As Europe starts opening up to travelers again, it’s more exciting than ever to think about the cultural treasures that await. For me, one of the great joys of travel is having in-person encounters with great art — which I’ve collected in a book called Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces. Here’s one of my favorites:    For 2,000 years, the Parthenon temple in Athens remained almost perfectly intact. But in 1687, with Athens under siege, the Parthenon was used to store a huge cache of gunpowder. (See where this is going?) Pow! A massive explosion sent huge chunks of the Parthenon everywhere.…

Food accounts for 13% of cities’ carbon emissions every year. But a small league of C40 Good Food Cities, from New York to Quezon City, is hoping to change that. BROOKLYN, New York – Little about the culinary center serving New York’s Health + Hospitals agency evokes a home kitchen. Hair-netted cooks mix the ingredients for salsa verde in white bins the size of babies’ bathtubs. A row of combi ovens, gleaming and tall, roast hundreds of sweet plantains at a time. Nearby, a 200-gallon water bath chills reduced-oxygen packets of just-steamed yellow-and-white “sunshine” rice, preserving their freshness. And yet,…

As Europe starts opening up to travelers again, it’s more exciting than ever to think about the cultural treasures that await. For me, one of the great joys of travel is having in-person encounters with great art — which I’ve collected in a book called Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces. Here’s one of my favorites:    This woman’s haunting face makes it clear right away that — despite the sumptuous beauty of this painting — it doesn’t tell a happy tale. The Lady of Shalott knows she’s floating down a river to her doom.  The English artist John William Waterhouse depicts the…

In a small dry corner of England, Aquagrain is creating a super-absorbent biodegradable hydrogel that could help crops grow in degraded lands. Aquagrain is a finalist for the 2024 Food Planet Prize. NEEDHAM, United Kingdom – In one of the smallest units in a sprawling industrial estate in the tiny English village of Needham Market, a scientist has been painstakingly refining a soil improving product. Made using animal carcasses, this hydrogel can hold enough water to transform degraded land into fertile soil. It may seem like the stuff of sci-fi, but Dr. Arjomand Ghareghani, the inventor of Aquagrain, has patented…