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 …

Is environmentalism a GAME to you? Does it look like some kind of GAME??? Oh, it doesn't? Well, it could. Upcoming game Anno 2070 lets you go all Sims on the fate of the planet. You decide up front whether to throw your lot in with the Ecos (who focus on sustainability but progress slowly) or the Tycoons (who focus on aggressive expansion). Either way, your goal is to make civilization grow without completely wrecking the environment (spoiler: the Ecos will probably do better on the second part), while simultaneously weathering the planetwide changes that are already in place by …

First dolphins, now whales -- sea mammals in New York City are bigger than Cats! Urban nature blogger Matthew Wills caught a humpback whale frolicking off Sandy Hook, N.J., within sight of the city. (He's got some great pictures over at his blog.) Wills was dismayed by the floating trash in the bay, not to mention all the garbage produced by his fellow boat passengers. But on the whole, the presence of whales and dolphins is a good indicator for water quality.

You gotta heart teenage geniuses: this one, Aidan Dwyer, age 13, figured out a way to make solar panel arrays more efficient after taking a walk in the woods. Here is his basic thought-process, broken down for us non-geniuses: Tree branches grow in a specific pattern. (It's called the Fibonacci sequence. Each number is the sum of the previous two. Sorry -- too much technical detail?) Trees are also really good at absorbing sunlight. Solar panels could be placed like leaves on a structure that follows the same mathematical pattern as a tree. Would that create more energy than just …

For most people, having a open stream of sewage running past your backyard is a problem, not an asset. That how Keshav Tavre, who lives in Bhiwandi, India, saw it, until he decided to set up a homemade filtration system. With a series of walls and layers of soil, he was able to filter the sewage until it was clean enough to use to grow crops. Later, he sold water commercially to local dye industries. For a while, the local authorities were against his use of the resulting water for commercial gain, but since they weren't doing anything with the …