Crowdfunding

The Pleistocene Park project is aiming to rebuild a lost Ice Age ecosystem in Siberia, and its directors, Sergey and Nikita Zimov, say it could help slow the effects of climate change. Now, the initiative is running a crowdfunding campaign to help transport a new herd of animals to the park.

For children living in poverty, footwear is one of many problems. Almost as soon as a child has received shoes to wear, they're likely to have grown out of them and have to make do with them being too small. The Shoe That Grows changes this. It allows children to adjust its size as their feet grow.

There's now plenty of evidence that sitting for long periods increases mortality risk, even if we exercise regularly. So if you spend your days at a sedentary desk job, the Elevate standing desk might interest you. It combines ergonomics with an elegant design at a price that won't break the bank.

Joining the sizable chunk of the wearable electronics market directed at maintaining our physical well-being is start-up Quell, which bills its device as the first over-the-counter wearable that offers relief from chronic pain.

Explore Mars, Inc., a private organization made up of technologists and former NASA engineers, wants to look for signs of any present life on Mars not by scratching about on the surface, but by dropping supersonic lances on the planet that will penetrate deep into the Martian soil.

The private effort to recover the 35-year old ISEE-3 spacecraft has ended in apparent failure. The engines failed to fire properly to make the planned course correction and the craft will head back into deep space.

A US$25 million crowdfunded, student-led mission plans to send three CubeSat microsatellites all the way to Mars, landing time capsules on the surface of the Red Planet that contain the digital messages from tens of millions of people around the world. Uploading your own file costs only 99 cents.

The ISEE-3 Reboot Project is a crowdfunding effort aimed at reactivating the comet-chasing space probe ISEE-3 launched in the 1970s.