The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• Does Your Home Have “Green” in its DNA? | Zillow Blog – Real Estate Market Stats, Celebrity Real Estate, and Zillow News

  Five basic tips to design “green” from Zillow.
  QUOTE
  Designing a new home is part art, part science. It takes both to make a house that’s energy-efficient, uses less material to build, and connects with its building site – what we call “green building.”

  But, beauty is skin deep and sometimes “green” is, too. A truly green home is green from the inside out; the “green” can’t be separated from the “home.” Sure, you can make any house more energy-efficient, but that’s usually just cosmetic surgery. Loading up a house with energy-saving gadgets helps a little, but a green home is born that way, starting before the design was just a twinkle in the architect’s eye.
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  tags: zillow green_buildings design architecture houses

• Priming the Body to Tackle Cancer – Technology Review

  Fascinating. New approach to tackling melanoma cancer, and possibly all cancers: start with the cell.
  QUOTE
  Butler and his colleagues harvested immune cells from nine patients. They souped up the cells in their lab—in effect giving them the ability to remember cancer cells—multiplied them in number, and infused them back into the patients from whom they been taken. This technique, called adoptive t-cell therapy, primes the immune system to seek out and destroy cancer cells throughout the body.
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  tags: mit_techreview cancer cells cellular_health health

• Revitalizing Cities – Harvard Business Review

  “Revitalizing Cities is the third of three blog series on social innovation culminating in three Think Tanks organized by the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The other two series explored Innovations in Health Care and Innovations in Education.”

  tags: cities harvard revitalizing harvard_business reference series

• Gary Shteyngart | The Days of Yore

  Great interview with Gary Shteyngart. Question: What’s it like being a writer today? Answer:
  QUOTE
  I would say that writers are the most desperate people I have ever seen in terms of their utter lack of self-esteem. Their incredible alcoholism. Their way of life. Also, this feeling that they are no longer culturally relevant. I was watching Mad Men and there was some executive who flies in from somewhere and says, “Wow, we just saw James Michener by the pool!” Just the idea that writers were celebrities. That people, even some random executive from nowhere, would seek them out and know who they were.

  The demise of writers as cultural figures has happened so quickly, I think it is still a shock. It is interesting to look at younger people from generations ahead of mine, because they never counted on that to begin with. But my peers, the people in their late 30’s now, to us literature still mattered when we were in our 20’s. We would discuss the new Martin Amis book with a comrade who was not a writer himself. Recently, I was at a dinner with a lot of very young people who just graduated from college and a friend said, “Oh, Gary is a novelist,” and they all looked at me like, what the hell is that? Like in a zoo! And then my friend said, “And he is also a contributing editor to Travel and Leisure,” and they said, “Oooo! Travel and Leisure! That must be awesome, dude!”
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  tags: writing flavorwire gary_shteyngart days_of_yore

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.