“It’s like crack.”

That’s how Andrew Cote describes his obsession with beekeeping, a career that keeps him buzzing from the heights of Manhattan’s most famous rooftops to the far reaches of the African bush.

As a founder of the New York City Beekeepers Association, Cote helped legalize beekeeping in the city, working with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to develop a best-practices guide for tending hives in the five boroughs. The NYCBA’s mission is to promote safe and responsible beekeeping - an important task at a time when bees are disappearing from parts of the planet.

“Particularly in an urban environment,” he explains, “people need to be very, very good stewards of their bees. They need to tend to them well, inspect them regularly, make sure that they have room to grow and that they’re not going to swarm.”

Of course, when New York City bees do swarm, Cote is the NYPD’s go-to bee guy. This spring alone, he’s been called to wrangle swarms in Staten Island, Harlem, Queens and on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

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Editor's note: Noah Wilson-Rich, Ph.D. is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Best Bees Company™ . Best Bees™ delivers, installs, and manages honey bee hives to residents of eastern Massachusetts. 100% of their profits go to fund their research to improve honey bee health through their Apivax™ line of products. Their motto is, “Together, we can save the world, one honey bee at a time.” 

By Noah Wilson-Rich, Ph.D., Special to CNN

To all of the readers who don’t think that honey bees are one of the most important concerns of our modern times, let me admit that I know where you’re coming from. I wasn’t the sort of kid who played in the dirt. I was terrified of insects (ew! bugs!), and never forgot my first run-in with a bee that stung me on my sacred pillow as a toddler. But if you eat food and if you enjoy flowers, then you need to pay attention to this.

Honey bees are of vital importance, and their declining populations are an incredibly critical issue. As pollinators, they are responsible for over 130 different fruit and vegetable crops that we eat. As an economic commodity, the cost of some of these crops has already increased because the numbers of honey bees has gone down. This basic supply and demand tilt has already impacted the over $15 billion dollar industry.
Historical context

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When's the last time someone told you about something they heard on the radio?

In an age of constant connectivity, social media and instant-access video, radio seems to literally be old news – a relic of past generations.

But the innovative, wildly popular WNYC-produced show Radiolab is looking like the exception.

"Being on the Internet has only increased our reach and the number of people who consume public radio," says Ira Glass, who hosts NPR's "This American Life," arguably the most popular radio show currently produced.

The Internet has transformed radio into live streams and podcasts. The inherent nature of radio has transitioned from ephemeral to enduring.

Think about it. A podcast by its very nature is permanent. It has an address – a url. It can be searched and, more importantly, downloaded. Listeners can 'own it,' play it repeatedly and share it with friends.

Traditionally radio has also been a social binder – families gathered around the radio to listen to the lastest news, fisted-clinched sports fans  listening with eager ear to last inning of the ballgame. But today its digitalization is making radio a more personal experience.

"When you're on a podcast you're deep into someone's ear canal. Maybe they're on the subway, maybe they're jogging, or maybe they're just sitting there," says Jad Abumrad, co-creator and host of Radiolab.

"Somehow you own them in a way you don't on the radio," says Jad Abumrad about how his work can engage his audience more deeply. "So subconsciously that gives us permission to do all kinds of things."

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Urban beekeeping. It’s been described as a surprisingly addictive trend - one that's taking over rooftops from Manhattan to Shanghai. But few beekeepers have the global reach of Andrew Coté.

From the heights of New York’s most luxurious hotels to the far reaches of the African bush, Coté is spreading his fascination with bees
to people throughout the world.

He has his hands in many hives. He is a founder of both the New York City Beekeepers Association and Bees Without Borders, a charitable
organization teaching beekeeping as a means to alleviate poverty in third-world countries. He’s a beekeeping consultant to several private customers and businesses throughout New York and Connecticut, including the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, The Bridge Café and York Preparatory School.

Coté also maintains his own hives, bottling his honey to sell each week at the Union Square Farmers Market.

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By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) - Rube Goldberg machines - those contraptions that, like the board game Mouse Trap, aim to accomplish a simple task in a needlessly complex way - don't really fit in an age obsessed with efficiency and perfection.

Yet, online, these fun-to-watch systems do seem to have incredible currency. Think OK Go music videos, for starters.

The machine below, called Mini-Melvin, caught my eye this week. Housed inside two suitcases, Mini-Melvin employs an alarm clock, a smartphone, a child's xylophone, a toy train and many other trinkets - all to stamp a short message on a postcard.

Check out the video below:

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Americans are known for being a nation of tinkerers –  inventors with imagination, creativity and pluck. But despite that legacy, and the largest consumer market in the world, it’s nearly impossible for an average inventor to see their idea actually make it to store shelves.

Ben Kaufman is determined to change that. He is the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Quirky.com, an innovative startup that is turning ideas into real-life products.

Kaufman, subject of last Sunday's "The Next List" on CNN, says his mission is “to make it possible for all people to execute on their great ideas, regardless of their luck, their circumstance or their pedigree. To give everyone a chance.”

The Quirky process leverages the power of thousands of community members and the experience of top-notch designers to take an idea from the “what if” stage all the way to the marketplace. Members not only vote on the products they’d like to see, they double as built-in buyers. And everybody who influences the final product gets a cut.

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By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) - OK, I know this sounds ridiculous. But hear me out. An Internet company in Mexico City recently tested the idea of giving responsible pet owners a treat for picking up after their dogs in public parks.

People put their dogs' droppings in a special container which measured the weight of the poop. The container, which doubled as a router, then emitted a set number of minutes of free Wi-Fi for every pound of feces it collected.

Yeah, that's kind of gross. And no, there apparently was nothing stopping Wi-Fi cheaters from putting rocks or other heavy objects in the bins instead of dog poop. But it's yet another example of game mechanics getting tacked on top of the real world we live in - trying to influence our behavior, for better or worse, with rewards. The same kind we give to our pets. FULL POST

Editor's note: Ben Kaufman is the CEO of Quirky.com, which helps inventors bring their ideas to the market. Kaufman is the subject of Sunday's episode of "The Next List," on CNN at 2 p.m. ET.

By Ben Kaufman, Special to CNN

(CNN) - Ninety-nine percent of consumer product companies are incredibly disconnected from the people that they serve. The process of trying to learn about what those people want only creates more distance.

We used to live in a world in which Big Companies made things, and people bought them, sometimes because they were the right things, sometimes because they were the only things. Before the Internet came along, this kind of worked. Before the Web, people’s expectations of how, where and to whom they could express themselves were very low. FULL POST

By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) - This almost doesn't require comment. Check out David Goldman's CNNMoney story about a new white paper commissioned by Intel, in which researchers say it is inevitable - inevitable! - that smarpthones will plug into brains.

Here's Goldman's explanation of what could happen:

... Step one: a lag-free operating system that anyone can use intuitively to perform any computing task.

Step two: Interfacing with the body. These kinds of interfaces are already operating in a relatively rudimentary way, with implants and pacemakers. But in its paper, Intel suggests that the link-up will be much more robust.

How robust? Well, have you seen "The Matrix?" FULL POST

By The Next List staff, CNN

(CNN) - How many times have you been in the middle of a routine day then - BAM! - a great idea pops into your head. Maybe it's a way to solve some annoying problem or to make a household chore easier. But for almost everyone, the next thought is this: "Never going to happen.”

That’s because bringing a product to market takes so much more than having a great idea. Invention, it sometimes seems, is largely the domain of large corporations, people with access to big time cash or big-time connections.

And that’s where Ben Kaufman comes in. He’s the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Quirky.com, a start-up website that gives would-be inventors a place to go with their ideas.

The CNN show "The Next List" will feature Kaufman on Sunday at 2 p.m. ET. Check out the preview video above. FULL POST