Ever see a bike on the street that had your heart going pitter-patter? Sarah Raz, of the Adventure Cycling Association, knows where you’re coming from: "I can't even tell you how many times I've seen a beauty of a bike, hand built or all vintage, parked near the post office or my grocery store, and I've just had to leave a love note," she writes. But there's a quick fix for this uncontrollable urge! Raz suggests keeping on hand a pack of Heroes and Criminals bike love notes (pictured above and also available for unicycles). Or print out these spoke …

The National Science Foundation found Michael Mann, a scientist at the center of Climategate, did nothing wrong. You don’t say. Ford and Toyota are going to be working together on technology for hybrid trucks and SUVs. Apparently Michele Bachmann wants to the United States to become an Iran-like state where oil is government-subsidized. How else to explain her continued, irrational insistence that gas will be $2 per gallon during her presidency? If there are too few lobsters in Long Island, there may be too many in Maine. A Halliburton exec took a swig of a new fracking fluid, made by …

It can be mildly annoying when movie stars get activist, because it usually just means looking sincere while wearing the ribbon color of the day. Which is why it's kind of cool that Daryl Hannah, who has never really stopped defending the environment since she came out of the ocean in 1984, is headed down to the Keystone XL protests, where people are being arrested left and right.  In the video above, Hannah talks about the importance of civil disobedience to progressive causes. "It's time for all of us to step out of our comfort zone and become these sort …

In a tweet last week, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman made the apparently super-controversial claim that he "trust[s] scientists on global warming." This weekend, he went a step further, telling ABC's Jake Tapper that his opponents' opposition to the idea of climate change is wrongheaded and extremist. Huntsman:  The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs …

Update: Depressingly, this wasn't funded by NASA at all, although one of the authors is from NASA's planetary science division (he worked on it in his free time). It's still a good read though. (Thanks, Kate Sheppard!) Here's good news for people who have been trying to draft the tinfoil-hat crew into the fight against climate change: A genuinely not-at-all-made-up-by-me NASA not NASA study posits that global warming could alert extraterrestrial civilizations that humanity is getting too big for its britches, and prompt them to attack us. The paper, which is mainly concerned with guessing whether aliens are mean or not, …

PETA has finally decided to drop the pretense that they're about something besides ladies in underwear. When .xxx domain names go into action in September, your friendly neighborhood animal rights crazies will be first in line --  and they presumably don't just intend the site for closeups of cow udders and literal beaver shots, but for the barely-clad, barely-legal college students that have become their trademark. So basically, they're shifting from "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" to just "I'd rather go naked." Here are a few other slogans PETA.xxx might want to consider: "We Beat Meat." "Be Gentle, …

The New York Times has come out with an editorial position on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and it’s unusually definitive, considering that we still have news media trying to represent “both sides” of the climate change “debate.” Here’s how they break it down. Canada and the U.S. want to build a pipeline thousands of miles long from Canada to Texas, to carry bitumen from the tar sands to refineries where it can be turned into fuel. On the one hand, this seems like a good idea: As long as we're stuck with oil, why not buy it from …

It would be natural to imagine that the fall of Tripoli would mean a significant decrease in the cost of oil and the pain that the average consumer feels at the pump. After all, in February, when unrest in Libya commenced, oil prices hit a two-year high. Libya is only the 15th biggest oil exporter in the world, but the oil it exports is of a particularly desirable type. But the truth is world oil markets couldn't give a big greasy bag of monkey fap how long it takes Libya's oil to come back on-line. Sure, there could be a …

2011 is the International Year of Forests, and as part of their efforts to promote the sustainable forestry, the National Association of State Foresters, which represents state forestry agencies, and the National Network of Forest Practitioners, granted a fellowship to photographer Josh Birnbaum to document the state of the nation's forests. Birnbaum's first stop was in West Virginia, where he hung out with young foresters (pictured above), visited with the wood industry, traveled with researchers to a post-mining reclamation area, and documented blight fungus. He's now in South Dakota, to cover insect infestations, but he'll also be making stops in …

In DC, protests against the Keystone XL pipeline began this weekend. The first round of protesters that cops arrested sat in jail through the weekend, longer than police had said they'd be detained. The area around Fukushima has levels of radioactivity so high, it could be uninhabitable for decades. The U.K. cycling industry contributes more than $4.7 billion to the country's economy each year. Cutting carbon will create, not kill, jobs. Mitt Romney might believe in global warming, but it doesn't seem like he believes in doing much about it on a political or a personal level: He's building a …