Yes, that Mexican-flavored shredded cheese mix, found right next to the Kraft singles, makes awesome quesadillas. But little strands of cheese curds are not meant to remain so sedately separate from each other, even as they are tossed into plastic bags and shipped across the country. So how do big food companies keep shredded cheese from clumping into a gooey mess? They add wood. Technically, the ingredient is powdered cellulose. Cellulose is the stuff that makes up the walls of plant cells, and it apparently has additional properties, like keeping cheese from clumping, thickening jam, and making low-fat ice cream …

Presumably everybody knows the basic depressing mechanisms of natural selection: In response to a cruel and unforgiving environment, those creatures that can adapt best or are already best-suited survive to reproduce, and everyone else dies horribly. It's all red-in-tooth-and-claw-y, and humans are well out of it, right? Yeah, well, about that: Turns out that now we've become the cruel and unforgiving environment. Whoops. An article (behind a reg wall, so we'll give you the highlights) in this month's New Scientist collects the effects humanity has had on shaping our fellow creatures: Tuskless elephants: In Zambia, the proportion of tuskless female …

House Republicans are planning on voting this afternoon to rev up offshore oil drilling again, and Democrats are taking the opportunity to prove that Republican's hatred of national deficits cannot outweigh their love for oil companies. Right now, oil companies get billions of dollars in tax breaks under a domestic manufacturing provision in the tax code. But, Democrats are arguing, given the price of gas lately, oil companies don't really need any additional incentives to do business in the U.S. So why not repeal those subsides and get, oh, $12.8 billion in additional revenue? Oil companies can certainly afford it …

House Republicans are forming a coalition to talk about energy priorities. They're calling it the Guild to Load Our Business Associates with Lucre While Also Realizing Many International Net Gains, or GLOBALWARMING. Ha ha, just kidding! They're calling it the House Energy Action Team, or HEAT. WHAT? THAT IS NOT EVEN BETTER. Given that the coalition is pushing to expand oil drilling, the name is appropriate, but it's rare for politicians to be so forthright. Next we look forward to a Republican immigration task force called Force Unfamiliar Countries' Kinsmen Out For Freedom.

Teenagers are suing the federal government for failing to protect the atmosphere. One plaintiff explains why. A recovery team went inside the Fukushima No. 1 reactor for the first time since the quake. The United Nation's climate change panel issued a preliminary report that says 12.9 percent of global energy came from renewables. Firewood in developing countries accounts for a big chunk of that, though. Farmers and ranchers can go ahead and shoot those pesky grey wolves now. While in Washington, D.C., Prince Charles visited an urban farm and took a few swings at the American agriculture system at a …

It's common knowledge that global warming deniers are prone to confusing climate with weather, as in this video that we posted last year but which I am embedding anyway because it's awesome. But a study in this month's Psychological Science confirms that your average schmo is more likely to believe in global climate change on unseasonably warm days than unseasonably cold ones. That's true even after controlling for political affiliation -- Democrats were more likely to believe in climate change, but the weather had an effect nearly two-thirds as strong as preexisting political commitments. "It is striking that society has …

A new Gallup poll finds that only 44 percent of those surveyed thought that today's youth would have a better life than their parents. That's worse than during the recession. In fact, it's the lowest percentage on record, for a question they've been asking since 1983. (The highest, weirdly, was in December 2001 -- 71 percent of people thought youth would be better off then, way more than in any other year. It must have been all that post-9/11 optimism.)  But the actual youth aren't feeling that dire. Among people ages 18 to 29, 57 percent thought they'd be better …

GE is making billions of dollars selling the world wind turbines and energy-efficient technology, so it's a little surprising to hear that the biggest regret of its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is all that hippy-dippy talk at the center of the company's Ecomagination campaign. "If I had one thing to do over again I would not have talked so much about green," Immelt said at an event sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Even though I believe in global warming and I believe in the science ... it just took on a connotation that was too elitist; it was too …

While a quarter of Americans have a net worth of zero, Jeremy Grantham controls a hedge fund worth $107 billion, and he has a message for the world: Resource scarcity, peak oil, and climate change could mean big bucks for those who can get out ahead of the disaster. Well, okay, not BIG bucks -- just nonzero bucks. "Our goal should be to get everyone out of abject poverty, even if it necessitates some income redistribution," Grantham says in his latest quarterly letter. Hippie! But even that level of success, he argues, will depend on us reconfiguring our expectations to …

How's this for a hands-on approach to saving the natural world: When this baby hummingbird was attacked, this guy rescued it and nursed it to a healthy adulthood in a stirring montage set to a Jack Johnson tune.  The dude says: when she thought she was ready to leave (and she was) she flew off to her favorite patch of the back yard, and her instincts instantly kicked in, and now she's just like all the other hummingbirds. for those that are concerned that she has imprinted on humans and wouldn't survive in the wild, don't worry, she is thriving. …