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Stockbox, a new Seattle startup that was recently funded on Kickstarter, is bringing fresh food to a place where it takes 45 minutes to get to the nearest grocery store. According to the USDA , 23 million Americans live in “ food deserts ”--areas without ready access to fresh, affordable, and healthy food.

* Explorers find pipes, twine from doomed 1845 expedition * Franklin, 128 men died trying to find Northwest Passage [More]

In Moby Duck , Donovan Hohn tracks the fate of 28,000 plastic bath toys (“rubber” ducks, frogs, turtles and beavers) across the Northwest Coast to their origins in China and even through the North West Passage. But how did these bath toys come to be spread on the shores of Alaska, Washington, Hawaii and Russia? On January 10th 1992, the Ever Laurel, a large container cargo ship, was caught in a storm in the North Pacific with severe waves rolling her from side to side.

India is running out of water for crops. Most of the water-intensive agriculture in the nation takes place in Punjab, a state in the northwest that makes up 2 percent of the country’s territory but provides more than 50 percent of its grain reserves. Farmers there currently pump out 45 percent more groundwater than is replenished by monsoon rains