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Oil on Gulf Coast after Hurricane Isaac reveals risks of offshore drilling
Images of oil leftover from 2010's BP spill washing up on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Isaac serve as a sad reminder that it’s impossible to clean up a major marine oil spill.
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Firefighters rescue adorable bobcat kitten from wildfire
Firefighters working to contain a California wildfire found this baby bobcat walking alone in circles by the side of the road. There was no trace of a mother bobcat, plus she kept going to sleep on their shoes, so the crew took the baby back to their command post, where public information officers cooed over her […]
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Mesmerizing real-time map of the world’s planes makes air travel look like a fungal infection
Eugh, what’s that swarming all over the surface of the planet? It looks like an insect horde, or maybe some kind of crawling fungus, but no, it’s just us in our flying machines. It’s simultaneously kind of gross and super-fascinating. PlaneFinder tracks every flight in the air at any given moment, in as close to […]
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World’s oldest message in a bottle has been found in Scotland
In 1914, a Scottish scientist named Captain C. Hunter Brown dropped 1,890 bottles in the North Sea as part of a science experiment. So far 315 of these bottles have been found, the most recent one last week by a Scottish fisherman named Andrew Leaper. At 98 years old, it’s the world’s oldest message in a […]
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This new bike grows when your kid grows
In response to the pesky but unavoidable fact that children tend to grow over time, Spanish bike company Orbea has designed a child’s bicycle that grows with them.
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Middle schoolers convince L.A. school district to ban styrofoam
Anyone who thinks that kids don’t care about anything but eating uncooked ramen and playing video games clearly underestimated the kids of Thomas Starr King Middle School in Los Angeles. Their interests include uncooked ramen, playing video games, building a tower of styrofoam, and getting so grossed out by it that they launch a letter-writing […]
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The Amazon rainforest’s clouds may come from mushrooms
I have not ever visited the Amazon, but in my imagination, it is populated by some serious, colorful, amazing fungi, all of which will either kill you or get you extremely high. But a new paper in Science found that the rainforest’s mushroom could have another vital purpose: producing a motherlode of potassium that helps […]
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The creepiest earthworm you have ever seen is 19 inches long
Forestry worker Li Zhiwei found this gigantic earthworm in his backyard and is keeping it as a pet. If you think that screenshot is vaguely disturbing, wait ’til you see this guy move:
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Earth’s most beautiful fractal patterns have to be seen to be believed
Computer science professor Paul Bourke has an exhaustive amount of information about fractals on his website, but for my money the coolest part is his collection of naturally occurring fractal images from Google Earth. If I hadn’t looked them up, I’d suspect some of these were computer-generated — but no, they’re real rivers, lakes, and […]
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International Agencies Using Flawed Data to Fast-Track Kosovo Coal Plant, Put Health At Risk
While no new coal plants have broken ground here in the US since 2008, the US government is backing a huge, polluting new coal plant oversees. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and World Bank are pushing a heavily polluting, costly, and controversial new coal plant in Kosovo. As if that weren’t bad enough, […]
