Latest Articles

Snowe job: The Senate needs reform, not a bipartisan chorus of kumbayah

Fix Congress with more compromises, says retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe. "Give me a break," sighs David Roberts.

Lexicon of Sustainability: Fishing after Katrina

The latest installment of the Lexicon series brings us up close and personal with a third-generation Gulf Coast crab fisherman.

The trouble with right-wing bitching about gas prices, in one handy cartoon

We might as well close up shop here, because cartoonist Ed Stein has done all the work for us.

Why climate change is irrelevant to clean energy

Maggie Koerth-Baker, science editor at BoingBoing, has written a book. Here’s the basic idea: In America at least, if we want to get anything done on clean energy, we have to divorce it from conversations about climate change.

‘Ag-gag’ rules choke off supply of livestock snuff films

Rather than deal with the inhumane, superbug-spawning conditions in factory farms, the Iowa state legislature would prefer to stifle one of activists' primary weapons of dissent.

‘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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.