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Paris has plans to make the Seine swimmable by 2024: by Feargus O’Sullivan The City of Paris is undertaking a new project, ‘Projet Life Adsorb,’ which may soon make Paris’s river Seine clean enough to swim in. Various attempts have been made to make the Seine swimmable, the first in 1988. Most recently, in 2017, swimming pools opened along Canal Saint Martin, a more sheltered waterway in the city’s east. Unfortunately high bacteria levels regularly force swimmers out of the pools. The new plan, which is being designed and implemented by a team of experts overseen by the City of Paris, “might be able to curb pollution more permanently, making it swimmable –  and usable as a competition venue – in time for the 2024 Summer Olympics,” writes Bloomberg’s Feargus …

Dutch couple are Europe’s first inhabitants of a 3D-printed house: The south Netherlands property, made by 3D printing a specially formulated cement through a nozzle on a robotic arm, is inspired by the shape of a boulder – a design difficult and expensive to construct using traditional methods, writes The Guardian. While properties have been partly constructed via 3D printing in France and the US, the Dutch home is said to be the first “legally habitable and commercially rented property where the load-bearing walls have been made using a 3D printer nozzle.” It is the first of five 3D-printed houses planned by construction firm Saint-Gobain Weber Beamix for a plot of land by the Beatrix canal. “It is beautiful,” said owner Elize Lutz. “It has the feel of a bunker …

“The Children Got Better Grades Learning Outside” Matluba Khan, Lecturer in Urban Design at Cardiff University, redesigned a school in Bangladesh to include outdoor learning elements requested by the students and teachers – and studied the results. Her research showed that the children’s maths and science improved with teaching and learning outdoors. “The Grade IV children performed significantly better in maths and science compared to a comparable school which had had no change in the environment,” she writes. “Hands-on learning outdoors made learning fun and engaging for everyone, but particularly benefited underachievers. We found that children who didn’t interact much in the classroom setting were more pro-active and participated more in their outdoor sessions.” Read about the project in The Conversation. Hundreds of Bus Stops Turned Into Bee Sanctuaries: The …