You probably already know that bottled water is kind of the worst thing ever, but did you know it's getting people in supply convoys blown up? Like other heavy, bulky things our troops have to truck in (primarily fuel), bottled water makes Marines vulnerable to attack by improvised explosives. They don’t even have the luxury of waiting for the BPA to kill them. Afghanistan has water, but a lot of it is contaminated by raw sewage. One solution is the the Lightweight Water Purification System, which "fits in a Humvee and can produce up to 125 gallons of potable water …

Waste heat: It's everywhere, and we're wasting it. (Hence the name.) Giant industrial processes throw off enormous amounts of the stuff, all of it not quite hot enough to be usable in conventional power generation. That's where the waste heat industry comes in. Using liquids that boil at temperatures significantly lower than water, they've created systems that can use waste heat from factories to produce electricity. And now they want the government to recognize this power as another form of renewable energy -- including providing tax incentives. It could totally happen, too. Obama recently visited a pioneer in the field, …

When a country commits to any project as monstrous as China's Three Gorges Dam, it is bound to encounter occasional difficulties. The Chinese government, as governments are wont to do, has preferred to gloss over the dam's detriments and emphasize its attributes, like the 84 billion kilowatt hours of electricity it produced last year. But this week the government released a statement acknowledging that the dam has fostered a few "urgent problems" that need addressing. Numbered among those are: the increasing concentration of raw sewage and pollution and of the algae that feeds on it; the threat of landslides; the …

Lots of people talk about the possibility of getting to 100 percent renewables by such and such a date -- if every one of these reports came true, we'd be exporting surplus wind power to the asteroid belt by now. But few countries are actually doing it. Denmark is one. And Denmark would like you to know that your plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions, no matter how ambitious, is like a wet noodle next to its monstrously tumescent plan to ride out the post-peak fossil fuelpocalypse in style. As the world’s population grows and emerging economies expand rapidly, global …

This is a very fuzzy, cute rodent, and no one has seen one like it since 1898. It's called a red-crested tree rat, or, more evocatively, a red-crested soft-furred spiny-rat. This one wandered up to two volunteers at Fundacións ProAves' El Dorado Nature Reserve in Colombia earlier this month and hung around for a couple of hours, just chilling like it wasn’t supposed to be extinct or anything. ProAves is launching what it calls a "major effort" to save the species, now that we know there are some.

The Daily Show - Lisa P. Jackson Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook   EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson was on the Daily Show last night, where she promised she would not regulate Jon Stewart's breathing, even though he admitted that he emits carbon dioxide. UPDATE: EVIDENTLY I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO WORK THE INTERNET. This is an old (but still awesome) interview. New and awesome interview here. (I probably should have been tipped off when he called her the "new" EPA administrator.) 

Hate to break it to you, but if it's really the end of the world tomorrow (or tonight), as Harold Camping and his followers attest, you're almost certainly screwed. So what will ease your suffering in the post-Rapture world? A lot of the same things you're already doing to save the environment. Dense living. Apparently the end of the world is going to come as a giant earthquake, which means that the Left Behind who live in walkable communities will have an easier time accessing resources, just like in any other natural disaster. Bike transport. You are not going to …

It's Bike to Work day. Now all you bike commuters know how secretaries feel on Administrative Professionals Day: “One DAY? I’ve been doing this day in and day out all year!” The rate of Amazon deforestation has been declining in recent years; this year, it climbed again. The Brazilian government is -- rightly -- freaking out. The head of Tokyo Electric Power, the company responsible for handling the Fukushima meltdown, resigned today. Rumor has it that BP CEO Tony Hayward has already invited him to join the new, quickly growing Ex-Heads of Disastrous Energy Companies club. (Motto: “We Just Want …

Many states have "renewable portfolio standards" mandating that they produce a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources. Libertarian and tea bag-ish critics of these standards have said that they will cause electricity rates to "skyrocket." But the numbers are in, and guess what? Science says the critics are wrong. Utility companies’ experiences vary a bit, but on the whole energy costs are barely being nudged by renewable standards, reports Midwest Energy News. In fact, far from being a financial drain, wind power is the most economic option in some places, such as the portion of the Dakotas and western …

The true successors to incandescent lightbulbs aren't CFLs, but LEDs, which are a totally different technology that, to date, has been a tad too expensive for most consumer. (Think $40 to $50 a bulb.) Switch LED aims to change that, with a bulb technology that's different in a handful of key ways. First, the bulbs are liquid-cooled -- hence their vaguely glass-paperweightish appearance. Second, their tiny LED bulbs are arrayed around the outside of the larger bulb, to create more diffuse light. And they're cheap: at $20 a bulb and only 15 percent the energy draw of a traditional bulb, …