We knew things were going to get weird once we found out there was a real-world Angry Bird. Now a farm in England is turning itself into live-action Farmville. For a £30 ($49) annual fee, members of MyFarm will get to weigh in on every decision made at Wimpole Estate Farm in Cambridgeshire. They'll vote on what to plant, when to harvest, what livestock to purchase, how to allocate the farm's land, which pig is the best singer, whether Brad should marry barley or amaranth, and every other choice that's critical to an agriculture/reality show hybrid. MyFarm is a project …

Between medical costs and lost productivity for parents, environmental illnesses in children cost $76.6 billion annually, says a new study in Health Affairs. That’s the cost of all illnesses that are correlated with exposure to pollutants and toxins. (Some of the associations are better-documented than others, but many -- like lead poisoning, which costs $50.9 billion annually -- are well-established.) What could we get if we weren’t spending that money? Well, you could buy a private island in the Florida keys ($18 million) and sit on it in your diamond-encrusted bra ($3 million), reading your Gutenberg Bible ($35 million) and …

Okay, normally it makes me throw up in my mouth a little to say "Mother Earth," but 16-year-old environmental activist Alec Loorz is just too cute, and he's helping to organize worldwide youth marches for the environment on Mother's Day. So the joke is inevitable. Your fault, adorable activist teen! Anyway, if you're looking for something green to do with your mom, there's probably a march in your town, and if there's not, you can start one! (Some of the marches aren't actually this Sunday, because of scheduling conflicts.) Here's the marches' raison d'etre, and if this doesn't make you pump your …

Amtrak just had its 40th birthday, and like many 40-year-olds, it is a diminished version of what it once was. It's still hanging on, and some lines have even been restored over time, in part thanks to the efforts of the National Association of Railroad Passengers (who made these maps for Greater Greater Washington). But is it any wonder more people don't take rail, when coverage has shrunk like a scrotum in a cold pool?

Presumably everybody knows the basic depressing mechanisms of natural selection: In response to a cruel and unforgiving environment, those creatures that can adapt best or are already best-suited survive to reproduce, and everyone else dies horribly. It's all red-in-tooth-and-claw-y, and humans are well out of it, right? Yeah, well, about that: Turns out that now we've become the cruel and unforgiving environment. Whoops. An article (behind a reg wall, so we'll give you the highlights) in this month's New Scientist collects the effects humanity has had on shaping our fellow creatures: Tuskless elephants: In Zambia, the proportion of tuskless female …

House Republicans are forming a coalition to talk about energy priorities. They're calling it the Guild to Load Our Business Associates with Lucre While Also Realizing Many International Net Gains, or GLOBALWARMING. Ha ha, just kidding! They're calling it the House Energy Action Team, or HEAT. WHAT? THAT IS NOT EVEN BETTER. Given that the coalition is pushing to expand oil drilling, the name is appropriate, but it's rare for politicians to be so forthright. Next we look forward to a Republican immigration task force called Force Unfamiliar Countries' Kinsmen Out For Freedom.

It's common knowledge that global warming deniers are prone to confusing climate with weather, as in this video that we posted last year but which I am embedding anyway because it's awesome. But a study in this month's Psychological Science confirms that your average schmo is more likely to believe in global climate change on unseasonably warm days than unseasonably cold ones. That's true even after controlling for political affiliation -- Democrats were more likely to believe in climate change, but the weather had an effect nearly two-thirds as strong as preexisting political commitments. "It is striking that society has …

A new Gallup poll finds that only 44 percent of those surveyed thought that today's youth would have a better life than their parents. That's worse than during the recession. In fact, it's the lowest percentage on record, for a question they've been asking since 1983. (The highest, weirdly, was in December 2001 -- 71 percent of people thought youth would be better off then, way more than in any other year. It must have been all that post-9/11 optimism.)  But the actual youth aren't feeling that dire. Among people ages 18 to 29, 57 percent thought they'd be better …

How's this for a hands-on approach to saving the natural world: When this baby hummingbird was attacked, this guy rescued it and nursed it to a healthy adulthood in a stirring montage set to a Jack Johnson tune.  The dude says: when she thought she was ready to leave (and she was) she flew off to her favorite patch of the back yard, and her instincts instantly kicked in, and now she's just like all the other hummingbirds. for those that are concerned that she has imprinted on humans and wouldn't survive in the wild, don't worry, she is thriving. …

Bush killed Osama, the president was born in Kenya, and there's no such thing as oil subsidies. Not buying it? You just need practice. If you can believe six impossible things before breakfast every day, before you know it you'll be as adept as Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, who last week told a constituent that "There are no special subsidies or tax breaks for oil companies, period." Mind you, the House GOP -- including Bishop -- just voted to extend the special subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies, shooting down a proposal that would have recouped tens of billions …