Wind turbines are loners. They need to give each other space to be effective. But a new design for wind farms, using a different type of turbines than the giant-fan kind going up all over the place, takes a page from a very social group of animals -- schooling fish -- to create the same amount of energy with shorter turbines, in a smaller area of land. These wind farms use vertical-axis turbines, which are often described as looking like egg-beaters. Like an egg beater's blades, the blades of these turbines move around a vertical pole. (More commonly-used turbines are …

T-rex courtesy of Ryan North Here's what the new post-crash barter economy looks like: People are trading housing for dinosaur services. From Vancouver Craigslist: Do you own more than one property? Do you have so many rental homes with no mortgage payments, yet you still feel unfulfilled? Tired of your illegal tenants whining that there are rats in the walls? Have you always wanted your own dinosaur? Now is your chance my friend. In exchange for one of your properties, I will be your personal dinosaur for one year. I will be at your beck and call, 24 hours a …

Here's one invasive species that's never going to end up on an invasivore menu: the brown marmorated stink bug. (This is actually the most appetizing photo I could find.) They smell when you squish them, they get all up in your house, and they ruined $37 million worth of fruit crops last year. And they're likely to make an even bigger mess this year as they migrate into warmer climates. The stink bugs, which are native to Asia, have no natural predators in the U.S., so they were bad enough when they first showed up in eastern Pennsylvania over a …

The Israeli sand cat is extinct in the wild, so its only hope is breeding programs in captivity. The birth of this stupifyingly cute fuzzball at Safari Zoo in Tel Aviv is therefore really good news -- it could help put the species on the path to recovery and reintroduction. But mostly we just like to look at its face.

King Abdullah of Jordan is probably the world's richest Star Trek fan, which explains why he's able to drop the GDP of Burundi on a theme park to celebrate his pop culture obsession. The good news is that the theme park will also be a showcase for cleantech, and will run on some kind of non-specified "green" power. To which we say: "lupDujHomwIj lubuy'moH gharghmey!" Which is Klingon for "my hovercraft is full of eels."

Wind power is pretty bad-ass to begin with, but conventional wisdom is that it's a "mature" technology that, unlike solar and other breakthrough energy technologies, won't be seeing much improvement in the coming decades. WRONGITY WRONG WRONG. “This is probably the most exciting time in the industry as far as companies launching new product platforms,” Mr. Radomski [an advisor to clean energy companies] said, adding that much of the research and development work was happening in Europe, where the modern wind industry grew up. From fully-automated wind turbine plants to blades with airplane-style flaps, wind power of the future is …

If you thought it was just your pension fund that was in the toilet, you'd best break out the plunger, 'cause you've got an entire planet that will shortly be following it down the loo. Check out this infographic: Those three red wedges that are spilling past the boundaries of Earth's capacities (in green) represent climate change, biodiversity loss and the nitrogen cycle. As you can see, ocean acidification and the phosphorous cycle aren't doing too well, either. This image, from a report on the nine "planetary boundaries" that we shouldn't exceed if we want to have a sustainable future, …

Photographer Max Hodges has a photo essay on Google+ about his travels in the Fukushima evacuation zone. This mysterious ninja, Shoji Kobayashi, had been living there since the nuclear disaster began, gardening and trying to salvage tsunami-damaged keepsakes.  Kobayashi was eventually forced to evacuate, and now lives in a small apartment with no garden and spends his time playing pachinko. Take a look through Hodges' photos for his story, and many other incredibly arresting images of radiation suits and tsunami damage from the disaster area.

Sometimes even Al Gore can’t resist cursing when he talks about climate skeptics. Listen here. EPA's scientific integrity policy doesn't do a particularly good job at its intended purpose: protecting scientists from political influence. Heavy-duty trucks have to meet fuel efficiency standards too. No word yet on monster trucks. More than 440,000 birds die each year in collisions with wind turbines. "Radical industrialist" and green businessman Ray Anderson died yesterday. Some people out there are so cold-hearted that they would steal ripe tomatoes from community garden plots.

A report from Canada's environmental agency predicts that the rise in greenhouse-gas emissions associated with mining tar-sands oils will be more than double the decrease in the country's emissions from other sources. Environment Canada said in its emissions trends report that the country could avoid 31 megatons in emissions by 2020. Most of those savings come from switching out natural gas for coal in electricity generation. But in that same period, emissions from tar-sands oil could rise by 62 megatons, the report said. By 2020, 12 percent of all of Canada's emissions could come from tar-sands mining. At these rates, …