Pack up your temperature sensors, your climate-modeling supercomputers, your tree and ice core sample equipment. Sarah Palin has spoken on climate change, and she says it's snowing in Alaska, ergo "global warming my gluteus maximus," Q.E.D. And you know it's science because she used the Latin word for "ass."

Nutella is essentially a perfect food -- delicious, no HFCS, delicious, full of natural ingredients, and fucking delicious. OK, yes, it has palm oil and is packed to the lid with (mostly unsaturated!) fat, but you make some compromises in the name of pure spreadable joy. Unfortunately, if you had any ideas about celebrating this superfood on World Nutella Day, Feb. 5, pack them in -- Ferrero, the company that makes the stuff, has insisted that the organizers cease and desist. Oh Nutella, why won't you let us love you? 

Ira Leifer studies the atmosphere. He also has the geekiest RV ever, set up to measure methane levels on the go. It has, for instance, "a mast that rises up five stories, like a periscope."

This is actually Leifer’s second mobile lab. The first one he set up in a rented camper van in 2010, after driving his equipment down to the Gulf Coast to measure methane in the wake of the BP oil spill. NPR reports:

[A]fter his research cruise ended, Leifer thought, "Why not sample the air on the way back home?" So he jury-rigged a setup for these delicate instruments in the back.

"It involved a lot of work with an air mattress folded in half, a giant tarp filled with Styrofoam peanuts, bungees holding things to the wall and so on," Leifer says. "It really looked like a Rube Goldberg kind of weird device in the back with this gas chromatograph sitting in the middle of it."

It's easy to get paranoid when you're riding a bike alongside drivers who, despite commanding vehicles much bigger and faster than yours, seem uninterested in your safety or survival. Sometimes it feels like they're out to get you. Or at least like they'd be happy if you got hurt.

And apparently, that paranoia is not entirely unjustified. In the U.K., for instance, one driver bragged on Twitter about knocking a person off his bike with her car:

In this case, bike activists who monitor social media for anti-cycling comments alerted the police, who told Way to report having being in a collision. (We can just imagine her whining "but I did report it! I told everyone on Twitter he deserved it!") But it is creepy that anyone would be so excited about potentially injuring another human being.

Gold mining today is far from the charming, if soggy, practice of standing in a river and trying to sift out gold nuggets. Today, miners sift out gold from a river of cyanide, basically: They mine rock with tiny concentrations of gold in it, crush it up, and use cyanide to pull the gold molecules out. This is terrible for the environment, as you might imagine. Mother Jones pulled these statistics together a few years ago:

Mining gold to create a single 1/3-ounce 18-karat ring produces at least 20 tons of waste and 13 pounds of toxic emissions.

Those emissions contain 5.5 pounds of lead, 3 pounds of arsenic, almost 2 ounces of mercury, and 1 ounce of cyanide.

But now scientists think they've come up with a way of extracting gold using a compound much more benign than cyanide. Instead, they think they can use cornstarch.

Back in 1897, a structure called the California Cycleway came very close to beautiful existence. The elevated structure would have provided a smooth, flat, uninterrupted ride for the nine miles from Pasadena to downtown. (You can see a Google map of the proposed route here.) Man, bike infrastructure proposals were so much better when bikes were the only game in town.

In this video for the Nature Conservancy, rapper Macklemore explains how municipal green space in his home city of Seattle influenced his career: He and his friends didn't want to kick it at their parents' houses, so they went and freestyled in parks. (Side note: Do people really still say "kick it," or is Macklemore even older than I am?) We knew, of course, that Macklemore was into creative reuse, but who knew he had so many ideas about urban infrastructure? 

A team of scientists at Harvard have discovered how to make crazy, beautiful, very tightly controlled shapes that are so tiny they're invisible to the naked eye. Just by making simple changes in the environment in which salt and silicon crystals grow, they've made gardens of flower-like structures. Wim Noorduin, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, grew a variety of these "flowers," recently featured in the journal Science.

Clothing retailers don't have it easy. It's very hard to keep up with what's in style. And what's in style now? Fracking! Which means flame-retardant clothing for when shit gets out of hand.

Don't freak out, but there's a problem with green roofs: They're not necessarily greener than ordinary roofs. Soooooo kind of a major problem. With a little extra effort, though, green roofs can be efficient AND locally sourced -- you just can’t take the easy way out.

Scientific American reports:

[R]ooftop vegetation has to be able to survive the high winds, prolonged UV radiation and unpredictable fluctuations in water availability. To resist these harsh environments, a majority of green roofs are planted with sedum, a non-native species that can survive wind and long periods without rainfall. A roof planted with sedum, however, is no greener, from the standpoint of sustainability, than is ordinary tar or asphalt.

Sedum, it turns out, absorbs sunlight, just like a tar roof would, and isn't particularly good at absorbing water. Planting your green roof with sedum is like hiring employees based on how long they can physically sit in an office chair instead of how good they are at doing the work.