Latest Articles

David Lynch would like you to stop littering OR ELSE

Perhaps to make up for the bad rap he gave to woods, owls, sycamore trees, and the little pine weasel in Twin Peaks, David Lynch apparently also directed a 1991 PSA about littering. It’s almost exactly what you would expect from a David Lynch PSA about littering — there’s even weird jerky dancing AND coffee! — […]

The Hunger Games: The world after a climate apocalypse, teen fiction style

The movie version of The Hunger Games, the wildly popular young adult novel set in a future ravaged by climate disasters and food insecurity, comes out this week.

Does cap-and-trade produce technological innovation?

A carbon cap-and-trade system might not spur major innovation on its own, a new study suggests. So add focused innovation policy to the mix.

Freak heat wave makes Obama and Oprah ‘nervous’ about climate

Speaking at a Chicago fundraiser hosted by Oprah, President Obama admitted that the city's heat wave was making him "a little nervous" about global warming.

Mutant carrots only want to love you

Awwwwww! Or possibly aaaauuuuuugh!

Starbucks juice bar: Vegan nirvana or yuppie hellhole?

There are two ways to think about Starbucks' first juice bar, which recently opened. Either this juice heralds the end of times, or it is a boon to vegans and vegetarians everywhere.

Engineer wants to stop Arctic warming with a cloud-whitening machine

Painting your roof white can (maybe) reflect enough heat to save a year’s worth of emissions. So painting the clouds white should be able to reflect enough heat to stop global warming, right? At least, that’s the theory recently put forth by an eminent U.K. engineer who wants to “whiten clouds” to prevent Arctic ice […]

Cloned baby goat is a super-adorable terrifying monster of science

The Kashmir region of south Asia is economically dependent on cashmere (the homophonic name is not a coincidence). But populations of pashmina goats, which produce the expensive wool, have been dwindling. So scientists at Sher-i-Kashmir University decided to hurry the process along, cloning a pashmina goat named Noori with little more than a microscope and crossed fingers.

Low doses of BPA are worse for you than high doses

The pesticide and plastics industry have a lot invested in the safety of chemicals like bisphenol A and atrazine. Such “endocrine-disrupting” chemicals mimic human hormones, and research has tied them to health problems like cancer and infertility. But these industries have always held up studies that look at exposure to huge doses of endocrine disruptors. […]

Study: GMO crops are killing butterflies

We’re all familiar with Big Ag’s bad reputation of picking on small-scale and organic farmers. Now Monsanto and its cronies are beating up an even more innocuous set of victims: beautiful, defenseless monarch butterflies.