Spanish design firm Play Studios asked kids to describe what they thought cities would look like in the future, then animated the kid-rendered cities in pop-up book form. There's plenty of fantasy here, but these budding urbanists also have an eye for connected, sustainable, eco-friendly living. Check out the monorails running between buildings in Boscopolis, or the cars in Bright City that run on fallen leaves. In the making-of video, one girl says of her city, "I just wanted Alicante to have in the future more electric cars, as well as more solar panels to decrease pollution." Hey, the kids really …

What would the world be like if we could build houses out of bacteria? For starters, the story of the Three Little Pigs might have ended very differently. But biomanufactured bricks, made of a mixture of sand and non-pathogenic bacteria, could also help house people in developing countries while saving almost 800 million tons of CO2 every year. The bricks' big innovation is that they don't have to be fired. The bacteria harden the sand by inducing calcite precipitation, which basically turns the sand into sandstone. There's no heat required, and once you've made the bacterial activate, every other part …

K.C., who writes the blog A Girl and Her Bike, is a girl with a bike. She's also a District of Columbia police officer. But the second part's not so obvious when she's riding on a Capital Bikeshare bike, out of uniform and just trying to get home from work. Which is probably why some jackasses stopped behind her at a red light decided it would be fun to bump her bike with their car. At very least, they probably thought it wouldn't get them arrested. Suckers! Instead, the bumper bump turned the Girl on a Bike into a Pissed-Off Police …

The Environmental Working Group has released an updated list of the Dirty Dozen, the fruits and vegetables with the worst pesticide levels. Drumroll please: Apples Celery Strawberries Peaches Spinach Nectarines (imported) Grapes (imported) Sweet bell peppers Potatoes Blueberries (domestic) Lettuce Kale/collard greens If you can, it's worth shelling out a little extra for the organic versions of these. You can offset it by pinching your pennies on the Clean Fifteen, the produce with the lowest pesticide levels: Onions Sweet Corn Pineapples Avocado Asparagus Sweet peas Mangoes Eggplant Cantaloupe (domestic) Kiwi Cabbage Watermelon Sweet potatoes Grapefruit Mushrooms

Need at-a-glance visual evidence of that "scientific consensus on climate change" we keep talking about? Skeptical Science has put together an interactive visualization of 4,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers. You can drag the year slider around to see how research changes over time. And it gets even more interactive! The site also lets you see information about the papers, or in some cases the papers themselves -- here's the first one indexed, from 1836. Plus, you can contribute to making the crowd-sourced project more comprehensive by adding links to papers you encounter. (The whole thing is still in development, and …

I honestly didn't believe this one was for real at first. No way even KFC, purveyors of a sandwich that uses fried meat as a delivery mechanism for fried meat, would seriously market a soda size called the "mega jug." And even if they did, they'd never have the chutzpah to donate "mega jug" dollars to juvenile diabetes research. Sadly, I had totally underestimated KFC's capacity for irony. The mega jug is a half gallon of soda, and this is a real local promotion. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation defends it thus: "JDRF supports research for type 1 diabetes, an …

Men and women probably do make passes at people who use their sunglasses purchase to provide someone in the developing world with vision surgery, eye care, or glasses. Okay, the scansion needs a little work, but the point is that buy-one-give-one shoe company TOMS is expanding into eyewear, and the concept's pretty sexy, and so are the shades. There are 284 million people in the world who are visually impaired, and at least 39 million who are blind. Most blindness-causing conditions are preventable or treatable, but many people can't afford the eye care they need, or the glasses that would …

Bike lanes and bike riders may be controversial, but bikes as an image are marketing gold right now. Want to sell it? Put a bike on it! Transportation Nation found bikes for sale or used as display elements at Kate Spade, CB2, Club Monaco, Anthropologie, the Gap, Urban Outfitters, and Brooklyn Industries. Sure, those bikes are being used to move whatever consumerist crap people are hawking. But on the flip side, the consumerist crap is also kind of selling the bike. If bikes are promoted as the image of coolness all over your favorite trendy store, you might just start …

Excited about your inevitable solar panels, but concerned they'll clash with your decor? Qsolar has you covered, you fashion victim. Their colored solar panels aren't just for the roof -- they can be integrated into the design of a building as cool-looking and functional walls or (semi-transparent) windows.

Pizza magnate and Republican presidential contender Herman Cain has unveiled his plan for combating illegal immigration: a 20-foot-tall, barbed-wire-studded, electrified Great Wall of U.S., and also a moat with alligators. Man, with that kind of go-getter attitude, imagine what he could achieve! Here are our predictions for how Herman Cain would tackle climate change if he believed in it, given that his approach to solving thorny political problems is apparently to throw alligators at them. Genetically engineered sharks that kill carbon by BITING IT TO DEATH. Pit with spikes for emissions to fall into. Steel cage match between a hurricane …