Maddie Mitton never dreamed that she’d be serving coffee and meals to strangers.

“I had a lot of problems with insecurity so looking people in the eye was really hard,” Mitton said on Monday.

Mitton lives with a host of mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder.

A lab-produced chicken product created by a small startup company in downtown Edmonton is expected to be ready to serve within five years.

Future Fields, a three-person company that launched a year and a half ago, is hoping to break through in the growing cultured meat industry by producing chicken products in a lab rather than the traditional farm in order to meet the growing demand for protein.

The urban built environment isn't always accommodating to those who have nowhere else to go after the sun sets and temperatures plummet. Increasingly, urban design can be downright hostile to those sleeping on the streets.

This winter, however, the Swedish capital of Stockholm is offering a brilliant and big-hearted antidote to a sweep of anti-homeless "defensive design" tactics popping up in both European and American cities. To be clear, Stockholm isn't making special accommodations to those who find themselves hunkering down on park benches and on sidewalks — rough sleepers, as they're often referred. But it is transforming another ubiquitous street-side fixture, the digital billboard, into a helpful tool for getting city's homeless population indoors in frigid weather.

Mustamäe, one of the 8 administrative districts of Tallinn, has already a robot delivery service. At the moment the robots are working on an area of just few square kilometers because the robots move at the same pace as pedestrians, but the goal is to soon cover the entire city and later on the entire country as well. The robots can carry up to 10 kilograms, enough for a few bags of shopping. The delivery fee is 1.5 Euros per delivery.

A sculpture made of abstract glass pieces glows on a platform at the entrance of The Forge, the name the smart-tech startup Pillar uses for its space on the edge of Downtown.

“We ask people to say what it is. What do you see?” said Bob Myers, who is managing director of Pillar, an Accenture Industry X.0 company. “There are no wrong answers.”

The sculpture is supposed to activate left-brain thinking, spurring creative and innovative ideas on projects completed at the smart-tech hub, he said.

“When people come into The Forge, we want a no-constraints frame of mind. It doesn’t mean that there’s not restraints. Let’s just not start there,” Myers said.

One of the pillars of the success of the Brainport region is cooperation. Cooperation in chains between networks of suppliers and OEMs and cooperation in the multi helix to create the optimal conditions for successful companies and groundbreaking innovations. And yet, at the start of the future study of Brainport Eindhoven, the participants indicated that even more cooperation was needed, both within the region and with parties outside of it. Cooperation is crucial for the development of future generations of applications and systems. Because even more than now, everything will be connected with everything by 2038.

In most cities, the plain coloring of utility boxes blends in with the background scenery. But in Calgary, these fixtures have become three-dimensional canvases, decorated by artists to add a splash of color to the city streets.

In 2010, the city of Calgary initiated the Utility Box Public Art Program with the goal of deterring vandalism and graffiti. With the help of local artists, the plain grays and greens typical of these fixtures disappeared beneath vibrant artworks depicting everything from the local wildlife to abstract patterns. Given the boxes’ popularity among the people of Calgary, the program became permanent in 2011 and has continued to grow, engaging new partners and artists from around the city.

When is the last time you visited your local library? If it’s been a while, then you might want to take note of an initiative from Montreal’s NDG borough that’s bringing the books to you.

“It’s about promoting literacy through the book, the magical powers of the book,” said Helen Fortin, CEO and executive director of the Fraser Hickson Institute.

Fortin and her team of three have created the MINIBIBLIOplus program.