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Will Hulu finally be sold? Things are certainly looking that way. Over the last few weeks everyone from Yahoo to TimeWarner has been kicking the tires of the TV and movie streaming service that’s owned by a trio of Hollywood studios--Disney, Fox, and NBCUniversal. And with increasing dissent among those studios as to what to do with Hulu, it seems like only a matter of time before a deal is worked out. Although a number of strategic options are being considered, one source told Fast Company that “Someone will buy them. The partners are motivated to be done with it.”

That motivation has been there for some time--Hulu was also put on the block in 2011--and underlines the tension that has always existed between the company and its Hollywood parents. Even as the service has thrived, building up an audience of over 4 million subscribers to its Hulu Plus service and generating nearly $700 million in revenue in 2012, Hulu’s corporate owners have seen it as a threat to their core businesses. Seven hundred million is impressive, sure, but the tens of billions of dollars that Fox et al. pull in cable subscriptions and TV ad dollars is even more so. In a feature about Hulu that I wrote last year about the company I delved into that tension and how it played out--basically a simmering, years-long battle between former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and the Hollywood suits, the ones from Fox in particular. It was the hot-headed, digital entrepreneur who (as Hollywood saw it) wanted the studios’ content for free versus stodgy, network traditionalists who were clinging to dying models.

With Kilar gone, Hulu is without its Napoleon. A sale seems the likeliest exit strategy. Though given Hulu’s roller-coaster history (an IPO was explored then scrapped back in 2010), and the partners’ discomfort over committing to long-term licensing deals for their content (which is why the former sale talks broke down), whatever happens, there’s sure to be drama.

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Merel Karhof has been using the breeze as muse for years, finding new ways to spin airflow into creative gold. Most notable, perhaps, is the London-based designer’s Wind Knitting Machine, which united a metal mill and loom to make one-of-a-kind scarves. Her ongoing Energy Harvesters series (I, II, III, and IV) underscores her continued fascination with the invisible force. And her latest project, a furniture collection, is not only ingenious but it’s the most ambitious yet.

Karhof sited the project in the historic Zaanse Schans region of the Netherlands, an industrial milling hub dating back almost 300 years. These days, it provides a stark glimpse back at the traditions that helped establish the region. On-site, Karhos harnessed whooshing gales and used original, still-functioning machinery in a three-fold process to make the furniture: a sawmill cut the wood that provided the structure for each piece, a color mill ground the pigment used to dye the yarn, and Karhof’s own knitting machine transformed those colored fibers into mini pillows to upholster the stools, benches, and seats. And much like she did with the scarves, whose length corresponded to time it took to make, each cushion is sized relative to how long it took to produce.

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Rich Brilliant Willing was formed in 2007 with the goal of uniting the oft disparate worlds of design and manufacturing from a fully equipped, Brooklyn-based studio and workshop. In the following six years, RBW’s founding trio of RISD grads--Charles Brill, Theo Richardson, and Alex Williams--have produced thoughtful lighting and furniture that have established their reputation as a design force.

“A design is a concept,” Brill explains in the first of our Making It video series. “There’s a series of problems or issues that we resolve into a finished product.” As technological advancements continue to evolve the relationship designers have with their finished collections, RBW remains committed to keeping hands-on from start to finish. Getting the inner workings--or “guts”--of a particular piece isn’t exactly as glamorous as refining the aesthetics and sculptural exterior, but it offers them the opportunity to develop both aspects concurrently.

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On May 10, researchers at the Mauna Loa Observatory, an atmospheric monitoring facility, sounded the alarm that carbon dioxide levels in the air had now passed 400 parts per million, an arbitrary marker, but signifying the rapidly growing share of the atmosphere that carbon dioxide is claiming--and getting climate change back into the public debate.

In light of that ignominious achievement, commentators are revisiting what exactly that means for a global population of 7 billion humans, who weren’t around 3 million years ago, the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and a time of zero arctic ice, higher ocean levels, and much hotter weather. The Guardian spoke with climate change expert Lord Nicholas Stern, who issued some severe warnings about what the future could look like, assuming nothing changes.

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Ugh. Just when you kinda sorta started to get a handle on the wide world of wine, along comes another new liquid metric for how cosmopolitan you really are (or aren’t): coffee. The variety is daunting. The differences are minute. This graphic should at least help with one subsection of the catalog.

Exceptional Expressions of Espresso, the latest from Pop Chart Lab, is a lovely visual guide to 23 espresso drinks, or, in their words, "a world tour of the purest form of coffee." Feel free to borrow that description the next time you’re on a coffee date.

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There seems to be no shortage to experiments with fresh building materials these days: algae buildings, homes built from shipping pallets, 3-D printed houses, and grow-as-you-go 3-D printed houses. Next up, body armor.

Or, rather, precisely coded and manufactured pieces of aluminum, pieced together into body armor. Architect Marc Fornes, who has experimented with creating code-generated physical structures in the past, is scaling down for his next exhibit and building human-sized sculptures instead of buildings.

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Last August, citing fears of "public disorder," Russian courts banned gay pride parades in Moscow for the next 100 years. With help from M&C Saatchi Stockholm, you can join Swedes in protesting this ridiculous ruling. Urge Russians to attend Stockholm Pride, where everybody is welcome. Visit the #GoWest website, where you can send a protest tweet in Russian. Your tweet will appear to be sent from inside Russia, in hopes of making the topic trend there. Go be a cyber spy for equality.

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World leaders like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad take such aggressive policies toward the press, they might as well be giving the public the finger (in Assad’s case, the murdering dictator part surely doesn’t help, either).

That’s the message of a campaign by the French non-profit Journalists Without Borders. A series of large, black and white photos, posted around Paris in celebration of World Press Freedom Day, depicts autocratic leaders digitally altered to be flipping the bird.

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A couple weeks ago, Lars von Trier revealed the cheeky poster for his forthcoming, highly anticipated and feared film, Nymphomaniac. Now, the director who doesn’t know how to be anything other than controversial has released a promotional photo for the film that fills in some of the gaps in viewers’ imaginations left by its minimalist predecessor.

In the new image, the entire cast is arranged around a movie set, looking like dolls splayed about a dollhouse. Shia LaBeouf is once again shirtless and laying near an overtly phallic fruit plate. Uma Thurman appears to be showing off the contents of her dress to the ever-chilly Udo Kier, while Christian Slater and LVT-muse Charlotte Gainsbourg enact a similar exhibition, only with Slater creepily lathering up a soap bucket.

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The cover for the Beastie Boys’ debut album, License To Ill, perfectly encapsulated the group’s subversive M.O. It showed a sleek plane with the Beasties’ logo on the tail--a nod to Led Zeppelin’s preferred mode of travel during the heyday of rockstar excess in the early '70s--but only after opening the gatefold did you see the punchline: the plane had just smashed into a cliff.

"That was our kind of sense of humor," explains David Gamble, AKA World B. Omes, who painted the iconic cover in 1986. Gamble’s just one of many artists and designers interviewed in this month’s Juxtapoz, a special issue dedicated to all the compelling art that helped propel the trio’s career. In the clip below, you can hear a bit about the work from the artists themselves.

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Bad news for surfers: Climate change could reduce wave heights in a quarter of the world’s ocean. Smaller waves: less fun.

According to new research, waves could fall 10% in the Atlantic, or an average of 0.9-1.3 feet, and they might fall 5% on the Pacific side.

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Ordinarily, it’s the characters in scary movies who are being haunted, but with the latest from The Ring producer, Neal Edelstein, it’s the audience’s turn. Pieces of his new film are set to emerge on viewers’ mobile devices at unpredictable times, like restless spirits returning from the grave.

Haunting Melissa is a scarily playful, thoroughly modern experiment with the media through which horror stories are delivered. The new film was made to be viewed over time, via an app on iPhone, iPad, or iPod. What’s more intriguing than the distribution method, however, is the schedule. The first installment is available on May 16, but viewers will never know when subsequent segments drop, or how long they’ll run. It’s a viewing experience designed specifically for the person who is pathologically glued to a smartphone, forever awaiting fresh intelligence to tumble forth.

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Bribes are a way of life in India, where 54% of residents reported in 2009 that they had paid bribes in the past year. No one is immune. While getting ready for an anti-corruption conference in Brazil, former law student Sreerupa Chowdhury found herself waiting an unnervingly long time for her visa. After the World Bank, a sponsor of the anti-corruption forum, contacted local authorities, her visa was delivered within a day. Presumably the holdup was because officials were waiting for a bribe.

Chowdhury is the co-founder of Bribe-Hackers, a new Calcutta-based organization that just received $20,000 from the World Justice Project’s Roderick B. Mathews Opportunity Fund competition to combat bribery in India. She has long been passionate about bribery in her country, where she says "nothing gets done without a bribe." So Chowdhury and fellow law school graduate Monalisa Saha launched Bribe-Hackers--an online platform for people to both report bribes to the general public and take action against the offending parties.

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1. 11 Of The World’s Hottest Bikes
Co.Design
Check out some of the most creative and unique bikes out today--love that wood bike by Jan Gunneweg.

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Foursquare cofounder and CEO Dennis Crowley has spent the better half of a decade rethinking the intersection of social and local. His startup has arguably brought "checking in" to the mainstream more than any other service, but now, he's imagining new ways to simplify the process--so we're no longer tied to yanking out our smartphones and manually telling the world where we are. At this year's SXSW, Crowley sat down with Fast Company to talk about how wearable technology like Google Glass could change the way we interact with the world around us.

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The great thing about having good cameras on our smartphones isn’t necessarily that we can take pictures whenever the inspiration strikes. It’s that we can take a picture at one moment and beam them out to the world in the next. The convergence of cell phones and cameras has effectively set our snapshots free; today, we don’t shoot for our own collections so much as we do for the grand public galleries in the cloud, places like Instagram and Facebook, where our photos can actually be enjoyed by others.

With DSLRs and point-and-shoots, we still don’t have that luxury. With those pieces of gear, technically superior though they may be, we shoot, we dump onto our computers, we meticulously archive--and then what? Whether you’re dragging files into folders and subfolders and subfolders inside of those by hand, or letting iPhoto do the work for you, the sad outcome is often the same: Many of those photos just end up sitting there gathering digital dust on our hard drives (or, worse yet, on our external hard drives, where we can’t even click across them serendipitously). Eternal Light gives them new life.

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We love to exalt changemakers. The social entrepreneur, the impact investor, the innovator--but the bravest changemaker of all turns out to be the most controversial: the immigrant.

Here in the United States, the current cap for family- or employer-sponsored visas per country of origin is just 25,620--the same number for Belgium or New Zealand as it is for China or India. There are hundreds of millions who want to move but can’t because their countries’ quotas get filled up year after year. That’s a shame, because there’s so much potential for change just waiting to be unleashed behind those quota walls.
If everyone who wanted to move to another country could do so, the effect of could be worth trillions more dollars in global GDP, according to a growing movement of economists. Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, compiled much of that research in a 2011 paper. In it, he proposes a thought experiment to convey a sense of what’s at stake:

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In the summer of 1970, several of rock’s biggest names--The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band--set out on a tour across Canada aboard a train dubbed the Festival Express. It was a somewhat eccentric mode of transportation, even for the time, since most performers traveled by bus or plane, but somehow an apropos choice for this merry collection of jam bands, folk rock groups, and blues musicians.

The festival was doomed from the start. Their first scheduled stop in Montreal was cancelled just weeks before the event because city officials feared violent uprisings--a concern that turned out to be more than just administrative paranoia. Days later, as the first performance finally got underway in Toronto, the festival was met with riots over the outrageous $14 ticket price. News of the fiasco would follow them for the rest of the concert tour, spreading from city to city, and it became apparent that the Festival Express was going to be one big money sinkhole.

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Although far less fearsome when they wear clothes, plenty of wild animals have the capacity to kill. While likely to be dispatched by razor-sharp claws or rows of bone-shredding teeth, humans who wander into the domain of apex predators can also be victims of their own lack of information. Now, the health and wellness blog Hella Wella is trying to drive that problem into extinction.

Hella Wella is mostly known for offering remedies and recipes, not teaching survivalism, but staying healthy sometimes involves a manic, instantaneous decision, rather than a series of smart health choices over the course of one’s life. Advice on dodging deadly critters fits neatly into their jurisdiction. Each animal covered in the survival guide is rated with a danger level, along with a listing of some preventative ideas on avoiding attack, and how to come out of one intact. Best of all, the advice is doled out in the cheeky style of the website, so that users might find themselves laughing while tucking away some info that may potentially help them survive.

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Name: Cole Wilson
Role at Fast Company: Director Of Editorial Relations. Cole played an essential role in putting together our 2013 list of 100 Most Creative People in business, which we just released on Monday. Check it out, and if you have any questions, Cole is your go-to.
Twitter: @magicoley
Titillating fact: Cole had a very short stint as a video game producer. When actresses wouldn't show up for production, Cole would often have to sub for them. She spent many a day in a CGI bodysuit, acting as a range of characters including (but not limited to) a prostitute and a police officer.

Things she's loving:

1. BABS
Enough about Benghazi, the IRS scandal, and the need for immigration reform! Barbara Walters is leaving The View, people. I couldn't believe Alessandra Stanley's strong, smart comprehensive look at Baba Wawa's career in the New York Times wasn't loved on by the Internets; I found it to be totally on point and illuminating.
 
Stanley does a great job congratulating Barbara on her intuitiveness by tracking her career trajectory with larger industry and cultural trends (i.e., first moving from evening broadcast to daytime television, the ongoing and increasing lack of viewer interest in network television, more and more programming moving to the Internet) and concludes it "didn’t seem as if Ms. Walters had grown too old to keep working; it seemed as if the television legend had decided that the medium was too old to contain her drive."  You go, Barbara!

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Millions of people lack access to safe water--and some don’t have water at all. When wells and lakes dry up, or natural disaster strikes, they are forced to rely on truck deliveries, or air-drops.

Ben Cohen watched the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and wondered if there was another way to get supplies to people. "They had water, but not an efficient way of getting it to people," he says. "Pipelines are the most efficient method of getting fluids to people, so we thought 'how can we rapidly install a pipeline?'"

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Some say that slapping calorie counts on menus effectively helps consumers decide whether to have fries with that. Others (guess who) argue that those assessments are faulty; that there’s just “not enough science” to link, say, sugary foods to obesity, or even that such mandates--in the case of calorie labeling, signed into law by President Obama a few years back--are a breach of the marketplace by overreaching politicians.

For photographer Henry Hargreaves, there’s plenty of blame to go around. His new photo essay, “Burning Calories,” takes a literal approach to handling the thorny caloric issue: Burn it all to hell.

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Despite their reputation as the ocean’s most deadly creature, sharks may have to cede that title to a creature that doesn’t even live there--humans. Consider the following facts: sharks kill just a handful of humans every year. Humans, on the other hand, kill tens of thousands of sharks every hour, or about 100 million per year, as a study published this March revealed.

That information is convincingly displayed in an infographic collaboration between content marketer Joe Chernov and the design studio Ripetungi. According to the project’s page, many of the sharks are killed through the gruesome process of "finning"--where fishermen hunt a shark, detach its fin, and discard the rest of the body in the ocean. Finning has only increased in recent years to fuel the demand, mostly in China, for shark fin soup, a traditional delicacy.

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In the mid-'60s, the animal behavior expert, autism sufferer, and all-around genius, Temple Grandin, created the "hug box." The device was a response to what she knew about her condition: enveloping pressure, like a hug, calmed her. But she didn’t like anyone too close. The box, which she used until about 2008, was a v-shaped space created from two boards covered with fake fur and rubber. Grandin would get inside, and increase the squeeze, sometimes staying a long time.

"At age 18, I constructed the squeeze machine to help calm down the anxiety and panic attacks," she later wrote. "Using the machine for 15 minutes would reduce my anxiety for up to 45-60 minutes. The relaxing effect was maximized if the machine was used twice a day."

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If someone collapsed in front of you, would you know what to do? Lifesaver, a new crisis simulator for smartphones, tablets, and PCs that combines interactivity with live-action film, just launched in the U.K. to enable members of the public to help should they encounter one of the 60,000 people in the country who have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest each year.

Fewer than 10% of those who arrest in public places or at home survive, according to medical charity Resuscitation Council (UK), producer of the official U.K. guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) followed by the U.K.'s National Health Service and first aid charities. Yet a bystander able to start CPR can double a person’s chances of survival.

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