Bike happy, cyclists, and bike free! The Colorado Supreme Court this week overturned a ban on bikes in the town of Black Hawk, where since June 2010 cycling citizens have been forced to walk their bikes through downtown's narrow roads or face $68 tickets. From The Denver Post:

Black Hawk's ban forced cyclists to walk their bikes through the city's casino-lined streets on the southern end of the famed Peak to Peak Highway, a high-country scenic by-way popular with road cyclists. ...

Black Hawk had argued that its home-rule status allowed it to script its own traffic laws. The city said the 2009 state law that required vehicles to give cyclists a 3-foot berth was unmanageable for gambler-toting tour buses and casino delivery trucks navigating Black Hawk's narrow streets. So the city's leaders chose to ban bikes. ...

The Supreme Court ruled the issue was not just local but impacted state residents. The court noted that municipalities can ban bikes -- Denver prohibits pedalers on the 16th Street Mall, as does Boulder on a stretch of Pearl Street -- but it must provide alternate routes within 450 feet, as required by state law.

The city's statement on Monday said it would "look for alternatives" to address safety concerns but would not develop an alternate bike path. "The city has no plans to construct any special accommodations to address this issue."

I wonder if Missouri State Rep. Rick Brattin (R) reads the Colorado news? Maybe he should! The state legislator is planning to introduce a bill to ban bicycling on at least some state roads. From the Missouri Bicycle and Pedestrian Federation:

Here's one way to stop global warming: SMASH CAPITALISM!

That is how I choose to read a study released this week by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which found that switching to a “more European” work schedule, i.e. working fewer hours and taking more vacation, could prevent as much as half of "global warming that is not already locked in." From U.S. News:

"The relationship between [shorter work hours and lower emissions] is complex and not clearly understood, but it is understandable that lowering levels of consumption, holding everything else constant, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions," writes economist David Rosnick, author of the study. Rosnick says some of that reduction can be attributed to fewer operating hours in factories and other workplaces that consume high levels of energy. ...

In what is probably the most skilled and least appetizing marketing strategy I've ever seen, Oreo is remaking Instagram photos as cookie-based monstrosities. If you tag your photo #cremethis, they'll render it in sculpted creme goo, and #cookiethis gets you carved cookies (or at least decorative crumbles). It is extremely impressive, extremely internet-savvy, and holy SHIT does it not make me want to eat an Oreo.

Here we were, thinking that carbon capture and storage was a knotty problem that might never be solved. But, as the BBC reports, a team of scientists has found that it might not be as hard as everyone's been saying to capture carbon dioxide waste. How did they discover the secret? They just took a hint from sea urchins.

Like other ocean creatures, sea urchins turn carbon dioxide into shells made of calcium carbonate. The sea urchins, the scientists found, use nickel to catalyze this process. And as it turns out, it's pretty easy for humans to trap carbon dioxide this way, too:

"It is a simple system," Dr Lidija Siller from Newcastle University told BBC News. "You bubble CO2 through the water in which you have nickel nanoparticles and you are trapping much more carbon than you would normally - and then you can easily turn it into calcium carbonate."

Boom -- carbon emissions, suddenly not a problem! (Or less of a problem.)

This project doesn't make much sense on a practical level, but we're into it anyway. In partnership with phone company O2, a designer has taken old, discarded phones, combined them with old, discarded shoes, and turned them into functional tools for communication: shoe phones!

Every shoe phone has a keypad so you can make calls on it. It's sort of like a secret spy phone, except it's pretty obvious when you're using it:

Matt Hope's "Breathing Bike" is, in theory, a bike that lets the rider pedal around super-polluted Beijing while breathing clean air. In practice, it’s a "provocative object" that Hope is kind of afraid to ride because it might electrocute him. But the theory is solid!

Here’s how it works: The wheels turn a generator that runs an air filter. The clean air goes through a tube, into one of those fighter pilot masks that make the wearer look like an alien. Ah, clean air.

The arctic ground squirrel lives (appropriately enough) in the Arctic, where it is very cold and very boring and there isn't a lot of food. In fact, it's so boring, and food is so scarce, that the squirrels essentially put themselves in cold storage for eight months out of the year, hibernating with a body temperature of minus 3 degrees C. Now, some nice scientists with cameras have managed to film this squirrel waking up from its epic slumber, and you can watch this chilly little guy wake up and warm up.

Oil companies in Alberta have learned a key lesson about the tar-sands business. Namely: Extracting tar-sands oil is one thing. Getting it refined and sold is another.

Tar-sands oil prices continue to fall as companies struggle to figure out how to get it to customers. There are three routes to do so, shown above. The route headed west (in blue) represents the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline -- a project that is on the brink of being cancelled. Heading south into the United States (in red), Keystone XL, the tribulations of which are legendary. Headed east (yellow), a possible pipeline to the St. Lawrence Seaway which, as far as I know, exists only in theory.

But there's another possibility, one previously unmentioned -- and previously impossible: Build a pipeline due north, to the formerly frozen Arctic Ocean. From Bloomberg:

Alberta’s landlocked oil producers facing pipeline bottlenecks to the south, west and east are welcome to ship their product north, according to Northwest Territories leader Bob McLeod.

McLeod, 60, said the territorial government would consider proposals to ship crude from Alberta oil sands producers, which include Suncor (SU) Energy Inc. and Canadian Natural Resources, to the Arctic. The territory would consider piggybacking on any new infrastructure to ship its own oil and gas, he said. ...

“The reality is, it’s doable,” McLeod said. “With climate change, the Arctic ice pack has melted significantly.” Asked if Alberta’s difficulties getting oil to market presents an opportunity for his region, McLeod said: “We think so.”

We're always looking for new ways to make naysayers understand the seriousness of climate change, but in Canada it's pretty clear: If you want people to be concerned about global warming, remind them that it threatens hockey. To help you in this endeavor, a Canadian organization has built an interactive map of Canada and the northern U.S. that lets you see the location of outdoor skating rinks, and whether or not they have managed to freeze.

Guess how many beads a “super krewe” throws out in a single city block? (“Krewes” are the groups that put on New Orleans Mardi Gras parades -- the super krewes first appeared in the '70s, upping the ante with more floats, celebrities, and presumably a big jump in bead volume.)

10 pounds?

100 pounds?

Try 15 tons. That’s some $56,000 in little plastic balls, hitting sky, then streets, then gutters, then the Louisiana coastline, for every single block of the parades. That’s what New Orleans residents Holly and Kirk Groh estimate, based on parade attendance figures and a Tulane study [PDF].

Sitting on the sidewalk for the parades in 2011, the Grohs watched the cascading plastic beads and all Holly could think about was all the waste.

Most of those strands of beads tossed out to paradegoers (extra if you show some skin) are made of petroleum products. For a city that is still recovering from the Deepwater Horizon explosion that leaked oil all over the Louisiana coastline, that struck her as especially tragic. “I think this is in other people’s hearts that it doesn’t quite feel right,” Holly Groh says. “But I think, as a group, we haven’t quite known what to do.”

The way Groh figured it, you can’t fight Mardi Gras -- you have to change it.