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The man without a plan: Romney has no real food and farming platform

Even when pressed, Mitt Romney has very little to say about food and agriculture -- unless it's a question of food safety, in which case he wants to let Big Food off the hook.

The Pope and his weird hat have a new electric car

Pope Benedict is considered the Green Pope. This does not mean that his weird hat is green, though that would be really cool. It means that he cares about the environment, so even though he is the Pope and also kind of scary-looking, he does cool, Norcal-y stuff like harness solar power for electricity and […]

Heirloom melon and tomato gazpacho [Recipe]

Want to impress the guests at your next dinner party? This refreshing seasonal soup offers a blast of intense flavor.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]