsewhere around the world. No matter that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has snapped up over 50% of the Android market in the U.S., Apple products are selling like crazy right now–and for higher price tags. They also have an identifiable cachet which will attract customers to Target stores where–whadya know?–they may spend a little extra cash on other items too. That is to say: any one of the hundreds of iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac accessories. Ironically, Target’s keeping Amazon-compatible accessories on its shelves for exactly this reason: They may be impulse purchases, ensuring stores like Target get a steady dribble of cash from low-value items sold in bulk.

Would Apple have insisted, though, that Target only sell Apple’s tablet devices (and other hardware) because Amazon is aiming squarely at Apple’s markets in tablets, music, video, and so on? It’s not beyond the pale. Apple does, after all, have a thing about controlling the market space.

As an interesting counterpoint, it’s common in Europe to see an in-store mini Apple store right alongside a shelf of rival tablet PCs from competitors, which could be a hole in this logic. But the Kindle isn’t really a presence among these devices because Amazon’s taking ages getting its international thinking straight, and while there are a ton of peer tablets, none is quite as much a “threat” as the Kindle (at least, right now).

And if it is an Apple dictate that Kindles don’t get sold alongside its precious tablets, then there’s one very good reason Target could be persuaded to go along with it. It’s because Apple isn’t a threat to Target’s business model in quite the same way that Amazon is. Amazon has oft been credited with the death of the physical bookstore, and nowadays sells all sorts of equipment and hardware that are typical Target stock. So much pressure on prices and convenience is exerted by Amazon that it may be one of the main factors behind Target rival Best Buy’s decision to close many big-box stores and totally alter its strategy. And while Amazon just needs efficient, low-staff distribution centers, Target needs a whole infrastructure, sales staff, and space. It can’t afford to “pile it high and sell it cheap” in the same digital way Amazon does.

Target’s just trying to avoid Best Buy’s fate. Or perhaps it also thinks e-readers aren’t the wave of the future.

Image: Flickr users Team Traveller, Tony Buser

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

Despite the gloom surrounding its stock price of late, Apple delivered another blowout quarter on Tuesday, thanks in large part to iPhone sales. But if you took the iPhone out of the equation, the overall numbers were just OK as Macs had a so-so quarter and iPad sales fell on the low end of estimates.

Apple sold 11.8 iPads during the quarter, which was lower than the 12.3 million to 13.5 million units that analysts had been expecting. During Apple’s earnings call with analysts Tuesday afternoon, a few took the opportunity to grill Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and CEO Tim Cook on the matter. One question was whether the introduction of the $399 iPad 2 had hindered sales of the new iPad.

“We’re just learning about elasticity of demand,” Oppenheimer said. “The $399 iPad 2 is doing well, but the new iPad is on fire.”

Cook said he was “thrilled with the results we’ve seen,” since lowering the price of the iPad 2 to $399, though “it’s too early to come to a clear conclusion.” The cheaper iPad unlocked some education demand, Cook added.

Nevertheless, the numbers were a comedown from the 15.4 million sold in Apple’s fiscal first quarter, which benefitted from the holiday season. Cook and Oppenheimer didn’t offer any more reasons for the perceived shortfall. “The new iPad is on fire. We’re selling them as fast as we can make them,” Cook said. One possibility is that analysts based their estimates on the new iPad’s opening weekend, in which it sold 3 million units.

To be sure, Apple is selling a lot of the devices. Since debuting the iPad in early 2010, Apple has sold 67 million of them. As Cook noted, it took Apple three years to sell that many iPhones and 24 years to sell as many Macs.

Speaking of Macs, those sales were also on the low end of estimates and grew just 7% over the year-ago quarter. Cook said one major reason was that Q2 2011 was a big quarter for Macs. Sales grew 28% in that quarter as the rest of the PC industry posted single-digit gains.

“Yes, I think there was some cannibalization from iPad and the market is slow,” Cook said of Mac sales in the latest quarter. But the “primary factor,” he said, was those year-ago sales.

A federal judge was scheduled to hear arguments Friday morning about what to do with users’ files that were seized in the U.S. government’s January raid on file-sharing service Megaupload.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (a.k.a. Kim Schmitz, pictured) and six others who ran the site were indicted by The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in January. They are accused of making $175 million and causing $500 million in copyright infringement; if they’re found guilty, they’re looking at a maximum 20 years prison sentence.

Since the indictment, the fate of data stored on Megaupload has been up in the air. Initially, the plan was to erase the data as of Feb. 2. The 25 petabytes of data still exists, though it is stored on 1,100 servers owned by Carpathia and Cogent. Carpathia, which is said to be spending $9,000 a day to maintain that data, is asking the U.S. Federal Court in Northern Virginia to rule on the matter.

Though the government has copied “selected data” from the servers and insists the servers can now be wiped clean, the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a public advocacy group — is representing an Ohio man, Kyle Goodwin who thinks otherwise. Goodwin, the operator of OhioSportsNet, says he has legal, copyrighted material of high school sports games that had been stored on Megaupload. The Motion Picture Association of America also wants the data preserved as evidence in a potential civil case against Megaupload.

BONUS: The Strange and Epic Lifestyle of Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom

We launch our first annual Innovation By Design awards, Scrabble gets a lovely makeover, and Jonah Lehrer makes it okay to daydream about unicorns. It’s our top stories of the week.

Fast Company Is Launching A Design And Innovation Competition. We Want YOU! C’mon now, don’t be shy.

6 Keys For Turning Your Company Into A Design Powerhouse. “While getting the best talent is an important goal, creating an environment where design can thrive should be the greater focus.”–Jeneanne Rae, CEO of Motiv Strategies.

Pair: A Social Networking App Just For Couples. Yes, but can it passive-aggressively do the dishes?

4 Problems Google Glasses Have To Solve Before Becoming A Hit. Dear Google: Be more like Apple. Love, us.

How Facebook Finds The Best Design Talent, And Keeps Them Happy. “Both Nicholas Felton and Mike Matas got personal invitations from the main man himself, CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”

3-D Printing Is So Last Year: MIT’s “Self-Assembling Sand” Builds Objects Instantly. Behold, wonder goop!

Watch These Scientists Grow Bones Using Lego Robots. “Industrial equipment is expensive, and Lego does the job for a fraction of the price.”–Researcher Michelle Oyen. Imagine the deal they’d get on Mega Bloks!

The New Strategic Edge: Tapping Your Customers’ Personal Passions. “Social impact is fast becoming a widespread, rigorous business metric.”

The World’s Sweetest Scrabble Set Is Now A Reality. At $199, it’s expensive, but boy, what a beaut.

3 Critical Insights Into Creativity From Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine.” Spend more time daydreaming? Done. Rainbows, unicorns, kitties. Rainbows, unicorns, kitties …

Suzanne LaBarre

Suzanne is a senior editor at Co.Design. You may email her at suzannelabarre@gmail.com Continued