Latest Articles

Making pollution costly: How China, British Columbia, and Australia are trying to get it done

China's environmental movement may be young, but it's starting to see real victories. So why are other countries having so much trouble enacting smart legal constraints?

Stamp of disapproval: House farm bill to gut nutrition program

In its new draft of the farm bill, the House of Representatives is pushing for $16.5 billion in food stamp cuts.

Cute bushy-tailed fossil suggests most dinosaurs had feathers

The dinosaur shown in this new fossil, which is so great it almost looks fake, is called Sciurumimus albersdoerferi — Sciurumimus means “squirrel mimic.” That’s undoubtedly because of its lush, bushy tail, perfectly preserved in fine-grained sediment. But that’s not a furry squirrel tail you’re looking at; it’s all feathers, and the discovery of S. albersdoerferi suggests […]

Win-win: Ancient fungus that ended coal formation could boost biofuel production

Genomics researchers have stumbled upon an incredible discovery: The same ancestral fungus that ended coal formation millennia ago may now be able to boost bioenergy production.

How’s the weather, America? July 5, 2012 edition

Fires, heat waves, impaired fishing. Same old, same old.

I Am Not a Virgin makes cute clothes out of beer bottles and yogurt cups

These are maybe the most attractive “green” clothes we have ever seen: They’re trendy, they make your ass look good (or at least they make her ass look good), and they’re made in part from recycled glass bottles.

Complete jerks think fracking is more important than democracy

In North Carolina, of course.

Seaweed toothpaste can kill bad plaque bacteria

Researchers in England were studying seaweed enzymes to see if they could clean bacteria off the hulls of ships, when they were suddenly struck by inspiration. We imagine it went something like this: Bob: Dick, your breath stinks! Dick: Sorry. Bob: It smells like the hull of a ship that’s been out to sea too […]

Antarctic moss eats 8,000-year-old penguin poop

Earlier this year, a slightly horrifying factoid made its way around the internet: Penguins poop so much that piles of their poop can be seen from space. But take heart, people who don’t like thinking about mountains of bird guano: It turns out that today’s penguin dung heap could be tomorrow’s source of nutrition for […]

Staggering video of a family returning to their destroyed home after Colorado fires

“I’m convinced that this planet is warming and that this is part of the result of that,” says Colorado wildfire victim Hani Ahmad while looking at the ruins of his house. “The West is a tinderbox … I’m terrified for everybody in the West.”