Archive: Mar 2012
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‘Waking Mars’ is the most amazing game about gardening you’ll ever play
New iOS app “Waking Mars” is a game about gardening, botany, and ecology, which sounds boring — especially if you’re about my age, and your primary school teachers tried to get you to learn about ecosystems via some clunky games with Oregon Trail-level graphics where you controlled the number of fish or ducks or some […]
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Giant, awesome ‘tree lobster’ survived 80 years in hiding
http://vimeo.com/14413689 The Lord Howe Island stick insect, which you see hatching above, looking like an alien struggling out of a human torso, will grow to the size of your hand. It’s also called a “tree lobster” — that’s how big it is. The most incredible thing about these insects, though, is not how big they […]
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MIT students invent bike helmet vending machine
Bikeshares are a really smart idea, so participants obviously know how to use their brains — but they apparently don’t know how to protect them. Helmet use on bikeshare bikes is pretty abysmal — data from Boston’s bikeshare program show that only 30 percent of users wear a helmet. So a group of adorable MIT […]
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Critical List: The gas boom scam; Bieber’s electric car
In Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell looks at “the scam behind the gas boom.” What really makes money for a natural gas company? “Buying and flipping the land that contains the gas,” Goodell reports. A team of scientists has discovered how to use wastewater’s bacteria to create electricity. For his 18th birthday Justin Bieber received (among […]
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Walmart is no savior: More small businesses = healthier people
Big box stores are often billed as saviors for food-insecure neighborhoods, but new research suggests otherwise.
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The littlest farmers taste their first crop [VIDEO]
The Perennial Plate crew visits a school garden in Georgia where the students plant, harvest, and taste their very first radishes.
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Go cargo: Utility bikes take cities by storm
One of the most common excuses for using gas power rather than pedal power goes something like this: “But I can’t take the kids/dog/groceries along on my bike.” The cargo bicycle eliminates that excuse.
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Obama calls to end subsidies for oil and gas
At a campaign stop in Nashua, N.H., the president called on Americans to demand a vote to end $4 billion in oil subsidies in the next few weeks.
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Bingaman’s Clean Energy Standard would be nice, but has no shot in hell
Sen. Jeff Bingaman released his long-awaited proposal for a Clean Energy Standard on Thursday.