One of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers thinks the key to the best flying experience might come from green technology and is hoping that the next generation of scientists will discover it.

On Friday Airbus announced the winner of its biennial Fly Your Ideas challenge, a competition that encouraged college students to brainstorm and sell their ideas on innovative and green improvements to the airplane industry.

“We want to fly at the minimum cost and also in a more environmentally friendly approach. This is why we do the initiative: to look at future endeavors and develop a vision,” said Charles Champion, the executive vice president of engineering at Airbus. “It’s a means to engage the generation of students today in order to make them part of the solution and engage them in awareness around aviation.”

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea might well be the most repressive totalitarian regime on earth, consigning two thirds of its nearly 25 million citizens to malnutrition, starvation, or worse, and 200,000 of its political undesirables to concentration camps, where human-rights groups estimate that 400,000 people have died from torture, executions, disease, and other causes.

But it is also, believe it or not, a delightfully fascinating tourist destination.

That, anyway, is the sales pitch of Andrea Lee, whose Fort Lee, N.J.-based Uri Tours is one of a handful of Western travel agencies with access to the planet’s most isolated pariah nation, which has been ruled for nearly seven decades by the bizarre and belligerent Kim family dynasty.

Troubadours strumming their guitars on street corners. Breakdancers flipping around subway poles. Magicians pulling reluctant passersby into their juggling tricks. Whether viewed as an earsore or a vibrant addition to urban life, street entertainers have been a constant presence in major cities all over the world.  And, as all metropolis dwellers know, they run the full gamut of talent. But every once in awhile you stumble across buskers who are so incredible you wonder why they’re on a street corner and not headlining a world tour.

In Portugal, a group of three friends are preparing to set out on a 100-day, 20-country, social-media fueled search to discover the best of the best of these largely unknown street artists. The project, called “Hello Europe,” was started last summer, when friends Guilherme Duarte, Ivo Tavares, and João Mendes decided they had grown tired of their day jobs (as a software engineer, chef, and product designer, respectively). “I really started to feel an urge to change my life, to try other things and find my way,” the 28-year-old Duarte says. “We started thinking about what would make us happy.”

The three decided they wanted to create a project that would give them an opportunity to travel. While brainstorming, they realized each had spent a good chunk of time photographing and videoing street artists. A few years before, Duarte remembers, he and Tavares watched a performer in Amsterdam climb a lamppost while juggling a soccer ball, and the group ended up playing a pick-up match on the street. It was a moment they always remembered, and it contributed to their decision to focus the project on promoting Europe’s most talented street artists, who generally receive little recognition. “We see life with the same eyes,” Duarte says of his co-founders.

We stop for lunch on a sandy, shallow bend in the river in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, overlooked by a pair of curious buffalo. As our boat, the Lily, bobs in the water, our guide suggests a swim. What, in this crocodile-infested river? “We’ve swum here before,” he says, “and we’ve never lost anyone yet.” My two sons—Hugo and Thomas, ages ten and thirteen—are champing at the bit.

I imagine how this will look if it goes wrong: He allowed his children to do what? But I remember all the times as a kid I swam in the Savé River in Zimbabwe—which probably has a higher croc count, to say nothing of bilharzia—so I cave. The boys leap off the Lily into the water. Up on the observation deck, I stand solemn sentinel.

The last thing the world needs is a new outbreak of fear of flying. But that is the unhappy consequence of a spat between James Fallows of The Atlantic and Hugo Lindgren, editor of The New York Times magazine.

Fallows and others pounced on an essay in the magazine by Noah Gallagher Shannon with the attention-getting headline “The Plane Was About to Crash. Now What?”

Shannon’s white-knuckle prose described circling over Philadelphia for two hours to burn off gas because the pilots believed the landing gear was jammed and they would have to make a belly landing.