This shopping cart attachment lets you compare the food miles on your purchases in a way that's quick, easy to interpret, and less complicated than the self-checkout. That is cool as hell! Also, this demonstration video, which was made for a conference, is a complete hoot. (I am a sucker for a British accent, though.)

Enough people thought this was a good idea that the ad made it into print. How did this ad meeting go? "We need to convince the youth to buy giant boat-cars." "Okay, tell them bikes will cockblock them." "Perfect, let's call it a day." Nice work, Don Draper. GM has clearly been getting a lot of blowback for this ad, which presents biking as an embarrassment so profound you'll want to hide your face from the sight of pretty girls. They've been falling over themselves to apologize on their Twitter feed. It's tough for them! Reality sucks, guys.  

Start getting accustomed to nothing and jelly sandwiches, Fluffernothings, and Reese's Nothing Cups. Record temperatures and droughts are projected to drive the price of peanut butter through the roof, with wholesale costs going up by as much as 40 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. The heat has made the peanut crop less than impressive, so fewer peanuts are being deemed worthy of butterfication. Inferior legumes get made into peanut oil, so peanut farmers aren't completely screwed. But the weather's been a disaster, so a much smaller percentage of the crop is being deemed edible. That means your ants …

West Philadelphia High School has a dropout rate of more than 50 percent, and 85 percent of students are low-income. But instead of making trouble in their neighborhood, getting in one little fight, or even shooting some B-ball outside of the school, a team of 15 dedicated West Philly students built a badass hybrid car that gets 160 miles to the gallon. Then they entered it in a contest where it beat the pants off cars built by fancy Ivy League engineers. The West Philly Hybrid X Team was the only high school team entered in last year's Progressive Insurance …

Here's Bill McKibben speaking at an Occupy Wall Street "mic check," where the crowd repeats back everything he says and acts as a sort of human-powered amplifier. The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way. The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they …

The Fortune 500 CEOs who make up the president's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness are all about building Keystone XL, reinstating deepwater drilling in the Gulf, and fracking up West Virginia. The idea is that these projects will create jobs and economic growth, at least until there's a disaster of some sort that economically depresses an area for an indefinite period of time. But come on, what are the chances of that? Sure, research out of Cornell says Keystone XL in particular could kill more jobs than it creates, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it will "support 250,000 …

The Washington Post reports that the USDA's nutrition guidelines are seriously out of step with food subsidies. The government recommends people eat fruits and veggies as nearly half their daily intake, and protein as less than a quarter -- but they subsidize meat in totally different proportions. We whipped up this little graphic to compare what they think people should eat with what they encourage farmers to produce.

Wired has posted a series of photos of seed vaults, storage units that bank tens of thousands of seeds in an attempt to preserve biodiversity against threats of extinction and climate change, and we can safely say they're the creepiest way of ensuring that species survive. This is some mad-science stuff! The Svalbard Seed Vault, for example, is housed practically at the North Pole, is built to be impervious to terror attacks, and has been compared to a Bond villain's lair. Wired calls it "the world’s insurance policy against botanical holocaust." The vaults hold tens of thousands of seeds, in a bid …

The planet is kind of amazing sometimes. Researchers have discovered plumes of fresh water at the bottom of the Dead Sea, deeper than any previous plumes that had been found. And around the plumes: life. Even though most microbes that live in salt die in fresh water and vice versa, some tough little buggers are hanging on in a space where salinity shifts constantly. The top of the springs’ rocks are covered with green biofilms, which use both sunlight and sulfide -- naturally occurring chemicals from the springs -- to survive. Exclusively sulfide-eating bacteria coat the bottoms of the rocks …

Here's a bike that runs on biogas from human poo, writes messages in the air, plays music, and features a talking toilet. Is it even worth making jokes about this? Is it even POSSIBLE? The bike is made by Japanese toilet manufacturer TOTO, and thankfully it does not appear to be headed for mass production -- it's a publicity tool to help TOTO raise environmental awareness. The company hopes its green initiatives will help reduce CO2 emissions in bathrooms by 50 percent by 2017 (no word on methane emissions). The bike is intended to draw attention to these environmental goals, …