Meet your new neighbor. He's got lots of friends. (Photo by Pip R. Lagenta.)

Raccoons are going to take over the earth. Or at least move into your apartment.

OK, they probably aren’t, but that was the impression I got while watching the Nature documentary Raccoon Nation, which I caught one recent night on PBS. (You can watch it here.)

The premise of the show is that urban habitats could actually be making raccoons smarter. Omnivorous, curious, intelligent, and super-adaptable, raccoons are turning out to be really good at overcoming every challenge that people throw at them. Cities are like giant playgrounds for them, filled with puzzles that they can solve with surprising ease -- and learn from in the process.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., where I live, one family came downstairs in the morning to find a dead raccoon wedged in their silverware drawer. The resulting picture (yikes) got passed around local blogs for days. It’s a horrible image, but it got a very different reaction than a similar picture of a rat or a snake would have elicited: People felt bad for the raccoon as much as they did for the person who stumbled down for breakfast and encountered its furry corpse.

Because here’s the thing about raccoons: Unlike other animals that people encounter rummaging through their garbage, they’re freaking adorable.

Urban Roots is a documentary about farming within the city limits of Detroit, and as such, it’s a handy way to get an education on the subject in something like 90 minutes.

It's showing March 6 at the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

Solar probably won’t really take off until it makes more economic sense to slap some photovoltaics on your roof than to continue paying your utility company for their dirty, probably mostly coal-fired power. That day has arrived in parts of sunny California and Hawaii, and it's coming to (not-so-sunny) Germany by 2013, reports Michael Coren at Fast Company.

This combination bike and scooter is nominally the work of fancypants designer Philippe Starck, but that's partly because "everyone in Bordeaux, France" doesn't have as much label cachet. (More than "everyone in Normal, Illinois" or something, but still.) Before Starck got his hands on the brief for the bike, which will be part of Bordeaux's bikeshare system, the city government solicited comments from more than 300 citizens on how their ideal bike would look and function.

Via the Dish, this art installation in downtown San Francisco is the ultimate tiny house. It's seven by eight by 11 feet, and it's suspended 40 feet in the air. Plus, it’s recycled AND green: It's made of 100-year-old reclaimed barn wood, and powered by off-grid solar.

Among other ideas, the project is meant to communicate "a new home front in the remaining voids of San Francisco" and "the arrogance of westward expansion," according to designboom. While we now think it's awesome and perhaps necessary to inhabit tiny spaces, for pioneers, it was just practical.

If you're like me, you watch this video and think "my house is 10 times as big as this apartment and only slightly more functional," and then curse the day you moved to the suburbs.

This is the smallest studio apartment you can build in California, by law -- 160 square feet -- and it includes a bevy of space-saving measures.

This is what long-term desertification looks like: The state of Texas lost 5.6 million urban trees -- and as many as 500 million forest trees -- in the drought that’s been going on since last year. That’s 10 percent of the city trees and 10 percent of the forest trees in the state. The urban trees alone provided an estimated $280 million in annual services (shading buildings, controlling stormwater runoff) and will cost $560 million to remove.

Mexico City just shut down its enormous Bordo Poniente landfill, which has received 79 million tons of garbage on its 927 acres since 1994. But they’re not just leaving all that rotting organic matter to, well, rot. Instead, the city open a landfill gas power plant, which should be able to power 35,000 homes at its peak, reports Elizabeth Malkin in the New York Times.

Photo by Daniel Pierce.

When Republicans loaded up a transportation bill with what the NRDC’s David Goldston floridly calls “a gallimaufry of bad ideas” that included the Keystone XL pipeline and oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it seemed like a cheap political stunt: The monstrosity would never stand a chance of becoming law. Sure enough, the White House has promised to veto the bill should it actually make it through Congress.

The House passed the drilling proposals last Thursday anyway, with help from 21 oil-loving Democrats. (Twenty-one Republicans broke ranks with House leadership, voting against the bill. A handful of them are from Florida, where the $60 billion tourism industry apparently trumps a few extra mil from offshore drilling.)

But amid all the debate over the transportation bill, one truth has gone unsaid -- a truth that explains, at least in part, what these proposals are doing in the transportation bill in the first place, and why the lines between opponents and supporters are not more clearly drawn: We have become slaves to our roads.

French centenarian Robert Marchand (that's not him above, we just didn't have permission to use the Reuters photo) has set a new cycling record: The furthest distance ridden in an hour in the 100-and-over category. Also, the smallest distance. Also, the first hour ride. There's not a lot of competition in this age bracket.