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For 107 hours, Portugal didn't need any fossil fuels. Here's how they did it.

Can you remember where you were from 6:45 a.m. May 7 to 5:45 p.m. May 11?

A lot happened during those 107 hours. The bison became our new national mammal. President Barack Obama announced that he would be the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima. Attorney General Loretta Lynch delivered a soul-stirring condemnation of North Carolina's discriminatory HB2 bill.

U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

Something pretty wild happened in Portugal during that time too. For those 107 hours, Portugal was a completely renewable country.

Photo from Miguel Riopa/AFP/Getty Images.

For just under five days, Portugal generated all of the electricity it needed from completely renewable sources. Fossil fuels still burned for other stuff — cars, for instance — but for those magical 107 hours, 100% of their electricity demand was covered by renewables.

The news comes from a report by the Portuguese Renewable Energy Association and Zero, a renewable energy association. In 2011, the country performed a similar feat but only for a few hours.

Part of what's really cool is that Portugal isn't tied to just one clean energy technology. It's trying a lot of different ones.

A wave power machine in near the Portuguese town of Povoa de Varzim. Photo from Joao Abreu Miranda/AFP/Getty Images.

As of 2015, about 22% of the country's electricity is coming from wind power alone, but Portugal also uses hydroelectric, wave, geothermal, and solar power as well as biofuels (which are the renewable cousins to fossil fuels).

What might be more impressive is how quickly Portugal's renewable energy sector has grown.

In 2013, Portugal got about 26% of its energy from renewables. By 2015, that had grown to more than 50%.

A solar power plant in Serpa, Portugal. Photo from Ceinturion/Wikimedia Commons.

How did they do it so fast? Portugal's government has invested in renewable energy like crazy. Portugal has been giving renewable energy producers guaranteed prices and payments as well as picking up a lot of the new infrastructure check.

Yes, this has left a considerable deficit for the government to deal with, but it says it has plans to eliminate it.

Portugal's not the only country with an impressive record in renewable energy lately. Take Denmark, for example.

Denmark's amazing at wind power. In fact, one particularly windy day last year generated 140% of the country's electricity needs.

Danish Queen Margrethe visits a offshore wind farm in 2013. Photo from Henning Bagger/AFP/Getty Images.

In fact, tons of countries are getting in on this. Germany recently generated so much renewable energy consumers were actually paid to use their electricity. In 2014, Latvia, Austria, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland also generated the majority of their electricity need from renewables.

Renewable energy is happening. Fast. And America can do this too.

The United States still gets the vast majority of its electricity from nonrenewable resources, particularly coal and natural gas, but with the right programs, it's estimated we could provide as much as 80% of our energy needs through renewables by 2050.

Portugal didn't use magic to make its record 107-hour run happen. That success was based on political will, investment, and readily available technologies — stuff we can, and should, start doing today.

Community

Facebook group brings people together IRL to make meaningful friendships

True

Making new friends as an adult is challenging. While people crave meaningful IRL connections, it can be hard to know where to find them. But thanks to one Facebook Group, meeting your new best friends is easier than ever.

Founded in 2018, NYC Brunch Squad brings together hundreds of people who come as strangers and leave as friends through its in-person events.

“Witnessing the transformative impact our community has on the lives of our members is truly remarkable. We provide the essential support and connections needed to thrive amid the city's chaos,” shares Liza Rubin, the group’s founder.

Despite its name, the group doesn’t just do brunch. They also have book clubs, seasonal parties, and picnics, among other activities.

NYC Brunch Squad curates up to 10 monthly events tailored to the specific interests of its members. Liza handles all the details, taking into account different budgets and event sizes – all people have to do is show up.

“We have members who met at our events and became friends and went on to embark on international journeys to celebrate birthdays together. We have had members get married with bridesmaids by their sides who were women they first connected with at our events. We’ve had members decide to live together and become roommates,” Liza says.

Members also bond over their passion for giving back to their community. The group has hosted many impact-driven events, including a “Picnic with Purpose” to create self-care packages for homeless shelters and recently participated in the #SquadSpreadsJoy challenge. Each day, the 100 members participating receive random acts of kindness to complete. They can also share their stories on the group page to earn extra points. The member with the most points at the end wins a free seat at the group's Friendsgiving event.

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Education

3,700-year-old Babylonian stone tablet gets translated, changes history

They were doing trigonometry 1500 years before the Greeks.

via UNSW

Dr. Daniel Mansfield and his team at the University of New South Wales in Australia have just made an incredible discovery. While studying a 3,700-year-old tablet from the ancient civilization of Babylon, they found evidence that the Babylonians were doing something astounding: trigonometry!

Most historians have credited the Greeks with creating the study of triangles' sides and angles, but this tablet presents indisputable evidence that the Babylonians were using the technique 1,500 years before the Greeks ever were.

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Bill Gates explains the ‘safest’ age to give a kid a cellphone

Sorry, kids.

Image from YouTube video/ Creative Commons/Attribution 3.0 Unported.

Bill Gates in conversation with The Times of India

Bill Gates sure is strict on how his children use the very technology he helped bring to the masses.

In a recent interview with the Mirror, the tech mogul said his children were not allowed to own their own cellphone until the age of 14. "We often set a time after which there is no screen time, and in their case that helps them get to sleep at a reasonable hour," he said. Gates added that the children are not allowed to have cellphones at the table, but are allowed to use them for homework or studying.

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This Map Reveals The True Value Of $100 In Each State

Your purchasing power can swing by 30% from state to state.

Image by Tax Foundation.

Map represents the value of 100 dollars.

As the cost of living in large cities continues to rise, more and more people are realizing that the value of a dollar in the United States is a very relative concept. For decades, cost of living indices have sought to address and benchmark the inconsistencies in what money will buy, but they are often so specific as to prevent a holistic picture or the ability to "browse" the data based on geographic location.

The Tax Foundation addressed many of these shortcomings using the most recent (2015) Bureau of Economic Analysis data to provide a familiar map of the United States overlaid with the relative value of what $100 is "worth" in each state. Granted, going state-by-state still introduces a fair amount of "smoothing" into the process — $100 will go farther in Los Angeles than in Fresno, for instance — but it does provide insight into where the value lies.

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Health

How does a kid cope in life after accidentally killing his brother? John did.

A childhood game went very wrong.

Image from "American Idol"/YouTube.

John Arthur Greene (left) and his brother Kevin



A childhood game can go very wrong in the blink of an eye.

"You'll never get me!"

“Freeze! Put your hands up."

If you've ever played cops and robbers, you know how the game goes.

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NASA says these 18 plants are the best at naturally filtering the air in your home

Breathe easy.

via NASA

Back in the late '80s, NASA was looking for ways to detoxify the air in its space stations. So it conducted a study to determine the most effective plants for filtering the air of toxic agents and converting carbon dioxide to oxygen.

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Pop Culture

A female writer jokingly asked what's a 'universal thing men like' and the responses were hilarious

Here are 19 of the best responses.

via Unsplash

What do these men love?

Writer and illustrator Aubrey Hirsch jokingly asked her followers on Twitter what’s a “universal thing that most men like?” because she was writing a comic and “just realized I don’t actually know any men in real life." The tweet inspired an avalanche of funny responses.

Hirsch is the author of “Why We Never Talk About Sugar,” a collection of short stories, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Child, American Short Fiction and Time.

The interesting thing about the responses is that they weren’t the typical stereotypes about men. She didn’t get a ton of people talking about sex, sports or toxic masculinity. Instead, there were a lot of folks that mentioned very specific male behaviors as if they were talking about a bizarre species they discovered in the wild.

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