Often, when we write about urban vertical farming, we post pictures of towers of happy-looking green plants. But the reality of vertical farming could be a little bit weirder and a little bit less natural-looking. It could be a little more pink.

NPR explains:

Light is a major problem with vertical farming. When you stack plants on top of each other, the ones at the top shade the ones at the bottom. The only way to get around it is to add artificial light — which is expensive both financially and environmentally.

Vertical farmers can lower the energy bill, Mitchell says, by giving plants only the wavelengths of light they need the most: the blue and red.

Which, together, create a purplish-pinkish color that makes the whole farm kind of look like a Matrix-style energy harvesting station for My Little Ponies.

This isn’t just good for sci-fi lighting effects — it’s also practical. LEDs are more energy-efficient and give off much less heat than incandescents, so vertical farmers can put lights closer to the plants without freaking them out. One pink-light farmer told NPR that this plants grow 20 percent faster under these lights. It’s not the idyllic green space we’d like to imagine will take over our cities, but it might work.

Amtrak fans in the House of Representatives have finally stumbled onto that age-old marketing principle: “If you want people to use a service, fill it with animals.” (I assume that’s what they teach in marketing school, and if they don’t they should.) Four House members have introduced a bill that would require all Amtrak trains to have at least one car that accommodates animals. Technically all the animals will be in kennels, but I’m going to cling to my fantasy of being whisked through the countryside in a pile of cats and dogs.

The idea behind the bill is that people would make more use of Amtrak if they could bring their furrier family members. ”My dog, Lily, is part of our family and travels with us to and from California all the time,” said Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), one of the bill’s cosponsors. “If I can take her a on a plane, why can’t I travel with her on Amtrak, too?” Wait, there are Republicans in on this thing? Wait, THREE of the cosponsors are Republicans? OK, well then maybe the idea behind the bill is that Amtrak is a liberal commie conspiracy preventing our freedoms of bringing dogs wherever we want. That’s fine by me, as long as the end result is that pets can go by train.

Of course, there are rules. (This is Congress!) You’d have to pay extra for your buddy, and you’d have to be taking a trip of less than 750 miles, and your animal would have to stay in a kennel or crate, and the kennel would have to conform to Amtrak carry-on luggage rules. That means people like me, who have 90-pound dogs, would still be SOL. However, there is NOTHING in the bill — I checked! — that prevents you from sitting in the animal car when you don’t have an animal along. And there is nothing that explicitly prevents you from heartily bribing dog-toting passengers to let Fido out of his kennel to give you kisses. Which means my dream of riding the rails covered in dogs might come true after all.

Artist Olafur Eliasson has an exhibit about glaciers called Your Waste of Time at MoMA PS1 in New York City. But the exhibit isn’t just about glaciers — it’s also made of glaciers. Eliasson has broken chunks off Icelandic glaciers and flown them to Queens, which I guess is OK if the point of the exhibit is to make a point about “time that is measured in thousands of years rather than mere decades,” as MoMA says, but is kind of ironic if he’s trying to make any kind of statement about preserving glaciers.

You don’t have to be a genius to be wondering, “Now how does a glacier stay glacier-like in an art museum?” And the answer to that question is “extreme and costly refrigeration.” Between that and the flight from Iceland, isn’t he being kind of mean to the glacier and the environment at the same time? It’s a reasonable question. But Eliasson has been into glaciers as part of his work for a long time, so, presumably, he cares about them. So perhaps what he is doing here is making you feel sorry for those little glacier pieces so that you then think about the big glacier they broke off of, melting away in Iceland? Only he knows. And, since he’s the sort of artist who has no qualms about putting a bunch of glaciers in an artificially cold room and saying “Hey, this is art, deal with it,” we suspect he won’t tell.

This tornado, guys. This tornado. I mean. I just. I can’t. The whole town! The kids! UGH. I am at the point with national tragedies where I just lose my ability to respond in any coherent way. What do we even DO at that point? Well, one approach is to watch heartwarming animal videos, like this one where a shocked tornado victim discovers during a CBS interview that she didn’t lose everything — she just lost everything except her dog.

If you don’t well up when she says, “bless your little bitty heart,” it’s possible that your own heart is malfunctioning. Or it’s possible that you’re too distracted by the fact that the TV news people don’t PUT THE DAMN MIC DOWN AND GO HELP THE DOG. But the pup makes it out of the rubble in one piece anyway, and other footage shows her (I think) walking away with nothing apparently broken. Thank goodness for one little bitty bit of good news.

Public schools increasingly talk a good game about the healthy stuff they’re serving for lunch. But the meals don’t always match the menu, as Zachary Maxwell discovered as a fourth grader. Maxwell sneakily recorded the gross lunches at his school, and from that footage was born his aptly titled documentary, Yuck.

Getting this footage wasn’t easy, he told The New York Times:

His hidden-camera documentary was almost derailed last year when he was caught filming without permission by a fearsome enforcer — the lunchroom monitor in his school cafeteria.

“She sent me to my teacher, and my teacher told me to delete everything,” said Zachary, who is now 11.

Zachary pretended to delete the day’s shots. After that lapse in production security, he said, “I fired my lookouts.”

But it was worth it: He proved to his parents that the food the school was promising — dishes like lasagna rolls and roasted spinach — weren’t what he was being served (grilled cheese). And the film’s been winning all kinds of accolades. If you live in New York, you can catch it this June at the Manhattan Film Festival.

In Britain, common cranes used to be — as their name would suggest — all over the place. But as a species, they fell early to human thoughtlessness. Between hunters and habitat loss, they’ve been gone from the wild, in Britain at least, since 1600.

Conservationists have been trying to bring the birds back, raising them in captivity for the past three years. Now, one pair has laid an egg! And the conservationists responsible for the birds aren’t taking any chances: They’re putting that egg under 24-hour surveillance..

Besides the run-of-the-mill natural threats to the eggs, conservationists are worried about “an obsessive minority” of egg collectors who seek out rare eggs to add to their trove. Apparently some people are really, really into this pursuit. Back in the 1800s, for instance, one natural historian found a zone-tailed hawk’s egg, put it in his mouth to protect it from an Apache raid, and then let someone break his teeth to get it back:

He was gagging from smoke and the still intact egg lodged in his mouth, and he couldn’t spit out the egg without breaking it. Try as he might, his swollen jaws could not open wide enough. Mumbling expletives at his first sergeant, Bendire ordered his men to have his mouth pried open to extract the egg.

Although they broke one of Bendire’s teeth in the process, he considered it a bargain for a perfect, uncracked zone-tailed hawk egg

More recently, a “notorious egg collector” died in pursuit of an egg:

While a friend watched in horror, Watson, 63, lost his grip on the slender trunk of a 12-metre (40ft) larch tree he had climbed to check out yet another unusual bird’s nest. The former power station worker tumbled to the ground in woods in south Yorkshire, a region where collectors have often played hide-and-seek with police. Paramedics arrived soon afterwards but the father-of-three had suffered massive injuries and was declared dead at the scene.

The crane egg is just sitting there on the ground — no Apaches or trees involved. So maybe it’s not so crazy to think that someone might be thinking about wandering over and snatching it away. If they try anything, though, at least they’ll be caught on tape — a prospect that’s not likely to deter someone who’d be willing to give up his teeth for an egg.

Have you ever sat on the subway across from a hot guy or girl holding the book you just finished, trying to peek at their left hand and wondering whether it’s kosher to start a conversation? The organization that runs the subways in Prague has a plan that will end these awkward deliberations for good. The company, ROPID, “wants to set aside carriages on some or all of its trains for singles seeking a soul mate,” Reuters reports. It’d basically be like Amtrak’s quiet car, except instead of sitting in silence, everyone will be scanning the car like they would a bar on a Saturday night.

Reuters:

Spokesman Filip Drapal said the initiative was one of the activities the city-owned company hoped would lure people out of their cars and onto public transportation.

“We want to emphasize that public transport is not only a means of travel but that you can do things there that you cannot do in your car,” he told Reuters.

We’re predicting that this service will be most popular in the evening and on weekends, though if there are morning people out there who want to strike up a romantic relationship during their morning commute, more power to them.

This time-lapse footage shows yesterday’s deadly tornado going from a neat, eerie-looking funnel to a giant clusterfuck of wind and destruction. It’s pretty stunning, but still easier to watch than pictures of lost dogs or decimated homes.

Part of the reason this tornado was so destructive is that it was on the ground for 40 minutes — many tornadoes only touch down for a fraction of that time. It was also unusually large and fast, though not the largest or fastest the country has ever seen. Watching the video won’t necessarily give you a sense of the scale, because the scale is almost unimaginable (the tornado was up to two miles wide — the best description I read said “the size of Chelsea,” though that’s only really helpful to people familiar with New York). But it does give you some idea of how chaotic it must have been.

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.”

Prescient Palin only ever backs winning horses like John McCain, Bristol and Levi’s marriage, and her own gubernatorial career, so if she says climate science is a non-starter then by god, we’re just going to throw in the towel. At least until we can get Obama to take inspiration from this completely real and not made up British law:

I suppose if anyone could inspire him to criminalize this kind of idiocy, it’s La Palin.

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? 

Sarah Rosso, the principal organizer of World Nutella Day, says she received a letter from Ferrero demanding that she stop using the Nutella name and logo. Since it’s a little hard to celebrate Nutella without using the word “Nutella,” that essentially spells death for any sort of World Day. Rosso, who described the letter as “a bit of a surprise and a disappointment,” will have to shut down her Facebook page, Twitter, and website — or, I guess, make them into blind items. “World Day to Celebrate An Unnamed Hazelnut Spread” doesn’t have as much of a ring, but at least it’s not actionable.

Anyway, some people are pretty pissed about this, calling Ferrero “crazy,” “idiots,” and “just plain stupid” on the World Nutella Day Facebook page. But what are we gonna do? As Betabeat said, “We’d call for a boycott of Nutella, but we all know it’s not physically possible.”