Space shuttle Discovery at its final launch, looking awesome and polluting like crazyPhoto: NASA Yesterday's final launch of the space shuttle Discovery provided some amazing images, and probably made a few of us look wistfully at the sky and think of space panoramas (or in my case space poop and space laundry, because I just read Packing for Mars). But even though astronauts report that gazing down at Earth makes them feel more tender and caring about their fragile planet, it's probably best for everyone if the rest of us remain on the ground. Even if space tourism becomes affordable …

  Here's what needs to happen for electric cars to become the new industry standard: They need to be seen as sexier, manlier, and more upscale than original fossil-fuel flavor. We know, we know, but don't shoot the messenger. Fortunately, Rolls Royce is now making inroads into the last one (and maybe the first) by unveiling a new electric car. The Rolls-Royce 102EX, also known as the Phantom Experimental Electric, will be used as part of a pilot project to test the future of EVs with the car company's core drivers. If it goes into production, this will be one …

Image: DesertXPressDesertXpress, a planned high-speed rail project between the L.A. area and Las Vegas, was supposed to be built entirely with private funding. As it turns out, developers will have to take out a federal loan, and there's some question as to whether the project can make enough money to pay it back. But this is a rail line that will reduce the travel time between the L.A. area and Vegas by more than half, shrinking the 190-mile trip to less than an hour and a half. Pretty cool. That barely allows you time to sleep off your drunk on …

Image: JMS BoggioPaul LePage, governor of Maine, is pretty confident that nothing can harm him as long as he doesn't know sh*t about dick. Here's his scientific assessment of the dangers of plastic additive bisphenol A: "Quite frankly, the science that I'm looking at says there is no [problem]," LePage said. "There hasn't been any science that identifies that there is a problem." LePage then added: "The only thing that I've heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the …

Itakeskus underground swimming complexPhoto: Lewis Martin From the country that brought you the world's spookiest children's series, please meet the underground city. Helsinki, Finland's capital, has decided to defeat sprawl by building down instead of out. Incised into the city's bedrock are a swimming pool, a shopping area, a church, a hockey rink, and a data center, not to mention "parking caverns" and a bunch of the city's necessary municipal doodads. An underground shadow city! Seriously, you guys, how is it possible for Finland to be so creepy and cool? Some of the benefits here are obvious -- it reduces …

Are you looking for something to flagellate yourself over? Carbon footprints are last week's news: The new hot subject for self-recrimination is your nitrogen footprint. According to the International Nitrogen Initiative, your nitrogen consumption is contributing to a host of environmental ills: Today, reactive nitrogen has dramatically increased in our air and water. It comes primarily from agricultural activities such as fertilizer use and manure runoff, and the burning of fossil fuels. This "nitrogen pollution" causes profound environmental impacts, including smog, acid rain, forest dieback, coastal ‘dead zones', biodiversity loss, stratospheric ozone depletion and increased greenhouse gases. It also affects …

Do you have sick tricks, some kind of awesome human-powered art vehicle, or just a great story to tell about a bike? Then you should submit a short film to the 2011 Bicycle Film Festival, an international, multi-city push to showcase the cultural significance of biking. To get inspired, watch BFF's compilation video of films from the past 10 years of the festival: Put together your own 10-minute Bike of Frankenstein, The Bike-Fast Club, or A Street Bike Named Desire, and submit it by April 1, 2011 for a chance to get screened in some of the festival's 27 cities.

Photo: Stefan KlooIf you look under "irony" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Rush Limbaugh calling Michelle Obama fat. But that's just what he did on Monday on his colonic irrigation of a radio show. Let's take this piece by piece, because there is too much stupid to swallow without chewing. "The problem is, and dare I say this, it doesn't look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice," Limbaugh said Monday on his radio program. "And then we hear that she's out eating ribs at 1,500 calories a serving with 141 grams of fat per serving." …

The U.K.'s greenest, cutest town. Image: Red Tree (2004) LLPCharles, the prince of Wales, is building the U.K.'s greenest town. We know what you're thinking, because we've seen Hot Fuzz too: It's important to be suspicious of British villages that look too good to be true. But Sherford, a planned eco-town that was just approved for construction in southwestern England, has a lot going for it. It won't be finished until 2020, so we don't know yet if it'll be secretly full of armed grannies, but on paper at least it's pretty cool. The activist formerly known as Prince: You'd …

Photo: Alexander KaiserWouldn't it be awesome if we could solve our waste problem and our fuel problem simultaneously, by turning one into the other? Okay, we're nowhere near the stage where you can just scrape your plate into your car, but there are an increasing number of procedures for turning useless crap into fuel. Most recently, students at Oklahoma State University devised a way to turn waste soda into ethanol. The basic operation is pretty simple. The students used samples of Pepsi, Coke, Sprite and Mountain Dew, to which they added a standard distiller's yeast along with extra nutrients. With …