Street artist INSA isn't satisfied working in only three dimensions. His graffiti projects also move in time. INSA paints, photographs, re-paints, and re-photographs his works over a span of days, resulting in a piece of street art that is beautiful at every moment but becomes something really special when viewed as a time-lapse animation.

Forget mercury-laden compact fluorescents. The efficient homes of tomorrow will be lit with LEDs.

Or so say executives at Cree, a lighting company that has started selling affordable LED lightbulbs that outwardly resemble the traditional, energy-hogging incandescent bulbs of old. The company claims that its new 60 watt-equivalent LED bulb, which costs $13 or $14 depending on which variety you buy, lasts 25 times longer and uses 84 percent less juice than does a traditional lightbulb.

On average, in America, it takes a person 25.4 minutes to get to work. But averages elide so much wonderful, painful information about location and the burden of commuting. Information that this map, put together by WNYC, lets you explore in agonizing detail:

io9 warns that "if you're into this kind of thing, this map can be a bit of a rabbit hole." So, uh, you can imagine what we've been doing for the past [REDACTED] minutes.

Flying squirrel race purists have another reason to hate climate change: Some scientists believe that as a response to shifting temperatures, the southern flying squirrel has begun to mate with the northern flying squirrel and -- just in case anyone reading this is really, really dumb -- vice versa.

Let's be clear. There is no question that the southern flying squirrel and northern flying squirrel have begun to do it and produce offspring. In a northern region of  Ontario currently being studied with regard to this strange squirrel interbreeding, about 4 percent of the squirrels now being born are hybrids. The question is why. There are many factors that can cause interbreeding, such as loss of habitat, or the sudden presence of invasive species. But Canadian scientists Jeff Bowman and Paul Wilson, who have been studying and tracking this interbreeding, are pretty sure this interbreed lovefest is climate-change related, mostly because the hybrids started to emerge around the same time -- 1995 -- that the winters began to get steadily warmer.

The city council of Fort Collins, Colo., voted Tuesday to ban fracking within city limits. The move has strong support from residents, but it makes the city the target of lawsuits from the state government and the oil and gas industry.

The new regulations [PDF] will block gas and oil exploration and ban the storage of hazardous fracking chemicals within the city, which is 65 miles north of Denver and home to 150,000 people.

Artist Yao Lu's works look like classical Chinese landscape paintings, but they're actually photographs of landfill garbage covered in construction netting. We trust you can all figure out the message here, and we don't have to go all art school on your ass.

This is a real soccer ball. You can head it, kick it, knee it, slap it out of a goal with your fist, or, if you are Diego Maradona, knock it into one. A soccer ball does not need another reason to be a wonderful thing, but this particular soccer ball provides one: Kick it around for 30 minutes and it powers an LED bulb for three hours.

Two months ago, my report “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight Against Global Warming” [PDF] was posted online (along with an important companion report, “The Too Polite Revolution” [PDF], by journalists Petra Bartosiewicz and Marissa Miley). These reports probed what happened with the big push for cap-and-trade legislation in 2009 and 2010, and mine used the results of months of research to place this episode within the larger political trends that have been playing out in U.S. politics in recent years.

As a scholar of U.S. politics, I am accustomed to analyzing social movements as well as efforts to enact big policy reforms, and I always look forward to learning as much from debates about my writings as from the original research. Nevertheless, I was surprised by the sudden and intense debate my report helped to kick off.

The whole report was accurately summarized in the first major news article on it, by Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian, but the editors assigned her article a headline and teaser that hit a sore spot: “Climate Change Inaction the Fault of Environmental Groups, Report Says: Academic Paper Largely Clears President Obama of Blame Over Failure to Pass Climate Legislation Through Congress.” No matter that my report pointed to Republican extremism as the problem that had to be “named,” faced, and effectively countered. No matter that it called for forward-looking strategies and hardly used the word “blame” at all (except in brief accounts of how various wings of environmentalism fingered each other for the cap-and-trade shortfall).

Almost instantly, Cap-and-Trader Joe Romm at the Center for American Progress called troops into battle, going after me for doing a 145-page “opinion piece” rather than a properly “refereed” research article (an odd accusation coming from a blogger). When comments at CAP's ThinkProgress blog deteriorated into tagging me as a plant by climate-change deniers, I left the Democratic Party’s “progressive” think tank to its own circular firing squad and focused on learning from discussions at my talks and from much more substantive debate at Grist and other media outlets.

I recently picked up a book that's been sitting in my must-read pile for a long time: David Halberstam's The Children, a remarkable account of the African-American students who began the momentous lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville in February 1960 and went on to risk their lives as Freedom Riders and as movement leaders in Birmingham and Selma. Half a century on, it can be easy to forget that citizens of this country took such risks, and made such sacrifices, in order to gain basic human rights.

Still, I thought I knew the story. So I was startled to find myself pierced, on the very first page, by Halberstam's description of one young woman's inner struggle:

Years later, though she could recall almost every physical detail of what it had been like to sit there in that course on English literature, Diane Nash could remember nothing of what Professor Robert Hayden had said. What she remembered instead was her fear. A large clock on the wall had clicked slowly and loudly; each minute which was subtracted put her nearer to harm's way. ... It was always the last class that she attended on the days that she and her colleagues assembled before they went downtown and challenged the age-old segregation laws at the lunch counters in Nashville's downtown shopping center.

Halberstam then describes Diane Nash's memory of the night before the first sit-in, on Feb. 13, 1960:

On that evening, she had sat alone in her room at Fisk University. Suddenly she was hit with an overpowering attack of nerves. What had she gotten herself into? she wondered. ... She, Diane Nash, a coward of the first order in her own mind, a person absolutely afraid not just of violence but of going to jail, was going to join a small group of black children and ministers and take on the most important and resourceful people in a big, very white, very Southern city....

It was a joke, she thought, it will never happen. We are a bunch of children. We're nice children, bright and idealistic, but we are children and we are weak.

I think I know why those words pierced me the way they did. Over the past year and a half, I've gotten acquainted, and at times worked closely, with a group of student climate activists in the Boston area. And while the situation they face is vastly different on multiple levels -- historical, cultural, political, personal -- from what students like Diane Nash confronted, I've seen them begin to make similar choices, and to take, or be willing to take, similar risks. A number of them have been arrested -- some multiple times, and in unpredictable circumstances -- for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience protesting the Keystone XL pipeline and extreme fossil-fuel extraction. And they are ready to do more.

Ed Orcutt is a Republican state representative in Washington, and he appears to be confused. As a member of the House Transportation Committee, Orcutt had a somewhat testy email exchange recently with a bike shop owner about a proposed bike fee. Reuters reports:

"You claim that it is environmentally friendly to ride a bike," Orcutt wrote to Dale Carlson, the owner of three bicycle shops in the Tacoma and Olympia areas who voiced concern that a proposed $25 fee on bicycle sales of $500 or more could hurt his business.

"But if I am not mistaken, a cyclists has an increased heart rate and respiration ... Since CO2 is deemed a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclist [sic] are actually polluting when they ride," Orcutt wrote late last month.

Carlson thought Orcutt "was being sarcastic or something." That wasn't the case, but Orcutt soon felt compelled to apologize.