Mac Bishop knows that entrepreneurs need to take risks. So, as the founder of Wool&Prince, he wore the prototype of the company's button-down shirt for 100 straight days:

Each day I attempted to wrinkle and odorize the shirt, but to no avail. In a couple of the more intense tests, such as the five mile runs, I was worried that the shirt wouldn’t revive itself. The entire shirt was damp with sweat and soaked in the pits, chest, and collar. I hung it up over night, said a little prayer, and woke to a fresh shirt in the morning. I’m dead serious. Try it yourself. I put cotton shirts and a synthetic shirt through the same test and the stench was unbearable. Some crazy science stuff going on here.

First of all, ew. Second of all, Wool&Prince hasn't released many details on the “crazy science stuff” behind this miracle. Well, there’s this:

Energy efficiency is one of those unfortunate ideas that's so, so useful and also so, so boring and hard to get people excited about. Most people, given the choice between solar panels and well-insulated walls, will choose to spend their money on solar panels, because they're cool.

But La Plate-forme Maison Passive has managed what I never thought possible. It's made energy efficiency sexy -- so sexy it needed multiple dildos as props:

New York City’s white-footed mice live in the city's parks and wooded areas, but they’re no country mice. They deal with all the dangers of urban living, like disease, pollution, and overcrowding. And as it turns out, the mice may actually be evolving in response to their urban lifestyle.

Scientist Jason Munshi-South wanted to figure out if the pressures of city living had caused the mice to evolve, Carl Zimmer writes at National Geographic. So he caught a bunch, sequenced their genes, and compared them to the genes of their rural cousins.

He and his colleagues found, Zimmer reports, a "handful of genes that evolved due to natural section." And some of them seem to have evolved in response to the pressures of city life:

Bas Lansdorp, the co-founder of Mars One, believes there are at least 500,000 people on Earth who'd like a one-way ticket to Mars. He might be right. Three days ago, his company opened up applications for its first project, which aims to send four people to Mars in 2023 as a "permanent human settlement,” and already 20,000 people have thrown their names into the hat. Don’t they know they’re all going to go crazy and kill each other?

Here's what's required for Round 1:

The online application consists of general information about the applicant, a motivational letter, a resume and a one minute video in which the applicant answers some given questions and explains why he or she should be among the first humans who set foot on Mars. At this stage the potential candidates can submit their application in one of the 11 most used languages on Internet: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Indonesian, Chinese Mandarin, Japanese, Korean.

Here's the list of qualifications the company's looking for. They include resiliency (“you are at your best when things are at their worst” -- yyyyyyep), adaptability, and ability to trust. (They say that means, "You trust in yourself and maintain trust in others." But it possibly also means "trust that you're not going to die immediately or in some terribly Hobbesian way alone on a distant planet.") You also have to pay $38.

We have seen a lot of solar chargers in our day. And among all of them, this is the first one we've seen that we will definitely run out and buy as soon as it's made available in the U.S. It's a portable socket that gets its power from the sun rather than the grid. You plug into a window instead of into the wall. It's easy.

That was the whole point, according to the designers, Kyohu Song and Boa Oh: "We tried to design a portable socket, so that users can use it intuitively without special training," they write.

It is really simple. The portable socket attaches to a window like a leech to human skin. On its underside, it has solar panels:

Next time you find yourself drunk at a festival, instead of finding an isolated patch of grass to pee on, consider the public tower of straw that turns your pee into plant-friendly compost.

I refer to L'Uritonnoir.

Yes, it is French.

But also, it is quite clever.

In 1958, Charles Keeling began measuring the the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Decades later, scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory are still measuring, creating "the world's longest unbroken record" of that data. They're the ones responsible for the upkeep of this famous graph:

It must be kind of terrifying to track carbon concentrations on a daily basis as they tick slowly upwards. And sometimes when you're watching something depressing, you just have to share it. So the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is in charge of the research, is posting the daily measurements on Twitter, so we can see the concentrations rise and fall with the seasons -- while, over the course of years, getting worse and worse and worse.

Josh Fox's 2010 documentary Gasland alerted legions of people to the dangers of fracking and helped grow the movement against the drilling technique, which has created a natural-gas bonanza in many parts of the U.S. Now Fox is back with a sequel, Gasland Part II, that premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

The new film begins much like its predecessor: Shots of politicians alternate with shots of the forest, dripping wet with fresh rain. Fox introduces himself, his home, and his problem: A gas company wants to frack his land and the land around it. But the sequel tells a different kind of story from the first film, and Fox plays a different part.

When Fox first started this project five years ago, he was an avant-garde theater writer and director. After his family received an offer from a gas company to lease his land, he spun his own questions about fracking into a powerful investigative film. Now, three years after Gasland became a sensation, he's one of the leading activists in the fight against fracking.

In the years between Fox’s two films, that fight has intensified. Big environmental groups (like the Sierra Club) that once worked with the natural gas industry started pushing back against fracking. The Obama administration strengthened its support for the development of natural gas resources. New York keeps delaying its decision on whether to allow fracking; Pennsylvania keeps letting the industry get away with doing pretty much whatever it wants. Whether to frack or not is no longer a good-faith policy debate. The two sides are engaged in “a war for who was going to tell this story,” as Fox puts it, and it’s escalating.

It's World Penguin Day!

We are fans of penguins. We do not want them to go extinct. Because look at all the things they do for us:

They fall down:

They play iPad games:

They bite Newt Gingrich.

So here are a few ways to celebrate:

With your lifelong partner:

Score one for mass transit: When your car breaks down, you're stuck on the side of the road, all by your lonesome. When your train breaks down, if you're lucky, you're stuck in a train car with a French winemaker who happens to have all the makings of a wine tasting at hand.

Washingtonian reports:

[W]inemaker Paul Goldschmidt, owner of Chateau Siaurac … was en route to DC for a special wine-tasting event at Calvert Woodley on Connecticut Avenue. The wine store had earlier sent out an announcement boasting of his visit as “what promises to be one of the most exciting in-store tasting events of the entire season.” It called Goldschmidt’s wines “stunning.” It was scheduled for 5 to 7 PM, but of course the time came and went and with no winemaker. He was trapped on a train.